Kreisler pressed the bell. It was a hoarse low z-like blast, braying softly into the crowded room. Kreisler still stood safely outside the door.

There was a rush in the passage: the hissing and spitting sounds inseparable from the speaking of the German tongue. Some one was spitting louder than the rest, and squealing dully as well. They were females disputing among themselves the indignity of door-openers. The most anxious to please gained the day.

The door was pulled ajar; an arch voice said:

“Wer ist das?”

“Ich bin’s, FrÄulein Lunken.”

The roguish and vivacious voice died away, however. The opening of the door showed in the dark vestibule Bertha Lunken with her rather precious movements and German robustness.

His disordered hair, dusty boots and white patch on the jacket had taken effect.

“Who is it?” a voice cried from within.

“It’s Herr Kreisler,” Bertha answered with dramatic quietness. “Come in Herr Kreisler; there are still one or two to come.” She spoke in a businesslike way, and bustled to close the door, to efface politely her sceptical reception of him by her handsome, wondering eyes.

“Ah, Herr Kreisler! I wonder where FrÄulein Vasek is?” he heard some one saying.

He looked for a place to hang his hat. FrÄulein Lunken preceded him into the room. Her expression was that of an embarrassed domestic foreseeing horror in his master’s eye. Otto appeared in his turn. The chatter seemed to him to swerve a little bit at his right. Bowing to two or three people he knew near the door, he went over to FrÄulein Lipmann, and bending respectfully down, kissed her hand. Then with a naÏve air, but conciliatory, began:

“A thousand pardons, FrÄulein Lipmann, for presenting myself like this. Volker and I have been at Fontenay-aux-Roses all the afternoon. We made a mistake about the time of the trains and I have only just got back; I hadn’t time to change. I suppose it doesn’t matter? It will be quite intime and bohemian, won’t it? Volker had something to do. He’s coming on to the dance later if he can manage it.”

This cunning, partly affected, with a genuinely infantile glee, served him throughout the evening. While waiting at the door he had hit on this ridiculous fib. Knowing how welcome Volker was and almost sure of his not turning up, he would use him to cover the patch from the whitewashed wall. But he would get other patches and find other lies to cover them up till he could hardly move about for this plastering of small falsehoods.

FrÄulein Lipmann had been looking at him with indecision.

“I am glad Herr Volker’s coming. I haven’t seen him for some weeks. You’ve plenty of time to change, you know, if you like. Herr Ekhart and several others haven’t turned up yet. You live quite near, don’t you, Herr Kreisler?”

“Yes, third to the right and second to the left, and keep straight on! But I don’t think I’ll trouble about it. I will do like this. I think I’ll do, don’t you, FrÄulein Lipmann?” He took a couple of steps and looked at himself complacently in a glass.

“You are the best judge of that.”

“Yes, that is so, isn’t it, FrÄulein? I have often thought that. How curious the same notion should come to you!” Again Kreisler smiled, and affecting to consider the question as settled turned to a man standing near him, with whom he had worked at Juan Soler’s. His hostess moved away, in doubt as to whether he intended to go and change or not. He was, perhaps, just talking to his friend a moment before going.

The company was not “mondain” but “interesting.” It was rather on its mettle on this occasion, both men and women in their several ways, dressed. An Englishwoman who was friendly with FrÄulein Lipmann was one of the organizers of the Bonnington Club. Through her they had been invited there. Five minutes later Kreisler found FrÄulein Lipmann in his neighbourhood again.

This lady had a pale fawn-coloured face, looking like the protagonist of a crime passionel. She multiplied her social responsibilities at every turn. But her manner implied that the quite ordinary burdens of life were beyond her strength. The two rooms with folding doors, which formed her salon and where her guests were now gathered, had not been furnished at haphazard. The “Concert” of Giorgione did not hang there for nothing. The books lying about had been flung down by a careful hand. FrÄulein Lipmann required a certain sort of admiration. But she had a great contempt for other people, and so drew up, as it were, a list of her attributes, carefully and distinctly underlining each. With each new friend she went over again the elementary points, as a schoolmistress would go over with each new pupil the first steps of grammar or geography, position of his locker, where the rulers were put, etc. She took up her characteristic attitudes, one after the other, as a model might; that is, those simplest and easiest to grasp.

Her room, dress and manner were a sort of chart to the way to admire FrÄulein Lipmann; the different points in her soul one was to gush about, the different hints one was to let fall about her “rather” tragic life-story, the particular way one was to regard her playing of the piano. You felt that there was not a candlestick, or antimacassar in the room but had its lesson for you. To have two or three dozen people, her “friends,” repeating things after her in this way did not give her very much satisfaction. But she had a great many of the characteristics of the “school-marm,” and she continued uninterruptedly with her duties teaching “Lipmann” with the solemnity, resignation and half-weariness, with occasional bursts of anger, that a woman would teach “twice two are four, twice three are six.” Her best friends were her best pupils, of course.

The rooms were furnished with somewhat the severity of the schoolroom, a large black piano—for demonstrations—corresponded more or less to the blackboard.

“Herr Schnitzler just tells me that dress is de rigueur. Miss Bennett says it doesn’t matter; but it would be awkward if you couldn’t get in.” She was continuing their late conversation. “You see it’s not so much an artists’ club as a place where the English SociÉtÉ permanente in Paris meet.”

“Yes, I see; of course, that makes a difference! But I asked, I happened to ask, an English friend of mine to-day—a founder of the club, Master Lowndes” (this was a libel on Lowndes), “he told me it didn’t matter a bit. You take my word for it, FrÄulein Lipmann, it won’t matter a bit,” he reiterated a little boisterously, nodding his head sharply, his eyelids flapping like metal shutters rather than winking. Then, in a maundering tone, yawning a little and rubbing his glasses as though they had now idled off into gossip and confidences:

“I’d go and dress only I left my keys at Soler’s. I shall have to sleep out to-night, I shan’t be able to get my keys till the morning.” Suddenly in a new tone, the equivalent of a vulgar wink:

“Ah, this life, FrÄulein! It’s accidents often separate one from one’s ‘smokkin’ for days; sometimes weeks. My ‘smokkin’ leads a very independent life. Sometimes it’s with me, sometimes not. It was a very expensive suit. That has been its downfall.”

“Do you mean you haven’t got a frac?”

“No, not that. You misunderstand me.” He reflected a moment.

“Ah, before I forget, FrÄulein Lipmann! If you still want to know about that little matter: I wrote to my mother the other day. In her reply she tells me that Professor Heymann is still at Karlsruhe. He will probably take a class in the country this summer as usual. The remainder of the party!” he added as the bell again rang.

He could not be brutally prevented from accompanying them to the dance. But with his remark about Volker he felt as safe as if he had a ticket or passe-partout in his pocket.

Kreisler was standing alone nearly in the middle of the room, his arms folded and staring at the door. He would use this fictitious authority and licence to its utmost limit. Some of the others were conscious of something unusual in his presence besides his dress and the disorder even of that. They supposed he had been drinking.

There were rustlings and laughter in the hall for some minutes. Social facts, abstracted in this manner, appealed to the mind with the strangeness of masks, each sense, isolated, being like a mask on another. Anastasya appeared. She came out of that social flutter astonishingly inapposite, like a mask come to life. The little fanfare of welcome continued. She was much more outrageous than Kreisler could ever hope to be: bespangled and accoutred like a princess of the household of Peter the Great jangling and rumbling like a savage showman through abashed capitals.

Her amusement often had been to disinter in herself the dust and decorations of some ancestress. She would float down the windings of her Great Russian and Little Russian blood, living in some imagined figure for a time as you might in towns on a stream.

“We are new lives for our ancestors, not theirs a playground for us. We are the people who have the Reality.” Tarr lectured her later, to which she replied:

“But they had such prodigious lives! I don’t like being anything out and out, life is so varied. I like wearing a dress with which I can enter into any milieu or circumstances. That is the only real self worth the name.”

Anastasya regarded her woman’s beauty as a bright dress of a harlot; she was only beautiful for that. Her splendid and bedizened state was assumed with shades of humility. Even her tenderness and peculiar heart appeared beneath the common infection and almost disgrace of that state.

The Bonnington Club was not far off and they had decided to walk, as the night was fine. It was about half-past nine when they started. Seven or eight led the way in a suddenly made self-centred group; once outside in the spaciousness of the night streets the party seemed to break up into sections held together in the small lighted rooms within—Soltyk and his friend, still talking, and a quieter group, followed.

FrÄulein Lunken had stayed behind with another girl, to put out the lights. Instead of running on with her companion to join the principal group, she stopped with Kreisler, whom she had found bringing up the rear alone.

“Not feeling gregarious to-night?” she asked.

Kreisler walked slowly, increasing, at every step, the distance between them and the next group, as though hoping that, should he draw her far enough back in the rear, like an elastic band she would in panic shoot forward. “Did he know many English people?” and she continued in a long eulogy of that race. Kreisler murmured and muttered sceptically. And she seemed then to be saying something about Soler’s, and eventually to be recommending him a new Spanish professor of some sort.

Kreisler cursed this chatterer and her complaisance in accompanying him.

“I must get some cigarettes,” he said briskly, as a bureau de tabac came in sight. “But don’t you wait, FrÄulein. Catch the others up.”

Having purposely loitered over his purchase, when he came out on the Boulevard again there she was waiting for him. “Aber! aber! what’s the matter with her?” Kreisler asked himself in impatient astonishment.

What was the matter with Bertha? Many things, of course. Among old general things was a state hardly of harmony with the Lipmann circle. She was rather suspect for her too obvious handsomeness. It was felt that she was perhaps a little too interested in the world. She was not quite obedient enough in spirit to the Lipmann. Even nuances of disrespect had been observed. Then Tarr had turned up nearly at the commencement of her incorporation. This was an eternal thorn in their sides, and chronic source of difficulty. Tarr was uncompromisingly absent from all their gatherings, and bowed to them, when met in the street, as it seemed to them, narquoisement, derisively, even. He had been excommunicated long ago, most loudly by FrÄulein Van Bencke.

“Homme sensuel!” she had called him. She averred she had caught his eye resting too intently on her well-filled-out bosom.

“Homme Égoiste!” (this referred to his treatment of Bertha, supposed and otherwise).

Tarr considered that these ladies were partly induced to continue their friendship for Bertha in a hope of disgusting her of her fiancÉ, or doing as much harm to both as possible.

Bertha alternately went to them a little for sympathy, and defied them with a display of his opinions.

Kreisler had lately been spoken about uncharitably among them. By inevitable analogy he had, in her mind, been pushed into the same boat with Tarr. She always felt herself a little without the circle.

So, Bertha, still in this unusual way clinging to him (although she had ceased plying him with conversation) they proceeded along the solitary backwater of Boulevard in which they were. Pipes lay all along the edge of excavations to their left, large flaccid surface-machinery of the City. They tramped on under the small uniform trees Paris is planted with, a tame and insipid obsession.

Kreisler ignored his surroundings. He was transporting himself, self-guarded Siberian exile, from one cheerless place to another. To Bertha Nature still had the usual florid note. The immediate impression caused by the moonlight was implicated with a thousand former impressions: she did not discriminate. It was the moon illumination of several love affairs. Kreisler, more restless, renovated his susceptibility every three years or so. The moonlight for him was hardly nine months old, and belonged to Paris, where there was no romance. For Bertha the darkened trees rustled with the delicious and tragic suggestions of the passing of time and lapse of life. The black unlighted windows of the tall houses held within, for her, breathless and passionate forms, engulfed in intense eternities of darkness and whispers. Or a lighted one, in its contrast to the bland light of the moon, so near, suggested something infinitely distant. There was something fatal in the rapid never-stopping succession of their footsteps—loud, deliberate, continual noise.

Her strange companion’s dreamy roughness, this romantic enigma of the evening, suddenly captured her fancy. The machine and indiscriminate side of her awoke.

She took his hand—rapid, soft and humble, she struck the deep German chord, vibrating rudimentarily in the midst of his cynicism.

“You are suffering! I know you are suffering. I wish I could do something for you. Cannot I?”

Kreisler began tickling the palm of her hand slightly. When he saw it interrupted her words, he stopped, holding her hand solemnly as though it had been a fish slipped there for some unknown reason. Having her hand—her often-trenchant hand with its favourite gesture of sentimental over-emphasis—captive, made her discourse almost quiet.

“I know you have been wronged and wounded. Treat me as a sister: let me help you. You think my behaviour odd: do you think I’m a funny girl? But, ah! we walk about and torment each other enough! I knew you were not drunk, but were half-cracked with something—Perhaps you had better not come on to this place?”

He quickened his steps, and still gazing stolidly ahead, drew her by the hand.

“I only should like you to feel I am your friend,” she said.

“Right!” with promptness came through his practical moustache.

“You’re afraid I—” she looked at the ground, he ahead.

“No,” he said, “but you shall know my secret! Why should not I avail myself of your sympathy? You must know that my frac—useful to waiters, that is why I get so much for the poor suit—this frac is at present not in my lodgings. No. That seems puzzling to you? Have you ever noticed an imposing edifice in the Rue de Rennes, with a foot-soldier perpetually on guard? Well, he mounts guard, night and day, over my suit!” Kreisler pulled his moustache with his free hand—“Why keep you in suspense? My frac is not on my back because—it is in pawn! Now, FrÄulein, that you are acquainted with the cause of my slight, rather wistful, meditative appearance, you will be able to sympathize adequately with me!”

She was crying a little, engrossed directly, now, in herself.

He thought he should console her.

“Those are the first tears ever shed over my frac. But do not distress yourself, FrÄulein Lunken. The garÇons have not yet got it!”

Kreisler did not distinguish Bertha much from the others. At the beginning he was distrustful in a mechanical way at her advances. If not “put up” to doing this, she at least hailed from a quarter that was conspicuous for Teutonic solidarity. Now he accepted her present genuineness, but ill-temperedly substituted complete boredom for mistrust, and at the same time would use this little episode to embellish his programme.

He had not been able to shake her off: it was astonishing how she had stuck: and here she still was; he was not even sure yet that he had the best of it. His animosity for her friends vented itself on her. He would anyhow give her what she deserved for her disagreeable persistence. He shook her hand again. Then suddenly he stopped, put his arm round her waist, and drew her forcibly against him. She succumbed to the instinct to “give up,” and even sententiously “destroy.” She remembered her resolve—a double one of sacrifice—and pressed her lips, shaking and wettened, to his. This was not the way she had wished: but, God! what did it matter? It mattered so little, anything, and above all she! This was what she had wanted to do, and now she had done it!

The “resolve” was a simple one. In hazy, emotional way, she had been making up her mind to it ever since Tarr had left that afternoon. He wished to be released, did not want her, was irked, not so much by their formal engagement as by his liking for her (this kept him, she thought she discerned). A stone hung round his neck, he fretted the whole time, and it would always be so. Good. This she understood. Then she would release him. But since it was not merely a question of words, of saying “we are no longer engaged” (she had already been very free with them), but of acts and facts, she must bring these substantialities about. By putting herself in the most definite sense out of his reach and life—far more than if she should leave Paris, their continuance of relations must be made impossible. Somebody else—and a somebody else who was at the same time nobody, and who would evaporate and leave no trace the moment he had served her purpose—must be found. She must be able to stare pityingly and resignedly, but silently, if he were mentioned. Kreisler exactly filled this ticket. And he arose not too unnaturally.

This idea had been germinating while Tarr was still with her that morning.

So, a prodigality and profusion of self-sacrifice being offered her in the person of Kreisler, she behaved as she did.

This clear and satisfactory action displayed her Prussian limitation; also her pleasure with herself, that done. Should Tarr wish it undone, it could easily be so. The smudge on Kreisler’s back was a guarantee, and did the trick in more ways than he had counted on. But in any case his whole personality was a perfect alibi for the heart, to her thinking. At the back of her head there may have been something in the form of a last attempt here. With the salt of jealousy, and a really big row, could Tarr perhaps he landed and secured even now?

In a moment, the point so gained, she pushed Kreisler more or less gently away. It was like a stage-kiss. The needs of their respective rÔles had been satisfied. He kept his hands on her biceps. She was accomplishing a soft withdrawal. They had stopped at a spot where the Boulevard approached a more populous and lighted avenue. As they now stood a distinct, yet strangely pausing, female voice struck their ears.

“FrÄulein Lunken!”

Some twenty yards away stood several of her companions, who, with fussy German sociableness, had returned to carry her forward with them, as they were approaching the Bonnington Club. Finding her not with them, and remembering she had lagged behind, with some wonderment they had walked back to the head of the Boulevard. They now saw quite plainly what was before them, but were in that state in which a person does not believe his eyes, and lets them bulge until they nearly drop out, to correct their scandalous vision. Kreisler and Bertha were some distance from the nearest lamp and in the shade of the trees. But each of the spectators would have sworn to the identity and attitude of their two persons.

Bertha nearly jumped out of her skin, broke away from Kreisler, and staggered several steps. He, with great presence of mind, caught her again, and induced her to lean against a tree, saying curtly: “You’re not quite well, FrÄulein. Lean—so. Your friends will be here in a moment.”

Bertha accepted his way out. She turned, indeed, rather white and sick, and even succeeded so far as to half believe her lie, while the women came up. Kreisler called out to the petrified and quite silent group at the end of the avenue. Soon they were surrounded by big-eyed faces. Hypocritical concern soon superseded the masks of scandal.

“She was taken suddenly ill.” Kreisler coughed conventionally as he said this, and flicked his trousers as though he had been scuffling on the ground.

Indignant glances were cast at him. Whatever attitude they might take up towards their erring friend, there was no doubt as to their feeling towards him. He was to blame from whichever way you looked at it. They eventually, with one or two curious German glances into her eyes, slow, dubious, incredulous questions, with a drawing back of the head and dying away of voice, determined temporarily to accept her explanation. To one of them, very conversant with her relations with Tarr, vistas of possible ruptures and commotions opened. Here was a funny affair! With Kreisler, of all people—Tarr was bad enough!

Bertha would at once have returned home, carrying out the story of sudden indisposition. But she felt the only thing was to brave it out. She did not want to absent herself at once. The affair would be less conspicuous with her not away. Her friends must at once ratify their normal view of this little happening. The only thing she thought of for the moment was to hush up and obliterate what had just happened. Her heroism disappeared in the need for action. So they all walked on together, a scandalized silence subsisting in honour chiefly of Kreisler.

Again he was safe, he thought with a chuckle. His position was precarious, only he held FrÄulein Lunken as hostage! Exception could not openly be taken to him, without reflecting on their friend. He walked along with perfect composure, mischievously detached and innocent.

FrÄulein Lipmann and the rest had already gone inside. Several people were arriving in taxis and on foot. Kreisler got in without difficulty. He was the only man present not in evening-dress.

One certain thing amongst many uncertainties about the English club, the Bonnington Club, was that it had not yet found itself quite. Its central room (and that was all there was of it—a shell of a house) reminded you of a public swimming-bath when it was used as a ballroom, and when used as a studio you thought of a concert-hall. But one had a respect for it. It had cost a good deal to build. It was quite phenomenally handsome as seen from the street, and was graceful. It made a cheerful show, with pink, red, and pale blue paper-chains and Chinese lanterns, one week for some festivity; and the next, sparely robed in dark red curtains, would settle its walls gravely to receive some houseless quartet. In this manner it paid its way. Some phlegmatic but obstinate power had brought it into existence. “Found a club, found a club!” it had reiterated in the depths of certain anonymous minds, with sleepy tenacity. Some one sighed, got up and went round to another, and said perhaps a club had better be founded. The other assented and subscribed something, to get rid of the other. In the course of time a young French architect had been entrusted with the job. A club. Yes. What sort of a club? The architect could not find out. Something to be used for drawing-classes, social functions, a reading-room, etc. He saw he was on the wrong tack. He went away and made his arrangements accordingly. He produced a design of an impressive and to all appearance finished house. It was a sincerely ironic masterpiece, but with a perfect gravity, and even stateliness, of appearance. It was the most non-committing faÇade, the most absolutely unfinal interior, the most tentative set of doors, ever seen: a monster of reservation.

Not only had it been put to every conceivable use itself, but it dragged the club with it, as it were. The club changed and metamorphosed itself with its changes. The club became athletic or sedentary according to the shifts and exigencies of the building’s existence. The members turned out in dress-clothes or gymnasium get-ups as the building’s destiny prompted, to back it up. One month they would have to prove that it was a gymnasium, the next that it was a drawing-school.

The inviting of the German contingent was a business move. They might be enticed into membership, and would in any event spread the fame of the club, getting and subsequently giving some conception of the resources of the club-house building. The salle was arranged very prettily. The adjoining rooms were hung with the drawings and paintings of the club members.

Kreisler ever since the scene on the boulevard had felt a reckless gaiety and irresponsibility, which he did not conceal.

With his abashed English hostess he carried on a strange conversation full of indirect references to the “stately edifice in the Rue de Rennes.” He had spoken of it to Bertha: “That stately edifice in the Rue de Rennes—but of course you don’t know it!”

With smiling German ceremoniousness, with ingenious circumlocutions, he bent down to his hostess’s nervously smiling face and poured into her startled ear symbols and images of pawnshops, usury, three gold balls, “pious mountains,” “smokkin” or “frac” suits, etc., which he seemed a little to confuse, overwhelmed her with a serious terminology, all in a dialect calculated to bewilder the most acute philologist.

“Yes, it is interesting,” she said with strained conviction.

“Isn’t it?” Kreisler replied. It was a comparative estimate of the facilities for the disposing of a watch in Germany and France.

“I’m going to introduce you, Herr Kreisler, to a friend of mine—Mrs. Bevelage.”

She wanted to give the German guests a particularly cordial reception. Kreisler did not seem, superficially, a great acquisition to any club, but he was with the others. As a means of concluding this very painful interview—he was getting nearer every minute to the word that he yet solemnly forbade himself the use of—she led him to a self-controlled remnant of beautiful womanhood who had a reputation with her for worldliness. Mrs. Bevelage could listen to all this, and would be able to cope with a certain disquieting element she recognized in the German.

He saw the reason of this measure; and, looking with ostentatious regret at a long-legged flapper seated next door, cast a reproachful glance at his hostess.

Left alone with the widow, he surveyed her ample and worldly form.

“Get thee to a nunnery!” he said dejectedly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yes. You have omitted ‘my lord.’”

Mrs. Bevelage looked pleased and puzzled. Possibly he was a count or baron.

“Do you know that stingy but magnificent edifice?”

“Yes??”

“That handsome home of precarious ‘fracs’ in the Rue de Rennes??”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand—” The widow had not got used to his composite tongue. She liked Kreisler, however.

“Shall we dance?” he said, getting up quickly.

He clasped her firmly in the small of the back and they got ponderously in motion, he stamping a little bit, as though he mistook the waltz for a more primitive music.

He took her twice, with ever-increasing velocity, round the large hall, and at the third round, at breakneck speed, spun with her in the direction of the front door.

The impetus was so great that she, although seeing her peril, could not act sufficiently as a break on her impetuous companion to avert the disaster. Another moment and they would have been in the street, amongst the traffic, a disturbing meteor, whizzing out of sight, had they not met the alarmed resistance of a considerable English family entering the front door as Kreisler bore down upon it. It was one of those large, featureless, human groups built up by a frigid and melancholy pair, uncannily fecund, during interminable years of blankness. They received this violent couple in their midst. The rush took Kreisler and his partner half-way through, and there they stood embedded and unconscious for many seconds. The English family then, with great dignity, disgorged them and moved on.

The widow had come somewhat under the fascination of Kreisler’s mood. She was really his woman, had he known it. She felt wrapt in the midst of a simoon—she had not two connected thoughts. All her worldliness and measured management of her fat had vanished. Her face had become coarsened in a few minutes. But she buzzed back again into the dance and began a second, mad, but this time merely circular career.

Kreisler was very careful, whatever he did, to find a reason for it. “He was abominably short-sighted; he had mistaken the front door for one leading into the third room, merely.” His burden, not in the best condition, was becoming more and more puffed, and heavier every moment. When satisfied with this part of his work he led Mrs. Bevelage into a sort of improvised conservatory and talked about pawnshops for ten minutes or so—in a mixture of French, English, and German. He then reconducted her, more dead than alive, to her seat, and strode off from her with great sweeps of his tall figure.

He had during this incident regained complete impassivity. He stalked away to the conservatory.

Bertha had soon been called on to dance vigorously without much intermission. In the convolutions of the valse, however, she matured a bold and new plan. She whirled and trotted with a preoccupied air.

Would Tarr hear of all this? She was alarmed, now it was done. Also she was cowed and sorry for her action at the thought of Lipmann and Van Bencke’s attitude towards the Kreisler kissing. She undoubtedly must secure herself. The plan she hit on offered a “noble” rÔle that she could not, in any circumstances, have resisted.

Her scheme was plain and clever. She would simply “tell the truth.”

“She had recognized something distracting in Kreisler’s life, the presence of crisis. On an impulse, she had offered him her sympathy. He had taken up her offer immediately in an astonishing and brutal manner. (One against him: two for her!) Such direct and lurid sympathy he claimed.”

So she jogged out her strategies in exhilaration of the waltzes.

At this point of her story she would hint, by ambiguous hesitation, that she, in truth, had been ready even for this sacrifice: had made it, if her hearers wished! She would imply rather that from modesty—not wanting to appear too “noble”—she refrained from telling them.

It is true that for such a confession she had many precedents. Only a week ago FrÄulein Van Bencke herself, inflating proudly her stout handsome person, had told them that while in Berlin she had allowed a young painter to kiss her: she believed “that the caresses of a pure woman would be helpful to him at that juncture of his life.” But this had not been, it was to be supposed, in the middle of the street. No one had ever seen, or ever would see, the young painter in question, or the kiss.

Busy with these plans, Bertha had not much time to notice Kreisler’s further deportment. She came across him occasionally, and keyed her solid face into an intimate flush and such mask as results from any sickly physical straining. “Poor mensch!”

Soltyk surprised one Anglo-Saxon partner after another with his wonderful English—unnecessarily like the real thing. He went about surprising people in a cold, tireless way, exhibiting no signs of pleasure, except as much as was testified to by his action, merely.

Kreisler saw him with Anastasya only twice. On those occasions he could not, on the strength of Soltyk’s attitude, pin him down as a rival. Yet he was thirsting for conventional figures. His endless dissatisfaction and depression could only be satisfied by active things, unlike itself. Soltyk’s self-possessed and masterly signs of distinguished camaraderie depressed Kreisler very much. The Russian had been there once at the critical moment, and was, more distantly, an attribute of Volker. He did not like him. How it would satisfy him to dig his fingers into that flesh, and tear it like thick cloth! He was “for it”; he was going out. He was being helped off by things. Why did he not shout? He longed to act: the rusty machine had a thirst for action. His energies were repudiating their master.

Soltyk’s analogies with Kreisler worked in the dark to some end of mutual destruction. The nuance of possibility Soltyk liked his friendships with women to have, was a different affair to Kreisler’s heady and thorough-going intrigues. But he liked his soul to be marked with little delicate wounds and wistfulnesses. He liked an understanding, a little melancholy, with a woman. They would just divine in each other possibilities of passion, that was yet too lasse and sad to rise to the winding of Love’s horns that were heard, nevertheless, in a dÉcor Versaillesque and Polonais. They were people who looked forward as others look back. They would say farewell to the future as most men gaze at the past. At the most they played the slight dawning and disappearing of passion, cutting, fastidiously, all the rest of the piece. So he was often found with women. Life had no lethargic intervals as with Kreisler. It at all times needed “expression” of such sort.

For Anastasya, Soltyk was one of her many impresarios, who helped her on to and off the scene of Life. He bored her usually, but they had something equivalent to pleasant business relations. She appreciated him as an Impresario.

These things arraying themselves in reality after this ordinary unexciting fashion, conventional figures of drama lacked. Kreisler was in the wrong company. But he conformed for the sake of the Invisible Audience haunting life. He emulated the matter-of-factness and aplomb that impressed him in the others À outrance. So much was this so that the Audience took some time to notice him, the vein of scandal running through the performance.

In the conservatory he established his head-quarters.

From there he issued forth on various errands. All his errands showed the gusto of the logic of his personality, and not despair. He might have been enjoying himself. He invented outrage that was natural to him, and enjoyed slightly the licence and scope of his indifference.

He, for instance, at the first sortie, noticed a rather congested, hot, and spectacled young woman, rather constantly fluttered over her womanhood, but overworked by her conscience, her features set by duty. He succeeded in getting her for a partner, and soon won her confidence by his scrupulous German politeness. He then, while marking time in a crush, disengaged his hand, and appeared to wish to alter the lie of her bosom, very apologetically.

“Excuse me! It’s awkward. More to the left—so! Clumsy things and women are so proud of them! (No: I’m sure you’re not!) No. Let it hang to the left!” The young lady, very red, and snorting almost in his face, left him brusquely.

Several young women, and notably a flapper, radiant with heavy inexperience and loaded with bristling bronze curls, he lured into the conservatory. They all came out with scarlet faces.

For the first hour he paid no attention to Anastasya, but prosecuted his antics as though he had forgotten all about her. He knew she was there and left her alone, even in thought, in a grim spirit. He hid coquettishly behind his solemn laughter-in-action, the pleasant veil of his hysteria.

He had become generally noticed in the room, although there were a great many people present. FrÄulein Lipmann hesitated. She thought at length that he was mad. In speaking to him and getting him removed, she feared a scandalous scene.

As he appeared on the threshold of the conservatory an expectant or anxious tremor invaded several backs. But he just stalked round this time on a tour of inspection, as though to see that all was going along as it should. He stared heavily and significantly at those young ladies who had been his partners, when he came across them. One he stopped in front of and gazed at severely. He then returned to the conservatory.

In his deck chair, his head stretched back, glasses horizontal and facing the ceiling, he considered the graceless Hamlet that he was.

“Go to a nunnery, Widow!”

He should have been saying that to his Ophelia.

Why did he not go to her? Contact was the essential thing, but so difficult to bring about.

He must make her angry, insult her: that would bare her soul. Then he would spit on it. Then he really could insult her. But Soltyk offered a conventional target for violence. Soltyk was evading him with his contempt. Soltyk! What should be done with him? Why (a prolonged and stormily rising “why”), there was no difficulty about that. He got up from his chair, and walked deliberately and quickly into the central room. But Soltyk was nowhere to be seen.

The dancers were circling rapidly past with athletic elation, talking in the way people talk when they are working. Their intelligences floated and flew above the waves of the valse, but with frequent drenchings, as it were, and cessations. The natural strangeness for him of all these English people together did not arrest his mind or lead him to observation, but yet got a little in the way. Couple followed couple, the noise of their feet, or dress, for a moment queerly distinct and near above the rest, as though a yard or two of quiet surrounded Kreisler. They came into this area for a moment, everything distinct and clear cut, and then went out again. Each new pair of dancers seemed coming straight for him. Their voices were loud for a moment. A hole was cut out of the general noise, as it were opening a passage into it. Each new face was a hallucination of separate energy, seeming very distant, laughs, words, movements. They were like trunkless, living heads rolling and bobbing past, a sea of them. The two or three instruments behind the screen of palms produced the necessary measures to keep this throng of people careering, like a spoon stirring in a saucepan. It stirred and stirred and they jerked and huddled insipidly round and round.

Kreisler was drawn up at the first door for a minute. He was just taking a step forward to work his way round to the next, when he caught sight of Anastasya dancing with (he supposed) some Englishman.

He stopped, paralysed by her appearance. This reality intercepted the course of his imaginary life (of which his pursuit of Soltyk was a portion). He stood like somebody surprised in a questionable act. He had not reckoned on being met by her before his present errand was finished. The next moment he was furious at this interference; at her having the power to draw him up. This imaginary life should grow. Hell and Heaven! he was not going to stop there looking at her. She and her partner had drawn up for a moment just in his way, being stopped by other couples marking time. She had not seen him. He took her partner roughly by the arm, pushing him against her, hustling him, fixing him with his eye. He passed beyond them then, through the passage he had made. His blood was flooding him, and making him expand and sink like a Russian dancer. The young man handled in this manner, shy and unprompt, stared after Kreisler with a “What the devil!” People are seldom so rude in England. Preparation for outbursts of potential rudeness form a part of the training of a German. Kreisler also, without apology, but as if waiting for more vigorous expostulation, was also looking back, while he stepped slowly along the wall towards a door beyond, the one leading to the refreshment-room.

Anastasya freed herself at once from her partner and pale and frowning (but as though waiting) was looking after Kreisler curiously. She would have liked him to stop. He had done something strange and was as suddenly going away. That was unsatisfactory. They looked at each other blankly. He showed no sign of stopping: she just stared. Suddenly it was comic. She burst out laughing. But they had clashed, like people in the dance, and were both disappearing from each other again, the shock hardly over. The contact had been brought about. He was still as surprised at his action, which had been done “in a moment,” as she was. Anastasya felt, too, in what way this had been contact. She felt his hand on her arm as though it had been she he had seized. This rough figure disappeared in the doorway, as incapable of explaining anything. She shivered nervously as she grasped her partner’s arm again, at this merely physical contact. “What’s the matter with that chap?” her partner asked, conscious of a lameness, but of something queer going on. This question had been asked a few minutes before elsewhere. “Herr Kreisler is behaving very strangely. Do you think he’s been drinking?” FrÄulein Lipmann had asked Eckhart.

Eckhart was a little drunk himself. He took a very decided view of Kreisler’s case.

“Comme toute la Pologne! As drunk as the whole of Poland!” he affirmed. But he only gave it as an opinion, adding no sign of particular indignation. He was beaming with greedy generosity at his great Amoureuse.

“Ah! here he comes again!” said FrÄulein Lipmann at the door. (It was when Kreisler had started up in search of Soltyk).

So Kreisler disappeared in the doorway. He passed through the refreshment-room. In a small room beyond he sat down by an open window.

Anastasya had at last got into line with him. She had been startled, awakened, and had also laughed. This was an exact and complete response to Kreisler at the present. Something difficult to understand and which should have been alarming for a woman, the feel of the first tugs of the maelstrom he was producing and conducting all on his own, and which required her for its heart: and then laughter, necessarily, once one was in that atmosphere, like laughing gas, with its gusty tickling.

But this was not how Kreisler felt about it. He was boiling and raging. That laugh had driven him foaming, fugitive and confused, into the nearest chair. He could not turn round and retaliate at the time. The door being in front of him, he vanished as Mephistopheles might sink with suddenness into the floor, at the receipt of some affront, to some sulphurous regions beneath, in a second; come to a stop alone, upright; stick his fingers in his mouth, nearly biting them in two, his eyes staring: so stand stock still, breathless and haggard for some minutes: then shoot up again, head foremost, in some other direction, like some darting and skulking fish, to the face of the earth. He did not even realize that the famous contact was established, so furious was he. He would go and strike her across the mouth, spit in her face, kiss her in the middle of the dance, where the laugh had been! Yet he didn’t move, but sat on staring in front of him, quite forgetful where he was and how long he had sat there, in the midst of a hot riot of thoughts.

He suddenly sat up and looked round, like a man who has been asleep and for whom work is waiting; got up with certain hesitation, and again made for the door. Well, life and work (his business) must he proceeded with all the same. He glanced reflectively and solemnly about, and perceived the Widow talking to a little reddish Englishman.

“May I take the Widow away for a little?” he asked her companion.

He always addressed her as “Widow”: he began all his discourses with a solemn “Widow!” occasionally alternating it with “Derelict!” But this, all uttered in a jumbled tongue, lost some of its significance.

The little Englishman on being addressed gave the English equivalent of a jump—a sudden moving of his body and shuffling of his feet, still looking at the floor, where he had cast his eyes as Kreisler approached.

“What? I?”

“Widow! permit me?” said Kreisler.

Manipulating her with a leisurely gusto, he circled into the dance.

The band was playing the “Merry Widow” valse.

“Merry Widow!” he said smilingly to his partner. “Yes, Merry Widow!” shaking his head at her.

The music seemed fumbling in a confused mass of memory, but finding nothing definite. All it managed to bring to light was a small cheap photograph, taken at a Bauern Bal, with a flat German student’s cap. The man remained just his photograph. Their hostess also was dancing. Kreisler noted her with a wink of recognition. Dancing very slowly, almost mournfully, he and his partner bumped into her each time as they passed. The Widow felt the impact, but it was only at the third round that she perceived the method and intention inducing these bumps. She realized they were going to collide with the other lady. The collision could not be avoided. But she shrank away, made herself as small and soft as possible, bumped gently and apologized over her shoulder, with a smile and screwing up of the eyes, full of meaning. At the fourth turn of the room, however, Kreisler having increased her speed sensibly, she was on her guard, and in fact already suggesting that she should be taken back to her seat. He pretended to be giving their hostess a wide berth this time, but suddenly and gently swerved, and bore down upon her. The Widow veered frantically, took a false step, tripped on her dress, tearing it, and fell to the ground. They caused a circular undulating commotion throughout the neighbouring dancers like a stone falling in a pond. Several people bent down to help Mrs. Bevelage—Kreisler’s assistance was angrily rejected. His partner scrambled to her feet and went to the nearest chair, followed by one or two people.

“Who is he?”

“He’s drunk.”

“What happened?”

“He ought to be turned out!” people said who had seen the accident.

Kreisler regained the conservatory with great dignity.

But now FrÄulein Lippmann, alone, appeared before him as he lay stretched in his chair, and said in a tight, breaking voice:

“I think, Herr Kreisler, you would do well now, as you have done nothing all the evening but render yourself objectionable, to relieve us of your company. I don’t know whether you’re drunk. I hope you are, for?”

“You hope I’m drunk, FrÄulein?” he asked in an astonished voice.

He remained lolling at full length.

“A lady I was dancing with fell over, owing entirely to her own clumsiness and intractability—but perhaps she was drunk; I didn’t think of that.”

“So you’re not going?”

“Certainly, FrÄulein—when you go! We’ll go together.”

“Scheusal!” Hurling hotly this epithet at him—her breath had risen many degrees in temperature at its passage, and her breast heaved in dashing it out (as though, in fact, the word “scheusal” had been the living thing, and she were emptying her breast of it violently), she left the room. His last exploit had been accomplished in a half disillusioned state. He merely went on farcing because he could think of nothing else to do. Anastasya’s laughter had upset and ended everything of his “imaginary life.” He told himself now that he hated her. “Ich hasse dich! Ich hasse dich!” he hissed over to himself, enjoying the wind of the “hasse” in his moustaches. But (there was no doubt about it) the laugh had crushed him. Ridiculous and hateful had been his goal. But now that he had succeeded he thought chiefly in the latter affair, he was overwhelmed. His vanity was wounded terribly. In laughing at him she had puffed out and transformed in an extraordinary way, also, his infatuation. For the first time since he had first set eyes on her he realized her sex. His sensuality had been directly stirred. He wanted to kiss her now. He must get his mouth on hers—he must revel in the laugh, where it grew! She was nÉfaste. She was in fact evidently the devil.

So his idÉe fixe having suddenly taken body and acquired flesh, now allied to his senses, the vibration became more definitely alarming. He began thinking about her with a slow moistening of the lips. “I shall possess her!” he laid to himself, seeing himself in the rÔle of the old Berserker warrior, ravening and irresistible. The use of the word shall in that way was enough.

But this infernal dance! With the advent of the real feeling all the artificial ones flew or diminished at once. He was no longer romantically “desperate,” but bored with his useless position there. All his attention was now concentrated on a practical issue, that of the “possession” of Anastasya.

He was tired as though he had been dancing the whole evening. He got up and threw his cigarette away; he even dusted his coat a little with his hand. He then, not being able to get at the white patch on the shoulder, took it off and shook it. A large grey handkerchief was used to flick his boots with.

“So!” he grunted, smartly shooting on his coat.

The central room, when he got into it, appeared a different place. People were standing about and waiting for the next tune. It had been completely changed by his novel and material feeling for Anastasya. Everything, for a second time, was quite ordinary, but not electrically ordinary, almost hushed, this time. He had become a practical man, surrounded by facts. But he was much more worried and tired than at the beginning of the evening.

To get away was his immediate thought. But he felt hungry. He went into the refreshment-room. On the same side as the door, a couple of feet to the right, was a couch. The trestle-bar with the refreshments ran the length of the opposite wall. The room was quiet and almost empty. Out of the tail of his eye, as he entered, he became conscious of something. He turned towards the couch. Soltyk and Anastasya were sitting there, and looking at him with the abrupt embarrassment people show when an absentee under discussion suddenly appears. He flushed and was about to turn back to the door. But he flushed still more next moment, at thought of his hesitation. This humiliating full-stop beneath their eyes must be wiped out, anyhow. He walked on steadily to the bar.

A shy consciousness of his physique beset him. He felt again an outcast—of an inferior class, socially. He must not show this. He must be leisurely.

He was leisurely. He thought when he stretched his hand out to take his cup of coffee that it would never reach it. Reduced to posing nude for Anastasya and the Russian was the result of the evening! Scores of little sensations, like troublesome imps, herded airily behind him. They tickled him with impalpable fingers.

He munched sandwiches without the faintest sense of their taste. Anastasya’s eyes were scourging him. He felt like a martyr. Suddenly conscious of an awkwardness in his legs, he changed his position. His arms were ludicrously disabled. The sensation of standing neck deep in horrid filth beset him. Compelled to remain in soaking wet clothes and unable to change them, his body gradually drying them, would have been a similar discomfort. The noise of the dancing began again, filled the room. This purified things somewhat. He got red in the face as though with a gigantic effort, but went on staring in front of him.

His anger kept rising. He stood there deliberately longer; in fact on and on, almost in the same position. She should wait his pleasure till he liked to turn round, and—then. He allowed her laughter to accumulate on his back, like a coat of mud. In his illogical vision he felt her there behind him laughing and laughing interminably. Had he gone straight up to her, in a moment of passion, both disembodied as it were, anything in the shape of objective observation disappearing, he could have avoided this scrutiny. He had preferred to plank himself there in front of her, inevitably ridiculous, a mark for that laugh of hers. Soltyk was sharing it. More and more his laughter became intolerable. The traditional solution again suggested itself. Laugh! Laugh! He would stand there letting the debt grow, letting them gorge themselves on his back. The attendant behind the bar began observing him with severe curiosity. He had stood in almost the same position for five minutes and kept staring darkly past her, very red in the face. Then suddenly a laugh burst out behind him—a blow, full of insult, in his ears—and he nearly jumped off the ground. After his long immobility the jump was of the last drollery. His fists clenched, his face emptied of every drop of colour, in the mere action he had almost knocked a man, standing beside him, over. The laugh, for him, had risen with tropic suddenness, a simoom of intolerable offence. It had carried him off his legs, or whirled him round rather, in a second. A young English girl, already terrified at Kreisler’s appearance, and a man, almost as much so, stood open-mouthed in front of him. As to Anastasya and Soltyk, they had very completely disappeared, long before, in all probability.

To find that he had been struggling and perspiring in the grasp of a shadow was a fresh offence, merely, for the count of the absentees. Obviously, shadow or not, there or not there, it was they. He felt this a little; but they had disappeared into the Ewigkeit for the moment. He had been again beating the air. This should have been a climax, of blows, words, definite things. But things remained vague. The turmoil of the evening remained his, the solid part of it, unshared by anybody else. He smiled, rather hideously and menacingly, at the two English people near him, and walked away. He was not going in search of Anastasya. They would be met somewhere or other, no doubt. All he wanted now was to get away from the English club as soon as possible.

While he was making towards the vestibule he was confronted again with FrÄulein Lipmann. “Herr Kreisler, I wish to speak to you,” he heard her say.

“Go to the devil!” he answered without hesitation or softness.

“Besotted fool! if you don’t go at once, I’ll get?”

Turning on her like lightning, with exasperation perfectly meeting hers, his right hand threatening, quickly raised towards his left shoulder, he shouted:

“Lass mich doch—gemeine alte Sau!”

The hissing, thunderous explosion was the last thing in vocal virulence. The muscles all seemed gathered up at his ears like reins, and the flesh tightened and white round his mouth.

FrÄulein Lipmann took several steps back. Kreisler with equal quickness turned away, rapped on the counter, while the attendant looked for his hat, and left the Club. FrÄulein Lippmann was left with the heavy, unforgettable word “sow” deposited in her boiling spirit, that, boil as it might, would hardly reduce this word to tenderness or digestibility.