“Oh, hullo, Chris darling!” cried Sally from the doorway. “How sweet of you to come! I was feeling most terribly lonely. I’ve been crying on Frau Karpf’s chest. Nicht wahr, Frau Karpf?” She appealed to the toad landlady, “ich habe geweint auf Dein Brust.” Frau Karpf shook her bosom in a toad-like chuckle.
“Would you rather have coffee, Chris, or tea?” Sally continued. “You can have either. Only I don’t recommend the tea much. I don’t know what Frau Karpf does to it; I think she empties all the kitchen slops together into a jug and boils them up with the tea-leaves.”
“I’ll have coffee, then.”
“Frau Karpf, Leibling, willst Du sein ein Engel und bring zwei Tassen von Kaffee?” Sally’s German was not merely
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incorrect; it was all her own. She pronounced every word in a mmcing, specially “foreign” manner. You could tell that she was speaking a foreign language from her expression alone. “Chris darling, will you be an angel and draw the curtains?”
I did so, although it was still quite light outside. Sally, meanwhile, had switched on the table-lamp. As I turned from the window, she curled herself up delicately on the sofa like a cat, and, opening her bag, felt for a cigarette. But hardly was the pose complete before she’d jumped to her feet again:
“Would you like a Prairie Oyster?” She produced glasses, eggs and a bottle of Worcester sauce from the boot-cupboard under the dismantled washstand: “I practically live on them.” Dexterously, she broke the eggs into the glasses, added the sauce and stirred up the mixture with the end of a fountain-pen: “They’re about all I can afford.” She was back on the sofa again, daintily curled up.
She was wearing the same black dress to-day, but without the cape. Instead, she had a little white collar and white cuffs. They produced a kind of theatrically chaste effect, like a nun in grand opera. “What are you laughing at, Chris?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. But still I couldn’t stop grinning. There was, at that moment, something so extraordinarily comic in Sally’s appearance. She was really beautiful, with her little dark head, big eyes and finely arched noseand so absurdly conscious of all these features. There she lay, as complacently feminine as a turtle-dove, with her poised self-conscious head and daintily arranged hands.
“Chris, you swine, do tell me why you’re laughing?”
“I really haven’t the faintest idea.”
At this, she began to laugh, too: “You are mad, you know!”
“Have you been here long?” I asked, looking round the large gloomy room.
“Ever since I arrived in Berlin. Let’s seethat was about two months ago.”
I asked what had made her decide to come out to Ger—
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many at all. Had she come alone? No, she’d come with a girl friend. An actress. Older than Sally. The girl had been to Berlin before. She’d told Sally that they’d certainly be able to get work with the Ufa. So Sally borrowed ten pounds from a nice old gentleman and joined her.
She hadn’t told her parents anything about it until the two of them had actually arrived in Germany: “I wish you’d met Diana. She was the most marvellous gold-digger you can imagine. She’d get hold of men anywhereit didn’t matter whether she could speak their language or not. She made me nearly die of laughing. I absolutely adored her.”
But when they’d been together in Berlin three weeks and no job had appeared, Diana had got hold of a banker, who’d taken her ofi with him to Paris.
“And left you here alone? I must say I think that was pretty rotten of her.”
“Oh, I don’t know… . Everyone’s got to look after themselves. I expect, in her place, I’d have done the same.”
“I bet you wouldn’t!”
“Anyhow, I’m all right. I can always get along alone.”
“How old are you, Sally?”
“Nineteen.”
“Good God! And I thought you were about twenty-five!”
“I know. Everyone does.”
Frau Karpf came shuffling in with two cups of coffee on a tarnished metal tray.
“Oh, Frau Karpf, Leibling, wie wunderbar von Dich!”
“Whatever makes you stay in this house?” I asked, when the landlady had gone out: “I’m sure you could get a much nicer room than this.”
“Yes, I know I could.”
“Well then, why don’t you?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m lazy, I suppose.”
“What do you have to pay here?”
“Eighty marks a month.”
“With breakfast included?”
“NoI don’t think so.”
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“You don’t think so?” I exclaimed severely. “But surely you must know for certain?”
Sally took this meekly: “Yes, it’s stupid of me, I suppose. But, you see, I just give the old girl money when I’ve got some. So it’s rather difficult to reckon it all up exactly.”
“But, good heavens, SallyI only pay fifty a month for my room, with breakfast, and it’s ever so much nicer than this one!”
Sally nodded, but continued apologetically: “And another thing is, you see, Christopher darling, I don’t quite know what Frau Karpf would do if I were to leave her. I’m sure she’d never get another lodger. Nobody else would be able to stand her face and her smell and everything. As it is, she owes three months’ rent. They’d turn her out at once if they knew she hadn’t any lodgers: and if they do that, she says she’ll commit suicide.”
“All the same, I don’t see why you should sacrifice yourself for her.”
“I’m not sacrificing myself, really. I quite like being here, you know. Frau Karpf and I understand each other. She’s more or less what I’ll be in thirty years’ time. A respectable sort of landlady would probably turn me out after a week.”
“My landlady wouldn’t turn you out.”
Sally smiled vaguely, screwing up her nose: “How do you like the coffee, Chris darling?”
“I prefer it to Fritz’s,” I said evasively.
Sally laughed: “Isn’t Fritz marvellous? I adore him. I adore the way he says, ‘I give a damn.’ “
” ‘Hell, I give a damn.’ ” I tried to imitate Fritz. We both laughed. Sally Ht another cigarette: she smoked the whole time. I noticed how old her hands looked in the lamplight. They were nervous, veined and very thinthe hands of a middle-aged woman. The green finger-nails seemed not to belong to them at all; to have settled on them by chance. like hard, bright, ugly little beetles. “It’s a funny thing,” she added meditatively, “Fritz and I have never slept together,
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you know.” She paused, asked with interest: “Did you think we had?”
“Well, yesI suppose I did.”
“We haven’t. Not once …” she yawned. “And now I don’t suppose we ever shall.”
We smoked for some minutes in silence. Then Sally began to tell me about her family. She was the daughter of a Lancashire mill-owner. Her mother was a Miss Bowles, an heiress with an estate, and so, when she and Mr. Jackson were married, they joined their names together: “Daddy’s a terrible snob, although he pretends not to be. My real name’s Jackson-Bowles; but, of course, I can’t possibly call myself that on the stage. People would think I was crazy.”
“I thought Fritz told me your mother was French?”
“No, of course not!” Sally seemed quite annoyed. “Fritz is an idiot. He’s always inventing things.”
Sally had one sister, named Betty. “She’s an absolute angel. I adore her. She’s seventeen, but she’s still most terribly innocent. Mummy’s bringing her up to be very county. Betty would nearly die if she knew what an old whore I am. She knows absolutely nothing whatever about men.”
“But why aren’t you county, too, Sally?”
“I don’t know. I suppose that’s Daddy’s side of the family coming out. You’d love Daddy. He doesn’t care a damn for anyone. He’s the most marvellous business man. And about once a month he gets absolutely dead tight and horrifies all Mummy’s smart friends. It was he who said I could go to London and learn acting.”