Marquis Casti-Piani
Fräulein Elfriede von Malchus
Herr König
Lisiska
Three Girls
Scene—A room with three doors, and windows with the blinds drawn. On each side, facing each other, two arm-chairs upholstered in red. In both down-stage corners are little trellis screens behind which the actor is hidden from the stage tho not from the audience. Red upholstered stools in both these corners.
Elfriede von Malchus sits in one of the arm-chairs. She is evidently uneasy. She wears a modern “reformed” dress with hat, cloak, and gloves.
Elfriede—How much longer are they going to keep me waiting? [Long pause. She remains sitting motionless.] How much longer are they going to keep me waiting! [Long pause as before.] How much longer are they going to keep me waiting here!! [After a moment, she gets up, takes off her cloak and lays it on the chair, takes off her hat and puts it on the cloak, and then walks up and down twice with manifest excitement. Stopping, she cries again:] How much longer will they keep me waiting here??!! [On her last word, the Marquis Casti-Piani enters thru the centre door. He is a tall, bald-headed man, with a high forehead, great black, melancholy eyes, strong, hooked nose, and thick, drooping black mustache. He wears a black coat, a dark, fancy waistcoat, dark gray trousers, patent-leather shoes and a black cravat with a diamond pin.]
Casti-Piani—[Bowing.] What can I do for you, madam?
Elfriede—I have already explained it to the—lady, as clearly as I can possibly explain it, why I am here.
Casti-Piani—The—lady told me why you were here. The lady told me also that you were a member of the International Union for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic.
Elfriede—That I am! I am a member of the International Union for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic. But even if I did not belong to it I could not possibly have spared myself this search! For nine months I’ve been on the track of this unfortunate, and everywhere I’ve been so far she’d just been carried off to another city. But she is in this house! She’s here at this moment! The—lady who was here just now admitted that, without any beating round the bush. She promised me she would send the girl here to this room, so that I could speak with her in private and undisturbed. I am waiting here now for the girl, and for no one else. I have no desire and no need to go through a second cross-examination.
Casti-Piani—I beg you, madam, not to excite yourself further. The girl felt she should present herself to you—respectably dressed. The lady asked me to tell you that, for she feared that in your agitation you might be tempted to take some needlessly violent measure. And she asked me to do what I could to help you through the embarrassment which waiting in these surroundings would naturally cause you.
Elfriede—[Walking up and down.] Pray keep your amiable conversation to yourself! There is nothing new for me now in the atmosphere of this place. The first time I entered such a house, I had to fight physical nausea. Only then did I realize what tremendous self-suppression my entrance into the Union for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic had involved me in. Till then I had taken part in our activities as an idle pastime, solely to avoid growing old and gray in uselessness.
Casti-Piani—This confession awakens in me so much sympathy that I feel tempted to ask you for your credentials as an active member of the International Union for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic. We know from experience that a lot of people crowd into that calling who have quite other ends in view than the rescue of fallen girls. If you are earnestly bent on attaining your high purposes, the strict precautions we are compelled to use will assuredly meet your approval.
Elfriede—I have been a member of our Union for nearly three years now. My name is—Fräulein von Malchus.
Casti-Piani—Elfriede von Malchus?
Elfriede—Yes, Elfriede von Malchus.—How do you know my first name?
Casti-Piani—Why, we read the annual reports of the Union. If I remember right, you were a distinguished speaker at last year’s annual meeting in Cologne?
Elfriede—I am sorry to say that for two whole years I did nothing but write and speak and speak and write, without ever working up courage to attack the white slave traffic directly, until finally the white slave traffic found a victim under my own roof, in my own family!
Casti-Piani—If I am rightly advised, however, only your own papers, books, and magazines were to blame for this misfortune. Apparently you did not keep them carefully enough away from the young person for whose rescue you are here at this moment?
Elfriede—There you are absolutely right! I grieve to confess I cannot contradict you there! Night after night, when I had stretched under the bed-clothes, content with myself and the world, for a ten-hour sleep undisturbed by any earthly emotion, that seventeen-year-old girl crept into my study without my ever dreaming of it and glutted her love-starved imagination with the most seductive pictures of sensual pleasure, and the fearfullest vice, from my piles of books on the suppression of the white slave traffic. Silly goose that I was, in spite of my twenty-eight years, I never saw the next morning that the girl had sat up all night! I had never in my life known a sleepless night! When I went to work again in the morning I never once asked myself how my papers could have got into such atrocious confusion!
Casti-Piani—If I mistake not, my dear young lady, the girl had been engaged by your parents to do the lighter housework?
Elfriede—To her destruction! Yes! Mama as well as Papa was enchanted with her propriety and modesty. To Papa, who is a ministerial official and a bureaucrat of the purest water, her presence in our house was like a sunbeam. At her sudden disappearance, Papa as well as Mama stopped calling my activities for the Union an old maid’s eccentricity. They called it an outright crime.
Casti-Piani—The girl is the illegitimate child of a wash-woman?—Do you perhaps know who her father was?
Elfriede—No, I never asked her about that.—But pray who are you? How do you come to know all this?
Casti-Piani—Hm—the girl had read in one of your Union’s publications that certain advertisements were published in the daily papers by which, under certain well-known false pretenses, the white-slavers decoyed young girls into their clutches in order to introduce them to the love-market. Accordingly, the girl looked up an insertion of that kind in the first paper that came to hand, and on finding one, wrote a very correct letter of application for the position falsely advertised in the insertion. In this way I made her acquaintance.
Elfriede—And you dare tell me that—with such cynicism!
Casti-Piani—I dare tell you that, my dear young lady, with just such objectivity.
Elfriede—[In the utmost excitement, with fists clenched.] So the monster who delivered up this girl to a life of shame was you!
Casti-Piani—[With a disconsolate smile.] If you guessed, my dear young lady, the hidden springs of your diabolical excitement, you would be wise enough, perhaps, to keep perfectly calm in the presence of such a monster as I seem to you to be.
Elfriede—[Curt.] I don’t understand that. I don’t know what you mean!
Casti-Piani—You—are—still—a virgin?
Elfriede—[Gasping.] How dare you put such a question to me!
Casti-Piani—Who in God’s wide world will forbid me!—But we’ll leave that. In any case, you have not married. You are, as you just informed me yourself, twenty-eight years old. These facts may be sufficient to prove to you that in comparison with other women, not to speak of that child of nature for whose rescue you have come here,—you are only to a very slight degree open to sensuous influences.
Elfriede—You may be right in that.
Casti-Piani—I speak, of course, only with the understanding that I shall not annoy you with this discussion. I am very far from thinking you unhealthily or unnaturally constituted. But do you know, my young lady, how you have satisfied those sensuous cravings that you have?—to be sure, as you admit, extremely weak?
Elfriede—Well?
Casti-Piani—By joining the International Union for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic.
Elfriede—[Restraining her anger.] Who are you, my dear sir!—I came here to free an unfortunate girl from the claws of vice! I did not come here to listen to lectures, in very bad taste, from you.
Casti-Piani—Nor did I suppose you did. But you see, when viewed from this standpoint, we are more allied to one another than you in your proud little bourgeois virtue ever dreamt. On you nature has conferred but an extremely scant sensuous susceptibility. The storms of life have long since made a horribly chilly desert of me. But what fighting the white slave traffic is to your sensual life, that, to mine, if you will still grant me something of the kind,—is the white slave traffic itself!
Elfriede—[Aroused.] Don’t dissemble so shamelessly, you vile creature! Do you think you can lull me to sleep with your fantastic sense-hocus-pocus?—me, who’ve run after that girl from one den of vice to another like a hunted brute?! I’m not here now as a member of the Union for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic. I’m here as an unhappy criminal who has unintentionally plunged an innocent young life into suffering and despair. I shall never be happy again as long as I live if I can’t snatch this child from her ruin now. You would have me believe an impure curiosity drives me into this house. You’re a liar! You don’t believe your own words! And it was not unsatisfied sensuality that made you barter this girl away, but money-greed! You lured and sold this girl because it was good business!
Casti-Piani—Good business! Naturally! But good business is based on profits for both parties. I may say that I do no business which is not good. Every business that is not good is immoral!—Or do you believe perhaps that the love-business is a bad business for the woman?
Elfriede—How do you mean?
Casti-Piani—I mean simply this—I don’t know whether you’re just in the mood at this moment to listen to me with some attentiveness?
Elfriede—Save your introduction, for God’s sake!
Casti-Piani—Well then, I mean this: When a man finds himself in dire need there is often no choice left him but stealing or starving. But when a woman is in need, she has a third choice: the possibility of selling her love. This way out remains for the woman only because in granting her body she need not experience any emotion. Now since the world was created, woman has made use of this advantage. To speak of nothing else, man is by nature vastly superior to woman from the sheer fact that the woman suffers in childbirth——
Elfriede—That’s the screaming incongruity exactly! That’s what I’m always saying. To bear children is pain and care, but to beget them passes as an amusement. And nevertheless benevolent Creation (which suffers from crazy fits in many other respects, too) has laid the burden of pain and care on the weaker sex!
Casti-Piani—On that, young lady, we’re quite of the same opinion. And now you want to rob your unfortunate sisters of the little advantage over the male which—“crazy Creation” did confer on them: the advantage of being able, in extreme need, to sell their sexual favors,—by representing this sale as an inexpiable shame! I’ll say you’re a fine champion of woman’s rights!
Elfriede—[Almost in tears.] That possibility of selling ourselves weighs on our oppressed sex as an unspeakable misfortune, an everlasting curse!
Casti-Piani—But—God in heaven knows—it isn’t our fault that the buying and selling of love weighs on the female sex as an everlasting curse! We traders have no dearer aim than that this love-business should be as open and unmolested as any other honest trade! We have no loftier ideal than that prices in the love-business should be as high as they can possibly be made to be. Hurl your accusations, if you would fight the oppression of your unfortunate sex, in the face of conventional society! If you would defend your sisters’ natural rights, attack first of all the International Union for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic!
Elfriede—[Boiling over.] I won’t let you humbug me here any longer! I am firmly convinced that you have no serious intention of setting the girl free. While I play the fool here listening to your sociological lectures, the poor thing’ll be hustled into a cab somehow, packed off to the station and transported to some place where she’ll be safe all her life from members of the Union for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic.—Very well, I know what I have to do! [Takes hat.]
Casti-Piani—[Smiling.] If you guessed, dear lady, how your outburst of rage beautified your bourgeois appearance, you would not be in such a hurry to depart.
Elfriede—Let me out! It’s high time!
Casti-Piani—Where are you thinking of going now?
Elfriede—You know quite as well as I do where I am going now!
Casti-Piani—[Takes her by the throat, chokes her, and forces her into one of the chairs.] You’ll stay here. I’ve still got a word to say to you! Try to scream, go ahead, try it! We are accustomed here to every possible outcry. Shriek as loud as you can shriek!—[Letting her go.] I shall be surprised if I don’t bring you to reason before you run straight from this house to the police!
Elfriede—[Gasping, toneless.] It’s the first time in my life violence like that has been offered me!
Casti-Piani—You have done so awfully much in your useless life for the uplift of the daughters of joy! Now for once do something useful for the uplift of joy! Then you needn’t feel sorry for the poor creatures any more. Because the joy-business is branded as the vulgarest, shamefullest of all professions, girls and women of good society give themselves to a man for nothing rather than let their favors be paid for! Thereby these girls and women degrade their sex in the same way as a tailor degrades his craft if he gives clothes to his customers for nothing!
Elfriede—[Still as though stunned.] I don’t understand one word of all that! I went to school when I was five and stayed there till I was fourteen. Then I had to sit on a school-bench three more years before taking my teacher’s examinations. As long as I was young, our house was frequented by gentlemen of the best society. I had a proposal from one man who had inherited an estate of twenty square miles and who would have followed me to the ends of the world if I had wanted him to. But I felt I couldn’t love him. Perhaps it wasn’t right of me. Perhaps I was only lacking that minimum of passion which is essential to marriage under any circumstances.
Casti-Piani—Have you calmed down at last?
Elfriede—Just explain one more thing to me. If the girl in the course of the life she’s living here, brings a child into the world, who will take care of that child?
Casti-Piani—You take care of it! Or as a feminist, have you perhaps something on earth more important to do? So long as any woman under God’s sun must still be afraid of becoming a mother, all the “emancipation” in the world is nothing but empty gabble! Motherhood is a necessity of nature for a woman, like breathing and sleeping. And this innate right has been most barbarously restricted by conventional society. A natural child is almost as big a disgrace as the love-business itself! Whore here and whore there! The mother of an illegitimate child is no more spared the name of whore than is a girl in this house. If ever anything in your woman’s movement inspired me with loathing, it was the morality that you inject into your disciples on life’s way. Do you imagine the love-business would ever in the world’s history have been described as a disgrace if the man could have competed with the woman in the love-market? Envy! Nothing but commercial envy! Nature accorded to the woman the monopoly of being able to trade in her love. Therefore conventional society, which is governed by man, would like nothing better than over and over again to represent that trade as the most shameful of crimes!
Elfriede—[Stands up and lays her cloak over the chair. Walking up and down.] I confess I am at this moment quite unable to tell whether your opinions on that point are right or not. But how in the world is it possible for a man of your culture, of your social views, of your intellectual eminence, to throw his life away among the vilest elements of society! God knows it may have been only your beastly brutality that has made me take your assertions seriously. But I feel very sure you’ve given me things to think about for a long time to come, things I’d never in my life have thought of myself. Every winter for years I’ve heard from twelve to twenty lectures by all the male and female authorities on the woman movement; but I can’t remember ever having heard a word that went to the bottom of the business the way your statements do.
Casti-Piani—[In a singsong.] Let us always realize quite clearly, my dear lady, that we all are as though walking in our sleep on a ridge-pole, and that any unexpected enlightenment can be the breaking of our necks.
Elfriede—[Staring at him.] What do you mean by that?—There’s something monstrous in your mind?!
Casti-Piani—[Very quietly.] I said it only in regard to your views, which so far have let you feel so innocently safe in throwing round epithets like respectable and vile as if you were specially commissioned of God to sit in judgment on your fellow-mortals.
Elfriede—[Staring at him.] You’re a great man.—You’re a high-minded man!
Casti-Piani—Your words probe the mortal wound that I brought with me into the world and that I shall probably die of, some day. [Throws himself into a chair.] I am—a moralist!
Elfriede—And would you bewail your fate on that account?! Because the power of making other men happy was given you? [After a short inner struggle, she throws herself at his feet.] Marry me, marry me, for mercy’s sake! Before I saw you I was never able to imagine the possibility of giving myself to a man! I am absolutely inexperienced; that I can swear to you by the sacredest oaths. Till this moment I never guessed what the word love meant. With you, here, I feel it for the first time. Love lifts the lover up above his miserable self. I’m an everyday average woman, but my love for you makes me so free and fearless that nothing is impossible to me. Continue, in God’s name, from crime to crime! I will go before you! Go to prison! I will go before you! Go from prison to the scaffold! I will go before you. Don’t, I beseech you, don’t let this fortunate opportunity escape! Marry me, marry me, marry me! So shall help come to us two poor children of men!
Casti-Piani—[Stroking her head, without looking at her.] Whether you love me or don’t love me, you dear animal, is all one to me. Of course, you cannot know how many thousand times I have already had to undergo just such outbursts of emotion. Far be it from me to undervalue love. But alas, love must also serve as the vindication of all those innumerable women who merely satisfy their sensual wants, without asking the least return, and by their unrecompensed abandon only ruin the market.
Elfriede—Marry me! There is still time for you to begin a new life! Marriage will reconcile you with society. You can be editor of a socialist paper, you can be a representative in the Reichstag! Marry me, and then even you will learn for once in your life what superhuman sacrifices a woman is capable of in her boundless love!
Casti-Piani—[Still without looking at her, stroking her hair.] The best your superhuman sacrifices could do would be to turn my stomach. All my life I have loved tigresses. With bitches I was never anything but a stick of wood. My only consolation is that marriage, which you glorify so rapturously and for which bitches are bred, is a civilized institution. Civilized institutions arise only that they may be surmounted. The race will win beyond marriage just as it has surmounted slavery. The free love-market, where the tigress triumphs, is founded on a primordial law of unalterable nature. And how proud and high will woman stand in the world, so soon as she has conquered the right to sell herself, unbranded, at the highest price a man will bid for her! Illegitimate children will be better cared for then by the mother, than legitimate ones are now by the father. Then the pride and ambition of woman will no longer lie in the man who allots her her place, but in the world, where she struggles up to the highest position that her value can give her. Then what a glorious fresh vital sound the words “daughter of joy” will have! In the story of paradise it is written that Heaven endowed woman with the power to seduce. Woman seduces whom she will. Woman seduces when she will. She does not wait for love. And conventional society combats this hellish danger to our sacred civilization, by bringing woman up in an artificial darkness of mind and soul. The growing girl must not know what it means to be a woman. All our institutions might go to smash if she did! No hangman’s dodge is too base for the defense of conventional society! With every advance of civilization the love-business expands. The cleverer the world gets, the bigger is the love-market. And our celebrated civilization, in the name of morality, condemns these millions of daughters of joy to starvation, or robs them in the name of morality of their self-respect and life-vindication, yea, hurls them down to the level of beasts, all in the name of morality! How many centuries more will an immorality which cries to Heaven ravage this world with the sword and ax of morality!
Elfriede—[Voicelessly whimpering.] Marry me! You stand above and beyond the world! For the first time, to-day I offer my hand to a man!
Casti-Piani—[Stroking her hair without looking at her.] Materialism! Commercialism!—What would the world know about morality at all, if man could commandeer love as he bosses politics!
Elfriede—I hope for no higher happiness from our marriage than the privilege of kneeling so before you all my life and listening to your words!
Casti-Piani—Have you ever asked yourself what marriage means?
Elfriede—Till this moment I’ve had no occasion to do so. [Rising.] Tell me! I shall do everything to come up to your requirements.
Casti-Piani—[Draws her onto his knee.] Come here, my child. I’ll explain it to you. [Elfriede is prudish for a moment.] Please keep still.
Elfriede—I have never sat on a man’s knee.
Casti-Piani—Give me a kiss. [She kisses him.] Thanks. [Holding her off.] You’d like to know what marriage is?—Tell me, which is stronger: a man who has one dog or a man who has none?
Elfriede—The man who has the dog is stronger.
Casti-Piani—And now tell me again, which is stronger: a man who has one dog or a man who has two dogs?
Elfriede—I guess the man who has one dog is stronger, for of course, two dogs couldn’t very well help getting jealous of each other.
Casti-Piani—That would be the least consideration. But he would have to feed two dogs or else they’d run away, while one dog takes care of himself and also if there is need protects his master from robbers.
Elfriede—And by this abominable comparison you would explain the unselfish inseparable union of man and wife? Merciful God, what a life you must have had!
Casti-Piani—The man with one wife is economically stronger than if he had none; but he is also economically stronger than if he had to take care of two or more wives. That is the cornerstone of marriage. Woman would never have dreamt of this ingenious device!
Elfriede—You poor pitiable man! Did you ever know a home and family? Did you ever have a mother to nurse you when you were sick, to read you stories when you were convalescing, for you to confide in when there was something in your heart, and who helped you always and always, even when you had thought for the longest time that there was no more help for you on God’s earth?
Casti-Piani—What I lived through as a child no human creature could live through without having his will and energy broken and ruined. Can you imagine yourself a young man of sixteen and still whipped because the logarithm of Pi won’t go into his head? And the man who whipped me was my father! And I whipped back! I beat my father to death! He died after I’d beaten him once.—But these are trifles. You see what sort of creatures I live with here. I have never heard among these creatures the insults that were my mother’s share all through my childhood and which her spitefulness earned afresh for her each day. But those are trifles. The slaps, blows and kicks with which father, mother and a dozen teachers vied with one another to demean my defenseless body, were trifling in comparison with the slaps, blows and kicks with which the vicissitudes of life have vied with one another to degrade my defenseless soul.
Elfriede—[Kisses him.] If you could guess how much I love you for all those frightful experiences!
Casti-Piani—The life of man is tenfold death before death. Not merely for me. For you! For everything that breathes! For the ordinary man, life consists of pains, aches and tortures which his body suffers. And if a man struggles up to a higher plane, in the hope of escaping the sufferings of the body, then for him life consists of pains, aches and tortures which the soul endures and beside which the torments of the body were a kindness. How horrible this life is is shown by mankind’s having had to think out a Being that consisted of nothing but goodness, but love, but kindness,—and by all humanity’s having to pray daily, hourly to this Being, in order to endure its life at all!
Elfriede—[Caressing him.] When you marry me, pains of the body and soul-pains alike will have an end! You need not plague yourself any longer with all these frightful questions. My mama has a private fortune of sixty thousand marks, and after all their twenty-five years of happy married life, Papa hasn’t an inkling of it. Doesn’t the prospect lure you, of marrying me and having sixty thousand marks cash suddenly at your disposal?
Casti-Piani—[Pushing her off nervously.] You don’t understand how to caress, young lady! You act like an ass that’s trying to be a setter. Your hands irritate me! That’s not because you haven’t learnt anything. It’s because of your having sprung from the enslaved love-life of conventional society. There’s nothing thoroughbred in your body. You lack the necessary delicacy! Delicacy, modesty, shame! You lack the feeling for the effect of your caresses, a feeling that every thoroughbred child is born with.
Elfriede—[Springing up.] And you dare to tell me that in this house?
Casti-Piani—[Rising simultaneously.] That I dare tell you in this house!
Elfriede—In this house? That I lack the necessary delicacy, the necessary shame?!
Casti-Piani—That you lack the necessary delicacy and sense of shame! In this house of ill-fame I tell you that! Get it into your head, once and for all, with what fine tact these creatures apply themselves to their defamed calling! The girl most lately come into this house knows more about the soul of man than the most famous professor of psychology in the most renowned university. You, young lady, would assuredly experience the same disappointments here as you have always had. The woman who is created for the love-market can be recognized at the first glance. Her frank and regular features shine with innocent rapture and blissful innocence.—[Regarding Elfriede.] In your face, with all due respect, I can find no trace of either rapture or innocence.
Elfriede—[Hesitating.] Don’t you believe, my lord, that with my iron will, my energy, and my insuperable enthusiasm for the beautiful, I might yet acquire the delicacy and the fine tact of which you speak?
Casti-Piani—No, no, madam!—please, no! Get rid of those notions on the spot!
Elfriede—I am so deeply convinced of the moral significance of everything you say that the utmost sacrifice by which I could overcome my bourgeois helplessness would not be too great for me!
Casti-Piani—No, no. I won’t agree to that! That would be horrible. Life is horrible enough. No, no, madam! Keep your fearful fingers off the one divine ray that pierces the shuddering night of our tortured earthly existence! What am I living for? Why do I take part in this civilization of ours? No, no! The one pure flower of heaven in life’s thorn-thicket, befouled with sweat and blood, shall not be trampled out under clumsy feet! Believe me, I beg you, that I would have shot a bullet through my head half a century ago if it had not been that above the wail shrieking to heaven from birth-pangs, woes of life and death-agonies, still gleamed this one bright star!
Elfriede—The utmost mental exertion fails to give me even an inkling of your meaning! What is that ray that pierces the night of our existence? What is the one pure flower of heaven that must not be trampled into the dirt?
Casti-Piani—[Taking Elfriede’s hand and whispering mysteriously.] Sensual pleasure, gracious lady!—The laughing, sunny enjoyment of the senses! Sensual joy is the ray, the flower of heaven, because it is the one unclouded bliss, the one pure rapture undefiled, that earthly existence offers us. Believe me when I say that for half a century nothing has kept me in this world but selfless worship of this one full-throated laughing joy, this sensual pleasure that repays mankind for all the torments of existence!
Elfriede—I think somebody’s coming.
Casti-Piani—Lisiska, probably!
Elfriede—Lisiska? Who is Lisiska?
Casti-Piani—The girl who studied those books on the suppression of the white slave traffic in your house! In a moment you can convince yourself if I have said too much! We are prepared for such occasions, thank heaven. [Takes her down right.] Sit down behind this screen. From here, even you can for once in your life watch the clear, unsullied bliss of two people whom the joy of the senses draws together! [Elfriede seats herself on the stool behind the screen, right. Casti-Piani goes to the centre door, glances out, and then retires behind the screen, left, and sits. Herr König and Lisiska enter, centre. He is a young man of twenty-five, in a gay sport-suit with knee-breeches. Lisiska is dressed in a simple white garment reaching to the calf, black stockings, patent-leather slippers, and a white bow in her loose black hair.]
Herr König—
I have not come to while my time away,
A sensualist in the circle of your charms,
And will with gratitude and friendship pay
If quickly sober’d I can leave your arms.
Lisiska—
Speak not so friendly in my ear.
Here you are lord, and command us here.
Hesitate not to color my pallid
And bloodless cheeks with buffets untallied!
That for a whore like me
Is an unheard-of fee!
Helpless lamenting, sobbing and wailing
Need not cause you the slightest quailing.
Shallow’s the bliss from such abuse!
Pile pitiless blow upon blow without truce!
If your fist should smash in my face entire
Even that would not slake my desire!
Herr König—
I am not prepared for such words, such a test....
Is this a merry welcome for the guest?
You speak as if in purgatory already
Here, you atoned for lust enjoyed and gone.
Lisiska—
Oh, no! Untamed the Monster, Lust, doth eddy,
Raging forever in flesh, blood and bone!
Think you I, the devil’s spouse,
Would ever have happened into this house
If my heart’s horrible hammering stopped
When Rapture seized me and shone?
Rapture evaporates, dropped
On a hot stone!
And Lust, an unstilled throe,
A hungering woe,
Plunges, to find death, into this
And every abyss!
Are you not cruel, good sir, in your joys?
I should be sorry!
But what do you care for my noise?
Strike me, your quarry!
Herr König—
If that dark urge is really yours, to go
From the last depths to something yet below,—
I could shed tears that from the spring-time crew
Of amorous girls I picked and chose just you.
Out of your eyes, so innocent, so gay,
There gleamed on me a bliss without alloy....
Lisiska—
Do you wish that our time pass away—
And we have no joy?
Down there, over our rules and tenets,
Mother Adele sits, watch in hand:
Counts and reckons, immovable, bland,
My enjoyment’s minutes!
[Pause.]
Herr König—
You have grown tired of ecstasy at length
And hope for lassitude from tears and pain,—
For some deep calm to overcome the strength
Of your hot craving day and night in vain.
Lisiska—
If I sleep, then please with a sudden hard
Punch in the ribs wake me up, well-jarred!
Herr König—
That note was false! A flaw is in the reed!
—How can a human being understand that?!
Whistle at happiness—at life—you can that,—
But sleep? No! that was blasphemy indeed!
Lisiska—
I am not your property,
You need not protect me;
Spare not then so anxiously
The joys that still affect me;
Seek no means to comfort me;
Kindness knows not how to;
Who beats me up most mercilessly,—
He’s the one I bow to.
You ask me
Whether or no
I still can blush?
Unmask me
With a quick blow,
And mark the flush!
Herr König—
Cold sweat runs down me, chill’d in skull and spine,
Shuddering!—Let me out!... Half in a dream
I hoped to pluck the sweet fruits of love’s vine.
You offer thorns to me instead!... You seem
A young wild thing; how came it that you strayed—
Impossible!—from flower-paths to these briars?
Lisiska—
Leave not my sore desires
All unallayed!
Turn not heartless away from your slave!
Before me I have my grave,
And my only hope is to leave behind
No more of this world than I needs must.
Think you, we only come to such lust
Because in this house we are kept confined?
No, it is but the senses’ torturing thirst
Holds us here accursed!
But this, too, was reckoned without insight:
Night by night
I see it, blinding-clear:—that even
In this house no heaven
Of peace to the senses is given!
Elfriede—[In her hiding-place, to herself, with astonishment.] God Almighty! That is just the exact contrary of what I’ve imagined it for ten long years!
Casti-Piani—[In his hiding-place, to himself, with horror.] Devil! Devil! Devil! That is the exact contrary of what I’ve imagined about sensual joy for fifty years!
Lisiska—
Don’t go away from me! Hear me, hard-hearted!
I was an innocent child, and started
Life earnestly, full of duty and zeal!
I could never carelessly smile,—but feel—?!...
From my teachers, even my brothers and sisters,
I often heard awed admiring whispers,
And my parents would both presage:
“You’ll be the delight of our old age.”
Then with a sudden blast
That was past!
And once-awakened lust
Grew over all bounds, all “oughts,”
Over all my thoughts,
Over all my heart’s feeling of trust,
So that I marvel’d, driven
Infatuate, master’d, what it implied,
That I saw no lightning strike at my side
Nor heard any thunder from heaven.
Then it came to me—hope, that our life had been given
For joy to us, joy never glutted nor dried.
Herr König—
And this high hope you found was not fulfilled?
—I speak, I know, as a blind man of—of——
Lisiska—
No—it was only a hellish drive
Whence no joy remained alive.
Herr König—
But when so many girls have died of love—
Was it with all of them—Desire unstilled?
—But then, how should such hordes of women press
By thousands down your path of dire excess?
Lisiska—
Have you no will to glory
In the stripes upon my body?
For what was it made so soft,—
For what was it so tender created?
Speechless looks have dilated
O’er stroke upon stroke here, oft!
Flagging desires anew to inflame
Boasting I tell from whom they came.
Herr König—
Be still, I tell you! One more word thereon
And I’ll have stayed too long!... ’Tis plain to see
In your pale features how tempestuously
Youth fled from you!... Your innocence once gone,
Did he who robbed you of it leave you in shame?
Lisiska—
No—but another came,
Found glee and blame;
For always I swore eternal troth
To the young fools, and broke the oath.
Always I hoped my curse
Must disappear with another man.
Each time it was bitterness or worse.
No rest could be found for me, or can,
For ’twas always only the hellish drive
Out of which no joy came forth alive!
Herr König—
So to this house you came at last, and lead
A life of riot and revel here indeed!
Music resounds, champagne drips from the tables,
Laughter roars through the graying dawn full oft,
Nought the long working-day knows but the soft
Sound of hot tongues’ husht lisping of love’s fables.—
What a low, common beggar I must be
To you—proud queen of joy and ecstasy!
I came with what was mine from you to purchase
A plain, straightforward interchange of pleasure.
I could tear my hair with rage! For without measure
Hideous is the lust that here besmirches
Those libertines your friends and you their game!
They set no stops to their inhuman glee!
Hasten and wreathe their limbs! A purer aim
And element upbuoys and quickens me!
I sought refreshment, and have no desire
To smear myself in the earth’s deepest mire!
Lisiska—
Oh, stay! If you desert me now, ’tis harder,—
’Tis night around me again! Don’t go away!
Like a lip-lash already each word you say
Flicks me, and stings my craving with pricking whips:
Would you might loathe and hate me with such ardor
That it would be your fists and not your lips
Whose blow on blow aches through my body’s smart!
Once you’ve been pressed to my heart
Then go back whence you came,
Smilingly write my name
In your notebook ... —while with me
There will stay but the ghastly curse—to be
Once more in the grip of the hellish drive
Out of which no joy remained alive!
Herr König—
I can’t believe my senses now!—It seems,
You’ve fallen in love with me? Oh, cruel!—Spurned
By women, I have wept aloud and yearned
Thru many—how many—nights of tortured dreams!
Is the first love in all my life now faltering
Toward me upon bought lips?!—Are you not bound
To give to every stranger, without paltering,
His will,—and hopes of comfort would you found
On me?—to me lay passionately bare
Your soul, whose lurid charms shall hold me fast?
If e’er my lot so close to yours were cast
I should be seized with horror past compare!
Lisiska—
For God’s sake, don’t believe in my love!
’Tis my duty here to affect the dove!
Think to yourself just once what it means
When suddenly someone parts the screens!—
Rake up love’s coals, be alive and elated;
There is a man by God created!—
—Do you want me to play that wretched game
With you here?
To feel but loathing when your high’st flame
Burns thru here?!
But if you thoroly with your Hunnish
Fists my body and limbs will punish,—
That, if you find pleasure in it,
Can unite us till my dying minute!
Herr König—
White robe of innocence! Spirit unstained
By even this house! Your purity makes blind
My eyes; your beauty takes my heart and mind
With infinite gazing.—Rioting unrestrained
In fierce self-martyrdom without repose—
You fight the soul’s unfathomable woes,—
Death in your face, and in your heart hot hate
For all earth’s vain delights turned desolate!
[He kneels.]
Let me be friend, be brother to you! Whether
You give your body up to me—lies deep
Beneath us!—so have you exalted me!
To your slim knees here solemnly I vow
That only as soul cleaves to soul art thou
My own—so only am I thine—together!
Out of hell’s agony to heaven’s steep
You soared, and now unconscious of the sweep,
Of lusts that ebb and flow beneath your height
Must bleed your life out in sublimity
Thru me shall that be shown to all men’s sight!
From my chaste poetry the world shall learn
To weigh the wrong and misery of sold love!
I swear it by the eternal stars above,
The purest light that in our night can burn.
Give me a pledge, avow to me openly:—
Have you by love been gladden’d? once? or ever?
Lisiska—[Raising him.]
If you killed me now straight off, I could never
Say it differently!
It was always only the hellish drive
Whence no joy remained alive.
Thus, once for all, it is in this place:
Here is the rendezvous
Of all to whom love is a pang without grace
And a hankering ever new!
What other chance callers may appear
Aren’t taken in earnest by us here!
Men such as you
Are few
For they count for nothing where
We house, whom men compare
With beasts unheeded.—
But now have I yet succeeded
In bringing you round to grant
Comfort to my wild want?
Herr König—
What wilderness of paths your hand may lead me,
Still gleams a star above us that will speed me!
Lisiska—[Hugs and kisses him.]
Then come, love! pliable at last, for trysts
In ancient, ne’er-disturbed tranquillity,
As uttermost lust’s calm bliss long known to me!
Oh, if I only died under your fists!
[Both exeunt, right.]
Casti-Piani—[Breaking out of his hiding-place, wildly.] What was that?
Elfriede—[Breaking out likewise, passionately.] What was that! Worthless parasite that I am! What did my withered brain ever think the joy of the senses was! Self-immolation, glowing martyrdom, that’s what the life in this house is! And I, in my lying arrogance, in my threadbare virtue, supposed this house a breeding-place of depravity!
Casti-Piani—I am smashed and shattered!!
Elfriede—All my youth, that the good God gave me overflowing with the desire and the power to love,—I have wantonly dragged it through the gray, soul-smothering dirt of the streets! Coward that I was, the sacredness of sensual passion seemed to me the basest reprobacy!
Casti-Piani—[Stunned.] That was the blinding-bright enlightenment that unforeseen breaks his neck who walks in his sleep on the ridge-pole!
Elfriede—[Passionately.] That was the blinding-bright enlightenment!
Casti-Piani—What am I still doing in the world, if even sensual pleasure is nothing but a hellish flaying of man, nothing but a satanic butchery of mankind, like all the rest of our earthly existence?! So that’s the true aspect of the one divine ray that pierces the horrible night of our tormented life! Oh, if only I had shot a bullet through my head half a century ago! Then I would have been spared this pitiful bankruptcy of my bilked and swindled spiritual wealth.
Elfriede—What is there still for you to do in the world? I can tell you! You trade in girls. You boast you trade in girls. Anyway, you have the closest relations with all the places that count in the white slave trade. Sell me! I beseech you, sell me into a house like this! You can make a very lucrative bargain of me! I have never loved; and, surely, that doesn’t lower my value! I won’t bring you any disgrace! You shall add, by me, to the honor in which your customers hold you! I promise! I will guarantee myself to you with any oath you ask me!
Casti-Piani—[Half-crazed.] What will keep me from breaking my neck? What will help me across the icy shudders of death?
Elfriede—I will help you across! I! Sell me! Then you’ll be saved!
Casti-Piani—Who are you?
Elfriede—I want to find my death in the joy of the senses. I want to give myself up to be slaughtered on the altar of sensuous love!
Casti-Piani—Am I to sell you—you?
Elfriede—I want to die the martyr’s death that this girl who was just here is dying! Have I no natural human rights the same as others?
Casti-Piani—Heaven preserve me from it! [With mounting emphasis.] This—this—this is the derisive laughter of Hell, that rings above my plunge into death!
Elfriede—[Sinking to his feet.] Sell me! Sell me!
Casti-Piani—The most terrible times of my life arise before me. Once before, I sold in the love-market a girl whom nature had not intended for it! For that crime against nature I spent six full years behind prison bars. Of course she, too, was one of those temperamentless creatures in whose faces one can see “big feet.”
Elfriede—[Clasping his knees.] On my soul I implore you, sell me! You were right. My activity in combating the white slave traffic was unsatisfied sensuality. But my sensuousness is not weak! Ask me for proofs. Shall I kiss you madly, insanely?
Casti-Piani—[In utmost despair.] And this ear-piercing howl of suffering at my feet? What is that! This echoing shriek for help from birth-pangs, woes of life, and death-agonies I will no longer endure. I cannot stand this earth’s continuous crying any longer!
Elfriede—[Wringing her hands.] To you yourself, if you will, I will yield up my virginity! To you yourself, if you will, I will give my first love-night!
Casti-Piani—[Shrieking.] The last straw! [A shot. Elfriede utters a piercing yell. Casti-Piani, the smoking revolver in his right hand, his left pressed convulsively to his breast, totters to one of the arm-chairs and breaks down in it.]
Casti-Piani—I—I beg your pardon—Baroness. I’ve—I’ve hurt myself.—That was not—not gallant of me——
Elfriede—[Bending over him.] God have mercy, you haven’t hit yourself with it?!
Casti-Piani—Don’t—don’t hurt my ears—shrieking! Be loving—loving—loving—if you can——
Elfriede—[Stands up in horror, both hands in her hair, stares at him and screams.] No! No! No! I can’t be loving with this sight before me! I can’t be loving! [Directly after the shot, three slim young girls, dressed exactly like Lisiska, have curiously one after the other stepped out of the three doors. Hesitatingly they approach Casti-Piani, and, with the minimum of action or emotion, gesturing silently among themselves, they essay to ease his death-struggles. He looks up and sees them.]
Casti-Piani—And that—and that—ve-vengeance? Spirits of vengeance?—No! No!—That—that is Marushka! I see you now. That is Euphemia!—That, Theophila!— —Marushka! Kiss me, Marushka! [The slenderest of the three girls bends over Casti-Piani and kisses him on the mouth.] No! [In anguish.] No! No! That wasn’t anything!—Kiss—kiss me differently! [She kisses him again.]—So!—So, so, so!—I have de-deceived you [slowly raising himself, supported by Marushka]—deceived you all! The joy of the senses—torture—bloody agony!— —At last—at last—deliverance! [He stands, straight and stiff, as though seized with catalepsy, his eyes very wide open.] We—we must receive—His Worship— —standing.... [He falls dead.]
Elfriede—[Drowned in tears, to the three girls.] Well?—Is none of you girls brave enough to do it? You were more to this man than I was permitted to be! [The three girls shake their heads and withdraw shyly, frightened, but cold and impassive. Elfriede, sobbing, turns to the corpse:] Then forgive me miserable! While you were alive, you abhorred me with all your soul! Forgive me that I come near you now! [Kisses him passionately on the mouth. Breaking into a flood of tears.] This last disillusion, even in your fearfullest blackest pessimism you can never have conceived,—that a virgin was to close your eyes! [She closes his eyes and sinks, weeping piteously, at his feet.]
CURTAIN