From his window in the neighbouring boulevard Kreisler’s eye was fixed blankly on a spot thirty feet above the scene of the Hobson-Tarr dialogue. He was shaving himself, one eye fixed on Paris. It beat on this wall of Paris drearily. Had it been endowed with properties of illumination and been directed there earlier in the day, it would have served as a desolate halo for Tarr’s ratiocination. For several days Kreisler’s watch had been in the Mont de PiÉtÉ. Until some clock struck he was in total ignorance of the time of day.

The late spring sunshine flooded, like a bursted tepid star, the pink boulevard. The people beneath crawled like wounded insects of cloth. A two-story house terminating the Boulevard Pfeiffer covered the lower part of the CafÉ Berne.

Kreisler’s room looked like some funeral vault. Shallow, ill-lighted, and extensive, it was placarded with nude and archaic images, painted on strips of canvas fixed to the wall with drawing-pins. Imagining yourself in some Asiatic dwelling of the dead, with the portraits of the deceased covering the holes in which they had respectively been thrust, you would, following your fancy, have turned to Kreisler seeking to see in him some devout recluse who had taken up his quarters there.

Kreisler was in a sense a recluse (although almost certainly the fancy would have gasped and fallen at his contact). But cafÉs were the luminous caverns where he could be said, most generally, to dwell; with, nevertheless, very little opening of the lips and much recueillement or meditation; therefore not unworthy of some rank among the inferior and less fervent solitudes.

A bed like an overturned cupboard, dark, and with a red billow of cloth and feathers covering it entirely; a tesselated floor of dark red tile; a little rug, made with paint, carpet, cardboard, and horse-hair, to represent a leopard—these, with chair, washstand, easel, and several weeks’ of slowly drifting and shifting garbage, completed its contents.

Kreisler flicked the lather on to a crumpled newspaper, with an irresponsible gesture. Each time his razor was raised he looked at himself with a peering vacancy. His face had long become a piece of troublesome meat. Life did not each day deposit an untidiness that could be whisked off by a Gillette blade, as Nature did its stubble.

His face, it is true, wore like a uniform the frowning fixity of the Prussian warrior. But it was such a rig-out as the Captain of Koepenich must have worn, and would take in nobody but a Teutonic squad. The true German seeks every day, by little acts of boorishness, to keep fresh this trenchant Prussian attitude; just as the German student, with his weekly routine of duels, keeps courage simmering in times of peace, that it may instantly boil up to war pitch at the least sign from his Emperor.

He brushed his clothes in a sulky, vigorous way, like a silent, discontented domestic of a shabby, lonely master. He cleaned his glasses with the absorption and tenderness of the short-sighted. Next moment he was gazing through them, straddled on his flat Slav nose—brushing up whimsical moustaches over pouting mouth. This was done with two tiny ivory brushes taken out of a small leather case—present from a fiancÉe who had been alarmed that his moustaches showed an unpatriotic tendency to droop.

This old sweetheart just then disagreeably occupied his mind. But he busied himself about further items of toilet with increased precision. To a knock he answered with careful “Come in.” He did not take his eyes from the glass, spotted blue tie being pinched into position. He watched with impassibility above and around his tie the entrance of a young woman.

“Good morning. So you’re up already,” she said in French.

He treated her as coolly as he had his thoughts. Appearing just then, she gave his manner towards the latter something human to play on, with relief. Imparting swanlike undulations to a short stout person, eye fixed quizzingly on Kreisler’s in the glass, she advanced. Her manner was one seldom sure of welcome, a little deprecatingly aggressive. She owned humorously a good-natured face with protruding eyes, gesticulated with, filling her silences with explosive significance. Brows always raised. A soul made after the image of injuries. A skin which would become easily blue in cold weather was matched with a taste in dress inveterately blue. The Pas de Calais had somehow produced her. Paris, shortly afterwards, had put the mark of its necessitous millions on a mean, lively child.

“Are you going to work to-day?” came in a minute or two.

“No,” he replied, putting his jacket on. “Do you want me to?”

“It would be of certain use. But don’t put yourself out,” with grin tightening all the skin of her face, making it pink and bald and her eyes drunken.

“I’m afraid I can’t.” Watched with sort of appreciative raillery, he got down on his knees and dragged a portmanteau from beneath the bed. “Susanna, what can I get on that?” he asked simply, as of an expert.

“Ah, that’s where we are? You want to pawn this? I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps they’d give you fifteen francs. It’s good leather.”

“Perhaps twenty?” he asked. “I must have them!” he clamoured of a sudden, with energy that astonished her.

She grimaced, looked very serious; said, “Je ne sais pas, vous savez!” with several vigorous, yet rhythmical and rich, forward movements of the head. She became the broker: Kreisler was pressing for a sum in excess of regulations. Not for the world, any more than had she been the broker in fact, would she have valued it at a penny over what it seemed likely to fetch.

“Je ne sais pas, vous savez!” she repeated. She looked even worried. She would have liked to please Kreisler by saying more, but her business conscience prevented her.

“Well, we’ll go together.”

This conversation was carried on strictly in dialect. Suzanne understood him, for she was largely responsible for the lingo in which Kreisler carried on conversation with the French. This young woman had no fixed occupation. She disappeared for periods to live with men. She sat as a model.

“Your father hasn’t sent yet?” He shook his head.

“Le cochon!” she stuttered.

“But it will come to-morrow, or the day after, anyway.” The idiosyncrasies of these monthly letters were quite familiar to her. The dress-clothes had been pawned by her on a former occasion.

“What do you need twenty francs for?”

“I must have, not twenty, but twenty-five.”

Her silence was as eloquent as face-muscles and eye-fluid could make it.

“To get the dress-clothes out,” he explained, fixing her stolidly with his eye.

She first smiled slowly, then allowed her ready mirth to grow, by mechanical stages, into laughter. The presence of this small, indifferent, and mercenary acquaintance irritated him. But he remained cool. Just then a church clock began striking. He foreboded it was already ten, but not later. It struck ten and then eleven. He leapt the hour—the clock seemed rushing with him, in a second, to the more advanced hour—without any flurry, quite calmly. Then it struck twelve. He at once absorbed that further hour as he had the former. He lived an hour as easily and carelessly as he would have lived a second. Could it have gone on striking he would have swallowed, without turning a hair, twenty, thirty strokes!

Going out with Suzanne, he turned the key carefully in the door. The concierge or landlord might slip in and fire his things out in his absence.

The portmanteau, whisked up from the floor, flopped along with him like a child’s slack balloon. He frowned at Suzanne and, prepared for surprises, went warily down the stairs.

He had felt a raw twinge of anger as he had opened the door, looking down at the first boards of his room. A half an hour before, on waking, he had sat up in bed and gazed at the crevice at its foot where a letter, thrust underneath by the concierge, usually lay. He had stared as though it had been a shock to find nothing. That little square of rich bright white paper was what he had counted on night to give him—that he had expected to find on waking, as though it were a secretion of those long hours. It made him feel that there had been no night—long, fecund, rich in surprises—but merely a barren moment of sleep. A stale and garish continuation of yesterday, no fresh day at all, had dawned. The chill and phlegmatic appearance of his room annoyed him. It was its inhospitable character that repelled the envelope pregnant with revolutionary joy and serried German marks. Its dead unchangeableness must preclude all innovation. This spell of monotony on his life he could not break. The room cut him off from the world. He gazed around as a man may eye a wife whom he suspects of intercepting his correspondence. There was no reason why the letter with his monthly remittance should have come on that particular morning, already eight days overdue.

“If I had a father like yours!” said Suzanne in menacing, humorous sing-song, eyes bulging and head nodding. At this vista of perpetual blackmail she fell into a reverie.

“Never get your father off on your fiancÉe, Suzanne!” Kreisler advised in reply.

“Comment?” Suzanne did not understand, and pulled a sour face.

“I had a fiancÉe.”

“Oui. TrÈs bien. Tu t’es brouillÉ avec elle?”

“I have quarrelled with her; yes. She married my father. Or I married her, I may say, to my father. That was a mistake.”

“I believe you! That, as you say, was careless! You don’t get on well with her?”

“I never see her.”

“You never go home?”

Kreisler was too proud to reply to Suzanne very often. He marched on, staring severely ahead.

“How long ago is it that you—how long have you had that stepmother?”

“My father married four years ago.”

“Married your—girl??”

“That’s it.”

“And that’s why you have trouble? She makes the trouble. She is at the bottom of the trouble? Ah! You never told me that. Now I understand why. What’s she like? Is she nice?”

“Not bad.”

They got near the Berne.

“Let’s have a cup of coffee,” Kreisler said.

Suzanne sat down—with the hiding of her red hands, her guilty lofty silence, eyebrows raised as though with a slimy pescine enamel, inducing an impression of nefarious hurry and impermanence. Kreisler was sour and full of himself. His bag looked as though it should hold the properties or merchandise of some illicit trade or amusement.

Suzanne seemed to triumph at this information.

She pressed and pressed in breathless undertone, fascinated by something. Family dramas, of all dramas, she had the expertest interest in.

“You remember the time I had to send three letters to the old devil??”

“Of course! Three months ago, you mean?” Suzanne had taken a near and serious interest in Otto’s financial arrangements. She remembered dates well, apart from that.

Otto did not proceed for some time. She stared quizzingly and patiently past the tip of his nose.

“He then asked me to give up art. He told me of two posts in German firms that were vacant. That was her doing, the swine! One was a station-restaurant business.”

“You refused!”

“I didn’t reply at all.”

In this his methods were very similar to his father’s. The elder Kreisler had repeatedly infuriated his son, calculating on such effect, by sending his allowance only when written for, and even then neglecting his appeal for several days. It came frequently wrapped up in bits of newspapers, and his letters of demand and expostulation were never answered. On two occasions forty marks and thirty marks respectively had been deducted, merely as an irritative measure.

“DÎtes! Why don’t you write to your stepmother?”

“Write to her? No, I won’t write to her.”

“P’raps she wants you to. I should. Why don’t you write to her?”

“I shall before—I shall some day!”

“Before what?”

“Oh, before?”

Suzanne once more glimmered into the absurd distance.

“He will send, I suppose?”

“Now—? Yes, I suppose sooner or later it will turn up.”

“If it didn’t what would you do? You think it’s your stepmother who does it? Why don’t you manage her? You are stupid. You must allow me to tell you that.”

Kreisler knew the end was not far off; this might be it. So much the better!

Kreisler’s student days—a lifetime in itself—had unfitted him, at the age of thirty-six, for practically anything. He had only lost one picture so far. This senseless solitary purchase depressed him whenever he thought of it. How dreary that cheque for four pounds ten was! Who could have bought it? It sold joylessly and fatally one day in an exhibition.

CHAPTER II

Nine months previously Kreisler had arrived in Paris at the Gare de Lyon, from Italy. He had left Rome, according to his account, because the Italian creditor is such a bad-tempered fellow, and he could never get any sleep after 8—or latterly 7.30—even, in the morning.

He had dispatched this note before leaving to a Herr Ernst Volker.—For some time he stood on the Paris platform, ulster thrown back, smoking a lean cigar, with a straw stuck in it. He was glad to be in Paris. How busy the women, intent on travel, were! Groups of town-folk, not travellers, stood like people at a show. Each traveller was met by a phalanx of uninterested faces beyond the gangway.

His standing on the platform was a little ceremonious and military. He was taking his bearings. Body and belongings with him were always moved about with certain strategy. At last, with racial menace, he had his things swept together, saying heavily:

“Un viagre!”

Ernst Volker was not in, but had left word he would be there after dinner. It was in a pension. He rented a studio as well in the garden behind. The house was rather like a French Public Baths, two-storied, of a dirty purple colour. Kreisler looked up at it and felt that a very public sort of people must live there, looking big and idle in their rooms and constantly catching the eye of the stranger on the pavement. He was led to the studio in rear of the house, and asked to wait.

He turned round several long canvases and was astonished to find dashing ladies in large hats before him.

“Ha ha! Well, I’m damned! Bravo, Ernst!” he exploded in his dull solitude, extremely amused.

Volker had not done this in Rome.—Even there he had given indications of latent virtuosity, but had been curbed by classic presences. Since arriving in Paris he had blossomed prodigiously. He dealt out a vulgar vitality by the peck to each sitter, and they forgave him for making them comparatively “ugly.” He flung a man or woman on to nine feet of canvas and pummelled them on it for a couple of hours, until they promised to remain there or were incapable of moving, so to speak. He had never been able to treat people like this in any other way of life, and was grateful to painting for the experience. He always appeared to feel he would be expected to apologize for his brutal behaviour as an artist, and was determined not to do so.

A half-hour later, on his return, the servant told him somebody was waiting in the studio. With face not exhibiting joyful surprise, but rather the collected look of a man of business arriving at his office, he walked out quickly across the garden.

When he saw Kreisler the business look disappeared. Nothing of his private self remained for the moment, all engulfed in his friend’s personality.

“But, Ernst! What beautiful pictures! What pleasant company you left me to wait amongst!—How are you? I am glad to see you again!”

“Had a good journey? Your letter amused me!—So Rome became too hot?”

“A little! My dear chap, it was eine ganz verdammte klemme! In this last scuffle I lost—but I lost!—half the clothes off my back! But chiefly Italian clothes; that is fortunate!”

“Why didn’t you write?”

“Oh, it wasn’t serious enough to call for help.” He dismissed the out-of-date notion at once!—“This is a nice place you’ve got.”—Kreisler looked round as though measuring it. He noticed Volker’s discomfort. He felt he was examining something more intimate than the public aspect of a dwelling. It was as though his friend were expecting a wife, whom Kreisler had not met, to turn up suddenly.

“Have you dined?—I waited until eight. Have you…?”

“I should like something to eat. Can we get anything here?”

“I’m afraid not.—It’s rather late for this neighbourhood. Let’s take these things to your room—on the way—and go to the Grands Boulevards.”

They stayed till the small hours of the morning, in the midst of “Paris by Night” of the German bourgeois imagination, drinking champagne and toasting the creditors Kreisler had left behind in Rome.

Kreisler, measured by chairs or doors, was of immoderate physical humanity. He was of that select section, corporally, that exceed the mean. His long round thighs stuck out like poles. This large body lounged and poised beside Volker in massive control and over-reaching of civilized matter. It was in Rome or in Paris. It had an air of possession everywhere. Volker was stranger in Paris than his companion, who had only just arrived. He felt a little raw and uncomfortable, almost a tourist. He was being shown “Paris by Night”; almost literally, for his inclinations had not taken him much to that side of the town.

Objects—cocottes, newsvendors, waiters—flowed through Kreisler’s brain without trouble or surprise. His heavy eyes were big gates of a self-centred city. It was just a procession. There was no trade in the town.

He was a property of Nature, or a favourite slave, untidy and aloof. Kreisler so real and at home was like a ghost sitting there beside him, for Ernst Volker. He had not had the time to solidify yet in Paris by all rights, and yet was so solid and accustomed at once. This body was in Paris now!—with an heroic freedom.

Volker began looking for himself. He was only made of cheap thin stuff. He picked up the pieces quietly. This large rusty machine of a man smashed him up like an egg-shell at every meeting. His shell grew quickly again, but never got hard enough.

He was glad to see him again! Kreisler was a good fellow.—Despite himself Ernst Volker was fidgety at the lateness of the hour. The next day FrÄulein Bodenaar, who was sitting for him, was due at 9.30. But the first night of seeing his friend again—He drank rather more than usual, and became silent, thinking of his Westphalian home and his sister who was not very well. She had had a bicycle accident, and had received a considerable shock. He might spend the summer with her and his mother at Berck-sur-Mer or Calais. He would have gone home for a week or so now, only an aunt he did not like was staying there.

“Well, let’s get back!” said Kreisler, rather thoughtful, too, at all the life he had seen.

CHAPTER III

In Paris Ernst Volker had found himself. It seemed especially constructed for him, such a wonderful, large, polite institution. No one looked at him because he was small. For money in Paris represented delicate things, in Germany chiefly gross ones. His money lent him more stature than anything else could, and in a much more dignified and subtle way than elsewhere. His talent benefited for the first time by his money. Heavy temperament, primitive talent, had their big place, but money had at last come into its own and got into the spiritual sphere. A very sensible and soothing spirit reigned in this seat of intelligence. A very great number of sensible, well-dressed figures perambulated all over these suave acres. Large tribes of “types” prosecuted their primitive enthusiasms in certain cafÉs, unannoyed by either the populace or the differently minded Élite. The old romantic values he was used to in his Fatherland were all deeply modified. Money—that is luck and its power—was the genius of the new world. American clothes were adapted for the finer needs of the Western European.

On the evening following Kreisler’s arrival Volker had an engagement. The morning after that Kreisler turned up at half-past twelve. Volker was painting FrÄulein Bodenaar. She was very smartly dressed, in a tight German way. He displayed a disinclination to make Kreisler and his sitter acquainted. He was a little confused. They arranged to meet at dinner-time. He was going to lunch with FrÄulein Bodenaar.

Kreisler the night before had spent a good deal of money in the German paradise beyond the river. Volker understood by the particular insistent blankness of Kreisler’s eye that money was needed. He was familiar with this look. Kreisler owed him fifteen hundred marks. He had at first made an effort to pay back Volker money borrowed, when his allowance arrived. But in Rome, and earlier for a short time in MÜnich, his friend’s money was not of so much value as it was at present. Ernst waived repayment in an eager, sentimental way. The debt grew. Kreisler had felt keenly the financial void caused by Volker’s going off to Paris. He had not formulated to himself the real reason of his following Volker. Nor had he taken the trouble to repudiate it. He was now in the position of a man separated for some months from his wife. He was in a luxurious hurry to see once more the colour of Volker’s gold.

Kreisler was very touchy about money, like many borrowers. He sponged with discrimination. He had not for some time required to sponge at all, as Volker amply met his needs. So he had got rather out of practice. He found this reopening of his account with little friend Ernst a most delicate business. It was worse than tackling a stranger. He realized there might be a modification of Volker’s readiness to lend. He therefore determined to ask for a sum in advance of actual needs, and by boldness at once re-establish continuity.

After dinner he said:

“You remember Ricci? Where I got my paints the first part of the time. I had some trouble with that devil before I left. He came round and made a great scandal on the staircase. He shouted ‘Bandit! Ha! ha! Sporca la tua Madonna!’—how do you say it?—‘Sporco Tedesco.’ Then he called the neighbours to witness. He kept repeating he was ‘not afraid of me.’ I took him by the ear and kicked him out!” he ended with florid truculence.

Volker laughed obsequiously but with discomfort. Kreisler solicited his sympathetic mirth with a masterful eye. He laughed himself, unnecessarily heartily. A scene of violence in which a small man was hustled, which Volker would have to applaud, was a clever prelude. Then Otto began to be nice.

“I am sorry for the little devil! I shall have the money soon. I shall send it him. He shall not suffer. Antonio, too. I don’t owe much. I had to settle most before I left. Himmel! My landlord!” He choked mirthfully over his coffee a little, almost upsetting it, then mincingly adjusted the cup to his moustached lips.

If he had to settle up before he left, he could not have much now, evidently! There was a disagreeable pause.

Volker stirred his coffee. He immediately showed his hand, for he looked up and with transparent innocence asked:

“By the way, Otto, you remember Blauenstein at MÜnich??”

“You mean the little Jew from whom everybody used to borrow money?” Kreisler fixed him severely and significantly with his eye and spoke with heavy deliberation.

“Did people borrow money from him? I had forgotten. Yes, that’s the man. He has turned up here; who do you think with? With Irma, the Bohemian girl. They are living together—round the corner there.”

“Hum! Are they? She was a pretty little girl. Do you remember the night Von Gerarde was found stripped and tied to his door-handle? He assured me Irma had done it and had pawned his clothes.”

Was Volker thinking that Blauenstein’s famous and admitted function should be resorted to as an alternative for himself by Kreisler?

“Volker, I can speak to you plainly; isn’t that so? You are my friend. What’s more, already we have—” he laughed strongly and easily. “My journey has cost the devil of a lot. I shall be getting my allowance in a week or so. Could you lend me a small sum of money. When my money comes?”

“Of course! But I am hard up. How much—?” These were three jerky efforts.

“Oh, a hundred and fifty or two hundred marks.”

Volker’s jaw dropped.

“I am afraid, my dear Kreisler, I can’t—just now—manage that. My journey, too, cost me a lot. I’m very sorry. Let me see. I have my rent next week? I don’t see how I can manage?”

Volker had a clean-shaven, depressed, and earnest face. He had always been honest and timid.

Kreisler looked sulkily at the tablecloth and knocked the ash sharply off his cigarette into his cup.

He said nothing. Volker became nervous.

“Will a hundred marks be of any use?”

“Yes.” Kreisler drew his hand over his chin as though stroking a beard down and then pulled his moustaches up, fixing the waitress with an indifferent eye. “Can you spare that?”

“Well—I can’t really. But if you are in such a position that?”

This is how he lost Volker. He felt that hundred marks, given him as a favour, was the last serious bite he would get. He only gradually realized of how much more worth Volker’s money now was, and what before was an unorganized mass of specie, in which the professional borrower could wallow, was now a sound and suitably conducted business. He met that night the new manager.

He was taken round to the Berne after dinner. He did not realize what awaited him. He found himself in the head-quarters of many national personalities. Politeness reigned. Kreisler was pleased to find a permanent vat of German always on tap. His roots mixed sluggishly with Ernst’s in this living lump of the soil of the Fatherland dumped down at the head of the Boulevard Pfeiffer.

The Germans he met here spoke a language and expressed opinions he could not agree with, but with which Volker evidently did. They argued genially over glasses of beer and champagne. He found his ticket at once. He was the vielle barbe of the party.

“Yes, I’ve seen Gauguins. But why go so far as the South Sea Islands unless you are going to make people more beautiful? Why go out of Europe? Why not save the money for the voyage?” he would bluster.

“More beautiful? What do you understand by the word ‘beautiful,’ my dear sir?” would answer a voice in the service of new movements.

“What do I call beautiful? How would you like your face to be as flat as a pancake, your nostrils like a squashed strawberry, one of your eyes cocked up by the side of your ear? Would not you be very unhappy to look like that? Then how can you expect any one but a technique-maniac to care a straw for a picture of that sort—call it Cubist or Fauve or whatever you like? It’s all spoof. It puts money in somebody’s pocket, no doubt.”

“It’s not a question, unhappily, of how we should like our faces to be. It is how they are. But I do not consider the actual position of my eyes to be any more beautiful than any other position that might have been chosen for them. The almond eye was long held in contempt by the hatchet-eye?”

Kreisler peered up at him and laughed. “You’re a modest fellow. You’re not as ugly as you think! Nach! I like to find?”

“But you haven’t told us, Otto, what you call beautiful.”

“I call this young lady here”—and he turned gallantly to a blushing cocotte at his side—“beautiful, very beautiful!” He kissed her amid gesticulation and applause.

“That’s just what I supposed,” his opponent said with appreciation.

He did not get on well with Soltyk. Louis Soltyk was a young Russian, half Polish, who occasionally sat amongst the Germans at the Berne. Volker saw more of him than anybody. It was he who had superseded Kreisler in the position of influence as regards Volker’s purse. Soltyk did not borrow a hundred marks. His system was far more up to date. Ernst had experienced an unpleasant shock in coming into contact with Kreisler’s clumsy and slovenly, small-scale money habits again! Soltyk physically bore, distantly and with polish, a resemblance to Kreisler. His handsome face and elegance were very different. Kreisler and he disliked each other for obscure physiological reasons: they had perhaps scrapped in the dressing-rooms of creation for some particular fleshly covering, and each secured only fragments of a coveted garment. In some ways, then, Soltyk was his efficient and more accomplished counterpart, although as empty and unsatisfactory as himself.

“Aber wo ist der deutsche Student?” Soltyk would ask, referring to him usually like that.

“He’s in good company somewhere!” Volker revealed Kreisler as a lady’s man. This satisfied Soltyk’s antipathy. The Russian kept an eye on Volker’s pocket while Kreisler was about. He had not only recognized in him a mysterious and vexing kinship, with his instinct; his sharper’s sense, also, noted the signs of the professional borrower, the most contemptible and slatternly member of the crook family. In an access of sentiment Ernst asked his new friend to try and sell a painting of Kreisler’s. Soltyk dealt in paintings and art objects. But Soltyk took him by the lapel of the coat and in a few words steadied him into cold sense.

“Non! Sois pas bÊte! Here,” he pulled out a handful of money and chose a dollar-piece. “Here—give him this. You buy a picture—if it’s a picture you want to buy—of Krashunine’s. Kreisler has nothing but Kreisler to offer. C’est peu!”

Ernst introduced Kreisler next to another sort of Paris compatriot. It was a large female contingent this time. He took him round to FrÄulein Lipmann’s on her evening, when these ladies played the piano and met.

Kreisler felt that he was a victim of strategy. He puffed and swore outside, complained of their music, the coffee, their way of dressing.

The Lipmann circle could have stood as a model for Tarr’s Bourgeois-Bohemians, stood for a group.

For chief characteristic this particular Bourgeois-Bohemian set had the inseparability of its members. Should a man, joining them, wish to flirt with one particularly, he must flirt with all—flatter all, take all to the theatre, carry the umbrellas and paint-boxes of all. Eventually, should he come to that, it is doubtful if a proposition of marriage could be made otherwise than before the assembled band! And marriage alone could wrench the woman chosen away from the clinging bunch.

Kreisler, despite his snorting, went again with Volker. The female charm had done its work. This gregarious female personality had shown such frank invitation to Volker that had any separate woman exhibited half as hospitable a front he would have been very alarmed. As it was, it had at first just fulfilled certain bourgeois requirements of his lonely German soul. Kreisler came a few weeks running to the Lipmann soirÉe. Never finding Volker there, he left off going as well. He felt he had been tricked and slighted. The ladies divined what had happened. FrÄulein Lipmann, the leader, put a spiteful little mark down to each of their names.

CHAPTER IV

Kreisler pocketed Ernst’s hundred marks and made no further attempt on the formerly hospitable income of his friend. Debts began accumulating. Only he found he had grown suddenly timid with his creditors. The concierge frightened him. He conciliated the garÇon at the cafÉ, to whom he owed money. He even paid several debts that it was quite unnecessary to pay, in a moment of panic and weakness. A straitened week ensued. At the Berne he had lost his nerve in some way; he clowned obsequiously on some evenings, and, depressed and slack the next, perhaps, resented his companions’ encores.

Next he gradually developed the habit of sitting alone. More often than not he would come into the cafÉ and go to a table at the opposite side of the room to that at which the Germans were sitting.

Ridicule is sighted at twenty yards, the spectator then, without the sphere of average immediate magnetism. For once it does not matter, but if persisted in it inevitably results in humour. Those who keep to themselves awaken mirth as a cartwheel running along the road by itself would. People feel with the “lonely” man that he is going about with some eccentric companion—that is himself. Why did he choose this deaf-and-dumb companion? What do they find to say? He is ludicrous as two men would be who, perpetually in each other’s company, were never seen to exchange a word—who dined together, went to theatre or cafÉ, without ever looking at each other or speaking.

So Kreisler became a lonely figure. It was a strange feeling. He must be quiet and not attract attention. He was marked in some way as though he had committed a theft. Perhaps it was merely the worry of perpetual “tick” beginning to tell. For the moment he would just put himself aside and see what happened. He was afraid of himself too. Always up till then immersed in that self, now for the first time he stood partly outside it. This slight divorce made him less sure in his actions. A little less careful of his appearance, he went sluggishly about, smoking, reading the paper a great deal, working at the art school fairly often, playing billiards with an Austrian cook whose acquaintance he had made in a cafÉ and who disappeared owing him seven francs.

Volker had been a compendious phenomenon in his life, although his cheery gold had attracted him to the more complete discovery. He had ousted women, too, from Kreisler’s daily needs. He had become a superstition for his tall friend.

It was Kreisler’s deadness, his absolute lack of any reason to be confident and yet perfect aplomb, that mastered his companion. But this acquired eventually its significance as well, for Kreisler. The inertia and phlegm, outward sign of depressing everyday Kreisler, had found some one for whom they were a charm and something to be envied. Kreisler’s imagination woke shortly after Volker’s. It was as though a peasant who had always regarded his life as the dullest affair, were suddenly inspirited about himself by realizing some townsman’s poetic notion of him. Kreisler’s moody wastefulness and futility had found a raison d’Être and meaning.

Ernst Volker had remained for three vague years becalmed on this empty sea. Kreisler basked round him, never having to lift his waves and clash them together as formerly he had been forced sometimes to do. There had been no appeals to life. Volker had been the guarantor of his peace. His failure was the omen of the sinking ship, the disappearance of the rats!

Then they had never arrived at terms of friendship. It had been only an epic acquaintanceship, and Kreisler had taken him about as a parasite that he pretended not to notice.

There was no question, therefore, of a reproach at desertion. He merely hopped off on to somebody else. Kreisler was more exasperated at this than at the defection of a friend, who could be fixed down, and from whom at last explanation must come. It was an unfair advantage taken. A man had no right to accompany you in that distant and paradoxical fashion, get all he could, become ideally useful, unless it was for life.

He watched Soltyk’s success with distant mockery. Volker’s loves were all husks, of illogical completeness.

A man appeared one day in the Berne who had known Kreisler in MÜnich. The story of Kreisler’s marrying his fiancÉe to his father then became known. Other complications were alleged in which Otto’s paternity played a part. The dot of the bride was another obscure matter. It was during his aloofness. He looked the sort of man, the party agreed, who would splice his sweetheart with his papa or reinforce his papa’s affairs with a dot he did not wish to pay for at last with his own person. The Berne was also informed that Kreisler had to keep seventeen children in MÜnich alone; that he only had to look at a woman for her to become pregnant. It was when the head of the column, the eldest of the seventeen, emerged into boyhood, requiring instruction, that Kreisler left for Rome. Since then a small society had been founded in Bavaria to care for Kreisler’s offsprings throughout Germany. This great capacity of Otto’s was, naturally, not admired; at the best it could be considered as a misdirected and disordered efficiency. The stories pleased, nevertheless. When he appeared that night his friends turned towards his historic figure with cries of welcome. But he was not gregarious. He missed his opportunity. He took a seat in the passage-way leading to the Bureau de Tabac. As their laughter struck him through his paper he was unstrung enough to be annoyed.

He frowned and puckered up his eyes, and two flushed lines descended from his eyes to his jaw. On their way out one or two of his compatriots greeted him:

“Sacred Otto! Why so unsociable?”

“Hush! He has much to think about. You don’t understand what the cares of—”

“Come, old Otto, a drink!”

He shook them off with mixture of affected anger and genuine spitting oaths. He avoided their eyes and spat blasphemously at his beer. He avoided the cafÉ for some days.

Kreisler then recovered.

At first nothing much happened. He had just gone back again into the midst of his machinery like a bone slipped into its place, with a soft crick. He became rather more firm with his creditors. He changed his rooms (moving then to the Boulevard Pfeiffer), passed an occasional evening with the Germans at the Berne, and started a portrait of Suzanne, who had been sitting at the school.

“How is Herr Volker? Is he out of Paris?” FrÄulein Lipmann asked him when they met. “Come round and see us.”

People’s actual or possible proceedings formed in very hard-and-fast mould in Kreisler’s mind, seen not with realism, but through conventions of his suspicious irony. This solicitude as to Volker he contrasted with their probable indifference as regards his old, shabby, and impolite self.

But he went round, his reception being insipid. He had shown no signs of animation or interest in them. Both he and the ladies were rather doubtful as to why he came at all. No pleasure resulted on either side from these visits, yet they doggedly continued. A distinct and steady fall in the temperature could be observed. He sneered, as though the aimlessness of his visits were an insult that had at last been taken up. They would have been for ever discontinued except for a sudden necessity to reopen that channel of bourgeois intercourse.

CHAPTER V

On the first day of his letter being overdue, a convenient way of counting, Otto rose late, from a maze of shallow dreams, and was soon dressed, wanting to get out of his room.

As the clock struck one he slammed his door and descended the stairs alertly. The concierge, on the threshold of her “loge,” peered up at him.

“Good morning, Madame Leclerc; it’s a fine day,” said Kreisler, in his heavy French, his cold direct gaze incongruously ornamented by a cheerful smile.

“Monsieur has got up late this morning,” replied the concierge, with very faint amiability.

“Yes, I have lost all sense of time. J’ai perdu le temps! Ha ha!” He grinned mysteriously. The watch had gone the way of the dress clothes some days already.

She followed him slowly along the passage, become extremely grave. “Quel original! quel genre!” With a look of perplexed distrust she watched him down the street.—This German good humour and sudden expansiveness has always been a portentous thing to French people. Latin races are as scandalized at northern amenities, the badness of our hypocrisies or manners and total immodesty displayed, as the average man of Teutonic race is with the shameful perfection of and ease in deceit shown by the French neighbour. Kreisler, still beneath the eye of the concierge, with his rhythmic martial tread, approached the restaurant. A few steps from the threshold he slowed down, dragging his long German boots, which acted as brakes.

The Restaurant Lejeune, like many others in Paris, had been originally a clean, tranquil little creamery, consisting of a small shop a few feet either way.—Then one customer after another had become more gluttonous. He had asked, in addition to his daily glass of milk, for beefsteak and spinach, or some other terrific nourishment, which the decent little business at first supplied with timid protest. But perpetual scenes of sanguine voracity—weeks of compliance with the most brutal and unbridled appetites of man—gradually brought about a change in its character.—It became frankly a place where the most carnivorous palate might be palled. As trade grew, the small business had burrowed backwards into the house—the victorious flood of commerce had burst through walls and partitions, flung down doors, discovered many dingy rooms in the interior that it instantly filled with serried cohorts of eaters. It had driven out terrified families, had hemmed the apoplectic concierge in her “loge,” it had broken out on to the court at the back in shed-like structures. And in the musty bowels of the house it had established a broiling, luridly-lighted, roaring den, inhabited by a rushing and howling band of slatternly savages.—The chef’s wife sat at a desk immediately fronting the entrance door. When a diner had finished, adding up the bill himself on a printed slip of paper, he paid it there on his way out. In the first room a tunnel-like and ill-lit recess furnished with a long table formed a cul-de-sac to the left. Into this Kreisler got. At the right-hand side the passage led to the inner rooms.

A mind feeling the need for things clean and clear cut would have been better content, although demurring, with Kreisler’s military morning suit, slashed with thick seams; carefully cut hair, short behind, a little florid and bunched on the top; his German high-crowned bowler hat, and plain cane, than the Charivari of the Art-fashion and uniform of The Brush in those about him, chiefly students from the neighbouring Art schools.

He was staring at the bill of fare when some one took the seat in front of him.—He looked up, put down the card. A young woman was sitting there, who now seemed waiting, as though Kreisler might be expected, after a rest, to take up the menu again and go on reading it.

“Have you done with?? May I??”

At the sound of her voice he moved a little forward, and in handing it to her, spoke in German.

“Danke schÖn,” she said, smiling with a German nod of racial recognition.

He ordered his soup.—Usually this meal passed in surly impassible inspection of his neighbours and the newspaper. Staring at and through the figure in front of him, he spent several minutes. He seemed making up his mind.

“Monsieur est distrait aujourd’hui,” Jeanne said, who was waiting to take his order.

Contrary to custom, he sought for some appetizing dish, to change the routine. Appetite had not woken, but he had become restless before the usual dull programme. There were certain tracts of menu he never explored. His eye always guided him at once to the familiar place where the “plat du jour” was to be found, and the alternative sweets heading the list. He now plunged his eye down the long line of unfamiliar dishes.

He fixed his eye on Jeanne with indecision too, and picked up the menu. “My vis-À-vis is pretty!” he thought.

“Lobster salad, mayonnaise, and a pommes À l’huile, Jeanne,” he called out.

This awakening to beauties of the menu brought with it a survey of his neighbour. Vaguely, she must be connected with lobster salad. How could that be?

First he was surprised that such a beautiful girl should be sitting there. Beautiful people wander dangerously about in life, just like ordinary folk. He appeared to think that they should be isolated like powder magazines or lepers. This man could never leave good luck alone, or reflect that that, too, was a dangerous vagrant. He could not quite grasp that it was a general good luck and easily explained phenomenon.

He had already been examined by the beautiful girl. Throwing an absent far-away look into her eyes, she let them wander over him. Afterwards she cast them down into her soup. As a pickpocket, after brisk work in a crowd, hurries home to examine and evaluate his spoil, so she then examined collectedly what her dreamy eyes had noted. This method was not characteristic of her, but of the category of useful habits bequeathed us, each sex having its own. Perhaps in her cloudy soup she beheld something of the storm and shock that inhabited her neighbour.

Without preliminary reflection Kreisler found himself addressing her, a little abashed when he suddenly heard his voice, and with eerie feeling when it was answered.

“From your hesitation in choosing your lunch, gnÄdiges FrÄulein, I suppose you have not been long in Paris?”

“No, I only arrived a week ago, from America.” She settled her elbows on the table for a moment.

“Allow me to give you some idea of what the menu of this restaurant is like.” This was like a lesson. He started ponderously. “At the head of each list you will find simple dishes; elemental dishes, I might call them! (Elementalische plÄtter!) This is the rough material from which the others are evolved. Each list is like an oriental dance. It gets wilder as it goes along. In the last dish you can be sure that the potatoes will taste like tomatoes, and the pork like a sirloin of beef.”

“So!” laughed the young woman, with good German guttural. “I’m glad to say I have ordered dishes that head the list.”

“Garlic is an enemy usually ambushed in gigot.—That is his only quite certain haunt.”

“Good; I will avoid gigot.” She was indulgent to his clowning, and drawled a little in sympathy. Between language and feeding, Kreisler sought to gain the young lady’s confidence, adhering conventionally to the progress of Creation.

He found his neighbour inclined to slight Nature. He, too, was a little overlooked; in waiving of conventions being blandly forestalled. There was something uncomfortable about all this. He must brace himself. He realized with the prophetic logic of his hysteria, racing through the syllogisms his senses divined, sensations now anachronisms, afterwards recognized as they burst out in due course. This precocity in the restaurant took him to the solution of what their coming together might mean.

One plethoric impression of her was received—although from her—instalment of a senseless generosity.

She wore a heavy black burnous, very voluminous and severe; a large ornamental bag was on the chair at her side, which you expected to contain herbs and trinkets, paraphernalia of the witch, rather than powder, lip-cream, and secrets. Her hat was immense and sinuous; generally she implied an egotistic code of advanced order, full of insolent strategies.

Other women in the restaurant appeared dragged down and drained of vitality by their clothes beside her, Kreisler thought, although she wore so much more than they did. Her large square-shouldered and slim body swam in hers like a duck.

When she laughed, this commotion was transmitted to her body as though sharp, sonorous blows had been struck on her mouth. Her lips were long, hard bubbles risen in the blond heavy pool of her face, ready to break, pitifully and gaily. Grown forward with ape-like intensity, they refused no emotion noisy egress if it got so far. Her eyes were large, stubborn, and reflective, brown coming out of blondness. Her head was like a deep white egg in a tobacco-coloured nest. She exuded personality with alarming and disgusting intensity. It was an ostentation similar to diamonds and gold watch-chains. Kreisler felt himself in the midst of a cascade, a hot cascade.

She seemed to feel herself a travelling circus of tricks and wonders, beauty shows and monstrosities. Quite used to being looked at, she had become resigned to inability to avoid performing. She possessed the geniality of public character and the genius of sex. Kreisler was a strange loafer talked to easily, without any consciousness of condescension.

Just as he was most out of his depth, Kreisler had run up against all this! It all had the mellowness of sunset, and boomed in this small alcove infernally.—By the fact of sex this figure seems to offer him a traditional substantiality. He clutches at it eagerly as at something familiar and unmetamorphosed—and somewhat unmetamorphosable—by Fate.

In the first flush he revolves with certain skill in this new champ de manoeuvres, executing one or two very pretty gymnastics. He has only to flatter himself on the excellent progress, really, that he makes.

“My name is Anastasya,” she says irrelevantly to him, as if she had stupidly forgotten, before, this little detail.

Whew! his poor ragged eyelashes flutter, a cloud of astonishment passes grotesquely over his face; like the clown of the piece, he looks as though he were about to rub his head, click his tongue, and give his nearest man-neighbour an enthusiastic kick. “Anastasya!” It will be “Tasy” soon!

He outwardly becomes more solemn than ever, like a merchant who sees an incredible dupe before him, and would in some way conceal his exhilaration. But he calls her carefully at regular intervals, Anastasya!

“I suppose you’ve come here to work?” he asked.

“I don’t want to work any more than is absolutely necessary. I am overworked as it is, by living merely.” He could well believe it; she must do some overtime! “If it were not for my excellent constitution?”

This was evidently, Kreisler felt, the moment to touch on the heaviness of life’s burden; as her expression was perfectly even and non-committal.

“Ah, yes,” he sighed heavily, one side of the menu rising gustily and relapsing, “Life gives one work enough.”

She looked at him and reflected, “What work does ‘cet oiseau-lÀ’ perform?”

“Have you many friends here, Anastasya?”

“None.”—She laughed with ostentatious satisfaction at his funniness. “I came here, as a matter of fact, to be alone. I want to see only fresh people. I have had all the gusto and illusion I had lent all round steadily handed back to me where I come from. ‘I beg your pardon! Your property, ma’am!’ The result is that I am amazingly rich!—I am tremendously rich!” She opened her eyes wide; Kreisler pricked up his ears and wondered if this were to be taken in another sense. He cast down his eyes respectfully. “I have the sort of feeling that I have enough to go all round.—But perhaps I haven’t!”

Kreisler lingered over her first observation: “wanted to be alone.” The indirect compliment conveyed (and he felt, when it was said, that he was somewhere near the frontier, surely, of a German confidence) was rather mitigated by what followed. The “having enough to go all round”; that was very universal, and included him too easily in its sweep.

“Do you want to go all round?” he asked, with heavy plagiarism of her accent, and solemn sentimental face.

“I don’t want to be mean.”

His eyes struggled with hers; he was easily thrown.

But she had the regulation feminine foible of charity, he reassured himself, by her answer.

Kreisler’s one great optimism was a belief in the efficacy of women.—You did not deliberately go there—at least, he usually did not—unless you were in straits. But there they were all the time, vast dumping-ground for sorrow and affliction—a world-dimensioned pawnshop, in which you could deposit not your dress-suit or garments, but yourself, temporarily, in exchange for the gold of the human heart. Their hope consisted, no doubt, in the reasonable uncertainty as to whether you would ever be able to take yourself out again. Kreisler had got in and out again almost as many times as his “smokkin” in its pawnshop.

Women were Art or expression for him in this way. They were Man’s Theatre. The Tragedies played there purged you periodically of the too violent accumulations of desperate life. There its burden of laughter as well might be exploded.—Woman was a confirmed Schauspielerin or play-actress; but coming there for illusion he was willingly moved. Much might be noticed in common between him and the drunken navvy on Saturday night, who comes home bellicosely towards his wife, blows raining gladly at the mere sight of her. He may get practically all the excitement and exertion he violently needs, without any of the sinister chances a more real encounter would present. His wife is “his little bit” of unreality, or play. He can declaim, be outrageous to the top of his bent; can be maudlin too; all conducted almost as he pleases, with none of the shocks of the real and too tragic world. In this manner woman was the Æsthetic element in Kreisler’s life. Love, too, always meant unhappy love for him, with its misunderstandings and wistful separations. He issued forth solemnly and the better for it. He approached a love affair as the deutscher Student engages in a student’s duel—no vital part exposed, but where something spiritually of about the importance of a nose might be lost; at least stoically certain that blood would be drawn.

A casual observer of the progress of Otto Kreisler’s life might have said that the chief events, the crises, consisted of his love affairs—such as that unfortunate one with his present stepmother.—But, in the light of a careful analysis, this would have been an inversion of the truth. When the events of his life became too unwieldy or overwhelming, he converted them into love, as he might have done, with specialized talent, into some art or other. He was a sculptor—a German sculptor of a mock-realistic and degenerate school—in the strange sweethearting of the “free-life.” The two or three women he had left about the world in this way—although perhaps those symbolic statues had grown rather characterless in Time’s weather and perhaps lumpish—were monuments of his perplexities. After weeks of growing estrangement, he would sever all relations suddenly one day—usually on some indigestible epigram, that worried the poor girl for the rest of her days. Being no adept in the science of his heart, there remained a good deal of mystery for him about the appearance of “Woman” in his life. He felt that she was always connected with its important periods; he thought, superstitiously, that his existence was in some way implicated with dem Weib. She was, in any case, for him, a stormy petrel. He would be killed by a woman, he sometimes thought. This superstition had flourished with him before he had yet found for it much raison d’Être.—A serious duel having been decided on in his early student days, this reflection, “I am quite safe; it is not thus that I shall die,” had given him a grisly coolness. His opponent nearly got himself killed, because he, for his part, had no hard and fast theory about the sort of death in store for him.

This account, to be brought up to date, must be modified. Since knowing Volker, no woman had come conspicuously to disturb him. Volker had been the ideal element of balance in his life.

But between this state—the minimum degree of friendship possible—a distant and soothing companionship—and more serious states, there was no possible foothold for Kreisler.

Friendship usually dates from unformed years. But Love still remains in full swing long after Kreisler’s age at that time; a sort of spurious and intense friendship.

An uncomfortable thing happened now. He realized suddenly all the possibilities of this chance acquaintanceship, plainly and cinematographically.—He was seized with panic.—He must make a good impression.—From that moment he ran the risk of doing the reverse. For he was unaccustomed to act with calculation.—There he was like some individual who had gone nonchalantly into the presence of a prince; who—just in the middle of the audience—when he would have been getting over his first embarrassment—is overcome with a tardy confusion, the imagination in some way giving a jump. It is the imagination, repressed and as it were slighted, revenging itself.

Casting about desperately for means of handling the situation, he remembered she had spoken of getting a dog to guide her.—What had she meant? Anyway, he grasped at the dog. He could regain possession of himself in romantic stimulus of this figure. He would be her dog! Lie at her feet! He would fill with a merely animal warmth and vivacity the void that must exist in her spirit. His imagination, flattered, came in as ally. This, too, exempted him from the necessity of being victorious. All he asked was to be her dog!—only wished to impress her as a dog! Even if she did not feel much sympathy for him now, no matter.—He would humbly follow her up, put himself at her disposal, not be exigent. It was a rÔle difficult to refuse him. Sense of security the humility of this resolution brought about caused him to regain a self-possession. Only it imposed the condition, naturally, of remaining a dog.—Every time he felt his retiring humbleness giving place to another sensation, he anew felt qualms.

“Do you intend studying here, FrÄulein?” he asked, with a new deference in his tone—hardly a canine whine, but deep servient bass of the faithful St. Bernard.—She seemed to have noticed this something new already, and Kreisler on all fours evidently astonished her. She was inclined to stroke him, but at the same time to ask what was the matter.

“A year or two ago I escaped from a bourgeois household in an original manner. Shall I tell you about that, Otto?”

Confidence for confidence, he had told Anastasya that he was Otto.

“Please!” he said, with reverent eagerness.

“Well, the bourgeois household was that of my father and mother.—I got out of it in this way.—I made myself such a nuisance to my family that they had to get rid of me.” Otto flung himself back in his chair with dramatic incredulity. “It was quite simple.—I began scribbling and scratching all over the place—on blotting-pads, margins of newspapers, on my father’s correspondence, the wall-paper. I inundated my home with troublesome images. It was like vermin; my multitude of little figures swarmed everywhere. They simply had to get rid of me.—I said nothing. I pretended to be possessed. I got a girl-friend in MÜnich to write enthusiastic letters: her people lived quite near us when we were in Germany.”

Kreisler looked at her rather dully, and smiled solemnly, with really something of the misplaced and unaccountable pathos and protest of dogs (although still with a slavish wagging of the tail) at some pleasantry of the master.—Her expansiveness, as a fact, embarrassed him very much at this point. He was divided between his inclination to respond to it in some way, and mature their acquaintance at once, and his determination to be merely a dog. Yet he felt that her familiarity, if adopted, in turn, by him, might not be the right thing. And yet, as it was, he would appear to be holding back, would seem “reserved” in his mere humility. He was a very perplexed dog for some time.

He remained dumb, smiling up at her with appealing pathos from time to time. She wondered if he had indigestion or what. He made several desperate dog-like sorties. But she saw he was clearly in difficulties—As her lunch was finished, she called the waitress.—Her bill was made out, Kreisler scowling at her all the while. Her attitude, suggesting, “Yes, you are funny, you know you are. I’d better go, then you’ll be better,” was responded to by him with the same offended dignity as the drunken man displays when his unsteadiness is observed. He repudiated sulkily the suggestion that there was anything wrong. Then he grew angry with her. His nervousness was her doing.—All was lost. He was very near some violence.—But when she stood up, he was so impressed that he sat gaping after her. He remained cramped in his place until she had left the restaurant.

He moved in his chair stiffly; he ached as though he had been sitting for his portrait. The analogy struck him. Had he been sitting for his portrait? These people dining near him as though they had suddenly appeared out of the ground—he was embarrassed at finding himself alone with them. They knew all that had happened, but were pretending not to. He had not noticed that they were there all round him, overbearing and looking on. It was as though he had been talking to himself, and had just become aware of it. A tide of magnetism had flowed away, leaving him bare and stranded.—He cursed his stupidity. He then stopped this empty mental racket abruptly.—Only a few minutes had passed since Anastasya’s departure. He seized hat and stick and hurried up to the desk.—Once outside he gave his glasses an adjusting pull, gazed up and down the boulevard in all directions. No sign of the tall figure he was pursuing. He started off, partly at a run, in the likeliest direction.—At the CafÉ Berne corner, where several new vistas opened, there she was, some way down the Boulevard du Paradis, on the edge of the side-walk, waiting till a tram had passed to cross. Having seen so much, should he not go back? For there was nothing else to be done. To catch her up and force himself on her could have only one result, he thought. He might, perhaps, follow a little way. That was being done already.

They went on for some hundred yards, she a good distance ahead on the other side of the boulevard. Walking for a moment, his eyes on the ground, he looked up and caught her head pivoting slowly round. She no doubt had seen him.—With shame he realized what was happening.—“Here I am following this girl as though we were strangers! This is what I began in the restaurant. I am putting the final touch by following her in the street, as though we had never spoken!” Either he must catch her up at once or vanish. He promptly turned up a side street, and circled round to his starting-point.

His nature would probably have sought to fill up the wide, shallow gap left by Ernst and earlier ties either by another Ernst or, more likely, a variety of matter. It would have been only a temporary stopping. Now a gold crown, regal person, had fallen on the hollow.

But his nature was an effete machine and incapable of working on all that glory. Desperate at dullness, he betook himself to self-lashings. He would respond to utmost of weakened ability; with certainty of failure, egotistically, but not at a standstill. Kreisler was a German who, by all rights and rules of the national temperament, should have committed suicide some weeks earlier. Anastasya became an idÉe fixe. He was a machine, dead weight of old iron, that, started, must go dashing on. His little-dog simile was veritably carried out in his scourings of the neighbourhood, in hope of crossing Anastasya. But these “courses” gave no result. Benignant apparition, his roughness had scared it away, and off the earth, for ever. He entered, even infested, all painting schools of the quarter. He rapidly pursued distant equivocal figures in streets and gardens. Each rendered up its little quota of malignant hope, then presented him with a face of monotonous strangeness.

It was Saturday when Kreisler was found preparing to take his valise to the Mont de PiÉtÉ. On the preceding evening he had paid one of his unaccountable calls on FrÄulein Lipmann, the first for some time. He had a good reason for once. This salon was the only place of comparatively public assembly in the quarter he had not visited. Entering with his usual slight air of mystification, he bent to kiss FrÄulein Lipmann’s hand in a vaguely significant fashion.

The blank reciprocal indifference of these calls was thus relieved. It awoke a vague curiosity on one side, a little playful satisfaction on the other. This might even have ripened into a sort of understanding and bonhomie. He did not pursue it or develop the rÔle. After a half-hour of musing on the brink of a stream of conversation and then music, he suddenly recognized something, flotsam bobbing past. It had bobbed past before several times. He gradually became steadily aware of it. A dance at the Bonnington Club, that would take place the following evening, was the event that arrested him. Why was this familiar? Anastasya! Anastasya had spoken of it. That was all he could remember. Would she be there? He at once, and as though he had come there to do so, fished delicately in this same stream of tepid chatter for an invitation to the dance. FrÄulein Lipmann, the fish he particularly angled for, was backward. They did not seem to want him very much at the dance. Nevertheless, after an hour of indefatigable manoeuvring, the exertion of many powers seldom put forth in that salon, he secured the form, not the spirit, of an invitation.

Kreisler saw, in his alarmed fancy, Anastasya becoming welded into this gregarious female personality. The energy and resource of the Devil himself would be required to extricate her. She must be held back from this slough for the moment he needed.

Was it too late to intercept her? But he felt he might do it. The eyes of these ladies, so far dull with indifference, would open. He would be seen as a being with a new mysterious function. He felt that Volker’s absence from their rÉunions was due to his not wishing to meet him. They, too, must see that. Now the enigmatical and silent doggedness of these visits would seem explained. He would appear like some unwieldy, deliberate parasite got on to their indivisible body. The invitation given, he made haste to go. If he stayed much longer it would be overlaid with all sorts of offensive and effacing matter, and be hardly fit for use. A defiant and jeering look on his face, he withdrew with an “Until to-morrow.”

It was at this point that the “smokkin” came into prominence.

CHAPTER VII

“Impossible, my poor Kreisler! Five francs. No more!”

Suzanne stood at attention before him in the hall of the Mont de PiÉtÉ. If she had been inexorable before, she was now doubly so beneath the eyes of the veritable officials. The sight of them, and the half-official status of go-between and interpreter, urged her to ape-like importance.

With flushed and angry face, raised eyebrows, shocked at his questioning the verdict, she repeated, “Five francs; it’s the most.”

“No, that’s no good; give me the portmanteau,” he said.

She gave it him in silence, eyebrows still raised, eyes fixed, staring with intelligent disapproval right in front of her. She did not look at her eminent countrymen behind the large counter. But her intelligent and significant stare, lost in space, was meant to meet and fraternize with probable similar stares of theirs, lost in the same intelligent void.

Her face fixed in distended, rubicund, discontentedly resigned mask, she walked on beside him, the turkey-like backward-forward motion of fat neck marking her ruffled state. Kreisler sat down on a bench of the Boulevard du Paradis, she beside him.

“Dis! couldn’t you have borrowed the rest?” she said at last.

Kreisler was tired. He got up.

“No, of course I couldn’t. I hate people who lend money as I hate pawnbrokers.”

Suzanne listened, with protesting grin. Her head nodded energetically.

“Eh bien! si tout le monde pensait comme toi?!”

He pushed his moustache up and frowned pathetically.

“OÙ est Monsieur Volker?” she asked.

“Volker? I don’t know. He has no money.”

“Comment! Il n’a pas d’argent? C’est pas vrai! Tu ne le vois plus?”

“Good-bye.” Kreisler left Suzanne seated, staring after him.

The portmanteau dragged along, he strode past a distant figure. Suzanne saw him turn round and examine the stranger’s face. Then she lost sight of them round a corner of the boulevard.

“Quel type!” she exclaimed to herself, nearly as the concierge had done. She sauntered back home, giving Kreisler the benefit of several sour reflections.

In a little room situated behind the Rue de la GaietÉ, she pulled open one of two drawers in her washstand, which contained a little bread, tea, potatoes, and a piece of cold fish. She spread out a sheet of the Petit Parisian beside the basin. Having peeled the potatoes and put them on the gas, she took off those outdoor things that just enabled her to impart a turkey-like movement to her person. Then, dumpy, in a salmon-check petticoat, her legs bowed backwards and her stomach stuck out, she stood moodily at the window. A man she knew, now in the Midi, sent her now and then a few francs.

This rueful spot, struck in image of this elementary dross of humanity, was Kreisler’s occasional haunt. Cell of the unwieldy, tragic brain of the city, with million other similar cells, representing overwhelming uniform force of brooding in that brain, attracted him like a desert or ocean.

He would listen solemnly, like a great judge, to Suzanne’s perpetual complaints, sitting on the edge of her bed, hat on head. She was so humble and so pretentious. Her imagination was arrogant and constantly complaining. The form her complaints took was always that of lies—needless, dismal lies. She could not grumble without inventing and she never stopped grumbling. This, then, was one of Kreisler’s dwellings. He lived at large. Some of his rooms, such as this, the CafÉ de Berne, and Juan Soler’s School of Art, he shared with others. On very troubled days his body, like the finger of a weather-glass, would move erratically. When found in Suzanne’s room it might be taken as an indication of an unsettled state. A tendency to remain at home, on the contrary, denoted mostly a state of equilibrium and peace.

CHAPTER VIII

The portmanteau fell under the bed; he crushed into the red bulbous cover. Kreisler never sat on his bed except when going to get into it. For another man it would have replaced the absent armchair. In those moments of depression in which he did so he always, at once, felt more depressed, or quite hopeless. Head between hands, he now stared at the floor. Four or five hours! He must raise money, else he could not go to the dance. How absurd, this fuss about such a sum! All the same, how the devil could he get it?

“Small as it is, I shan’t get it,” he thought to himself. He began repeating this stupidly, and stuck at word “shan’t.” His brain and mouth clogged up, he stuttered thickly in his mind. He sprang up. But the slovenly, hopeless quality of the bed clung to him. This was a frivolous demonstration. He wandered to the window; stood staring out, nose flattened against the pane.

The sudden quiet and idleness of his personality was an awakening after the little nightmare of Suzanne. But it was not a refreshing one.

His portmanteau had always received certain consideration, as being, next the dress-suit, the most dependable article among those beneath his sway—to come to his aid if their common existence were threatened. He had now thrown it under the bed with disgust. He and all his goods were rubbish for the streets.

He sauntered from the window to the bed and back. Whenever he liked, in a sense, he would open the door and go out; but still, until then (and when would he “like”?) he was a poor prisoner. Outside, he took some strength and importance from others. In here he touched bottom and realized what the Kreisler-self was, with four walls round it.

His muscles were still full. They symbolized his uselessness. The thought, so harsh and tyrannical, of his once more going to the window and gazing down at the street beneath made him draw back his chair. He sat midway in the room, looking steadily out at the housetops. But, like his vigorous muscles and his deadness, there was the same contradiction; his mechanical obstinacy as regards Anastasya and his comic activity at present to get to a dance.

Comrades at painting school, nodding acquaintances, etc., were once more run through. None valued his acquaintance at more than thirty centimes, if that.

Perhaps Anastasya had left Paris? This solution, occurring sometimes, had only made his activity during the last few days more mad and mechanical—the pursuit of a shadow.

Ten minutes later, through a series of difficult clockwork-like actions, he had got once more to Lejeune’s to have lunch. With disgust he took what had been his usual seat latterly, at the table in the recess; the one place, he was sure, Anastasya would never be found in again, wherever else she might be found.

Lunch nearly over, he caught sight of Lowndes. “Hi, Master Lowndes!” he called out—always assuming great bluffness and brutality, as he called it, with English people, and laborious opposite to “stiffness.” “How do you do?”

The moment his eye had fallen on “Master” Lowndes this friend’s probable national opulence had occurred to him as a tantalizing fact. No gross decision could be come to in that moment. Lowndes was called to be kept there a little bit, while he turned things over and made up his mind. This was an acquaintance existing chiefly on chaff and national antithesis. It meant nothing to him. What matter if he were refused? Lowndes not being a compatriot made it easier. Something must be sacrificed. Lowndes’ acquaintanceship was a possession something equivalent to a cheap ring, a souvenir. He must part with it, if necessary.

Lowndes grinned at sight of Kreisler. He had finished his own lunch and was just going off. He had almost forgotten his idea in coming to the restaurant, that of seeing his German acquaintance. Swaying from side to side on his two superlatively elastic calves, he sat down opposite the good Otto, who leered back, blinking. He spoke German better than Kreisler any other language, so they used that, after a little flourish of English.

“Well, what have you been doing? Working?”

“No,” replied Kreisler. “I’m giving up painting and becoming a business man. My father has offered me a position!”

This subject seemed no more important than his speech made it, and yet it filled his life. Lowndes smiled correctly, not suspecting realities.

“Have you seen Douglas?” This was a friend through whom they had known each other in Italy.

Why should this fellow lend him thirty francs? The grin would not be there, he felt, had he been conscious that the other was thinking of the contents of his pocket. Not humour, but a much colder stuff no doubt mounted guard over his pocket-book, guarantee of this easiness and health. Oh, the offensive prosperity of the English, smugness of middle-class affluence! etc. etc.

Kreisler imagined the change that would come over this face when there was question of thirty francs. Estrangement set in on his side already, anger and humiliation at the imagined expression. This was of help. Here was his chance of borrowing that very insignificant but illusive sum. The man was already an enemy. He would willingly have knocked him on the head and taken his money had they been in a quiet place.

The complacent health and humoristic phlegm with which he grinned and perambulated through life charged Kreisler with the contempt natural to his more stiff and human education. His relations with him hinging on mild racial differences, he saw behind him the long line of all the Englishmen he had ever known. “Useless swine,” he thought, “so pleased with his cursed English face, and mean as a peasant!”

“Oh, I was asked for my opinion on a certain matter this morning. I was asked what I thought of German women!”

“What reply did you make, Mr. Lowndes?”

“I didn’t know what to say. I suggested that my friend should come along and get your opinion.”

“My opinion as an expert? My fees as an expert are heavy. I charge thirty francs a consultation!”

“I’m sure he’d have paid that,” Lowndes laughed innocently. Kreisler surveyed him unsympathetically.

“What, then, is your opinion of our excellent females?” he asked.

“Oh, I have no opinion. I admire your ladies, especially the pure Prussians.”

Kreisler was thinking: “If I borrow the money, there must be some time mentioned for paying back—next week, say. He would be more likely to lend it if he knew where to find me. He must have my address.”

“Come and see me—some time,” he blinked. “52 Boulevard Pfeiffer, fourth floor, just beside the restaurant here. You see? Up there.”

“I will. I looked you up at your old address a month or so ago; they didn’t know where you’d gone.”

Kreisler stared fixedly at him—a way of covering discomfiture felt at this news. The old address reminded him of several little debts there. For this reason he had not told them where he was going. The concierge would complain of her old tenant; probably, even, Lowndes might have been shown derelict tradesmen’s bills. Not much encouragement for his proposed victim!

Lowndes was writing on a piece of paper.

“There’s my address: Rue des Flammes.”

Kreisler looked at it rather fussily and said over: “5 Rue des Flammes. Lowndes.” He hesitated and repeated the name.

“R. W.—Robert Wooton. Here, I’ll write it down for you.”

“Are you in a hurry? Come and have a drink at the Berne,” Kreisler suggested when he had made up his bill.

On the way Lowndes continued a discourse.

“A novelist I knew told me he changed the names of the characters in a book several times in the course of writing it. It freshened them up, according to him. He said that the majority of people were killed by their names. I think a name is a man’s soul.”

Kreisler forged ahead, rhythmically and sullenly.

“If we had numbers, for instance, instead of names, who would take the number thirteen?” Lowndes wondered in German.

“I,” said Kreisler.

“Would you?”

Every minute Kreisler delayed increased the difficulty. His energy was giving out. They were now sitting on the terrasse at the Berne. He had developed a particular antipathy to borrowing. An immense personal neurasthenia had grown up round this habit of his, owing to his late discomfitures. He already heard an awkward voice, saw awkward eyes. Then he suddenly concluded that the fact that Lowndes was not a German made it more difficult, instead of less so, as he had thought. Why could he not take?—why petition? He knew that if Lowndes refused he would break out; he nearly did so as it was. With disgust and fatigue he lay back in his chair, paying no attention to what Lowndes was saying. His mind was made up. He would not proceed with his designs on this dirty pocket. He became rough and monosyllabic. He wished to purify himself in rudeness of his preceding amiability.

Lowndes had been looking at a newspaper. He put it down and said he must go back to “work.” His “morning” had, of course, been interrupted by Tarr!

Kreisler still saw the expression on the Englishman’s face he had imagined, and restrained with difficulty the desire to spit in it. The nearness they had been to this demand must have affected, he thought, even his impervious companion. He had asked and been refused, to all intents and purposes. He got up, left Lowndes standing there, and went into the lavatory at the side of the cafÉ, where he had a thorough wash in cold water.

Back at his table, he saw no sign of the Englishman, and sat down to finish his drink, considering what his next move should be.

Various pursuits suggested themselves. He might go and offer himself as model at some big private studios near the Observatoire. He could get a week’s money advanced him? He would dress as a woman and waylay somebody or other on the boulevards. He might steal some money. Volker was the last. He came just after murder. He would go to Ernst Volker—he with his little obstinate resolve in obscurity of his mind no longer to be Kreisler’s acquaintance. Obstinacy in people of weak character is the perfectly exasperating thing. They have no right to their resoluteness—appearing weaker and meaner than ever in anomalous tenacity. Volker, naturally submissive, had broken away and was posing somewhere as a stranger. He felt physical disgust; this proceeding was indecent.

A spirit that has mingled with another, suddenly covering itself and wishing to regain its strangeness, can be as indecent as a strange being suddenly baring itself. A man’s being is never divined so completely and pungently as when his friendship cools and he becomes once more a stranger. This is one of the moments when the imagination, most awake, sees best.

This little rat’s instinctive haste to separate from him was an ill omen: what did he care for omens? he clamoured impatiently.

At this juncture in his reflections, from where he sat on the cafÉ terrace he saw Volker’s back, as he supposed, disappearing round a corner, as though trying to avoid a meeting. Blood came to his head with a shock. He nearly sprang forward in pursuit of this unsociable form. Rushing words of insult rose to his lips, he fidgeted on his seat, gazed blankly at the spot where he had seen the figure. That it was no longer there exasperated him beyond measure. It was as though he considered that Ernst should have remained at the corner, immobile, with his back towards him, a visible mark and fuel for anger. He made a sign to the waiter, indicating that his drink would go into his “tick.” He then hurried off in the direction of Volker’s house—the direction also that the back had taken—determined to get something out of him. Kreisler, letting instinct guide his steps, took the wrong turning—following, in fact, his customary morning’s itinerary. He found himself suddenly far beyond the street Volker lived in, near Juan Soler’s atelier. He gazed down the street towards the atelier, then took off his glasses and began carefully wiping them. While doing this he heard words of greeting and found Volker at his elbow.

“Hallo! You look pretty hot. You nearly knocked me over a minute ago in your haste,” he was saying.

Kreisler jumped—as the bravest might if, having stoutly confronted an apparition, it suddenly became a man of flesh and blood. Had his glasses been firmly planted on his nose things might have gone differently. He frowned vacantly at Ernst and went on rubbing them.

Volker saw that something was wrong. It would have been to his advantage also to “have out” anything that was there and have done with it. But in his attitude German sluggishness seemed appealing to the same element in Kreisler’s nature, claiming its support and sympathy.

“It’s dreadfully hot!” he said uneasily, looking round as though examining the heat. He stepped up on to the pavement out of the way of a horse-meat cart. The large-panelled conveyance, full of enormous outlandish red carcases, went rushing down the street, carrying an area of twenty yards of deafness with it. This explosion of sound had a pacifying effect on Kreisler; it made him smile for some reason or other. Volker went on: “I don’t know whether I told you about my show.”

“What show?” Kreisler asked rudely.

“In Berlin, you know. It has not gone badly. Our compatriots improve. I’ve got a commission to paint the Countess Wort. What have you been doing lately?” There was a forbidding pause. “I’ve intended coming round to see you; but I’ve been sticking at home working. Have you been round at the Berne?” He spoke rapidly and confidentially, as two business men meeting in the street and always in a hurry might try and compress into a few minutes, between two handshakes, a lot of personal news. He seemed to wish to combine conviction that he was very anxious to tell Kreisler all about himself and (by his hurried air) paralysis of the other’s intention to have an explanation.

“I am glad you are going to paint the Countess Wort. I congratulate you, Mr. Volker! I am in a hurry. Good day.”

Kreisler turned and walked towards the Atelier Juan Soler. For no reason (except that it was impossible) he could not get money from Volker. It was as though that money would not be real money at all. Supposing he got it; the first place he tried to pass it the man would say, “This is not money.” As for taking him to task, his red, correct face made it impossible; it had suddenly become a lesson and exercise that it would be ridiculous to repeat. He was not a schoolboy.

Volker walked away ruffled. He was mortified that, by apprehension of a scene, he had been so friendly. The old Otto had scored. He, Volker, had humiliated himself needlessly, for it was evident Kreisler’s manner had been misinterpreted by him.

Kreisler had not intended going to Soler’s that day. Yet there he was, presumably got there now to avoid Ernst Volker. He saw himself starting up from the Berne a quarter of an hour before, steaming away in pursuit of a skulking friend—impetus of angry thought carrying him far beyond his destination; then Volker comes along and runs him into the painting school. He compared himself to one of those little steam toys that go straight ahead without stopping; that any one can take up and send puffing away in the opposite direction. Humouring this fancy, he entered the studio with the gaze a man might wear who had fallen through a ceiling and found himself in a strange room in midst of a family circle. The irresponsible, resigned, and listless air signified whimsical expectancy. Some other figure would rise up, no doubt, and turn him streetwards again?

A member of the race which has learnt to sleep standing up posed on the throne. He had suddenly come amongst brothers. He was as torpid as she, as indifferent as these mechanical students. The clock struck. With a glance at the massier, the model slowly and rhythmically abandoned her rigid attitude, coming to life as living statues do in ballets; reached stiffly for her chemise. The dozen other figures, who had been slowly pulsing—advancing or retreating, suspended around her yellowness—now laboriously moved, relapsing aimlessly here and there, chiefly against walls.

He had been considering a fat back and especially a parting carried half-way down the back of the head. Why should not its owner, and gardener, he had reflected, continue it the whole distance down, dividing his head in half with a line of white scalp? This man now turned on him sudden, unsurprised, placid eyes. Had he eyes, as well as a parting, at the back of his head? Kreisler felt on the verge of courteous discussion as to whether that parting should or should not be gone on with till it reached the neck.

Three had struck. He left and returned to the neighbourhood of the Berne by the same and longest route, as though to efface in some way his previous foolish journey.

Every three or four hours vague hope recurred of the delayed letter, like hunger recurring at the hour of meals. He went up to the loge of his house and knocked.

“Il n’y a rien pour vous!”

Four hours remained. The German party was to meet at FrÄulein Lipmann’s after dinner.

CHAPTER IX

Otto’s compatriots at the Berne were sober and thoughtful, with discipline in their idleness. Their monthly moneys flowed and ebbed, it was to be supposed, small regular tides frothing monotonously in form of beer. This rather desolate place of chatter, papers, and airy, speculative business had the charm of absence of gusto.

Kreisler was ingrainedly antiquated, purer German. He had experienced suddenly home-sickness, that often overtakes voluntary exiles at the turn of their life—his being, not for Germany, exactly, but for the romantic, stiff ideals of the German student of his generation. It was a home-sickness for his early self. Like knack of riding a bicycle or anything learnt in youth, this character was easily assumed. He was gradually discovering the foundations of his personality. Many previous moods and phases of his nature were mounting to the surface.

Arrived in front of the CafÉ Berne, he stood for fifteen minutes looking up and down the street, at the pavement, his watch, the passers-by. Then he chose the billiard-room door to avoid the principal one, where he usually entered.

All the ugly familiarity of this place, he hated with methodic, deliberate hatred; taking things one by one, as it were, persons and objects. The garÇon’s spasmodic running about was like a gnat’s energy over stagnation.

Passing from the billiard-room to a gangway with several tables, his dull, exasperated eye fell on something it did not understand. How could it be expected to understand? It was an eye and it stuck. It was simple, though. It was amazed and did not understand.

Anastasya.

Set in the heart of this ennui, it arrested the mind like a brick wall some carter drowsed on his wagon. Stopping dead, Kreisler stared stupidly. Anastasya was sitting there with Soltyk. With Soltyk! He seemed about to speak to them—they, at least, were under this impression. Quite naturally he was about to do this, like a child. As though in intense abstraction, he fixed his eyes on them. Then he took a step towards them, possibly with the idea of sitting down beside them. Consciousness set in, with a tropic tide of rage, and carried him at a brisk pace towards the door, corresponding to the billiard-room door, on the other side of the cafÉ. Yet in the midst of this he instinctively raised his hat a little, his eyes fixed now on his feet.

He was in a great hurry to get past the two people sitting there. This could not be done without discovering two inches of the scalp for a moment—as an impatient man in a crush, wishing to pass, pushes another aside, raising his hat at the same time to have the right to be rude.

Same table on terrasse as an hour before. But Kreisler seemed sitting on air, or one of those wooden whirling platforms in the fÊtes.

The garÇon, with a femininely pink, virile face which, in a spirit of fun, he kept constantly wooden and solemn except when, having taken your order, he winked or smiled—came up hastily.

“Was wÜnschen Sie?” he asked, wiping the table with a serviette. He had learned a few words of German from the customers. Supposing Kreisler rather a touchy man, he always attempted to put him at his ease, as the running of bills was valuable to him. He had confidence in this client, and wished the bill to assume vague and profitable proportions.

Kreisler’s thoughts dashed and stunned themselves against this waiter. His mind stood stock-still for several minutes. This pink wooden face paralysed everything. As its owner thought “the young man” was having a joke with him, it became still more humorously wooden. The more wooden it became, the more paralysed became Kreisler’s intelligence. He stared at him more and more oddly, till the garÇon was forced to laugh. As a matter of fact, Kreisler mentally was steadying himself on this hard personality. As he had appeared to walk deliberately with hot intention to his seat, so he seemed gazing deliberately at the waiter and choosing his drink. Then the dam gave way. He hated this familiar face; his thought smashed and buffeted it. Such commercial modicum of astute good nature was too much. It was kindness that only equilibrium could ignore. The expression of his own face became distorted. The garÇon fixed him with his eye and took a step back, with dog-like doubt, behind the next table.

Anastasya had smiled in a very encouraging way as he passed. This had offended him extremely. Soltyk—Anastasya; Soltyk—Anastasya. That was a bad coupling! His sort of persecution mania seized him by the throat. This had done it! Soltyk, who had got hold of Volker and was the something that had interfered between that borrowable quantity and himself, occupied a position not unsimilar to his stepmother. Volker and his father, who had kept him suspended in idleness, and who now both were withdrawing or had withdrawn like diminishing jets of water, did not attract the full force of his indolent, tragic grumpiness.

Behind Ernst and his parent Soltyk and his stepmother stood.

A certain lonely and comic ego all people carry about with them, who is always dumb except when they get drunk or become demented. It then talks, never sincerely, but in a sort of representative, pungent way. This ego in Kreisler’s case would not have been shameless and cynical if it had begun to grumble about Volker. It would have said, “Hang that little Ernst! I come to Paris, I am ashamed to say, partly for him. But the little swine-dog has given me the go-by. Hell take his impudence! I don’t like that swine-dog Soltyk! He’s a slimy Russian rascal!” It would not have said: “I’ve lost the access to Ernst’s pocket. The pig-dog Soltyk is sitting there!”

In any case his vanity too was hurt.

Anastasya now provided him with an acceptable platform from which his vexation might spring at Soltyk. There was no money or insignificant male liaison to stuff him down into grumpiness. “Das Weib” was there. All was in order for unbounded inflammation.

He wanted to bury his fear in her hot hair; he wanted to kiss her lips as he had never kissed any woman’s; all the things he wanted—! But what would Soltyk be doing about it? He had met her alone, and that was all right and not impossible with a world made by their solitary meeting in the restaurant. He had lived with her instinctively in this solitary world of he and she. It was quite changed at present. Soltyk had got into it. Soltyk, by implication, brought a host of others, even if he did not mean that he was a definite rival there himself. What was he saying to her now? Sneers and ridicule, oceans of sneers directed at himself, more than ten thousand men could have discharged, he felt, certainly were inundating her ear. His stepmother-fiancÉe, other tales, were being retailed. Everything that would conceivably prejudice Anastasya, or would not, he accepted as already retailed. There he sat, like a coward. He was furious at their distant insulting equanimity.

A breath of violent excitement struck him, coming from within. He stirred dully beneath it. She was there; he had only put a thin partition between them. His heart beat slowly and ponderously. “On hearing what the swine Soltyk has to say she will remember my conduct in the restaurant and my appearance. She will make it all fit in. And, by God, it does fit in! Himmel! Himmel! there’s nothing to be done! Anything I did, every movement, would only be filling out the figure my ass-tricks have cut for her!”

He was as conscious of the interior, which he could not see from his place on the street, as though, passing through, he had just found the walls, tables, chairs, painted bright scarlet. He felt he had left a wake of seething agitation in his passage of the cafÉ. Passing the two people inside there had been the affair of a moment, not yet grasped. This experience, apparently of the past, was still going on. The sense’s picture, even, was not yet complete. New facts, details, were added every moment. He was still passing Anastasya and Soltyk. He sat on, trembling, at the door. There were other exits. She might be gone. But he forgot about them.

How he had worried himself about the pawned suit. Fate had directed him there to the cafÉ to save him the trouble of further racking his brains about it. Should he leave Paris? But he was mutinous. The occurrence of this idea filled him with suspicions.

The fit was over; reaction had set in. He was eyeing himself obliquely in the looking-glass behind his head.

He almost jumped away at two voices beside him, and the thrilling sound of a dress; it was as though some one had spoken with his own voice. It seemed all round him, attacking him. The thin, ordinary brushing of a skirt was like the low breathing of a hidden animal to a man in the forest. He felt they were coming to speak to him—just as they had thought that he was. The nerves on that side of his head twitched as though shrinking from a touch.

They were crossing the terrasse to the street. His heart beat a slow march. Her image there had become used. The reality, in its lightning correction of this, dug into his mind. There once more the real figure had its separate and foreign life. He was disagreeably struck by a certain air of depression and cheerlessness in the two figures before him. This one thing that should have been pleasant, displeased him. He was angry as though she had been shamming melancholy.

They were not talking, the best proof of familiarity. A strange figure occurred to him; he felt like a man, with all organs, bones, tissues complete, but made of cheap perishable stuff, who could only live for a day and then die of use.

This image, reality now before him, had drawn out all his energy, like a distinct being nourished by him. The image, intact in his mind, had returned him more or less the vigour spent. Her listlessness seemed a complement of the weakness he now felt. Energy was ebbing away from both.

He stared with bloodshot eyes. Then he got up and began walking after her. Soltyk, on hearing steps, turned round; but he made no remark to Anastasya. They crossed the street and got into a passing tram. Otto Kreisler went back to the cafÉ.

It was like returning to some hall where there had been a banquet to find empty chairs, empty bottles, and disorder. The vacant seats around seemed to have been lately vacated. Then there was the sensation of being left behind. The CafÉ Berne was a solitary and antediluvian place. Everything began to thrust itself upon him—the people, street, insignificant incidents—as though this indifferent life of facts, in the vanishing of the life of the imagination, had now become important, being the only thing left. Common life seemed rushing in and claiming him, and emphasizing his defeat and the new condition thus inaugurated. He went to Lejeune’s for dinner. During the whole day he had been in feverish hurry, constantly seeing time narrowing in upon him. Now he had a sensation of intolerable leisure.

The useless ennui of his life presented itself to him for the thousandth time, but now clearly. This fact seemed to have been waiting with irritating calm, as though to say, “As soon as you can give me your attention?—Well, what are you going to do with me?” For he had compromised himself irretrievably. He knew that sooner or later he must marry and settle down with this stony fact, multiply its image. Things had gone too far.

And how about his father? What was that letter going to contain? His father had got a certain amount of pleasure out of him. Otto had satisfied in him in turn the desire of possession (that objects such as your watch, your house, which could equally well belong to anybody, do not satisfy), of authority (that servants do not satisfy), of self-complacency (that self does not): had been to him, later, a kind of living cinematograph and travel-book combined; and, finally, had inadvertently lured with his youth a handsome young woman into the paternal net. But he knew that he could procure no further satisfaction to this satiated parent. He could be henceforth a source only of irritation and expense.

After dinner he walked along the boulevard. The dark made him adventurous. He peered into cafÉs as he passed. He noticed it was already eight. Supposing he should meet some of the women on the way to FrÄulein Lipmann’s? He made a movement as though to turn down a side-street and hide himself at thought of possible confrontation. Next moment he was walking on obstinately in the direction of the Lipmann’s house. His weakness drew him on, back into the vortex. Anything, death, and annihilation, was better than going back into that terrible colourless mood. His room, the cafÉ, waited for him like executioners. He had escaped from it for a time. Late agitations had given him temporary freedom, to which he was now committed. Dressed as he was, extremely untidy, he would go to FrÄulein Lipmann’s flat. Only humiliation he knew awaited him in that direction. If Anastasya were there (he would have it that she would be found wherever he least would care to see her) then anything might happen. But he wanted to suffer still more by her; physically, as it were, under her eyes. That would be a relief from present suffering. He must look in her eyes; he must excite in her the maximum of contempt and dislike. He wanted to be in her presence again, with full consciousness that his mechanical idyll was barred by Fate. Not strong enough to leave things as they were, he could not go away with this incomplete and, physically, uncertain picture behind him. It was as though a man had lost a prize and wanted written and stamped statement that he had lost it. He wished to shame her. If he did not directly insult her, he would at least insult her by thrusting himself on her. Then, at height of her disgust, he would pretend again to make advances.

As to the rest of the party, a sour glee possessed him at thought of their state by the time he had done with them. He already saw their faces in fancy when he should ring their bell and present himself, old morning suit, collar none too clean, dusty boots. All this self-humiliation and suffering he was preparing for himself was wedded with the thought of retaliation. Kreisler’s schooldays could have supplied him with a parallel if he could have thought just then. He saw a curious scene proceeding beneath a desk in class. The boy next to him had jabbed his neighbour in the hand with a penknife. The latter, pale with fury, held his hand out in sinister invitation, hissing, “Do it again! do it again!” The boy next to Kreisler complied. “Do it again!” came still fiercer. He seemed to want to see his hand a mass of wounds and delect himself with the awful feeling of his own rage. Kreisler did not know how he should wipe out this debt with the world, but he wanted it bigger, more crushing. The bitter fascination of suffering drew him on to substitute real wounds for imaginary.

Near FrÄulein Lipmann’s house he rubbed his shoulder against a piece of whitewashed wall with a grin. He went rapidly up the stairs leading to her flat on the entresol, considering a scheme for the commencement of the evening. This seemed so happy that he felt further resourcefulness in misconduct would not be wanting.