Some days later, in the evening, Tarr was to be found in a strange place. Decidedly his hosts could not have explained how he got there. He displayed no consciousness of the anomaly.

He had introduced himself—now for the second time—into FrÄulein Lipmann’s Æsthetic saloon, after dining with her and her following at Flobert’s Restaurant. As inexplicable as Kreisler’s former visits, these ones that Tarr began to make were not so perfectly unwelcome. There was a glimmering of meaning in them for Bertha’s women friends. He had just walked in two nights before, as though he were an old and established visitor there, shaken hands and sat down. He then listened to their music, drank their coffee and went away apparently satisfied. Did he consider that his so close connexion with Bertha entitled him to this? It was at all events a prerogative he had never before availed himself of, except on one or two occasions at first, in her company.

The women’s explanation of this eccentric sudden frequentation was that Tarr was in despair. His separation from Bertha (or her conduct with Kreisler) had hit him hard. He wished for consolation or mediation.

Neither of these guesses was right. It was really something absurder than that that had brought him there.

Only a week or ten days away from his love affair with Bertha, Tarr was now coming back to the old haunts and precincts of his infatuation. He was living it all over again in memory, the central and all the accessory figures still in exactly the same place. Suddenly, everything to do with “those days,” as he thought of a week or two before (or what had ended officially then) had become very pleasing. Bertha’s women friends were delightful landmarks. Tarr could not understand how it was he had not taken an interest in them before. They had so much of the German savour of that life lived with Bertha about them!

But not only with them, but with Bertha herself he was likewise carrying on this mysterious retrospective life. He was so delighted, as a fact, to be free of Bertha that he poetized herself and all her belongings.

On this particular second visit to FrÄulein Lipmann’s he met Anastasya Vasek. She, at least, was nothing to do with his souvenirs. Yet, not realizing her as an absolute new-comer at once, he accepted her as another proof of how delightful these people in truth were.

He had been a very silent guest so far. They were curious to hear what this enigma should eventually say, when it decided to speak.

“How is Bertha?” they had asked him.

“She has got a cold,” he had answered. It was a fact that she had caught a summer cold several days before.—“How strange!” they thought.—“So he sees her still!”

“She hasn’t been to Flobert’s lately,” RenÉe Lipmann said. “I’ve been so busy, or I’d have gone round to see her. She’s not in bed, is she?”

“Oh, no, she’s just got a slight cold. She’s very well otherwise,” Tarr answered.

Bertha disappears. Tarr turns up tranquilly in her place. Was he a substitute? What could all this mean? Their first flutter over, their traditional hostility for him reawakened. He had always been an arrogant, eccentric, and unpleasant person: “Homme ÉgoÏste! Homme sensuel!” in Van Bencke’s famous words.

On seeing him talking with new liveliness, not displayed with them, to Anastasya, suspicions began to germinate. Even such shrewd intuition, a development from the reality, as this: “Perhaps getting to like Germans, and losing his first, he had come here to find another.” Comfortable in his liberty, he was still enjoying, by proxy or otherwise, the satisfaction of slavery.

The arrogance implied by his infatuation for the commonplace was taboo. He must be more humble, he felt, and take an interest in his equals.

He had been “Homme ÉgoÏste” so far, but “Homme sensuel” was an exaggeration. His concupiscence had been undeveloped. His Bertha, if she had not been a joke, would not have satisfied him. She did not succeed in waking his senses, although she had attracted them. There was no more reality in their sex relations than in their other relations.

He now had a closer explanation of his attachment to stupidity than he had been able to give Lowndes. It was that his artist’s asceticism could not support anything more serious than such an elementary rival, and, when sex was in the ascendant, it turned his eyes away from the highest beauty and dulled the extremities of his senses, so that he had nothing but rudimentary inclinations left.

But in the interests of his animalism he was turning to betray the artist in him. For he had been saying to himself lately that a more suitable lady-companion must be found; one, that is, he need not be ashamed of. He felt that the time had arrived for Life to come in for some of the benefits of Consciousness.

Anastasya’s beauty, bangles, and good sense were the very thing.

Despite himself, Sorbert was dragged out of his luxury of reminiscence without knowing it, and began discriminating between the Bertha enjoyment felt through the pungent German medium of her friends, and this novel sensation. Yet this sensation was an intruder. It was as though a man having wandered sentimentally along an abandoned route, a tactless and gushing acquaintance had been discovered in unlikely possession.

Tarr asked her from what part of Germany she came.

“My parents are Russian. I was born in Berlin and brought up in America. We live in Dresden,” she answered.

This accounted for her jarring on his maudlin German reveries.

“Lots of Russian families have settled latterly in Germany, haven’t they?” he asked.

“Russians are still rather savage. The more bourgeois a place or thing is the more it attracts them. German watering places, musical centres and so on, they like about as well as anything. They often settle there.”

“Do you regard yourself as a Russian—or a German?”

“Oh, a Russian. I?”

“I’m glad of that,” said Tarr, quite forgetting where he was, and forgetting the nature of his occupation.

“Don’t you like Germans then?”

“Well, now you remind me of it, I do:—Very much, in fact,” He shook himself with self-reproach and gazed round benignantly and comfortably at his hosts. “Else I shouldn’t be here! They’re such a nice, modest, assimilative race, with an admirable sense of duty. They are born servants; excellent mercenary troops, I understand. They should always be used as such.”

“I see you know them À fond.” She laughed in the direction of the Lipmann.

He made a deprecating gesture.

“Not much. But they are an accessible and friendly people.”

“You are English?”

“Yes.”

He treated his hosts with a warm benignity which sought, perhaps, to make up for past affronts. It appeared only to gratify partially. He was treating them like part and parcel of Bertha. They were not ready to accept this valuation, that of chattels of her world.

The two Kinderbachs came over and made an affectionate demonstration around and upon Anastasya. She got up, scattering them abruptly and went over to the piano.

“What a big brute!” Tarr thought. “She would be just as good as Bertha to kiss. And you get a respectable human being into the bargain!” He was not intimately convinced that she would be as satisfactory. Let us see how it would be; he considered. This larger machine of repressed, moping senses did attract. To take it to pieces, bit by bit, and penetrate to its intimacy, might give a similar pleasure to undressing Bertha!

Possessed of such an intense life as Anastasya, women always appeared on the verge of a dark spasm of unconsciousness. With their organism of fierce mechanical reactions, their self-possession was rather bluff. So much more accomplished socially than men, yet they were not the social creatures, but men. Surrender to a woman was a sort of suicide for an artist. Nature, who never forgives an artist, would never allow her to forgive. With any “superior” woman he had ever met, this feeling of being with a parvenu never left him. Anastasya was not an exception.

On leaving, Tarr no longer felt that he would come back to enjoy a diffused form of Bertha there. The prolongations of his Bertha period had passed a climax.

On leaving RenÉe Lipmann’s, nevertheless, Tarr went to the CafÉ de l’Aigle, some distance away, but with an object. To make his present frequentation quite complete, it only needed Kreisler. Otto was there, very much on his present visiting list. He visited him regularly at the CafÉ de l’Aigle, where he was constantly to be found.

This is how Tarr had got to know him.

Tarr had arrived at Bertha’s place about seven in the evening on his first return from Montmartre. He hung about for a little. In ten minutes’ time he had his reward. She came out, followed by Kreisler. Bertha did not see him at first. He followed on the other side of the street, some fifteen yards behind. He did this with sleepy gratification. All was well.

Relations with her were now, it must be clear, substantially at an end. A kind of good sensation of alternating jealousy and regret made him wander along with obedient gratitude. Should she turn round and see him, how uncomfortable she would be! How naturally alike in their mechanical marching gait she and the German were! He was a distinct third party. Being a stranger, with very different appearance, thrilled him agreeably. By a little manoeuvre of short cuts he would get in front of them. This he did.

Bertha saw him as he debouched from his turning. She stopped dead, and appeared to astonished Kreisler to be about to take to her heels. It was flattering in a way that his mere presence should produce this effect. He went up to her. Her palm a sentimental instrument of weak, aching, heavy tissues, she gave him her hand, face fixed on him in a mask of regret and reproach. Fascinated by the intensity of this, he had been staring at her a little too long, perhaps with some of the reflection of her expression. He turned towards Kreisler. He found a, to him, conventionally German indifferent countenance.

“Herr Kreisler,” Bertha said with laconic energy, as though she were uttering some fatal name. Her “Herr Kreisler” said hollowly, “It’s done!” It also had an inflexion of “What shall I do?”

A sick energy saturated her face, the lips were indecently compressed, the eyes wide, dull, with red rims.

Tarr bowed to Kreisler as Bertha said his name. Kreisler raised his hat. Then, with a curious feeling of already thrusting himself on these people, he began to walk along beside Bertha. She moved like an unconvinced party to a bargain, who consents to walk up and down a little, preliminary to a final consideration of the affair. “Yes, but walking won’t help matters,” she might have been saying. Kreisler’s indifference was absolute. There was an element of the child’s privilege in Tarr’s making himself of the party (“Sorbet, tu es si jeane”). There was the claim for indulgence of a spirit not entirely serious! The childishness of this turning up as though nothing had happened, with such wilful resolve not to recognize the seriousness of things, Bertha’s drama, the significance of the awful words, “Herr Kreisler!” and so on, was present to him. Bertha must know the meaning of his rapid resurrection—she knew him too well not to know that. So they walked on, without conversation. Then Tarr inquired if she were “quite well.”

“Yes, Sorbert, quite well,” she replied, with soft tragic banter.

As though by design, he always found just the words or tone that would give an opening for this sentimental irony of hers.

But the least hint that he had come to reinstate himself must not remain. It must be clearly understood that Kreisler was the principal figure now. He, Tarr, was only a privileged friend.

With unflattering rapidity somebody else had been found. Her pretension to heroic attachment was compromised. Should not he put in for the vacated berth?

He had an air of welcoming Kreisler. “Make yourself at home; don’t mind me,” his manner said. As to showing him over the premises he was taking possession of—he had made the inspection, himself, no doubt!

“We have a mutual friend, Lowndes,” Tarr said to Kreisler, pleasantly. “A week or two ago he was going to introduce me to you, but it was fated?”

“Ah, yes, Lowndes,” said Kreisler, “I know him.”

“Has he left Paris, do you know?”

“I think not. I thought I saw him yesterday, there, in the Boulevard du Paradis.” Kreisler nodded over his shoulder, indicating precisely the spot on which they had met. His gesture implied that Lowndes might still be found thereabout.

Bertha shrank in “subtle” pantomime from their affability. From the glances she pawed her German friend with, he must deserve nothing but horrified avoidance. Sorbert’s astute and mischievous way of saddling her with Kreisler, accepting their being together as the most natural thing in life, roused her combativity. Tarr honoured him, clearly out of politeness to her. Very well: all she could do for the moment was to be noticeably distant with Kreisler. She must display towards him the disgust and reprobation that Tarr should feel, and which he refused, in order to vex her.

Kreisler during the last few days had persisted and persisted. He had displayed some cleverness in his choice of means. As a result of overtures and manoeuvres, Bertha had now consented to see him. Her demoralization was complete. She could not stand up any longer against the result, personified by Kreisler, of her idiotic actions. At present she transferred her self-hatred from herself to Kreisler.

Tarr’s former relations with Bertha were known to him. He resented the Englishman’s air of proprietorship, the sort of pleasant “handing-over” that was going on. It had for object, he thought, to cheapen his little success.

“I don’t think, Herr Kreisler, I’ll come to dinner after all.” She stood still and rolled her eyes wildly in several directions, and stuck one of her hands stiffly out from her side.

“Very well, FrÄulein,” he replied evenly.—The dismissal annoyed him. His eyes took in Tarr compendiously in passing. Was this a resuscitation of old love at his expense? Tarr had perhaps come to claim his property. This was not the way that is usually done.

“Adieu, Herr Kreisler,” sounded like his dismissal. A “let me see you again; understand that here things end!” was written baldly in her very bald eyes. With irony he bid good day to Tarr.

“I hope we shall meet again”: Tarr shook him warmly by the hand.

“It is likely,” Kreisler replied at once.

As yet Kreisler was undisturbed. He intended not to relinquish his acquaintance with Bertha Lunken. If the Englishman’s amiability were a polite way of reclaiming property left ownerless and therefore susceptible of new rights being deployed as regards it, then in time these later rights would be vindicated. Kreisler’s first impression of Tarr was not flattering. But no doubt they would meet again, as he had said.

CHAPTER III

Bertha held out her hand brutally, in a sort of spasm of will: said, in the voice of “finality,”

“Good-bye, Sorbet: good-bye!”

He did not take it. She left it there a moment, saying again, “Good-bye!”

“Good-bye, if you like,” he said at length. “But I see no reason why we should part in this manner. If Kreisler wouldn’t mind”—he looked after him—“we might go for a little walk. Or will you come and have an apÉritif?”

“No, Sorbert, I’d rather not.—Let us say good-bye at once; will you?”

“My dear girl, don’t be so silly!” He took her arm and dragged her towards a cafÉ, the first on the boulevard they were approaching.

She hung back, prolonging the personal contact, yet pretending to be resisting it with wonder.

“I can’t, Sorbert. Je ne peux pas!” purring her lips out and rolling her eyes. She went to the cafÉ in the end. For some time conversation hung back.

“How is FrÄulein Lipmann getting on?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.”

“Ah!”

Tarr felt he had five pieces to play. He had played one. The other four he toyed with in a lazy way.

“Van Bencke?”

“I have not seen her.”

That left three.

“How is Isolde?”

“I don’t know.”

“Seen the Kinderbachs?”

“One of them.”

“How is Clara?”

“Clara? She is quite well, I think.”

The solder for the pieces of this dialogue was a dreary grey matter that Bertha supplied. Their talk was an unnecessary column on the top of which she perched herself with glassy quietude.

She turned to him abruptly as though he had been hiding behind her, and tickling her neck with a piece of feather-grass.

“Why did you leave me, Sorbert?—Why did you leave me?”

He filled his pipe, and then said, feeling like a bad actor:

“I went away at that particular moment, as you know, because I had heard that Herr Kreisler?”

“Don’t speak to me about Kreisler—don’t mention his name, I beg you.—I hate that man.—Ugh!”

Genuine vehemence made Tarr have a look at her. Of course she would say that. She was using too much genuineness, though, not to be rather flush of it for the moment.

“But I don’t see?”

“Don’t; don’t!” She sat up suddenly in her chair and shook her finger in his face. “If you mention Kreisler again, Sorbert, I shall hate you too! I especially pray you not to mention him.”

She collapsed, mouth drawn down at corners.

“As you like.” In insisting he would appear to be demanding an explanation. Any hint of exceptional claims on her confidence must be avoided.

“Why did you leave me?—You don’t know.—I have been mad ever since. One is as helpless as can be—When you are here once more, I feel how weak I am without you. It has not been fair. I have felt just as though I had got out of a sick-bed. I am not BLAMING you.”

They went to Flobert’s from the cafÉ. It was after nine o’clock, and the place was empty. She bought a wing of chicken; at a dairy some salad and eggs; two rolls at the baker’s, to make a cold supper at home. It was more than she would need for herself. Sorbert did not offer to share the expense. At the gate leading to her house he left her.

Immediately afterwards, walking towards the terminus of the Montmartre omnibus, he realized that he was well in the path that led away, as he had not done while still with her. He was glad and sorry, doing homage to her and the future together. She had a fascination as a moribund Bertha. The immobile short sunset of their friendship should be enjoyed. A rich throwing up and congesting of souvenirs on this threshold were all the better for the weak and silly sun. Oh what a delightful, imperturbable clockwork orb!

The next day he again made his way across Paris from Montmartre at a rather earlier hour. He invited himself to tea with her. They talked as though posing for their late personalities.

He took up deliberately one or two controversial points. In a spirit of superfluous courtesy he went back to the subject of several of their old typical disputes, and argued against himself.

All their difficulties seemed swept away in a relaxed humid atmosphere, most painful and disagreeable to her. He agreed entirely with her, now agreeing no longer meant anything! But the key was elsewhere. Enjoyment of and acquiescence in everything Berthaesque and Teutonic was where it was to be found. Just as now he went to see Bertha’s very German friends, and said “How delightful” to himself, so he appeared to be resolved to come back for a week or two and to admire everything formerly he had found most irritating in Bertha herself. Before retiring definitely, like a man who hears that the rind of the fruit he has just been eating is good, and comes back to his plate to devour the part he had discarded, Tarr returned to have a last tankard of German beer.

Or still nearer the figure, his claim in the unexceptionable part of her now lapsed, he had returned demanding to be allowed to live just a little while longer on the absurd and disagreeable section.

Bertha suffered, on her side, more than all the rest of the time she had spent with him put together. To tell the whole Kreisler story might lead to a fight. It was too late now. She could not, she felt, in honour, seek to re-entangle Tarr, nor could she disown Kreisler. She had been found with Kreisler: she had no means of keeping him away for good. An attempt at suppressing him might produce any result. Should she have been able, or desired to resume her relations with Tarr, Kreisler would not have left him uninformed of things that had happened, shown in the most uncongenial light. If left alone, and not driven away like a dog, he might gradually quiet down and disappear. Sorbert would be gone, too, by that time!

Their grand, never-to-be-forgotten friendship was ending in shabby shallows. Tarr had the best rÔle, and did not deserve it. Kreisler was the implacable remote creditor of the situation.

CHAPTER IV

Tarr left Bertha punctually at seven. She looked very ill. He resolved not to go there any more. He felt upset. Lejeune’s, when he got there, was full of Americans. It was like having dinner among a lot of canny children. Kreisler was not there. He went on a hunt for him afterwards, and ran him to earth at the CafÉ de l’Aigle.

Kreisler was not cordial. He emitted sounds of surprise, shuffled his feet and blinked. But Tarr sat down in front of him on his own initiative. Then Kreisler, calling the garÇon, offered him a drink. Afterwards he settled down to contemplate Bertha’s Englishman, and await developments. He was always rather softer with people with whom he could converse in his own harsh tongue.

The causes at the root of Tarr’s present thrusting of himself upon Kreisler were the same as his later visits at the Lipmann’s. A sort of bath of Germans was his prescription for himself, a voluptuous immersion. To heighten the effect, he was being German himself: being Bertha as well.

But he was more German than the Germans. Many aspects of his conduct were so un-German that Kreisler did not recognize the portrait or hail him as a fellow. Successive lovers of a certain woman fraternizing; husbands hobnobbing with their wives’ lovers or husbands of their unmarried days is a commonplace of German or Scandinavian society.

Kreisler had not returned to Bertha’s. He was too lazy to plan conscientiously. But he concluded that she had better be given scope for anything the return of Tarr might suggest. He, Otto Kreisler, might be supposed no longer to exist. His mind was working up again for some truculent action. Tarr was no obstacle. He would just walk through Tarr like a ghost when he saw fit to “advance” again.

“You met Lowndes in Rome, didn’t you?” Tarr asked him.

Kreisler nodded.

“Have you seen FrÄulein Lunken to-day?”

“No.” As Tarr was coming to the point Kreisler condescended to speak: “I shall see her to-morrow morning.”

A space for protest or comment seemed to be left after this sentence, in Kreisler’s still very “speaking” expression.

Tarr smiled at the tone of this piece of information. Kreisler at once grinned, mockingly, in return.

“You can get out of your head any idea that I have turned up to interfere with your proceedings,” Tarr then said. “Affairs lie entirely between FrÄulein Lunken and yourself.”

Kreisler met this assurance truculently.

“You could not interfere with my proceedings. I do what I want to do in this life!”

“How splendid. Wunderbar! I admire you!”

“Your admiration is not asked for!”

“It leaps up involuntarily! Prosit! But I did not mean, Herr Kreisler, that my desire to interfere, had such desire existed, would have been tolerated. Oh, no! I meant that no such desire existing, we had no cause for quarrel. Prosit!”

Tarr again raised his glass expectantly and coaxingly, peering steadily at the German. He said, “Prosit” as he would have said, “Peep-oh!”

“Pros’t!” Kreisler answered with alarming suddenness, and an alarming diabolical smile. “Prosit!” with finality. He put his glass down. “That is all right. I have no desire,” he wiped and struck up his moustaches, “to quarrel with anybody. I wish to be left alone. That is all.”

“To be left alone to enjoy your friendship with Bertha—that is your meaning? Am I not right? I see.”

“That is my business. I wish to be left alone.”

“Of course it’s your business, my dear chap. Have another drink!” He called the garÇon. Kreisler agreed to another drink.

Why was this Englishman sitting there and talking to him? It was in the German style and yet it wasn’t. Was Kreisler to be shifted, was he meant to go? Had the task of doing this been put on Bertha’s shoulders? Had Tarr come there to ask him, or in the hope that he would volunteer a promise, never to see Bertha again?

On the other hand, was he being approached by Tarr in the capacity of an old friend of Bertha’s, or in her interests or at her instigation?

With frowning impatience he bent forward quickly once or twice, asking Tarr to repeat some remark. Tarr’s German was not good.

Several glasses of beer, and Kreisler became engagingly expansive.

“Have you ever been to England?” Tarr asked him.

“England?—No—I should like to go there! I like Englishmen! I feel I should get on better with them than with these French. I hate the French! They are all actors.”

“You should go to London.”

“Ah, to London. Yes, I should go to London! It must be a wonderful town! I have often meant to go there. Is it expensive?”

“The journey?”

“Well, life there. Dearer than it is here, I have been told.” Kreisler forgot his circumstances for the moment. The Englishman seemed to have hit on a means of escape for him. He had never thought of England! A hazy notion of its untold wealth made it easier for him to put aside momentarily the fact of his tottering finances.

Perhaps this Englishman had been sent him by the Schicksal. He had always got on well with Englishmen!

The peculiar notion then crossed his mind that Tarr perhaps wanted to get him out of Paris, and had come to make him some offer of hospitality in England. In a bargaining spirit he began to run England down. He must not appear too anxious to go there.

“They say, though, things have changed. England’s not what it was,” he said.

“No. But it has changed for the better.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“Quite true. The last time I was there it had improved so much that I thought of stopping. Merry England is foutu! There won’t be a regular Pub. in the whole country in fifty years. Art will flourish! There’s not a real gipsy left in the country. The sham art-ones are dwindling!”

“Are the Zigeuner disappearing?”

“Je vous crois! Rather!”

“The only Englishmen I know are very sympathisch.”

They pottered about on the subject of England for some time. Kreisler was very tickled with the idea of England.

“English women—what are they like?” Kreisler then asked with a grin. Their relations made this subject delightfully delicate and yet, Kreisler thought, very natural. This Englishman was evidently a description of pander, and no doubt he would be as inclined to be hospitable with his countrywomen in the abstract as with his late fiancÉe in material detail.

“A friend of mine who had been there told me they were very ‘pretty’”—he pronounced the English word with mincing slowness and mischievous interrogation marks in his distorted face.

“Your friend did not exaggerate. They are like languid nectarines! You would enjoy yourself there.”

“But I can’t speak English—only a little. ‘I spik Ingleesh a leetle,’” he attempted with pleasure.

“Very good! You’d get on splendidly!”

Kreisler brushed his moustaches up, sticking his lips out in a hard gluttonous way. Tarr watched him with sympathetic curiosity.

“But—my friend told me—they’re not—very easy? They are great flirts. So far—and then bouf! You are sent flying!”

“You would not find anything to compare with the facilities of your own country. But you would not wish for that?”

“No?—But, tell me, then, they are cold?—They are of a calculating nature?”

“They are practical, I suppose, up to a certain point. But you must go and see.”

Kreisler ruminated.

“What do you find particularly attractive about Bertha?” Tarr asked in a discursive way. “I ask you as a German. I have often wondered what a German would think of her.”

Kreisler looked at him with resentful uncertainty for a moment.

“You want to know what I think of the Lunken?—She’s a sly prostitute, that’s what she is!” he announced loudly and challengingly.

“Ah!”

When he had given Tarr time for any possible demonstration, he thawed into his sociable self. He then added:

“She’s not a bad girl! But she tricked you, my friend! She never cared that”—he snapped his fingers inexpertly—“for you! She told me so!”

“Really? That’s interesting.—But I expect you’re only telling lies. All Germans do!”

“All Germans lie?”

“‘Deutsches Volk—the folk that deceives!’ is your philosopher Nietzsche’s account of the origin of the word Deutsch.”

Kreisler sulked a moment till he had recovered.

“No. We don’t lie! Why should we? We’re not afraid of the truth, so why should we?”

“Perhaps, as a tribe, you lied to begin with, but have now given it up?”

“What?”

“That may be the explanation of Nietzsche’s etymology. Although he seemed very stimulated at the idea of your national certificate of untruthfulness. He felt that, as a true patriot, he should react against your blue eyes, beer, and childish frankness.”

“Quatsch! Nietzsche was always paradoxal. He would say anything to amuse himself. You English are the greatest liars and hypocrites on this earth!”

“‘See the Continental Press’! You should not swallow that rubbish. I only dispute your statement because I know it is not first-hand. What I mean about the Germans was that, like the Jews, they are extremely proud of success in deceit. No enthusiasm of that sort exists in England. Hypocrisy is usually a selfish stupidity, rather than the result of cunning.”

“The English are stupid hypocrites then! We agree. Prosit!”

“The Germans are uncouth but zealous liars! Prosit!”

He offered Kreisler a cigarette. A pause occurred to allow the acuter national susceptibilities to cool.

“You haven’t yet given me your opinion of Bertha. You permitted yourself a truculent flourish that evaded the question.”

“I wish to evade the question.—I told you that she has tricked you. She is very malin! She is tricking me now; or she is trying to. She will not succeed with me! ‘When you go to take a woman you should be careful not to forget your whip!’ That Nietzsche said too!”

“Are you going to give her a beating?” Tarr asked.

Kreisler laughed in a ferocious and ironical manner.

“You consider that you are being fooled, in some way, by FrÄulein Lunken?”

“She would if she could. She is nothing but deceit. She is a snake. Pfui!”

“You consider her a very cunning and double-faced woman?”

Kreisler nodded sulkily.

“With the soul of a prostitute?”

“She has an innocent face, like a Madonna. But she is a prostitute. I have the proofs of it!”

“In what way has she tricked me?”

“In the way that women always trick men!”

With resentment partly and with hard picturesque levity Kreisler met Tarr’s discourse.

This solitary drinker, particularly shabby, who could be “dismissed” so easily, whom Bertha with accents of sincerity, “hated, hated!” was so different to the sort of man that Tarr expected might attract her, that he began to wonder. A certain satisfaction accompanied these observations.

For that week he saw Kreisler nearly every day. A partie À trois then began. Bertha (whom Tarr saw constantly too) did not actually refuse admittance to Kreisler (although he usually had first to knock a good many times), yet she prayed him repeatedly not to come any more. Standing always in a drooping and desperate condition before him, she did her best to avert a new outburst on his part. She sought to mollify him as much as was consistent with the most absolute refusal. Tarr, unaware of how things actually stood, seconded his successor.

Kreisler, on his side, was rendered obstinate by her often tearful refusal to have anything more whatever to do with him. He had come to regard Tarr as part of Bertha, a sort of masculine extension of her. At the cafÉ he would look out for him, and drink deeply in his presence.

“I will have her. I will have her!” he once shouted towards the end of the evening, springing up and calling loudly for the garÇon. It was all Tarr could do to prevent him from going, with assurances of intercession.

His suspicions of Tarr at last awoke once more. What was the meaning of this Englishman always there? What was he there for? If it had not been for him, several times he would have rushed off and had his way. But he was always there between them. And in secret, too, probably, and away from him—Kreisler—he was working on Bertha’s feelings, and preventing her from seeing him. Tarr was anyhow the obstacle. And yet there he was, talking and palavering, and offering to act as an intermediary, and preventing him from acting. He alone was the obstacle, and yet he talked as though he were nothing to do with it, or at the most a casually interested third party. That is how Kreisler felt on his way home after having drunk a good deal. But so long as Tarr paid for drinks he staved him off his prey.

CHAPTER V

Tarr soon regretted this last anti-climax stage of his adventure. He would have left Kreisler alone in future, but he felt that by frequenting him he could save Bertha from something disagreeable. With disquiet and misgiving every night now he sat in front of his Prussian friend. He watched him gradually imbibing enough spirits to work him up to his pitch of characteristic madness.

“After all, let us hear really what it all means, your Kreisler stunt, and Kreisler?” he said to her four or five days after his reappearance. “Do you know that I act as a dam, or rather a dyke, to his outrageous flood of liquorous spirits every night? Only my insignificant form is between you and destruction, or you and a very unpleasant Kreisler, at any rate.—Have you seen him when he’s drunk?—What, after all, does Kreisler mean? Satisfy my curiosity.”

Bertha shuddered and looked at him with dramatically wide-open eyes, as though there were no answer.

“It’s nothing, Sorbert, nothing,” she said, as though Kreisler were the bubonic plague and she were making light of it.

Yet a protest had to be made. He had rather neglected the coincidence of his arrival and Bertha’s refusal to see Kreisler. He must avoid finding himself manoeuvred into appearing the cause. A tranquil and sentimental revenant was the rÔle he had chosen. Up to a point he encouraged Bertha to see his boon companion and relax her sudden exclusiveness. He hesitated to carry out thoroughly his part of go-between and reconciler. At length he began to make inquiries. After all, to have to hold back his successor to the favours of a lady, from going and seizing those rights (presumably temporarily denied him), was a strange situation. At any moment now it seemed likely that Kreisler would turn on him. This would simplify matters. Better leave lovers to fight out their own quarrels and not take up the ungrateful rÔle of interferer and voluntary policeman. All his retrospective pleasure was being spoilt. But he was committed to remain there for the present. To get over his sensation of dupe, he was more sociable with Kreisler than he felt. The German interpreted this as an hypocrisy. His contempt and suspicion of the peculiar revenant grew.

Bertha was tempted to explain, in as dramatic a manner as possible, the situation to Tarr. But she hesitated always because she thought it would lead to a fight. She was often, as it was, anxious for Tarr.

“Sorbert, I think I’ll go to Germany at once,” she said to him, on the afternoon of his second visit to RenÉe Lipmann’s.

“Why, because you’re afraid of Kreisler?”

“No, but I think it’s better.”

“But why, all of a sudden?”

“My sister will be home from Berlin, in a day or two?”

“And you’d leave me here to ‘mind’ the dog.”

“No.—Don’t see Kreisler any more, Sorbert. Dog is the word indeed! He is mad: ganz verucht!—Promise me, Sorbert”—she took his hand—“not to go to the cafÉ any more!”

“Do you want him at your door at twelve to-night?—I feel I may be playing the part of—gooseberry, is it??”

“Don’t, Sorbert. If you only knew!—He was here this morning, hammering for nearly half an hour. But all I ask you is to go to the cafÉ no more. There is no need for you to be mixed up in all this. I only am to blame.”

“I wonder what is the real explanation of Kreisler?” Sorbert said, pulled up by what she had said. “Have you known him long—before you knew me, for instance?”

“No, only a week or two—since you went away.”

“I must ask Kreisler. But he seems to have very primitive notions about himself.”

“Don’t bother any more with that man, Sorbert. You don’t do any good. Don’t go to the cafÉ to-night!”

“Why to-night?”

“Any night.”

Kreisler certainly was a “new link”—too much. The chief cause of separation had become an element of insidious rapprochement.

He left her silently apprehensive, staring at him mournfully.

So that night, after his second visit to FrÄulein Lipmann’s, he did not seek out Kreisler at his usual head-quarters with his first enthusiasm.

CHAPTER VI

Already before a considerable pile of saucers, representing his evening’s menu of drink, Kreisler sat quite still, his eyes very bright, smiling to himself. Tarr did not at once ask him “what Kreisler meant.” “Kreisler” looked as though it meant something a little different on that particular evening. He acknowledged Tarr’s arrival slightly, seeming to include him in his reverie. It was a sort of silent invitation to “come inside.” Then they sat without speaking, an unpleasant atmosphere of police-court romance for Tarr.

Tarr still kept his retrospective luxury before him, as it maintained the Kreisler side of the business in a desired perspective. Anastasya, whom he had seen that evening, had come as a diversion. He got back, with her, into the sphere of “real” things again, not fanciful retrospective ones.

This would be a reply to Kreisler (an Anastasya for your Otto) and restore the balance. At present they were existing on a sort of three-legged affair. This inclusion of the fourth party would make things solid and less precarious again.

To maintain his rÔle of intermediary and go on momentarily keeping his eye on Kreisler’s threatening figure, he must himself be definitely engaged in a new direction, beyond the suspicion of hankerings after his old love.

Did he wish to enter into a new attachment with Anastasya? That could be decided later. He would make the first steps, retain her if possible, and out of this, charming expedient pleasant things might come. He was compelled to requisition her for the moment. She might be regarded as a travelling companion. Thrown together inevitably on a stage-coach journey, anything might happen. Delight, adventure, and amusement was always achieved: as his itch to see his humorous concubine is turned into a “retrospective luxury,” visits to the Lipmann circle, mysterious relationship with Kreisler. This, in its turn, suddenly turning rather prickly and perplexing, he now, through the medium of a beautiful woman, turns it back again into fun; not serious enough for Beauty, destined, therefore, rather for her subtle, rough, satiric sister.

Once Anastasya had been relegated to her place rather of expediency, he could think of her with more freedom. He looked forward with gusto to his work in her direction.

There would be no harm in anticipating a little. She might at once be brought on to the boards, as though the affair were already settled and ripe for publicity.

“Do you know a girl called Anastasya Vasek? She is to be found at your German friend’s, FrÄulein Lipmann’s.”

“Yes, I know her,” said Kreisler, looking up with unwavering blankness. His introspective smile vanished. “What then?” was implied in his look. What a fellow this Englishman was, to be sure! What was he after now? Anastasya was a much more delicate point with him than Bertha.

“I’ve just got to know her. She’s a charming girl, isn’t she?” Tarr could not quite make out Kreisler’s reception of these innocent remarks.

“Is she?” Kreisler looked at him almost with astonishment.

There is a point in life beyond which we must hold people responsible for accidents and their unconsciousness. Innocence then loses its meaning. Beyond this point Tarr had transgressed. Whether Tarr knew anything or not, the essential reality was that Tarr was beginning to get at him with Anastasya, just having been for a week a problematic and officious figure suddenly appearing between him and his prey of the Rue Martine. The habit of civilized restraint had kept Kreisler baffled and passive for a week. Annoyance at Bertha’s access of self-will had been converted into angry interest in his new self-elected boon companion. He had been preparing lately, though, to borrow money from him. Anastasya brought on the scene was another kettle of fish.

What did this Tarr’s proceedings say? They said: “Bertha Lunken will have nothing more to do with you. You mustn’t annoy her any more. In the meantime, I am getting on very well with Anastasya Vasek!”

A question that presented itself to Kreisler was whether Tarr had heard the whole story of his assault on his late fiancÉe? The possibility of his knowing this increased his contempt for Tarr.

Kreisler was disarmed for the moment by the remembrance of Anastasya. By the person he had regarded as peculiarly accessible becoming paradoxically out of his reach, the most distant and inaccessible—such as Anastasya—seemed to be drawn a little nearer.

“Is FrÄulein Vasek working in a studio?” he asked.

“She’s at Serrano’s, I think,” Tarr told him.

“So you go to FrÄulein Lipmann’s?”

“Sometimes.”

Kreisler reflected a little.

“I should like to see her again.”

Tarr began to scent another mysterious muddle. Would he never be free of Herr Kreisler? Perhaps he was going to be followed and rivalled in this too? With deliberate meditation Kreisler appeared to be coming round to Tarr’s opinion. For his part too, FrÄulein Vasek was a nice young lady. “Yes, she is nice!” His manner began to suggest that Tarr had put her forward as a substitute for Bertha!

For the rest of the evening Kreisler insisted upon talking about Anastasya. How was she dressed? Had she mentioned him? etc. Tarr felt inclined to say, “But you don’t understand! She is for me. Bertha is your young lady now!” Only in reflecting on this possible remark, he was confronted with the obvious reply, “But is Bertha my young lady?”

CHAPTER VII

Tarr had Anastasya in solitary promenade two days after this. He had worked the first stage consummately. He swam with ease beside his big hysterical black swan, seeming to guide her with a golden halter. They were swimming with august undulations of thought across the Luxembourg Gardens on this sunny and tasteful evening about four o’clock. The Latins and Scandinavians who strolled on the Latin terrace were each one a microscopic hero, but better turned out than the big doubtful heroes of 1840.

The inviolate, constantly sprinkled and shining lawns by the LycÉe Henri Trois were thickly fringed with a sort of seaside humanity, who sat facing them and their coolness as though it had been the sea. Leaving these upland expanses to the sedentary swarms of Mammas and Papas, Tarr and Anastasya crossed over beneath the trees past the children’s carousels grinding out their antediluvian lullabies.

This place represented the richness of four wasted years. Four incredibly gushing, thick years; what had happened to this delightful muck? All this profusion had accomplished for him was to dye the avenues of a Park with personal colour for the rest of his existence.

No one, he was quite convinced, had squandered so much stuff in the neighbourhood of these terraces, ponds, and lawns. So this was more nearly his Park than it was anybody else’s. He should never walk through it without bitter and soothing recognition from it. Well: that was what the Man of Action accomplished. In four idle years he had been, when most inactive, trying the man of action’s job. He had captured a Park!—Well! he had spent himself into the Earth. The trees had his sap in them.

He remembered a day when he had brought a book to the bench there, his mind tearing at it in advance, almost writing it in its energy. He had been full of such unusual faith. The streets around these gardens, in which he had lodged alternately, were so many confluents and tributaries of memory, charging it on all sides with defunct puissant tides. The places, he reflected, where childhood has been spent, or where, later, dreams of energy have been flung away, year after year, are obviously the healthiest spots for a person. But perhaps, although he possessed the Luxembourg Gardens so completely, they were completely possessed by thousands of other people! So many men had begun their childhood of ambition in this neighbourhood. His hopes, too, no doubt, had grown there more softly because of the depth and richness of the bed. A sentimental miasma made artificially in Paris a similar good atmosphere where the mind could healthily exist as was found by artists in brilliant complete and solid times. Paris was like a patent food.

“Elle dit le mot, Anastase, nÉ pour d’Éternels parchemins.” He could not, however, get interested. Was it the obstinate Eighteenth Century animal vision? When you plunge into these beings, must they be all quivering with unconsciousness, like life with a cat or a serpent?—But her sex would throw clouds over her eyes. She was a woman. It was no good. Again he must confess Anastasya could only offer him something too serious. He could not play with that. Sex-loyalty to his most habitual lips interfered.

He had the protective instinct that people with a sense of their own power have for those not equals with whom they have been associated. He would have given to Bertha the authority of his own spirit, to prime her with himself that she might meet on equal terms and vanquish any rival. He experienced a slight hostility to Anastasya like a part of Bertha left in himself protesting and jealous. It was chiefly vanity at the thought of this superior woman’s contempt could she see his latest female effort.

“I suppose she knows all about Bertha,” he thought. Kreisler-like, he looked towards the Lipmann women. “Homme sensuel! Homme ÉgoÏste!”

She seemed rather shy with him.

“How do you like Paris?” he asked her.

“I don’t know yet. Do you like it?” She had a flatness in speaking English because of her education in the United States.

“I don’t like to be quite so near the centre of the world. You can see all the machinery working. It makes you a natural sceptic. But here I am. I find it difficult to live in London.”

“I should have thought everything was so perfected here that the machinery did not obtrude?”

“I don’t feel that. I think that a place like this exists for the rest of the world. It works that the other countries may live and create. That is the rÔle France has chosen. The French spirit seems to me rather spare and impoverished at present.”

“You regard it as a mother-drudge?”

“More of a drudge than a mother. We don’t get much really from France, except tidiness.”

“I expect you are ungrateful.”

“Perhaps so. But I cannot get over a dislike for Latin facilities. SuarÈs finds a northern rhetoric of ideas in Ibsen, for instance, exactly similar to the word-rhetoric of the South. But in Latin countries you have a democracy of vitality, the best things of the earth are in everybody’s mouth and nerves. The artist has to go and find them in the crowd. You can’t have ‘freedom’ both ways. I prefer the artist to be free, and the crowd not to be ‘artists.’ What does all English and German gush or sentiment, about the wonderful, the artistic French nation, etc., amount to? They gush because they find thirty-five million little BÉsnards, little Botrels, little Bouchers, or little Bougereaus living together and prettifying their towns and themselves. Imagine England an immense garden city, on Letchworth lines (that is the name of a model Fabian township near London), or Germany (it almost has become that) a huge nouveau-art, reform-dressed, bestatued State. Practically every individual Frenchman of course has the filthiest taste imaginable. You are more astonished when you come across a sound, lonely, and severe artist in France than elsewhere. His vitality is hypnotically beset by an ocean of artistry. His best instinct is to become rather aggressively harsh and simple. The reason that a great artist like Rodin or the Cubists to-day arouse more fury in France than in England, for instance, is not because the French are more interested in Art! They are less interested in art, if anything. It is because they are all ‘artistic’ and all artists in the sense that a cheap illustrator or Mr. Brangwyn, R.A., or Mr. Waterhouse, R.A., are. They are scandalized at good art; the English are inquisitive about and tickled by it, like gaping children. Their social instincts are not so developed and logical.”

“But what difference does the attitude of the crowd make to the artist?”

“Well, we were talking about Paris, which is the creation of the crowd. The man thinking in these gardens to-day, the man thinking on the quays of Amsterdam three centuries ago, think much the same thoughts. Thought is like climate and chemistry. It even has its physical type. But the individual’s projection of himself he must entrust to his milieu. I maintain that the artist’s work is nowhere so unsafe as in the hands of an ‘artistic’ vulgarly alive public. The other question is his relation to the receptive world, and his bread and cheese. Paris is, to begin with, no good for bread and cheese, except as a market to which American and Russian millionaire dealers come. Its intelligence is of great use. But no friendship is a substitute for the blood-tie; and intelligence is no substitute for the response that can only come from the narrower recognition of your kind. This applies to the best type of art rather than work of very personal genius. Country is left behind by that. Intelligence also.”

“Don’t you think that work of very personal genius often has a country? It may break through accidents of birth to perfect conditions somewhere; not necessarily contemporary ones or those of the country it happens in?”

“I suppose you could find a country or a time for almost anything. But I am sure that the best has in reality no Time and no Country. That is why it accepts without fuss any country or time for what they are worth; thence the seeming contradiction, that it is always actual. It is alive, and nationality is a portion of actuality.”

“But is the best work always ‘actual’ and up to date?”

“It always has that appearance. It’s manners are perfect.”

“I am not so sure that manners cannot be overdone. A personal code is as good as the current code.”

“The point seems to me to be, in that connexion, that manners are not very important. You use them as you use coins.”

“The most effectual men have always been those whose notions were diametrically opposed to those of their time,” she said carefully.

“I don’t think that is so; except in so far as all effectual men are always the enemies of every time. With that fundamental divergence, they give a weight of impartiality to the supreme thesis and need of their age. Any opinion of their fellows that they adopt they support with the uncanny authority of a plea from a hostile camp. All activity on the part of a good mind has the stimulus of a paradox. To produce is the sacrifice of genius.”

They seemed to have an exotic grace to him as they promenaded their sinuous healthy intellects in this eighteenth-century landscape. There was no other pair of people who could talk like that on those terraces. They were both of them barbarians, head and shoulders taller than the polished stock around. And they were highly strung and graceful. They were out of place.

“Your philosophy reminds me of Jean-Jacques,” she said.

“Does it? How do you arrive at that conclusion?”

“Well, your hostility to a tidy rabble, and preference for a rough and uncultivated bed to build on brings to mind ‘wild nature’ and the doctrine of the natural man. You want a human landscape similar to Jean-Jacques’ rocks and water falls.”

“I see what you mean. But I also notice that the temper of my theories is the exact opposite of Jean-Jacques’.—He raved over and poetized his wild nature and naturalness generally and put it forward as an ideal. My point of view is that it is a question of expediency only. I do not for a moment sentimentalize crudeness. I maintain that that crude and unformed bed, or backing, is absolutely essential to maximum fineness; just as crudity in an individual’s composition is necessary for him to be able to create. There is no more absolute value in stupidity and formlessness than there is in dung. But they are just as necessary. The conditions of creation and of life disgust me. The birth of a work of art is as dirty as that of a baby. But I consider that my most irremediable follies have come from fastidiousness; not the other thing. If you are going to work or perform, you must make up your mind to have dirty hands most part of the time. Similarly, you must praise chaos and filth. It is put there for you. Incense is, I believe, camels’ dung. When you praise, you do so with dung. When you see men fighting, robbing each other, behaving meanly or breaking out into violent vulgarities, you must conventionally clap your hands. If you have not the stomach to do that, you cannot be a creative artist. If people stopped behaving in that way, you could not be a creative artist.”

“So you would discourage virtue, self-sacrifice, and graceful behaviour?”

“No, praise them very much. Also praise deceit, lechery, and panic. Whatever a man does, praise him. In that way you will be acting as the artist does; If you are not an artist, you will not act in that way. An artist should be as impartial as God.”

“Is God impartial?”

“We disintegrate. His dream is no doubt ignorant of our classifications.”

“Rousseau again??”

“If you really want to saddle me with that Swiss, I will help you. My enthusiasm for art has made me fond of chaos. It is the artist’s fate almost always to be exiled among the slaves. The artist who takes his job seriously gets his sensibility blunted. He is less squeamish than other people and less discriminating.”

“He becomes in fact less of an artist?”

“An artist is a cold card, with a hide like a rhinoceros.”

“You are poetizing him! But if that is so, wouldn’t it be better to be something else?”

“No, I think it’s about the best thing to be.”

“With his women companions, sweethearts, he is also apt to be undiscriminating.”

“He is notorious for that!”

“I think that is a pity. Then that is because I am a woman, and am conscious of not being a slave.”

“But then such women as you are condemned also to find themselves surrounded by slaves!”

“Your frequentation of the abject has not caused you to forget one banal art!”

“You tempt me to abandon art. Art is the refuge of the shy.”

“Are you shy?”

“Yes.”

“You need not be.”

Her revolving hips and thudding skirts carried her forward with the orchestral majesty of a simple ship. He suddenly became conscious of the monotonous racket.

At that moment the drums beat to close the gardens. They had dinner in a Bouillon near the Seine. They parted about ten o’clock.

CHAPTER VIII

For the first time since his “return” Tarr found no Kreisler at the cafÉ. “I wonder what that animal’s up to,” he thought. The garÇon told him that Kreisler had not been there at all that evening. Tarr reconsidered his responsibilities. He could not return to Montmartre without just informing himself of Kreisler’s whereabouts and state of mind. The “obstacle” had been eluded. It must be transported rapidly “in the way” again, wherever and in whatever direction the sluggish stream was flowing.

Bertha’s he did not intend to go to if he could help it. A couple of hours at tea-time was what he had instituted as his day’s “amount” of her company. Kreisler’s room would be better. This he did. There was a light in Kreisler’s room. The window had been pointed out to him. This perhaps was sufficient, Tarr felt. He might now go home, having located him. Still, since he was there he would go up and make sure. He lighted his way up the staircase with matches. Arrived at the top floor he was uncertain at which door to knock. He chose one with a light beneath it and knocked.

In a moment some one called out “Who is it?” Recognizing the voice Tarr answered, and the door opened slowly. Kreisler was standing there in his shirt-sleeves, glasses on, and a brush in his hand.

“Ah, come in,” he said.

Tarr sat down, and Kreisler went on brushing his hair. When he had finished he put the brush down quickly, turned round, and pointing to the floor said, in a voice suggesting that that was the first of several questions:

“Why have you come here?”

Tarr at once saw that he had gone a step too far, and either shown bad calculation or chanced on his rival at an unfortunate time. It was felt, no doubt, that—acting more or less as “keeper,” or check, at any rate—he had come to look after his charge, and hear why Kreisler had absented himself from the cafÉ.

“Why have you come, here?” Kreisler asked again, in an even tone, pointing again with his forefinger to the centre of the floor.

“Only to see you, of course. I thought perhaps you weren’t well.”

“Ah, so! I want you, my dear English friend, now that you are here, to explain yourself a little. Why do you honour me with so much of your company?”

“Is my company disagreeable to you?”

“I wish to know, sir, why I have so much of it!” The Deutscher-student was coming to the top. His voice had risen and the wind of his breath appeared to be making his moustaches whistle.

“I, of course, have reasons, besides the charm of your society, for seeking you out.”

Tarr was sitting stretched on one of Kreisler’s two chairs looking up frowningly. He was annoyed at having let himself in for this interview. Kreisler stood in front of him without any expression in particular, his voice rather less guttural than usual. Tarr felt ill at ease at this sudden breath of storm and kept still with difficulty.

“You have reasons? You have reasons! Heavens! Outside! Quick! Out!”

There was no doubt this time that it was in earnest. He was intended rapidly to depart. Kreisler was pointing to the door. His cold grin was slightly on his face again, and an appearance of his hair having receded on his forehead and his ears gone close against his head warned Tarr definitely where he was. He got up. The absurdity in the situation he had got himself into chiefly worried him. He stood a moment in a discouraged way, as though trying to remember something. His desire for a row had vanished with the arrival of it. It had come at such an angle that it was difficult to say anything, and he had a superstition of the vanity about the marks left by hands, or rather his hands.

“Will you tell me what on earth’s the matter with you to-night?” he asked.

“Yes! I don’t want to be followed about by an underhand swine like you any longer! By what devil’s impudence did you come here to-night? For a week I’ve had you in the cafÉ. What did you want with me? If you wanted your girl back, why hadn’t you the courage to say so? I saw you with another lady to-night. I’m not going to have you hovering and slavering around me. Be careful I don’t come and pull your nose when I see you with that other lady! You’re welcome, besides, to your girl?”

“I recommend you to hold your mouth! Don’t talk about my girl. I’ve had enough of it. Where her sense was when she alighted on a specimen like you—” Tarr’s German hesitated and suddenly struck, as though for the rest of the night. He had stepped forward with a suggestion of readiness for drama:

“Heraus, schwein!” shouted Kreisler, in a sort of incredulous drawling crescendo, shooting his hand towards the door and urging his body like the cox of a boat. Like a sheep-dog he appeared to be collecting Tarr together and urging him out.

Tarr stood staring doubtfully at him.

“What?”

“Heraus! Out! Quicker! Quicker!! Quick!”

His last word, “Schnell!” dropped like a plummet to the deepest tone his throat was capable of. It was short and so absolutely final that the grace given, even after it had been uttered, for this hateful visitor to remove himself, was a source of astonishment to Tarr. For a man to be ordered out of a room that does not belong to him always puts him at a disadvantage. Should he insist, forcibly and successfully, to remain, it can only be for a limited time. He will have to go sooner or later, and make his exit, unless he establish himself there and make it his home henceforth; a change of lodging most people are not, on the spur of the moment, prepared to decide on. The room, somehow, too, seems on its owner’s side, and to be vomiting forth the intruder. The civilized man’s instinct of ownership makes it impossible for any but the most indelicate to resist a feeling of hesitation before the idea of resistance in another man’s shell! All Tarr’s attitude to this man had been made up of a sort of comic hypocrisy. Neither comedy nor hypocrisy were usable for the moment.

Had Tarr foreseen this possible termination of his rÔle of “obstacle?” And ought he, he would ask himself, to have gone on with this half-farce if he were not prepared to meet the ultimate consequences? Kreisler was quite unworthy to stand there, with perfect reason, and to be telling him to “get out.” It was absurd to exalt Kreisler in that way! But Tarr had probably counted on being equal to any emergency, and baffling or turning Kreisler’s violence in some genial manner.

He stood for a few seconds in a tumultuous hesitation, when he saw Kreisler run across the room, bend forward and dive his arm down behind his box. He watched with uncomfortable curiosity this new move, as one might watch a surgeon’s haste at the crisis of an operation, searching for some necessary implement, mislaid for the moment. He felt schoolboy-like, left waiting there at Kreisler’s disposition. It was as a reaction against this unpleasant feeling that he stepped towards the door. The wish not to “obey” or to seem to turn tail either had alone kept him where he was. He had just found the door when Kreisler, with a bound, was back from his box, flourishing an old dog-whip in his hand.

“Ah, you go? Look at this!” He cracked the whip once or twice. “This is what I keep for hounds like you!” Crack! He cracked it again in rather an inexperienced way with a certain difficulty. He frowned and stopped in his discourse, as though it had been some invention he were showing off, that would not quite work at the proper moment, necessitating concentration.

“If you wish to see me again, you can always find me here. You won’t get off so easily next time!” He cracked the whip smartly and then slammed the door.

Tarr could imagine him throwing it down in a corner of the room, and then going on with his undressing.

When Kreisler had jumped to the doorway Tarr had stepped out with a half-defensive, half-threatening gesture and then gone on with strained slowness, lighting a match at the head of the stairs. He felt like a discomfited pub-loafer as he raised the match to an imaginary clay pipe rising in his mind. There was the ostentatious coolness of the music-hall comedian.

The thing that had chiefly struck him in Kreisler under this new aspect was a kind of nimbleness, a pettiness in his behaviour and movements, where perhaps he had expected more stiffness and heroics; the clown-like gibing form his anger took, a frigid disagreeable slyness and irony, a juvenile quickness and coldness.

Tarr was extremely dissatisfied with the part he had played in this scene. First of all he felt he had withdrawn too quickly at the appearance of the whip, although he had in fact got under way before it had appeared. Then, he argued, he should have stopped at the appearance of this instrument of disgrace. To stop and fight with Kreisler, what objection was there to that, he asked himself? A taking Kreisler too seriously? But what less serious than fighting? He had saved himself an unpleasantness, something ridiculous, merely to find himself outside Kreisler’s door, a feeling of primitive dissatisfaction in him. Had he definitely been guilty of a lack of pluck or pride, it would have been better.

There was something mean and improper in all this that he could not reason away or mistake. He had undoubtedly insulted this man by his attitude, s’en Était fiche de lui; and when the other turned, whip in hand, he had walked away. What really should he have done? He should, no doubt, he thought, having humorously instituted himself Kreisler’s keeper, have humorously struggled with him, when the idiot became obstreperous. At that point his humour had stopped. Then his humour had limitations?

Once and for all and certainly: he had no right to treat a man as he had treated Kreisler and yet claim, when he turned and resented this treatment, immunity from action on the score of Kreisler’s idiocy. In allowing the physical struggle any importance he allowed Kreisler an importance, too, that made his former treatment of him unreal and unjustified. In Kreisler’s eyes he was a blagueur, without resistance at a pinch, who walks away when turned on. This opinion was of no importance, since he had not a shadow of respect for Kreisler. Again he turned on himself. If he was so weak-minded as to care what trash like Kreisler thought or felt! He wandered in the direction of the CafÉ de l’Aigle, gripped in this ratiocination.

His unreadiness, his dislike for action, his fear of ridicule, he treated severely in turn. He thought of everything he could against himself. And he laughed at himself. But it was no good. At last he gave way to the urgency of his vanity and determined not to leave the matter where it was. At once plans for retrieving this discomfort came crowding on him. He would go to the cafÉ as usual on the following evening, sit down smilingly at Kreisler’s table as though nothing had happened. In short, he would altogether endorse the opinion that Kreisler had formed of him. And yet why this meanness, even assumed, Tarr asked himself, even while arranging realistically his to-morrow evening’s purification? Always in a contemptuous spirit, some belittlement or unsavoury rÔle was suggesting itself. His contempt for everybody degraded him.

Still, for a final occasion and since he was going this time to accept any consequences, he would follow his idea. He would be, to Kreisler’s mind for a little, the strange “slaverer and hoverer” who had been kicked out on the previous night. He would even have to “pile it on thick” to be accepted at all, exaggerate in the direction of Kreisler’s unflattering notion of him. Then he would gradually aggravate Kreisler, and with the same bonhomie attack him with resolution. He laughed as he came to this point, as a sensible old man might laugh at himself on arriving at a similar decision.

Soothed by the prospect of this rectification of the evening’s blunder, Tarr once more turned to reflect on it, and saw more clearly than ever the parallel morals of his Bertha affair and his Kreisler affair. His sardonic dream of life got him, as a sort of Quixotic dreamer of inverse illusions, blows from the swift arms of windmills and attacks from indignant and perplexed mankind. He, instead of having conceived the world as more chivalrous and marvellous than it was, had conceived it as emptied of all dignity, sense, and generousness. The drovers and publicans were angry at not being mistaken for legendary chivalry or chÂtelaines. The very windmills resented not being taken for giants! The curse of humour was in him, anchoring him at one end of the see-saw whose movement and contradiction was life.

Reminded of Bertha, he did not, however, hold her responsible. But his protectorate would be wound up. Acquaintance with Anastasya would be left where it was, despite the threatened aggression against his nose.