You can’t leave your room in the morning, the secretaries want to be on their own, the servants bring their food from the kitchen, the chambermaids don’t usually have anything to do with that, and you can’t show yourself in the corridor at mealtimes either. It’s only while the gentlemen are working that the chambermaids are allowed to tidy up, not of course in the rooms that are occupied but in those that happen to be empty, and the housework has to be done very quietly so as not to disturb the gentlemen at their work. But how can anyone clean and tidy quietly if the gentlemen stay in their rooms day after day, and then there are the servants going around, dirty riffraff that they are, and when a room is finally free for the chamber-maid to go in, it’s in such a state that not even a deluge could wash it clean? It’s true that the gentlemen who come here are very fine, but you have a hard time of it mastering your disgust so that you can clean up after them. The chambermaids don’t have too much work, but what there is of it is tough going. And never a word of praise, only blame, particularly the frequent and vexatious accusation that files have been lost while you were clearing up. In fact nothing is ever lost, every tiny piece of paper is handed in to the landlord; well, files do get lost, yes, but it’s not the maids’ fault. And then commissions of inquiry come along and the maids have to leave their room and the commission of inquiry takes their beds apart; the maids don’t have any possessions, their few things fit into a pannier you can carry on your back, but the commission of inquiry spends hours searching all the same. Of course it never finds anything; how would files get into the maids’ rooms? What would the maids do with files? But once again the result is angry scolding and threats on the part of the disap-pointed commission of inquiry, conveyed only through the landlord. And never any peace—not by day or by night. Noise half the night, noise from first thing in the morning. If only the chambermaids at least didn’t have to live there, but they must, because it’s their busi-ness to bring small things ordered from the kitchen in between times, particularly at night. Again and again you hear that sudden banging of a fist on the chambermaids’ door, the order is dictated, you run down to the kitchen, you shake the sleeping kitchen-boys awake, you leave the tray of whatever has been ordered outside the chambermaids’ door, from which the gentlemen’s servants fetch it—how dreary it all is.
But that’s not the worst. The worst is when there are no orders and in the middle of the night, when everyone ought to be asleep, and most people really do get to sleep in the end, you sometimes hear someone slinking around outside the chambermaids’ door. Then the maids get out of bed—the beds are above each other, there’s very little space anywhere there; the whole room where the maids sleep is really no more than a big cupboard with three compartments—they listen at the door, they kneel down, they clutch one another in fear. And you keep hearing that person slinking about outside the door. Everyone would be glad if he finally did come in, but nothing happens, no one comes in. You have to remind yourself that there isn’t necessarily any danger, perhaps it’s just someone pacing up and down, wonder-ing whether to order something and unable to make up his mind. Well, perhaps that’s all it is, but perhaps it’s something quite differ-ent. The chambermaids don’t really know the gentlemen at all, they’ve hardly set eyes on them. Anyway, the maids inside the room are half dead with fear, and when at last it’s quiet again outside they lean against the wall without even enough strength to get back into bed. And that was the life waiting for Pepi; this very evening, she said, she was to move back to her old place in the maids’ room. And why? Because of K. and Frieda. Back to the life she’d barely escaped, escaped with K.’s help, to be sure, but also by dint of her own dili-gent efforts.
Because the maids on duty down there, even the most fastidious, do tend to neglect themselves. Who would they be pret-tifying themselves for? No one sees them, at most the kitchen staff, well, maybe a maid who’s satisfied with that will prettify herself. But otherwise they are in their little room, or in the gentlemen’s rooms, and again it would be silly and a waste of time to enter those rooms in neat, clean clothes. And you’re always in artificial light and stuffy air—the heating is always on—and always dead tired. The best way to spend your one free afternoon a week is to find some quiet place near the kitchen where you can sleep undisturbed and without fear. So why make yourself pretty? You hardly bother even to dress. And then—then Pepi was suddenly moved to the bar where the very opposite was necessary if you wanted to hold your ground, where you were always before other people’s eyes, those people including some very finicky and observant gentlemen, and where you must always look as fine and pleasant as possible. Well, that was a great change! And Pepi might boast that she left nothing undone. How things turned out later didn’t worry Pepi. She knew she had the abilities necessary for the job, she was sure of it, she is still convinced of it now and no one can take that conviction away from her, even today, the day of her defeat. The only difficult bit was knowing how to prove herself at first, because she was a poor chambermaid without nice clothes and jewellery, and the gentlemen don’t have the patience to hang about and see how you grow into the job, they want a proper barmaid at once, without any in-between period, or they’ll go some-where else. You might think their demands weren’t very great if Frieda could satisfy them. But that wasn’t so.
Pepi had often thought about it, she said, had often been in Frieda’s company, even shared a bed with her for a while. It wasn’t easy to make Frieda out, and anyone who didn’t study her very closely—and what gentleman is going to study a barmaid very closely?—would easily be led astray. No one knows better than Frieda herself how pathetic she looks; for instance, when you first see her let her hair down you clasp your hands in pity; a girl like that ought not really to be even a chamber-maid; she knows it too, and she has cried her eyes out over it many a night, pressing close to Pepi and winding Pepi’s hair around her own head. But when she was serving in the bar all her doubts were gone, she considered herself a beauty and knew how to make everyone think so too. She knows what people are like, that’s her real art. And she is a quick liar, and deceptive, so that people don’t have time to look at her more closely. Of course that won’t work forever, people do have eyes, and after all their eyes would tell them the truth. But when Frieda realized there was a danger of that she had something else up her sleeve, most recently, for instance, her relationship with Klamm. Her relationship with Klamm! If you don’t believe me, you can go to Klamm and ask him, said Pepi. How clever, how cunning. And if you daren’t go to see Klamm on that kind of subject, maybe you wouldn’t be let in to see him on far more important business, if Klamm is entirely inaccessible—though only to you and your like, because Frieda, for instance, can pop in and see him whenever she wants—well, if that’s the case, you still can find out, you’d think you only had to
