Then one fine afternoon Jeannette arrived without warning, having traveled from Buenos Aires to Hamburg. She brought with her so much money that she could have bought up a whole street in Charlottenburg, for she had dollars from the New World.
“My dear girl, how did you come by so much money?” her mother asked.
“I married a cattle rancher in the Argentine. He owned two million head of cattle, and when he died he left me a little fortune.”
“Whoever would have thought that my girl would have such a stroke of luck?” said the mother. Thus, Jeannette was known in the neighborhood as the Argentine millionaire’s widow.
With a handful of dollars, Jeannette bought her parents an apartment house that before the war had been worth maybe a half million marks. She had the title made out in her own name, so businesslike had she become in the New World, but her parents were assigned the income from the apartment house. Then she bought them a good number of sound shares that would move with the stock market prices; these she deposited with a dependable banking firm, with instructions that the dividends when due were to be paid to her parents.
This business over, Jeannette took a few weeks off to treat herself to a good time, which she well deserved after the strenuous years that lay behind her.
For the proper enjoyment of these weeks of pleasure the cooperation of the opposite sex was, of course, required. Pleasure is barely conceivable without it. But Jeannette didn’t make it a matter of her professional business; being on vacation, she carefully chose a gentleman with whom she knew she could enjoy herself.
The Bartels had moved into the apartment house; with official permission from the housing authorities they were allowed to occupy the flat on the top floor, which Jeannette had had built at her own expense. One morning Father Bartel went to Jeannette’s bedroom to speak to her and found her in bed with a gentleman. Jeannette and her friend had sat up late in a cabaret, drinking plenty of champagne, and for that reason he had not wakened in time to take his leave at a respectable early hour, in propriety and silence.
Father Bartel wanted to beat up the man, or shoot him, or deal with him in some other drastic manner. The gentleman, however, was tactful and well-bred; so with supreme dexterity he succeeded, despite Bartel’s aggressions, in getting himself more or less dressed. Then, with Jeannette’s help, he maneuvered himself to the door, onto the stairway, and away. He was safe.
Not so Jeannette. Her father, no longer obliged to deploy his forces on two fronts, gave her the full fury of his anger.
“Why did you come here, you whore, and shame us in front of everyone?” he roared at his daughter. “Better I’d have committed suicide as an honest doorman than to be so disgraced by my own daughter. You’re nothing but a whore, damn you. I’m done with you! Leave my house at once!”
The mother tried to calm him, but only made matters worse. The old man was furious, for the honor of a factory doorman had been trampled into the dirt. He had, as he insisted a hundred times, grown old with honor, and now when he had one foot in the grave, he had to suffer humiliation at the hands of his own daughter whom he had always regarded as an angel from heaven.
Jeannette listened to all this in silence. It seemed to her so remote, so strange, and indescribably silly that she felt it was all taking place on a stage, and that she was in the audience watching an old-fashioned piece of melodrama.
When Father Bartel repeated for the third time, “Never darken my door again, you’re my daughter no longer!” she suddenly realized that he was speaking to her.
Then she let him have it. She didn’t get worked up, but told him in a lively, conversational tone: “Not your daughter? Maybe you were responsible for bringing me into the world, but I didn’t ask you to, and I don’t think I’d have chosen you if I’d been consulted. What right have you to turn me out of this house? A fine father! No one ever called me a whore before. If any man had, I’d have clawed his face into shreds. Only my own father takes it upon himself to call me a whore! Anyhow, there’s no misunderstanding; you’re right! I’m just what you say. And what you are living on now are whore’s earnings!”
The father was silent. He just stared at her. The mother meanwhile sat down and cried quietly to herself. As a woman, with finer perceptions largely denied to men, she already had suspected the truth. But her homely common sense acquired over a lifetime of hard work had taught her not to probe needlessly into things which are best left alone. She thought it wiser not to know the precise truth; that way, life was easier to bear.
Jeannette was anxious to put her cards on the table and be done with it. Her role as a millionaire’s widow hadn’t been to her liking from the first, but the words had been put into her mouth by persistent questions on the origin of her riches. Now she was sick of the pose, even for the short time she meant to be in Charlottenburg.
“Yes, whore’s earnings,” she repeated with emphasis. “Every two, three, or four dollars means one man. Now you can figure out for yourself how many I’ve had and how many it took to save you from gassing yourselves. And as to your honorable watchman’s life, it’s no great honor to be buried a suicide! But of all the men who came to me not one ever called me a whore, not even the drunks, not even the sailors who come from long voyages and carry on like young bulls. All of them have said a friendly and courteous “Goodnight” when they left me, and most of them added a polite and genuine, “Thank you, señorita.” And why? Because I never cheated anyone. What you call honor isn’t my kind of honor; my honor and my pride are that everyone who comes to me gets an honest deal. I’ve always been worth the money, and today with all my experience I’m worth it more than ever. That is my pride and honor, never to cheat anyone.
“All right then, I’m a whore! But I’ve got money, while you with your watchman’s honor have none. Nobody will give you anything for your honor. And if I don’t give you spending money you hang around the place here all day and make Mother’s life a hell with your moaning. If it’ll give you any pleasure, you’re welcome to run out in the street and tell everyone that the Argentine millionaire’s widow is a whore! I don’t care. I just don’t give a damn. I’ve already got my visa, and I hadn’t thought of going this month, but now I’ll be off in an hour. I can still have a good time for a few weeks in Scheveningen and Ostende — I can afford it. Then I’ll start work again. I need another fifteen thousand to reach my goal. And now, please leave me alone. I’m going to dress and pack my trunks.”
Father Bartel left the room like a robot, and Jeannette said to her mother, “Look after Father. Don’t leave him alone; he might do something silly.” So the mother left. Jeannette packed quickly; within half an hour she stood in the hallway with her trunks packed and locked. She went down to the fourth floor to phone for a taxi.
Before the old couple had time to recover their senses, the taxi driver was tooting, and Jeannette called to him to come for her trunks. She took two hundred dollars from her handbag, put it on the table, and kissed her mother good-bye. Then calmly she took her father’s head between her hands, kissed him and said, “Good-bye, Father dear. Don’t think too badly of me, and don’t make a tragedy of it. Understand, I might otherwise have died of typhoid. I needed money for typhoid shots and hospital treatment, and that was how it all started. When I recovered, I was too weak to work, and so the whole thing went on. It saved my life, and both of yours. So… Now you know everything and can figure out the details for yourself. Well, good-bye. Who knows whether I’ll see you again in this life?”
The old father started to cry, took her in his arms, kissed her, and said, “Good-bye, child. I’m old, that’s all. It’s all right. You know best. Write us some time; Mother and I will be glad, always, to hear a word from you.”