“I hope we will never meet again, dear Sir … I had a good position in an office in Vienna. My salary … maybe you know how little a job like that pays; but my boss, a man between sixty and seventy, devoured me with his eyes every time I came close to him. I thought I could use that when I went to ask him for a raise. I explained my miserable living conditions to him.
“'Oh, but you could earn much more, my dear child,' he said to me. I was very upset, but he laughed. Oh, no, he was not lusting after my body, he assured me, what was he supposed to do with a young body that most likely would be insatiable. And he explained to me what I had to do, and for each single one of my shameful services he would give me half my present wages. That was how I made my money … without having to surrender my body.”
“Only to make more money?” I asked, amazed.
She just looked at me, and did not answer my question.
“One day that man suddenly died, just after I had left him. I shuddered when I thought that he could have died just as easily under my hands. And believe you me, every time one of those dotards requires my service, I am trembling with fear.” It seemed as if she were fighting a shiver of disgust before she went on, “I left Vienna soon thereafter and found a position in a distinguished small hotel, because I assumed that the tips during the season would be more than the wages of working for two years in an office.” An expression of incredible harshness clouded her face when she continued, “And I was not at all disappointed. One of the guests in the hotel happened to be a friend of my late Viennese employer and, as I soon found out, he knew all about our arrangement.” She paused. “And that is how I acquired, wherever I went, a circle of regular clients, making a small fortune during the past three years.”
“And you have kept your body unspoiled and I know you are very happy,” I jeered.
She winced and turned toward the door.
“Money, money, money! That's all you women ever think about, and you're willing to do anything to get it. You would even remain an untouched virgin, if you could make enough money out of it!”
She wanted to leave. At the door she turned once more toward me, “But what do you think of it when someone who has a trade like mine wants to buy her life's happiness that way?”
“Independence with the money?”
“And possibly more,” she said bitterly, “possibly … love?”
I came toward her and wanted to grab her hand, but she backed away.
“How could you understand … how could I expect that any man would understand?”
“Is it because you are in love with a man …?”
At that moment this woman seemed so great and admirable to me, as I had never known any woman before to be. My feeling about her must have shown on my face, because she reached me her hand, “Believe me, Sir, I am flesh and blood, and once it was very difficult for me to resist, despite my love for the one I am trying to win … and that was today … after all, I am but a woman.”
This confession, in all its simplicity, yes I must use the word I hate so much, in all its chastity, shattered me completely. I brought the girl's hands to my lips. The next moment I felt her arm around my neck and a kiss was placed upon my forehead. And then I was alone.
Can this be understood. Yes, yes, by all the devils who dish out our minimum amount of happiness which God would deny us if He could, I can understand it. And I swear by everything that is human in me, and hence good, it is permissible to do it! I would adore any woman who would do such a thing, or a similar one, for me forever and ever, I would even allow her to put her feet upon my neck.
But the history of the chambermaid from the hotel in Switzerland has an ending, too. Or rather, it has one for me. And even though I must interrupt the chronology, here it is.
Two years after the experience I just wrote about I happened to meet her again. After a long absence I had arrived for a short visit to my birthplace, and I must admit that I wouldn't even want to stay there as a dead body out of fear that my many relatives would get the idea to visit my grave on All Soul's Day with fake mourning and adorn my grave with flowers to show hypocritically that they had forgiven me my missteps, while actually their entire morality consists of one simple fact: their balls have no strength. But anyway, I was visiting my birthplace and suddenly recognized the girl as one of the salesladies in a glove shop in which I had wandered to buy a pair of gloves. She recognized me immediately and she was afraid that I would give signs of recognition while we were not alone in the shop.
When the few clients had left, she looked up at me and offered her hand. And at that moment I remembered her. I did not open my mouth, but my eyes asked the question. And she told me in her simple and forthright manner which had made such a great and shattering impression upon me two years ago. It is terrible! Is the devil not even strong enough to protect his handiwork against that which so-called well-educated moralists prefer to call the wrath of God? This woman had practiced a well-paid profession (she had not even invented it, because I heard about one who was called la bette Savonaise, the beautiful soaping woman, who at the time of the Concodat satisfied the lusts of the diplomats and cardinals alike with foaming soap), and she had within a few years made enough money to deposit a bond so that she could get married to a certain young officer with whom she was deeply in love. Even though she had been poor, she did not want to become his mistress and she had worked hard to earn the money she needed to become an officer's wife. Her love for this man had been so strong that she had hesitated to run the risk of becoming a victim of her own passions. And away from her homeland, in strange hotels, she had set out to make money by satisfying the passions of strangers while keeping her own body pure.
Though her innate disgust for her profession proved to be a good companion, it often happened that the woman within her awakened and she not only longed to give but also ached to receive. Nevertheless, she never gave in to that desire. And, finally, the day arrived when she had achieved her goal. She forthwith traveled to the garrison where her groom was stationed and deposited the money required for the bond. She did not tell him where the money came from, and he believed her story that it was from an inheritance. These two people lived for one day in a dreamworld of absolute happiness. The abstinence she had been forced to practice for three full years gave way to one enormous frenzy of the senses during that night. She had given herself to that man in the full knowledge and security that she was his.
The next day she found her officer in his room with his brains blown out; in his extreme happiness and after a full night and day of cavorting, he had gone into the officer's casino to gamble a little bit. He had lost control of the situation and gambled away her entire dowry. That had been a year ago, and now she was a saleslady in this glove shop of my hometown. And she had become respectable. She had become pregnant but she did not want to give birth to the child. She told this to me, visibly shaken, but without passion and without the pretense of suffering.
We shook hands quietly and I left. I have never seen her since, but that may be because I went out into the world again soon thereafter. But doesn't it sound to you as if the devil had lost all sense of humor?
After this entire day of incredible experiences, I had no desire to remain in that hotel any longer. Especially when I found out that the Swedish redhead and her tottering husband had left the hotel as if in flight, I decided that I, too, had no desire to remain. I went to Zurich.
Chapter Five. I TAKE A MISTRESS, RENEW AN ACQUAINTANCE, AND FIND SUCCESS
I had arrived in Zurich and found myself with nothing to do. Out of sheer boredom I decided to become an author. I wrote — truth and fantasy skillfully mixed together — a novel about my mother. And I was quite successful because its appearance in my homeland was greeted with a book burning and its further publication was forbidden.