"With mustard?" asked Mother in her clean white apron.
"With a lot of mustard, Mother!"
I ate the sausage greedily where I stood and had Alois bring me out a glass of beer from the International.
"Man is a queer creature, Mother, eh?" said I.
"I should say so," replied Mother eagerly. "A gentleman came here yesterday, ate two Wieners with mustard and afterwards couldn't pay for them.
It was late, there was nobody about, what could I do?
Well, you know, I let him ge.
And just think of it, to-day he comes back and pays for the Wieners and shouts me a drink as well!"
"A pre-war nature, Mother.
And how's business otherwise?"
"Bad!
Yesterday seven brace of Wieners and nine bock-wursts.
You know, if I hadn't the girls, I'd have been finished long ago."
The girls were the prostitutes who supported Mother to the best of their ability.
When they had captured a suitor and it was in any way possible, they would bring him round by Mother's stall to eat a bockwurst first, so that the old woman should make something.
"It will soon be getting warm now," Mother continued; "but in winter, in the wet and the cold—put on what clothes you like, you catch something."
"Give me another bockwurst," said I; "I've got a kind of wish to live.
And how are things at home?"
She looked at me out of her water-bright, little eyes.
"Always the same.
He sold the bed the other day."
Mother was married.
Ten years ago her husband had slipped, when jumping off a moving underground train, and been run over.
They had to take off both his legs.
The accident had had an extraordinary effect on him.
As a cripple he was so humiliated before his wife that he never slept with her again.
In addition to that, in the hospital he had learned to take morphia.
That brought him down very speedily; he got into homosexual circles, and before long the man who had been a normal husband for fifty years, was going around only with nancy boys.
To get money for the boys and the morphia, he took everything of Mother's he could lay hands on and sold it.
But Mother stuck to him, though he used often to beat her.
Every night until four in the morning she stood with her son at the sausage stall.
During the day she took in washing and did charring.
All the time she suffered from some internal complaint and weighed barely ninety pounds—yet one never saw her other than friendly. She believed things were still not so bad with her.
Occasionally, when he was feeling miserable, her husband would come to her and cry.
Those were her best times.
"Have you still got your good job?" she asked me.
I nodded.
"Yes, Mother.
I earn pretty well now."
"See that you keep it."
"I'll see to it, Mother."
I came home.
In the hall, as if called of God, stood the kitchen maid, Frida.
"You are a nice child," said I, for I felt moved to do some good deed.
She made a face as if she had drunk vinegar.
"Seriously," I went on, "what's the use of always quarrelling?
Life's too short, Frida, and full of accidents and perils.
People should stand together these days.
Let's make peace."
She ignored my outstretched hand, muttered something about damned boozing, and, banging the door, vanished.