Part 17

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=?!