CHAPTER I

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TARR

TARR

BY

P. WYNDHAM LEWIS

LONDON

THE EGOIST LTD.

23 ADELPHI TERRACE HOUSE, W.C.

1918

PRINTED AT

THE COMPLETE PRESS

WEST NORWOOD, S.E.

L’ouvrage eust été moins mien: et sa fin principale et

perfection, c’est d’estre exactement mien. Je corrigerois bien

une erreur accidentale, dequoy je suis plain, ainsi que je

cours inadvertemment; mais les imperfections qui sont en moy

ordinaires et constantes, ce seroit trahison de les oster.

Quand on m’a dit ou que moy-mesme me suis dict: “Tu es trop

espais en figures: Voilà un mot du cru de Gascoingne: Voilà

une frase dangereuse (je n’en refuis aucune de celles qui

s’usent emmy les rues françoises; ceux qui veulent combattre

l’usage par la grammaire se mocquent): Voilà un discours

ignorant: Voilà un discours paradoxe: En voilà un trop fol.

[Tu te joues souvent, on estimera que tu dies à droit ce que

tu dis à feinte.]—Ouy, fais-je, mais je corrige les fautes

d’inadvertence non celles de coustume. Est-ce pas ainsi que je

parle par tout? Me represente-je pas vivement? suffit.”

_Montaigne_, Liv. III, ch. v.

Le plus simplement se commettre à nature, c’est s’y commettre

la plus sagement. O que c’est un doux et mol chevet, et sain,

que l’ignorance et l’incuriosité, à reposer une teste bien

faicte!

_Montaigne_, Liv. II, ch. xiii, “De l’expérience.”

CONTENTS

PART PAGE

PROLOGUE ix

I. BERTHA 1

II. DOOMED, EVIDENTLY. THE “FRAC” 65

III. BOURGEOIS-BOHEMIANS 120

IV. A JEST TOO DEEP FOR LAUGHTER 150

V. A MEGRIM OF HUMOUR 199

VI. HOLOCAUSTS 238

VII. SWAGGER SEX 287

EPILOGUE 319

PROLOGUE

This book was begun eight years ago; so I have not produced this

disagreeable German for the gratification of primitive partisanship

aroused by the war. On the other hand, having had him up my sleeve for so

long, I let him out at this moment in the undisguised belief that he is

very apposite. I am incidentally glad to get rid of him. He has been on

my conscience (my conscience as an artist, it is true) for a long time.

The myriads of Prussian germs, gases, and gangrenes released into the

air and for the past year obsessing everything, revived my quiescent

creation. I was moved to vomit Kreisler forth. It is one big germ more.

May the flames of Louvain help to illuminate (and illustrate) my hapless

protagonist! His misdemeanours too, which might appear too harshly real

at ordinary times, have, just now, too obvious confirmations to be

questioned.

Germany’s large leaden brain booms away in the centre of Europe. Her

brain-waves and titanic orchestrations have broken round us for too long

not to have had their effect. As we never think ourselves, except a stray

Irishman or American, we should long ago have been swamped had it not

been for the sea. The habits and vitality of the seaman’s life and this

vigorous element have protected us intellectually as the blue water has

politically.

In Europe Nietzsche’s gospel of desperation, the beyond-law-man,

etc., has deeply influenced the Paris apache, the Italian Futurist

_littérateur_, the Russian revolutionary. Nietzsche’s books are full of

seductions and sugar-plums. They have made “aristocrats” of people who

would otherwise have been only mild snobs or meddlesome prigs; as much

as, if not more than, other writings, they have made “expropriators” of

what would otherwise merely have been Arsène Lupins: and they have made

an Over-man of every vulgarly energetic grocer in Europe. The commercial

and military success of Prussia has deeply influenced the French, as it

is gradually winning the imagination of the English. The fascination of

material power is, for the irreligious modern man, almost impossible to

resist.

There is much to be said for this eruption of greedy, fleshy, frantic

strength in the midst of discouraged delicacies. Germany has its mission

and its beauty. We will hope that the English may benefit by this power

and passion, without being unnecessarily grateful for a gift that has

been _bought_ with best English blood, and which is not as important or

unique as the great English gift bestowed centuries ago.

As to the Prophet of War, the tone of Nietzsche’s books should have

discredited his philosophy. The modern Prussian advocate of the

Aristocratic and Tyrannic took _everybody_ into his confidence. Then he

would coquet: he gave special prizes. _Everybody_ couldn’t be a follower

of his! No: only the _minority_: that is the minority who read his books,

which has steadily grown till it comprises certainly (or would were it

collected together) the ungainliest and strangest aristocratic caste any

world could hope to see!

Kreisler in this book is a German and nothing else. Tarr is the

individual in the book, and is at the same time one of the showmen of

the author. His private life, however, I am in no way responsible for.

The long drawn-out struggle in which we find this young man engaged is

illuminated from start to finish by the hero of it. His theory, put in

another way, is that an artist requires more energy than civilization

provides, or than the civilized mode of life implies: more _naïveté_,

freshness, and unconsciousness. So Nature agrees to force his sensibility

and intelligence, on the one hand, to the utmost pitch, leaving him, on

the other, an uncultivated and ungregarious tract where he can run wild

and renew his forces and remain unspoilt.

Tarr, in his analysis of the anomalies of taste, gives the key to a crowd

of other variants and twists to which most of the misunderstandings and

stupidities in the deciphering of men are due. He exaggerates his own

departure from perfect sense and taste into an unnecessary image of

Shame and Disgust, before which he publicly castigates himself. He is a

primitive figure, coupled with a modern type of flabby sophistication:

that is Bertha Lunkin. The Münich German Madonna stands nude, too, in the

market-place, with a pained distortion of the face.

Tarr’s message, as a character in a book, is this. Under the camouflage

of a monotonous intrigue he points a permanent opposition, of life

outstripped, and art become lonely. He incidentally is intended to

bring some comfort of analysis amongst less sifted and more ominous

perplexities of our time. His message, as he discourses, laughs, and

picks his way through the heavily obstructed land of this story, is the

message of a figure of health. His introspection is not melancholy; for

the strange and, as with his pedagogic wand he points out, hideously

unsatisfactory figures that are given ingress to his innermost apartments

become assimilated at once to a life in which he has the profoundest

confidence. He exalts Life into a Comedy, when otherwise it is, to his

mind, a tawdry zone of half-art, or a silly Tragedy. Art is the only

thing worth the tragic impulse, for him; and, as he says, it is his

drama. Should art, that is some finely-adjusted creative will, suddenly

become the drama of the youth infatuated with his maiden, what different

dispositions would have to be made; what contradictory tremors would

invade his amorous frame; what portions of that frame would still

smoulder amorously? These questions Tarr disposes of to his satisfaction.

So much by way of warning before the curtain rises. Even if the necessary

tragic thrill of misgiving is caused thereby (or are we going to be

“shocked” in the right way once again, not in Shaw’s “bloody,” schoolgirl

way?), it may extenuate the at times seemingly needless nucleus of blood

and tears.

P. WYNDHAM LEWIS

1915

PART I

BERTHA

CHAPTER I

Paris hints of sacrifice.—But here we deal with that large dusty facet

known to indulgent and congruous kind. It is in its capacity of delicious

inn and majestic Baedeker, where western Venuses twang its responsive

streets and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen. It is

not across its Thébaïde that the unscrupulous heroes chase each other’s

shadows. They are largely ignorant of all but their restless personal

lives.

* * * * *

Inconceivably generous and naïve faces haunt the Knackfus Quarter.—We

are not, however, in a Selim or Vitagraph camp (though “guns” tap

rhythmically the buttocks).—Art is being studied.—Art is the smell of oil

paint, Henri Murger’s _Vie de Bohème_, corduroy trousers, the operatic

Italian model. But the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

The Knackfus Quarter is given up to Art.—Letters and other things are

round the corner.—Its rent is half paid by America. Germany occupies

a sensible apartment on the second floor. A hundred square yards at

its centre is a convenient space, where the Boulevard du Paradis and

Boulevard Pfeifer cross with their electric trams.—In the middle is

a pavement island, like vestige of submerged masonry.—Italian models

festoon it in symmetrical human groups; it is also their club.—The Café

Berne, at one side, is the club of the “Grands messieurs Du Berne.” So

you have the clap-trap and amorphous Campagnia tribe outside, in the café

twenty sluggish common-sense Germans, a Vitagraph group or two, drinking

and playing billiards. These are the most permanent tableaux of this

place, disheartening and admonitory as a Tussaud’s of The Flood.

* * * * *

Hobson and Tarr met in the Boulevard du Paradis.—They met in a gingerly,

shuffling fashion. They had so many good reasons for not slowing down

when they met: crowds of little antecedent meetings all revivifying like

the bacilli of a harmless fever at the sight of each other: pointing to

_why_ they _should_ crush their hats over their eyes and hurry on, so

that it was a defeat and insanitary to have their bodies shuffling and

gesticulating there. “Why cannot most people, having talked and annoyed

each other once or twice, rebecome strangers simply? Oh, for multitudes

of divorces in our _mœurs_, more than the old vexed sex ones! Ah, yes:

ah, yes—!” had not Tarr once put forward, and Hobson agreed?

“Have you been back long?” Tarr asked with despondent slowness.

“No. I got back yesterday,” said Hobson, with pleasantly twisted scowl.

(“Heavens: One day here only, and lo! I meet him.”)

“How is London looking, then?”

“Very much as usual.—I wasn’t there the whole time.—I was in Cambridge

last week.”

(“I wish you’d go to perdition from time to time, instead of Cambridge,

as it always is, you grim, grim dog!” Tarr wished behind the veil.)

They went to the Berne to have a drink.

They sat for some minutes with what appeared a stately discomfort

of self-consciousness, staring in front of them.—It was really only

a dreary, boiling anger with themselves, with the contradictions of

civilized life, the immense and intricate camouflage over the hatred

that personal diversities engender. “Phew, phew!” A tenuous howl, like

a subterranean wind, rose from the borderland of their consciousness.

They were there on the point of opening with tired, ashamed fingers,

well-worn pages of their souls, soon to be muttering between their teeth

the hackneyed pages to each other: resentful in different degrees and

disproportionate ways.

And so they sat with this absurd travesty of a Quaker’s meeting: shyness

appearing to emanate masterfully from Tarr. And in another case, with

almost any one but Hobson, it might have been shyness. For Tarr had

a gauche, Puritanical ritual of self, the result of solitary habits.

Certain observances were demanded of those approaching, and quite

gratuitously observed in return. The fetish within—soul-dweller that is

strikingly like wood-dweller, and who was not often enough disturbed

to have had sylvan shyness mitigated—would still cling to these forms.

Sometimes Tarr’s cunning idol, aghast at its nakedness, would manage to

borrow or purloin some shape of covering from elegantly draped visitor.

But for Hobson’s outfit he had the greatest contempt.

This was Alan Hobson’s outfit.—A Cambridge cut disfigured his originally

manly and melodramatic form. His father was a wealthy merchant somewhere

in Egypt. He was very athletic, and his dark and cavernous features

had been constructed by Nature as a lurking-place for villainies and

passions. He was untrue to his rascally, sinuous body. He slouched and

ambled along, neglecting his muscles: and his dastardly face attempted

to portray delicacies of common sense, and gossamer-like backslidings

into the Inane that would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would

occasionally exploit his blackguardly appearance and blacksmith’s muscles

for a short time, however. And his strong, piercing laugh threw A B C

waitresses into confusion.

The Art-touch, the Bloomsbury stain, was very observable. Hobson’s

Harris tweeds were shabby. A hat suggesting that his ancestors had been

Plainsmen or some rough sunny folk, shaded unnecessarily his countenance,

already far from open.

The material for conversation afforded by a short sea voyage, an

absence, a panama hat on his companion’s head, had been exhausted.—Tarr

possessed no deft hand or economy of force. His muscles rose

unnecessarily on his arm to lift a wine-glass to his lips. He had no

social machinery, but the cumbrous one of the intellect. He danced

about with this, it is true. But it was full of sinister piston-rods,

organ-like shapes, heavy drills.—When he tried to be amiable, he usually

only succeeded in being ominous.

It was an effort to talk to Hobson. For this effort a great bulk of

nervous force was awoken. It got to work and wove its large anomalous

patterns. It took the subject that was foremost in his existence and

imposed it on their talk.

* * * * *

Tarr turned to Hobson, and seized him, conversationally, by the hair.

“Well, Walt Whitman, when are you going to get your hair cut?”

“Why do you call me Walt Whitman?”

“Would you prefer Buffalo Bill? Or is it Shakespeare?”

“It is not Shakespeare⸺”

“‘Roi je ne suis: prince je ne daigne.’—That’s Hobson’s choice.—But why

so much hair? I don’t wear my hair long. If you had as many reasons for

wearing it long as I have, we should see it flowing round your ankles!”

“I might ask you under those circumstances why you wear it short. But I

expect you have good reasons for that, too. I can’t see why you should

resent my innocent device. However long I wore it I should not damage you

by my competition⸺”

Tarr rattled the cement match-stand on the table, and the _garçon_ sang

“Toute suite, toute suite!”

“Hobson, you were telling me about a studio to let before you left.—I

forget the details⸺”

“Was it one behind the Panthéon?”

“That’s it.—Was there electric light?”

“No, I don’t think there was electric light. But I can find out for you.”

“How did you come to hear of it?”

“Through a German I know—Salle, Salla, or something.”

“What was the street?”

“The Rue Lhomond. I forget the number.”

“I’ll go and have a look at it after lunch.—What on earth possesses you

to know so many Germans?” Tarr asked, sighing.

“Don’t you like Germans?—You’ve just been too intimate with one; that’s

what it is.”

“Perhaps I have.”

“A female German.”

“The sex weakens the ‘German,’ surely.”

“Does it in Fräulein Lunken’s case?”

“Oh, you know her, do you?—Of course, you would know her, as she’s a

German.”

Alan Hobson cackled morosely, like a very sad top-dog trying to imitate a

rooster.

Tarr’s unwieldy playfulness, might in the chequered northern shade, in

conjunction with nut-brown ale, gazed at by some Rowlandson—he on the

ultimate borders of the epoch—have pleased by its à propos. But when the

last Rowlandson dies, the life, too, that he saw should vanish. Anything

that survives the artist’s death is not life, but play-acting. This

homely, thick-waisted affectation!—Hobson yawned and yawned as though he

wished to swallow Tarr and have done with him. Tarr yawned more noisily,

rattled his chair, sat up, haggard and stiff, as though he wished to

frighten this crow away. “Carrion-Crow” was Tarr’s name for Hobson: “The

olde Crow of Cairo,” rather longer.

Why was he talking to this man? However, he shortly began to lay bare the

secrets of his soul. Hobson opened:

“It seems to me, Tarr, that you know more Germans than I do. But _you’re

ashamed of it_. Hence your attack. I met a Fräulein Fierspitz the other

day, a German, who claimed to know you. I am always meeting Germans who

know you. She also referred to you as the ‘official fiancé’ of Fräulein

Lunken.—Are you an ‘official fiancé’? And if so, what is that, may I

ask?”

Tarr was taken aback, it was evident. Hobson laughed stridently. The real

man emerging, he came over quickly on another wave.

“You not only get to know Germans, crowds of them, on the sly; you make

your bosom friend of them, engage yourself to them in marriage and make

Heaven knows how many more solemn pacts, covenants, and agreements.—It’s

bound all to come out some day. What will you do then?”

Tarr was recovering gracefully from his relapse into discomfort. If ever

taken off his guard, he made a clever use immediately afterwards of

his _naïveté_. He beamed on his slip. He would swallow it tranquilly,

assimilating it, with ostentation, to himself. When some personal

weakness slipped out he would pick it up unabashed, look at it smilingly,

and put it back in his pocket.

“As you know,” he soon replied, “‘engagement’ is an euphemism. And, as

a matter of fact, my girl publicly announced the breaking off of our

engagement yesterday.”

He looked a complete child, head thrown up as though proclaiming

something he had reason to be particularly proud of.—Hobson laughed

convulsively, cracking his yellow fingers.

“Yes, it is funny, if you look at it in that way.—I let her announce

our engagement or the reverse just as she likes. That has been our

arrangement from the start. I never know at any given time whether

I am engaged or not. I leave all that sort of thing entirely in her

hands. After a severe quarrel I am pretty certain that I am temporarily

unattached, the link publicly severed somewhere or other.”

“Possibly that is what is meant by ‘official fiancé’?”

“Very likely.”

He had been hustled—through his vanity, the Cairo Cantabian

thought—somewhere where the time could be passed. He did not hesitate

to handle Tarr’s curiosities.—It is a graceful compliment to offer the

nectar of some ulcer to your neighbour. The modern man understands

his udders and taps.—With an obscene heroism Tarr displayed his. His

companion wrenched at it with malice. Tarr pulled a wry face once or

twice at the other’s _sans gêne_. But he was proud of what he could

stand. He had a hazy image of a shrewd old countryman in contact with the

sharpness of the town. He would not shrink. He would roughly outstrip his

visitor.—“Ay, I have this the matter with me—a funny complaint?—and that,

and that, too.—What then?—Do you want me to race you to that hill?”

He obtruded complacently all he had most to be ashamed of, conscious of

the power of an obsessing weakness.

* * * * *

“Will you go so far in this clandestine life of yours as to _marry_

anybody?” Hobson proceeded.

“No.”

Hobson stared with bright meditative sweetness down the boulevard.

“I think there must be a great difference between your way of approaching

Germans and mine,” he said.

“Ay: it is different things that takes us respectively amongst them.”

“You like the national flavour, all the same.”

“I like the national flavour!”—Tarr had a way of beginning a reply with

a parrot-like echo of the words of the other party to the dialogue;

also of repeating _sotto voce_ one of his own sentences, a mechanical

rattle following on without stop. “Sex is nationalized more than any

other essential of life. In this it is just the opposite to art.—There

is much pork and philosophy in German sex.—But then if it is the sex you

are after, it does not say you want to identify your being with your

appetite. Quite the opposite. The condition of continued enjoyment is to

resist assimilation.—A man is the opposite of his appetite.”

“Surely, a man _is_ his appetite.”

“No, a man is always his _last_ appetite, or his appetite before last;

and that is no longer an appetite.—But nobody _is_ anything, or life

would be intolerable, the human race collapse.—You are me, I am you.—The

Present is the furthest projection of our steady appetite. Imagination,

like a general, keeps behind. Imagination is the man.”

“_What_ is the Present?” Hobson asked politely, with much aspirating,

sitting up a little and slightly offering his ear.

But Tarr only repeated things arbitrarily. He proceeded:

“Sex is a monstrosity. It is the arch abortion of this filthy

universe.—How ‘old-fashioned!’—eh, my fashionable friend?—We are all

optimists to-day, aren’t we? God’s in his Heaven, all’s well with the

world! I am a pessimist, Hobson. But I’m a new sort of pessimist.—I think

I am the sort that will please!—I am the Panurgic-Pessimist, drunken with

the laughing-gas of the Abyss. I gaze on squalor and idiocy, and the more

I see it, the more I like it.—Flaubert built up his _Bouvard et Pécuchet_

with maniacal and tireless hands. It took him ten years. That was a long

draught of stodgy laughter from the gases that rise from the dung-heap?

He had an appetite like an elephant for this form of mirth. But he

grumbled and sighed over his food.—I take it in my arms and bury my face

in it!”

As Tarr’s temperament spread its wings, whirling him menacingly and

mockingly above Hobson’s head, the Cantab philosopher did not think it

necessary to reply.—He was not winged himself.—He watched Tarr looping

the loop above him. He was a drole bird! He wondered, as he watched him,

if he was a _sound_ bird, or _homme-oiseau_. People believed in him. His

Exhibition flights attracted attention. What sort of prizes could he

expect to win by his professional talents? Would this notable _ambitieux_

be satisfied?

The childish sport proceeded, with serious intervals.

“I bury my face in it!”—(He buried his face in it!!)—“I laugh hoarsely

through its thickness, choking and spitting; coughing, sneezing,

blowing.—People will begin to think I am an alligator if they see me

always swimming in their daily ooze. As far as sex is concerned, I am

that. Sex, Hobson, is a German study. A German study.” He shook his

head in a dejected, drunken way, protruding his lips. He seemed to find

analogies for his _repeating_ habits, with the digestion.—“All the

same, you must take my word for much in that connexion.—The choice of a

wife is not practical in the way that the securing of a good bicycle,

hygiene, or advertisement is. You must think more of the dishes of the

table. Rembrandt paints decrepit old Jews, the most decayed specimens of

the lowest race on earth, that is. Shakespeare deals in human tubs of

grease—Falstaff; Christ in sinners. Now as to sex; Socrates married a

shrew; most of the wisest men marry fools, picture post cards, cows, or

strumpets.”

“I don’t think that is quite true.” Hobson resurrected himself dutifully.

“The more sensible people I can think of off-hand have more sensible, and

on the whole prettier, wives than other people.”

“Prettier wives?—You are describing a meaningless average.—The most

suspicious fact about a distinguished man is the possession of a

distinguished wife. But you might just as well say in answer to my Art

statement that Sir Edward Leighton did not paint the decayed meat of

humanity.”

Hobson surged up a little in his chair and collapsed.—He had to appeal to

his body to sustain the argument.

“Neither did Raphael—I don’t see why you should drag Rembrandt

in—Rembrandt⸺”

“You’re going to sniff at Rembrandt!—You accuse me of following the

fashions in my liking for Cubism. You are much more fashionable yourself.

Would you mind my ‘dragging in’ cheese, high game⸺?”

Hobson allowed cheeses with a rather drawn expression. But he did not see

what that had to do with it, either.

“It is not _purely_ a question of appetite,” he said.

“Sex, sir, is _purely_ a question of appetite!” Tarr replied.

Hobson inclined himself mincingly, with a sweet chuckle.

“If it is _pure_ sex, that is,” Tarr added.

“Oh, if it is _pure_ sex—that, naturally⸺” Hobson convulsed himself and

crowed thrice.

“Listen, Hobson!—You mustn’t make that noise. It’s very clever of you to

be able to. But you will not succeed in rattling me by making me feel I

am addressing a rooster⸺”

Hobson let himself go in whoops and caws, as though Tarr had been

pressing him to perform.

When he had finished, Tarr said:

“Are you willing to _consider sex seriously, or not_?”

“Yes, I don’t mind.”—Hobson settled down, his face flushed from his

late display.—“But I shall begin to believe before very long that your

intentions are honourable as regards the fair Fräulein.—What exactly is

your discourse intended to prove?”

“_Not_ the desirability of the marriage tie, any more than a propaganda

for representation and anecdote in art. But _if_ a man marries, or a

great painter represents (and the claims and seductions of life are very

urgent), he will not be governed in his choice by the same laws that

regulate the life of an efficient citizen, a successful merchant, or the

ideals of a health expert.”

“I should have said that the considerations that precede a proposition of

marriage had many analogies with the health expert’s outlook, the good

citizen’s⸺”

“Was Napoleon successful in life, or did he ruin himself and end his days

in miserable captivity?—_Passion_ precludes the idea of success. Failure

is its condition.—Art and Sex when they are deep enough make tragedies,

and _not_ advertisements for Health experts, or happy endings for the

Public, or social panaceas.”

“Alas, that is true.”

“Well, then, well, then, Alan Hobson, you scarecrow of an advanced

fool-farm, deplorable pedant of a sophistic voice-culture⸺”

“I? My voice—? But that’s absurd!—If my speech⸺”

Hobson was up in arms about his voice: although it was not his.

Tarr needed a grimacing, tumultuous mask for the face he had to

cover.—The clown was the only rôle that was ample enough. He had compared

his clowning with Hobson’s Pierrotesque and French variety.

But Hobson, he considered, was a crowd.—You could not say he was an

individual.—He was a set. He sat there, a cultivated audience.—He had the

aplomb and absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd—of those

who know they are not alone.—Tarr was shy and the reverse by turns. He

was alone. The individual is rustic.

For distinguishing feature Hobson possessed a distinguished absence of

personality.

Tarr gazed on this impersonality, of crowd origin, with autocratic scorn.

Alan Hobson was a humble investor.

“But we’re talking at cross purposes, Hobson.—You think I am contending

that affection for a dolt, like my fiancée, is in some way a merit. I do

not mean that. Also, I do not mean that sex is my tragedy, but art.—I

will explain why I am associated sexually with this pumpkin. First, I am

an artist.—With most people, not describable as artists, all the finer

part of their vitality goes into sex. They become third-rate poets during

their courtship. All their instincts of drama come out freshly with their

wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by

sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of

deployment.—Its first creation is _the Artist_ himself, a new sort of

person; the creative man. But for the first-rate poet, nothing short of

a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.—And so on

all through the bunch of his gifts. One by one his powers and _moyens_

are turned away from the usual object of a man’s poetry, and turned away

from the immediate world. One solitary thing is left facing a woman.—That

is his sex, a lonely phallus.—Things are not quite so simple in actual

fact as this. Some artists are less complete than others. More or less

remains to the man.—Then the character of the artist’s creation comes in.

What tendency has my work as an artist, a ready instance? You may have

noticed that it has that of an invariable severity. Apart from its being

good or bad, its character is ascetic rather than sensuous, and divorced

from immediate life. There is no slop of sex in _that_. But there is no

severity left over for the work of the cruder senses either. Very often

with an artist whose work is very sensuous or human, his sex instinct,

if it is active, will be more discriminating than with a man more

fastidious and discriminating than he in his work. To sum up this part of

my disclosure.—No one could have a coarser, more foolish, slovenly taste

than I have in women. It is not even sluttish and abject, of the J. W. M.

Turner type, with his washerwoman at Gravesend.—It is bourgeois, banal,

pretty-pretty, a cross between the Musical Comedy stage and the ideal

of the Eighteenth-Century gallant. All the delicate psychology another

man naturally seeks in a woman, the curiosity of form, windows on other

lives, love and passion, I seek in my work and not elsewhere.—Form would

perhaps be thickened by child-bearing; it would perhaps be damaged by

harlotry.—Why should sex still be active? That is a matter of heredity

that has nothing to do with the general energies of the mind. I see I am

boring you.—The matter is too remote!—But you have trespassed here, and

you must listen.—I cannot let you off before you have heard, and shown

that you understand.—If you do not sit and listen, I will write it all

to you. YOU WILL BE MADE TO HEAR IT!—And _after_ I have told you this, I

will tell you why I am talking to a fool like you!”

“You ask me to be polite⸺”

“I don’t mind how impolite you are so long as you listen.”

“Well, I am listening—with interest.”

Tarr was tearing, as he saw it, at the blankets that swaddled this spirit

in its inner snobberies.—A bitter feast was steaming hot, and a mouth

must be found to eat it. This beggar’s had to serve. It was, above all,

an ear, all the nerves complete. He _must_ get his words into it. They

must not be swallowed at a gulp. They must _taste_, sting, and benefit by

the meaning of an appetite.—He had something to _say_. It must be said

while it was living. Once it was said, it could look after itself.—Hobson

had shocked something that was ready to burst out. He must help it out.

Hobson must pay as well for the intimacy. _He must pay Bertha Lunken

afterwards._

* * * * *

He felt like insisting that he should come round and apologize to her.

* * * * *

“A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will

not acknowledge or listen to them. The function of a friend is to be a

substitute for this defective self, to be the World and the Real without

the disastrous consequences of reality.—Yet punishment is one of his

chief offices.—The friend enlarges also substantially the boundaries of

our solitude.”

* * * * *

This was written in Tarr’s diary. He was now chastising this self he

wrote of for not listening, by telling the first stranger met.—Had a

friend been there he could have interceded for his ego.

“You have followed so far?” Tarr looked with slow disdainful suspicion

at Hobson’s face staring at the ground. “You have understood the nature

of my secret?—Half of myself I have to hide. I am bitterly ashamed of a

slovenly, common portion of my life that has been isolated and repudiated

by the energies I am so proud of. ‘I am _ashamed_ of the number of

Germans I know,’ as you put it.—I have in that rôle to cower and slink

away even from an old fruit-tin like you. It is useless heroically to

protect that section of my life. It’s no good sticking up for it. It is

not worth protecting. It is not even up to _your_ standards. I have,

therefore, to deliver it over to your eyes, and eyes of the likes of you,

in the end—if you will deign to use them!—I even have to beg you to use

your eyes; to hold you by the sleeve and crave a glance for an object

belonging to me!

“In this compartment of my life _I have not a vestige of passion_.—That

is the root reason for its meanness and absurdity.—The best friend of my

Dr. Jekyll would not know my Mr. Hyde, and vice versa. This rudimentary

self is more starved and stupid than any other man’s. Or to put it less

or more humbly, I am of that company who are reduced to looking to

Socrates for a consoling lead.

“Think of all the _collages_, marriages, and _liaisons_ that you know, in

which some frowsy or foolish or doll-like or log-like bitch accompanies

the form of an otherwise sensible man: a dumbfounding, disgusting, and

septic ghost!

“How foul and wrong this haunting of women is!—They are

everywhere!—Confusing, blurring, libelling, with their half-baked,

gushing, tawdry presences! It is like a slop of children and the bawling

machinery of the inside of life, always and all over our palaces. Their

silly food of cheap illusion comes in between friendships, stagnates

complacently around a softened mind.

“I might almost take some credit to myself for at least having the grace

to keep this bear-garden in the background.”

Hobson had brightened up while this was proceeding.—He now said:

“You might almost.—Why don’t you? I admire what you tell me. But you

appear to take your German foibles too much to heart.”

“Just at present I am engaged in a gala of the heart. You may have

noticed that.—I am not a strict landlord with the various personalities

gathered beneath my roof.—In the present case I am really blessed. But

you should see the sluts that get in sometimes! They all become steadily

my fiancée too.—Fiancée! Observe how one apes the forms of conventional

life. It does not mean anything, so one lets it stop. Its the same with

the café fools I have for friends—there’s a Greek fool, a German fool, a

Russian fool,—an English fool!—There are no ‘friends’ in this life any

more than there are ‘fiancées.’ So it doesn’t matter. You drift on side

by side with this live stock—friends, fiancées, ‘colleagues,’ and what

not.”

Hobson sat staring with a bemused seriousness at the ground.

“Why should I not speak plainly and cruelly of my poor, ridiculous

fiancée to you or any one?—After all, it is chiefly myself I am

castigating.—But you, too, must be of the party! The right to _see_

implies the right to be _seen_. As an offset for your prying, scurvy way

of peeping into my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as they

are⸺!”

“How have I pried into your affairs?” Hobson asked with a circumspect

surprise.

“Any one who _stands outside_, who hides himself in a deliquescent

aloofness, is a sneak and a spy⸺”

“That seems to me to be a case of smut calling the kettle black. I should

not have said that you were conspicuous⸺”

“No.—You know you have joined yourself to those who hush their voices

to hear what other people are saying!—Every one who does not _fight_

openly and bear his share of the common burden of ignominy in life, is

a sneak, unless it is for a solid motive.—The quiet you claim is not to

_work_ in.—What have you exchanged your temper, your freedom, and your

fine voice against? You have exchanged them for an old hat that does

not belong to you, and a shabbiness you have not merited by suffering

neediness.—Your pseudo-neediness is a sentimental indulgence.—Every man

should be forced to dress up to his income, and make a smart, _fresh_

appearance.—Patching the seat of your trousers, instead⸺!”

“Wait a minute,” Hobson said, with a laugh. “You accuse me of

sentimentality in my choice of costume. I wonder if you are as free from

sentimentality.”

“I don’t care a tinker’s blue curse about that.—I am talking about

_you_.—Let me proceed.—With your training, you are decked in the plumes

of very fine birds indeed. But your plumes are not meant to fly with,

but merely to slouch and skip along the surface of the earth.—You wear

the livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning and sleek domestic. No

thought can come out of your head before it has slipped on its uniform.

All your instincts are drugged with a malicious languor, an arm, a

respectability, invented by a set of old women and mean, cadaverous

little boys.”

Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the body to speak. But he

relapsed.

“You reply, ‘What is all this fuss about? I have done the best for

myself.—I was not suited for any heroic station, like yours. I live

sensibly and quietly, cultivating my vegetable ideas, and also my roses

and Victorian lilies.—I do no harm to anybody.’”

“That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your proceedings

possess a herdesque astuteness; in the scale against the individual

weighing less than the Yellow Press, yet being a closer and meaner

attack. Also you are essentially _spies_, in a scurvy, safe and well-paid

service, as I told you before. You are disguised to look like the thing

it is your function to betray—What is your position?—You have bought

for eight hundred pounds at an aristocratic educational establishment

a complete mental outfit, a programme of manners. For four years you

trained with other recruits. You are now a perfectly disciplined social

unit, with a profound _esprit de corps_. The Cambridge set that you

represent is as observed in an average specimen, a cross between a

Quaker, a Pederast, and a Chelsea artist.—Your Oxford brothers, dating

from the Wilde decade, are a stronger body. The Chelsea artists are

much less flimsy. The Quakers are powerful rascals. You represent, my

Hobson, the _dregs_ of Anglo-Saxon civilization!—There is nothing softer

on earth.—Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism, the

poor froth blown off the decadent nineties, the wardrobe—leavings of a

vulgar Bohemianism with its head-quarters in Chelsea!

“You are concentrated, systematic slop.—There is nothing in the universe

to be said for you.—Any efficient State would confiscate your property,

burn your wardrobe, that old hat, and the rest, as _infecte_ and

insanitary, and prohibit you from propagating.”

Tarr’s white collar shone dazzlingly in the sun.—His bowler hat bobbed

and out clean lines as he spoke.

“A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot

in the West of Europe.—They make it indirectly a peril and tribulation

for live things to remain in the neighbourhood. You are systematizing

and vulgarizing the individual.—You are not an individual. You have,

I repeat, no right to that hair and that hat. You are trying to have

the apple and eat it too.—You should be in uniform, and at work, _not_

uniformly _out of uniform_, and libelling the Artist by your idleness.

Are you idle?”

Tarr had drawn up short, turned squarely on Hobson; in an abrupt and

disconnected voice he asked his question.

Hobson stirred resentfully in his chair. He yawned a little. He replied:

“Am I idle, did you say? Yes, I suppose I am not particularly

industrious. But how does that affect you? You know you don’t mean all

that nonsense. Vous vous moquez de moi! Where are you coming to?”

“I have explained already where I come in. It is stupid to be idle. You

go to seed.—The only justification for your slovenly appearance, it is

true, is that it is ideally emblematic.”

“My dear Tarr, you’re a strange fellow. I _can’t_ see why these things

should occupy you.—You have just told me a lot of things that may be true

or may not. But at the end of them all—? Et alors?—alors?—_quoi?_ one

asks. You contradict yourself. You know you don’t _think_ what you talk.

You deafen me with your upside-downness.”

He gesticulated, got the French guttural r with satisfaction, and said

the _quoi_ rather briskly.

“In any case my hat is my business!” he concluded quickly, after a

moment, getting up with a curling, luscious laugh.

The _garçon_ hurried up and they paid.

“No, I am responsible for you.—I am one of the only people who _see_.

That is a responsibility.”—Tarr walked down the boulevard with him,

speaking in his ear almost, and treading on his toes.

“You know Baudelaire’s fable of the obsequious vagabond, cringing for

alms? For all reply, the poet seizes a heavy stick and belabours the

beggar with it. The beggar then, when he is almost beaten to a pulp,

suddenly straightens out beneath the blows; _expands_, _stretches_; his

eyes dart fire! He rises up and falls on the poet tooth and nail. In a

few seconds he has laid him out flat, and is just going to finish him

off, when an _agent_ arrives.—The poet is enchanted. He has accomplished

something!

“Would it be possible to achieve a work of that description with you? No.

You are meaner-spirited than the most abject tramp. I would seize you by

the throat at once if I thought you would black my eye. But I feel it my

duty at least to do this for your hat. Your hat, at least, will have had

its little drama to-day.”

Tarr knocked his hat off into the road.—Without troubling to wait for the

results of this action, he hurried away down the Boulevard du Paradis.

CHAPTER II

A great many of Frederick Tarr’s resolutions came from his conversation.

It was a tribunal to which he brought his hesitations. An active and

hustling spirit presided over this section of his life.

Civilized men have for conversation something of the superstitious

feeling that ignorant men have for the written or the printed word.

Hobson had attracted a great deal of steam to himself. Tarr was

unsatisfied.—He rushed away from the Café Berne still strong and with

much more to say. He rushed towards Bertha to say it.

A third of the way he came on a friend who should have been met before

Hobson. Then Bertha and he could have been spared.

Butcher was a bloody wastrel enamoured of gold and liberty.—He was a

romantic, educating his schoolboyish sense of adventure up to the pitch

of drama. He had been induced by Tarr to develop an interest in commerce.

He had started a motor business in Paris, and through circularizing

the Americans resident there and using his English connexions, he was

succeeding on the lines suggested.

Tarr had argued that an interest of this sort would prevent him from

becoming arty and silly.—Tarr would have driven his entire circle of

acquaintances into commerce if he could. He had at first cherished the

ambition of getting Hobson into a bank in South Africa.

As he rushed along then a gaunt car met him, rushing in the opposite

direction. Butcher’s large red nose stood under a check cap phenomenally

peaked. A sweater and Yankee jacket exaggerated his breadth. He was sunk

in horizontal massiveness in the car—almost in the road. A quizzing,

heavy smile broke his face open in an indifferent businesslike way. It

was a sour smile, as though half his face were frozen with cocaine.—He

pulled up with the air of an Iron-Age mechanic, born among beds of

embryonic machinery.

“Ah, I thought I might see you.”—He rolled over the edge and stood

grinning and stretching in front of his friend.

“Where are you off to?” Tarr asked.

“I heard there were some gypsies encamped over by Charenton.”—He smiled

and waited, his entire face breaking up expectantly into cunning pits and

traps.—Mention of “gypsies” usually drew Tarr. They were a survival of

Butcher’s pre-motor days.

“Neglecting business?” was all Tarr said however. “Have you time for a

drink?”

“Yes!” Butcher turned with an airy jerk to his car. “Shall we go to the

Panthéon?”

“How about the Univers? Would that take long?”

“The Univers? Four or five minutes.—Jump in.”

When they had got to the Univers and ordered their drink, Tarr said:

“I’ve just been talking to Alan Hobson. I’ve been telling him off.”

“That’s right.—How had he deserved it?”

“Oh, he happened to drop on me when I was thinking about my girl. He

began congratulating me on my engagement. So I gave him my views on

marriage, and then wound up with a little improvisation about himself.”

Butcher maintained a decorous silence, drinking his beer.

“You’re not engaged to be married, are you?” he asked.

“Well, that’s a difficult question.”—Tarr laughed with circumspection and

softness. “I don’t know whether I am or whether I’m not.”

“Would it be the German girl, if you were?”

“Yes, she’d be the one.”

There was a careful absence of comment in Butcher’s face.

“Ought I to marry the Lunken?”

“No,” Butcher said with measure.

“In that case I ought to tell her at once.”

“That is so.”

Tarr had a dark morning coat, whose tails flowed behind him as he walked

strongly and quickly along, and curled on either side of his hips as he

sat. It was buttoned half-way down the body.—He was taller than Butcher,

wore glasses, had a dark skin, and a steady, unamiable, impatient

expression. He was clean-shaven, with a shallow, square jaw and straight,

thick mouth.—His hands were square and usually hot.

He impressed you as having inherited himself last week, and as under

a great press of business to grasp the details and resources of the

concern. Not very much satisfaction at his inheritance, and no swank.

Great capacity was printed all over him.—He did not appear to have been

modified as yet by any sedentary, sentimental, or other discipline or

habit. He was at his first push in an ardent and exotic world, with a

good fund of passion from a frigid climate of his own.—His mistakes

he talked over without embarrassment. He felt them deeply. He was

experimental and modest.

A rude and hard infancy, according to Balzac, is best for development

of character. A child learns duplicity, and hardens in defence.—An

enervating childhood of molly-coddling, on the other hand, such as

Tarr’s, has its advantages.—He was an only child of a selfish, vigorous

mother. The long foundation of delicate trustfulness and childishness

makes for a store of illusion to prolong youth and health beyond the

usual term. Tarr, with the Balzac upbringing, would have had a little

too much character, like a rather too muscular man. As it was, he was a

shade too nervous. But his confidence in the backing of character was

unparalleled. You would have thought he had an iron-field behind him.

When he solicited advice, it was transparently a matter of form. But he

appeared to need his own advice to come from himself in public.—Did he

feel himself of more importance in public?—His relation to the world was

definite and complementary. He preferred his own word to come out of the

air; when, that is, issuing from his mouth, it entered either ear as an

independent vibration. He was the kind of man who, if he ever should wish

to influence the world, would do it so that he might touch himself more

plastically through others. He would paint his picture for himself. He

was capable of respect for his self-projection. It had the authority of a

stranger for him.

Butcher knew that his advice was not really solicited.—This he found

rather annoying, as he wanted to meddle. But his opportunity would

come.—Tarr’s affairs with Bertha Lunken were very exasperating. Of all

the drab, dull, and disproportionately long _liaisons_, that one was

unique! He had accepted it as an incomprehensible and silly joke.

“She’s a very good sort. You know, she is phenomenally kind. It’s not

quite so absurd as you think, my question as to whether I should marry

her. Her love is quite beyond question.”

Butcher listened with a slight rolling of the eyes, which was a soft

equivalent for grinding his teeth.

Tarr proceeded:

“She has a nice healthy penchant for self-immolation; not, unfortunately,

directed by any considerable tact or discretion. She is apt to lie down

on the altar at the wrong moment—even to mistake all sorts of unrelated

things for altars. She once lay down on the pavement of the Boulevard

Sebastopol, and continued to lie there heroically till, with the help of

an _agent_, I bundled her into a cab. She is genial and fond of a gross

pleasantry, very near to ‘the people’—_le peuple_, as she says, purringly

and pityingly. All individuals who have class marked on them strongly

resemble each other. A typical duchess is much more like a typical

nurserymaid than she is like anybody not standardized to the same extent.

So is Bertha, a bourgeoise, or rather bourgeois-Bohemian, reminiscent of

the popular maiden.”

Tarr relighted his cigarette.

“She is full of good sense.—She is a high standard Aryan female, in good

condition, superbly made; of the succulent, obedient, clear, peasant

type. It is natural that in my healthy youth, living in these Bohemian

wastes, I should catch fire. But that is not the whole of the picture.

She is unfortunately not a peasant. She has German culture, and a florid

philosophy of love.—She is an art-student.—She is absurd.”

Tarr struck a match for his cigarette.

“You would ask then how it is that I am still there? The peasant-girl—if

such it were—would not hold you for ever; even less so the _spoiled_

peasant.—But that’s where the mischief lies.—That bourgeois, spoiled,

ridiculous element was the trap. I was innocently depraved enough to find

it irresistible. It had the charm of a vulgar wall-paper, a gimcrack

ornament. A cosy banality set in the midst of a rough life. Youthful

exoticism has done it, the something different from oneself.”

Butcher did not roll his eyes any more. They looked rather moist. He was

thinking of love and absurdities that had checkered his own past, and was

regretting a downy doll. He was won over besides by Tarr’s _plaidoirie_,

as he always was. His friend could have convinced him of anything on

earth within ten minutes.

Tarr, noticing the effect of his words, laughed. Butcher was like a dog,

with his rheumy eyes.

“My romance, you see, is exactly inverse to yours,” Tarr proceeded. “But

pure unadulterated romanticism with me is in about the same rudimentary

state as sex. So they had perhaps better keep together? I only allow

myself to philander with _little_ things. I have succeeded in shunting

our noxious illusionism away from the great spaces and ambitions. I have

billeted it with a bourgeoise in a villa. These things are all arranged

above our heads. They are no doubt self-protective. The whole of a

man’s ninety-nine per cent. of obscurer mechanism is daily engaged in

organizing his life in accordance with his deepest necessity. Each person

boasts some notable invention of personal application only.

“So there I am fixed with my bourgeoise in my skin, _dans ma peau_. What

is the next step?—The body is the main thing.—But I think I have made

a discovery. In sex I am romantic and _arriéré_. It would be healthier

for all sex to be so. But that is another matter. Well, I cannot see

myself attracted by an exceptional woman—‘spiritual’ woman—‘noble soul,’

or even a particularly refined and witty animal.—I do not understand

attraction for such beings.—Their existence appears to me quite natural

and proper, but, not being as fine as men; not being as fine as pictures

or poems; not being as fine as housewives or classical Mothers of Men;

they appear to me to occupy an unfortunate position on this earth. No

man properly demarcated as I am will have much to do with them. They are

very beautiful to look at. But they are unfortunately alive, and usually

cats. If you married one of them, out of pity, you would have to support

the eternal grin of a Gioconda fixed complacently on you at all hours of

the day, the pretensions of a piece of canvas that had sold for thirty

thousand pounds. You could not put your foot through the canvas without

being hanged. You would not be able to sell it yourself for that figure,

and so get some little compensation. _Tout au plus_, if the sentimental

grin would not otherwise come off, you could break its jaw, perhaps.”

Butcher flung his head up, and laughed affectedly.

“Ha ha!”—he went again.

“Very good!—Very good!—I know who you’re thinking of,” he said.

“Do you? Oh, the ‘Gioconda smile,’ you mean?—Yes.—In that instance,

the man had only his silly sentimental self to blame. He has paid

the biggest price given in our time for a _living_ masterpiece.

Sentimentalizing about masterpieces and _sentimental prices_ will soon

have seen their day, I expect. New masterpieces in painting will then

appear again, perhaps, where the live ones leagued with the old dead

ones disappear.—Really, the more one considers it, the more creditable

and excellent my self-organization appears. I have a great deal to

congratulate myself upon.”

Butcher blinked and pulled himself together with a grave dissatisfied

expression.

“But will you carry it into effect to the extent?—Will you?—Would

marriage be the ideal termination?”—Butcher had a way of tearing up and

beginning all over again on a new breath.

“That is what Hobson asked.—No, I don’t think marriage has anything to do

with it. That is another question altogether.”

“I thought your remarks about the housewife suggested⸺”

“No.—My relation to the idea of the housewife is platonic. I am attracted

to the housewife as I might be attracted to the milliner. But just as

I should not necessarily employ the latter to make hats—I should have

some other use for her—so my connexion with the other need not imply a

_ménage_. But my present difficulty centres round that question:

“What am I to do with Fräulein Lunken?”

Butcher drew himself up, and hiccuped solemnly and slowly.

He did not reply.

“Once again, is marriage out of the question?” Tarr asked.

“You know yourself best. I don’t think you ought to marry.”

“Why, am I⸺?”

“No. You wouldn’t stop with her. So why marry?”

He hiccuped again, and blinked.

Tarr gazed at his oracle with curiosity.—With eyes glassily bloodshot,

it discharged its wisdom on gusts of air. Butcher was always surly about

women, or rather men’s tenderness for them. He was a vindictive enemy

of the sex. He stood, a patient constable, forbidding Tarr respectfully

a certain road. He spoke with authority and shortness, and hiccuped to

convey the absolute and assured quality of his refusal.

“Well, in that case,” Tarr said, “I must make a move. I have treated

Bertha very badly.”

Butcher smothered a hiccup.—He ordered another drink.

“Yes, I owe my girl anything I can give her. It is hardly my fault. With

the training you get in England, how can you be expected to realize

anything? The University of Humour that prevails everywhere in England

as the national institution for developing youth, provides you with

nothing but a first-rate means of evading reality. The whole of English

training—the great fundamental spirit of the country—is a system of

_deadening feeling_, a prescription for Stoicism. Many of the results are

excellent. It saves us from gush in many cases; it is an excellent armour

in times of crisis or misfortune. The English soldier gets his special

_cachet_ from it. But for the sake of this wonderful panacea—English

humour—we sacrifice much. It would be better _to face_ our Imagination

and our nerves without this soporific. Once this armature breaks down,

the man underneath is found in many cases to have become softened by it.

He is subject to shock, _over_sensitiveness, and many ailments not met

with in the more frank and direct races. Their superficial sensitiveness

allows of a harder core.—To set against this, of course, you have the

immense reserves of delicacy, touchiness, sympathy, that this envelope

of cynicism has accumulated. It has served English art marvellously.

But it is probably more useful for art than for practical affairs. And

the artist could always look after himself. Anyhow, the time seems to

have arrived in my life, as I consider it has arrived in the life of the

country, to discard this husk and armour. Life must be met on other terms

than those of fun and sport.”

Butcher guffawed provocatively. Tarr joined him. They both quaffed their

beer.

“You’re a terrible fellow,” said Butcher. “If you had your way, you’d

leave us stark naked. We should all be standing on our little island in

the savage state of the Ancient Britons—figuratively.” He hiccuped.

“Yes, figuratively. But in reality the country would be armed better than

it ever had been before. And by the sacrifice of these famous ‘national

characteristics’ we cling to sentimentally, and which are merely the

accident of a time, we should lay a soil and foundation of unspecific

force, on which new and realler ‘national flavours’ would very soon

sprout.”

“I quite agree,” Butcher jerked out energetically.

He ordered another lager.

“I agree with what you say. If we don’t give up dreaming, we shall get

spanked. I have given up my gypsies. That was very public-spirited of

me?” He looked coaxingly.

“If every one would give up their gypsies, their jokes, and their

gentlemen—‘Gentlemen’ are worse than gypsies. It would do perhaps if

they reduced them considerably, as you have your Gitanos.—I’m going to

swear off humour for a year. I am going to gaze on even you inhumanly.

All my mock matrimonial difficulties come from humour. I am going to

gaze on Bertha inhumanly, and not humorously. Humour paralyses the sense

for reality and wraps people in a phlegmatic and hysterical dream-world,

full of the delicious swirls of the switchback, the drunkenness of the

merry-go-round—screaming leaps from idea to idea. My little weapon

for bringing my man to earth—shot-gun or what not—gave me good sport,

too, and was of the best workmanship. I carried it slung jauntily for

some time at my side—you may have noticed it. But I am in the tedious

position of the man who hits the bull’s-eye every time. Had I not been

disproportionately occupied with her absurdities, I should not have

allowed this charming girl to engage herself to me.

“My first practical step now will be to take this question of ‘engaging’

myself or not into my own hands. I shall _disengage_ myself on the spot.”

“So long as you don’t engage yourself again next minute, and so on. If I

felt that the time was not quite ripe, I’d leave it in Fräulein Lunken’s

hands a little longer. I expect she does it better than you would.”

Butcher filled his pipe, then he began laughing. He laughed theatrically

until Tarr stopped him.

“What are you laughing at?”

“You are a nut! Ha! ha! ha!”

“How am I a _nut_? You must be thinking about your old machine out there.”

Butcher composed himself—theatrically.

“I was laughing at you. You repent of your thoughtlessness, and all that.

Your next step is to put it right. I was laughing at the way you go about

it. You now proceed kindly but firmly to break off your engagement and

discard the girl. That is very neat.”

“Do you think so? Well, perhaps it is a trifle over-tidy. I hadn’t looked

at it in that way.”

“You can’t be too tidy,” Butcher said dogmatically. He talked to Tarr,

when a little worked up, as Tarr talked to him. He didn’t notice that he

did. It was partly _câlinerie_ and flattery.

Tarr pulled out a very heavy and determined-looking watch. He would have

suffered had he been compelled to use a small watch. For the time to be

microscopic and noiseless would be unbearable. The time _must_ be human.

That he insisted on. And it must not be pretty or neat.

“It is late. I must go. Must you get back to Passy or can you stop?”

“Do you know, I’m afraid I must get back. I have to lunch with a fellow

at one, who is putting me on to a good thing. But can I take you

anywhere? Or are you lunching here?”

“No.—Take me as far as the Samaritaine, will you?”

Butcher took him along two sides of the Louvre, to the river.

“Good-bye, then. Don’t forget Saturday, six o’clock.”

Butcher nodded in bright, clever silence. He shuffled into his car again,

working his shoulders like a verminous tramp. He rushed away, piercing

blasts from his horn rapidly softening as he became smaller. Tarr was

glad he had brought the car and Butcher together. They were opposites

with some grave essential in common.

His usual lunch time an hour away, his so far unrevised programme was to

go to the Rue Lhomond and search for Hobson’s studio. For the length of

a street it was equally the road to the studio and to Bertha’s rooms. He

knew to which he was going.

But a sensation of peculiar freedom and leisure possessed him. There was

no hurry. Was there any hurry to go where he was going? With a smile in

his mind, his face irresponsible and solemn, he turned sharply into a

narrow street, rendered dangerous by motor-buses, and asked at a _loge_

if Monsieur Lowndes were in.

“Monsieur Lounes? Je pense que oui. Je ne l’ai pas vu sortir.”

He ascended to the fourth floor and rang a bell.

Lowndes was in. He heard him coming on tiptoe to the door, and felt

him gazing at him through an invisible crack. He placed himself in a

favourable position.

CHAPTER III

Tarr’s idea of leisure recognized no departure from the tragic theme of

existence. Pleasure could take no form that did not include Death and

corruption—at present Bertha and humour. Only he wished to play a little

longer. It was the last chance he might have. _Work_ was in front of him

with Bertha.

He was giving up _play_. But the giving up of play, even, had to take the

form of play. He had seen in terms of sport so long that he had no other

machinery to work with. _Sport might perhaps, for the fun of the thing,

be induced to cast out sport._

As Lowndes crept towards the door, Tarr said to himself, with ironic

self-restraint, “_Bloody_ fool, _bloody_ fool!”

Lowndes was a brother artist, who was not very active, but had just

enough money to be a Cubist. He was extremely proud of being interrupted

in his work. His “work” was a serious matter. He found “great difficulty”

in working. He always implied that _you_ did not. He had a form of

persecution mania as regards his “mornings.” From his discourse you

gathered that he was, first of all, very much sought after. People,

seemingly, were _always_ attempting to get into his room. You imagined

an immense queue of unwelcome visitors (how or why he had gathered

or originally, it was to be supposed, encouraged, such, you did not

inquire). You never saw this queue. The only person you definitely

knew had been guilty of interrupting his “work” was Thornton. This

man, because of his admiration for Lowndes’ intelligence and moth-like

attraction for his Cubism, and respect for his small income, had to

suffer much humiliation. He was to be found (even in the morning, strange

to say) in Lowndes’ studio, rapidly sucking a pipe, blinking, flushing,

stammering with second-rate Public School mannerisms, retailing scandal

and sensational news, which he had acquired from a woman who had sat next

him at the invariable dinner-party of the night before.

When you entered, he looked timidly and quickly at the inexorable

Lowndes, and began gathering up his hat and books. Lowndes’ manner became

withering. You felt that before your arrival, his master had been less

severe; that life might have been almost bearable for Thornton. When

he at last had taken himself off, Lowndes would hasten to exculpate

himself. “Thornton was a fool, but he could not always keep Thornton

out,” etc. Lowndes, with his Thornton, displayed the characteristics

of the self-made man. He had risen ambitiously in the sphere of the

Intelligence. Thornton sat like an inhabitant of the nether world of

gossip, pettiness, and squalor from which his friend had lately issued.

He entertained an immense respect for that friend. This one of his

own kind in a position of respect and security was what he could best

understand, and would have most desired to be.

“Oh! Come in, Tarr,” Lowndes said, looking at the floor of the passage,

“I didn’t know who it was.” The atmosphere became thick with ghostlike

intruders. The wretched Thornton seemed to hover timidly in the

background.

“Am I interrupting you?” Tarr asked politely.

“No-o-o!” a long, reassuring, musical negative.

His face was very dark and slick, bald on top, pettily bearded, rather

unnecessarily handsome. Tarr always felt a tinge of indecency in his good

looks. His Celtic head was allied to a stocky commercial figure. Behind

his spectacles his black eyes had a way of scouring and scurrying over

the floor. They were often dreamy and burning. He waddled slightly, or

rather confided himself first to one muscular little calf, then to the

other.

Tarr had come to talk to him about Bertha.

“I’m afraid I must have interrupted your work?” Tarr said with mock

ceremony.

“No, it’s all right. I was just going to have a rest. I’m rather off

colour.”

Tarr misunderstood him.

“Off colour? What is the matter with colour now?”

“No, I mean I’m seedy.”

“Oh, ah. Yes.”

His eyes still fixed on the ground, Lowndes pottered about, like a dog.

As with most educated people who “do” anything, and foresee analysis and

fame, he was biographically minded. A poor man, he did his Boswelling

himself. His self-characterization, proceeding whenever he was not

alone, was as follows: “A fussy and exacting man, slightly avuncular,

strangely, despite the fineness and amplitude of his character, minute,

precious, and tidy.” (In this way he made a virtue of his fuss.) To

show how the general illusion worked in a particular case: “He had been

disturbed in his ‘work’ by Tarr, or had just emerged from that state

of wonderful concentration he called ‘work.’ He could not at once bend

himself to more general things. His nerves drove him from object to

object. But he would soon be quiet.”

Tarr looked on with an ugly patience.

“Lowndes, I have come to ask you for a little piece of advice.”

Lowndes was flattered and relished the mystery.

“Ye-es,” he said, smiling, in a slow, ‘sober,’ professional sing-song.

“Or rather, for an opinion. What is your opinion of German women?”

Lowndes had spent two years in Berlin and Münich. Many of his friends

were Austrian.

“German women? But I must know first why you ask me that question. You

see, it’s a wide subject.”

“A wide subject—wide. Yes, very good! Ha ha!—Well, it is like this. I

think that they are superior to Englishwomen. That is a very dangerous

opinion to hold, as there are so many German women knocking about just

now.—I want to rid myself of it.—Can you help me?”

Lowndes mused on the ground. Then he looked up brightly.

“No, I can’t. Because I share it!”

“Lowndes, I’m surprised at you. I never thought you were that sort of

man!”

“How do you mean?”

“Perhaps you can help me nevertheless. Our ideas on females may not be

the same.”

Tarr always embarrassed him. Lowndes huddled himself tensely together,

worked at his pipe, and met Tarr’s jokes painfully. He hesitated to sally

forth and drive the joke away.

“What are your ideas on females?” he asked in a moment.

“Oh, I think they ought to be convex if you are concave—stupid if you

are intelligent, hot if you are cold, frigid if you are volcanic. Always

white all over, clothes, underclothes, skin and all.—My ideas do not

extend much beyond that.”

Lowndes organized Tarr’s statement, with a view to an adequate and light

reply. He gnawed at his pipe.

“Well, German women are usually convex. There are also concave ones.

There are cold ones and hot ones.” He looked up. “It all seems to depend

what _you_ are like!”

“I am cold; inclined to be fat; _forte tête_; and swarthy, as you see.”

“In that case, if you took plenty of exercise,” Lowndes undulated himself

as though for the passage of the large bubbles of chuckle, “I should

think that German women would suit you very well!”

Tarr rose.

“I wish I hadn’t come to see you, Lowndes. Your answer is disappointing.”

Lowndes got up, disturbed at Tarr’s sign of departure.

“I’m sorry. But I’m not an authority.” He leant against the fireplace to

arrest Tarr’s withdrawal for a minute or two. “Are you doing much work?”

“I? No.”

“Are you ever in in the afternoons? I should like to come round some day⸺”

“I’m just moving into a new studio.”

Lowndes looked suddenly at his watch, with calculated, ape-like

impulsiveness.

“Where are you having lunch? I thought of going down to Lejeune’s to see

if I could come across a beggar of the name of Kreisler. He could tell

you much more about German women than I can. He’s a German. Come along,

won’t you? Are you doing anything?”

“No, I know quite enough Germans. Besides, I must go somewhere—I can’t

have lunch just yet. Good-bye. Thank you for your opinion.”

“Don’t mention it,” Lowndes said softly, his head turned obliquely to his

shoulder, as though he had a stiff neck, and balancing on his calves.

He was rather wounded, or brusque, by the brevity of Tarr’s visit. His

“morning” had not received enough respect. It had been treated, in fact,

cavalierly. His “work” had not been directly mentioned.

When Tarr got outside, he stood on the narrow pavement, looking into a

shop window. It was a florist’s and contained a great variety of flowers.

He was surprised to find that he did not know a single flower by name.

He hung on in front of this shop before pushing off, as a swimmer does

to a rock, waving his legs. Then he got back into the street from which

his visit to Lowndes had deflected him. He let himself drift down it. He

still had some way to go before he need decide between the Rue Martine

(where Bertha lived) and the Rue Lhomond.

He had not found resolution in his talks. That already existed, the fruit

of various other conversations on his matrimonial position—held with the

victim, Fräulein Lunken, herself.

Not to go near Bertha was the negative programme for that particular day.

To keep away was seldom easy. But ever since his conversation at the

Berne he had been conscious of the absurd easiness of doing so, if he

wished. He had not the least inclination to go to the Rue Martine!—This

sensation was so grateful that its object shared in its effect. He

determined to go and see her. He wanted to enjoy his present feeling of

indifference. Where best to enjoy it was no doubt where she was.

As to the studio, he hesitated. A new situation was created by this new

feeling of indifference. Its duration could not be gauged.—He wished

to stay in Paris just then to finish some paintings begun some months

before. He substituted for the Impressionist’s necessity to remain in

front of the object being represented, a sensation of the desirability

of finishing a canvas in the place where it was begun. He had an

Impressionist’s horror of change.

So Tarr had evolved a plan. At first sight it was wicked. It was no

blacker than most of his ingenuities. Bertha, as he had suggested to

Butcher, he had in some lymphatic way, _dans la peau_. It appeared a

matter of physical discomfort to leave her altogether. It must be done

gradually. So he had thought that, instead of going away to England,

where the separation might cause him restlessness, he had perhaps

better settle down in her neighbourhood. Through a series of specially

tended ennuis, he would soon find himself in a position to depart. So

the extreme nearness of the studio to Bertha’s flat was only another

inducement for him to take it. “If it were next door, so much the

better!” he thought.

_Now for this famous feeling of indifference._ Was there anything in

it?—The studio for the moment should be put aside. He would go to see

Bertha. Let this visit solve this question.

CHAPTER IV

The new summer heat drew heavy pleasant ghosts out of the ground, like

plants disappeared in winter; spectres of energy, bulking the hot air

with vigorous dreams. Or they had entered into the trees, in imitation

of Pagan gods, and nodded their delicate distant intoxication to him.

Visions were released in the sap, with scented explosion, the spring one

bustling and tremendous reminiscence.

Tarr felt the street was a pleasant current, setting from some immense

and tropic gulf, neighboured by Floridas of remote invasions. He ambled

down it puissantly, shoulders shaped like these waves; a heavy-sided

drunken fish. The houses, with winks of the shocked clockwork, were

grazed, holding along their surface thick soft warmth. It poured weakly

into his veins. A big dog wandering on its easily transposable business,

inviting some delightful accident to deflect it from maudlin and massive

promenade. In his mind, too, as in the dog’s, his business was doubtful—a

small black spot ahead in his brain, half puzzling but peremptory.

The mat heavy light grey of putty-coloured houses, like thickening merely

of hot summer atmosphere without sun, gave a spirituality to this deluge

of animal well-being, in weighty pale sense-solidarity. Through the

opaquer atmosphere sounds came lazily or tinglingly. People had become

a Balzacian species, boldly tragic and comic: like a cast of “Comédie

Humaine” humanity off for the day, Balzac sleeping immensely in the

cemetery.

Tarr stopped at a dairy. He bought saladed potatoes, a _petit suisse_.

The coolness, as he entered, felt eerie. The dairyman, in blue-striped

smock and black cap, peaked and cylindrical, came out of an inner room.

Through its glasses several women were visible, busy at a meal. This

man’s isolation from the heat and mood of the world outside, impressed

his customer as he came forward with a truculent “Monsieur!” Tarr,

while his things were done up, watched the women. The discreet voices,

severe reserve of keen business preoccupations, showed the usual Paris

_commerçante_. The white, black, and slate-grey of dresses, extreme

neatness, silent felt over-slippers, make their commercial devotions

rather conventual. With this purchase—followed by one of strawberries at

a fruiterer’s opposite—his destination was no longer doubtful.

He was going to Bertha’s to eat his lunch. Hence the double quantity of

saladed potatoes. He skirted the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens for

fifteen yards. Crossing the road, he entered the Rue Martine, a bald

expanse of uniformly coloured rosy-grey pavement, plaster, and shutter. A

large iron gate led into a short avenue of trees. At its end Bertha lived

in a three-story house.

The leaden brilliant green of spring foliage hung above him, ticketing

innumerably the trees, sultry smoke volumes from factories in Fairyland.

Its novelty, fresh yet dead, had the effectiveness of an unnecessary

mirage. The charm of habit and monotony he had come to affront seemed to

have coloured, chemically, these approaches to its home.

He found Bertha’s eye fixed on him with a sort of humorous indifferent

query from the window. He smiled, thinking what would be the veritable

answer! On finding himself in the presence of the object of his erudite

discussion, he felt he had got the focus wrong. This familiar life, with

its ironical eye, mocked at him too. It was aware of the subject of

his late conversation. The twin of the shrewd feeling embodied in the

observation, “One can never escape from oneself,” appeared.

This ironical unsurprised eye at the window, so vaguely apropos, offended

him. It seemed to be making fun of the swaggering indifference he was

bringing to bask in the presence of its object. He became slightly

truculent.

“Have you had lunch yet, my dear?” he asked, as she opened the door to

him. “I’ve brought you some strawberries.”

“I didn’t expect _you_, Sorbet. No, I’ve not had lunch. I was just going

to get it.” (Sorbet, or in English, Sherbert, was his _nom d’amour_, a

perversion of his name, Sorbert).

Bertha’s was the intellectually fostered Greek type of German

handsomeness. It is that beauty that makes you wonder, when you meet it,

if German mothers have replicas and photographs of the Venus of Milo

in their rooms during the first three months of their pregnancy. It is

also found in the pages of Prussian art periodicals, the arid, empty

intellectualism of Münich. She had been a heavy baby. Her body now, a

self-indulgent athlete’s, was strung to heavy motherhood.

A great believer in tepid “air-baths,” she would remain, for hours

together, in a state of nudity about her rooms. She was wearing a pale

green striped affair, tight at the waist. It looked as though meant for

a smaller woman. It may have belonged to her sister. As a result, her

ample form had left the fullness of a score of attitudes all over it, in

flat creasings and pencillings—like the sanguine of an Italian master in

which the leg is drawn in several positions, one on top of the other.

“What have you come for, Sorbet?”

“To see you. What did you suppose?”

“Oh, you _have_ come to see me?”

“I brought these things. I thought you might be hungry.”

“Yes, I am rather.” She stopped in the passage, Dryad-like on one foot,

and stared into the kitchen. Tarr did not kiss her. He put his hand on

her hip—a way out of it—and led her into the room. His hand remarked that

she was underneath in her favourite state of nakedness.

Bertha went into the kitchen with the provisions. She lived in two rooms

on one side of the front door. Her friend, Fräulein Goenthner, to whom

she sub-let, lived on the other side of it, the kitchen promiscuously

existing between, and immediately facing the entrance.

Tarr was in the studio or salon. It was a complete bourgeois-bohemian

interior. Green silk cloth and cushions of various vegetable and mineral

shades covered everything, in mildewy blight. The cold, repulsive shades

of Islands of the Dead, gigantic cypresses, grottos of Teutonic nymphs,

had invaded this dwelling. Purple metal and leather steadily dispensed

with expensive objects. There was the plaster east of Beethoven (some

people who have frequented artistic circles get to dislike this face

extremely), brass jars from Normandy, a photograph of Mona Lisa (Tarr

hated the Mona Lisa).

A table just by the window, laid with a white cloth, square embroidered

holes at its edges, was where Tarr at once took up his position.

Truculence was denoted by his thus going straight to his eating-place.

Installed in the midst of this ridiculous life, he gave a hasty glance

at his “indifference” to see whether it were safe and sound. Seen through

it, on opening the door, Bertha had appeared _unusual_. This impressed

him disagreeably. Had his rich and calm feeling of bounty towards her

survived the encounter, his “indifference” might also have remained

intact.

He engrossed himself in his sense of physical well-being. From his pocket

he produced a tin box containing tobacco, papers, and a little steel

machine for rolling cigarettes given him by Bertha. A long slim hinged

shell, it nipped in a little cartridge of tobacco, which it then slipped

with inside a paper tube, and slipping out again empty, the cigarette was

made.

Tarr began manufacturing cigarettes. Reflections from the shining metal

in his hand scurried about amongst the bilious bric-à-brac. Like a layer

of water lying on one of oil, the light heated stretch by the windows

appeared distinct from the shadowed part of the room.

This place was cheap and dead, but rich with the same lifelessness as the

trees without. These looked extremely near and familiar at the opened

windows, breathing the same air continually as Bertha. But they were

dusty, rough, and real.

Bertha came in from the kitchen. She went on with a trivial rearrangement

of her writing-table. This had been her occupation as he appeared at

the gate beneath, drawing her ironical and musing eye from his image to

himself. A new photograph of Tarr was being placed on her writing-table

flush with the window. Ten days previously it had been taken in that

room. It had ousted a Klinger and generally created a restlessness, to

her eye, in the other objects.

“Ah, you’ve got the photographs, have you?—Is that me?”

She handed it to him.

“Yes, they came yesterday!”

“Yesterday” he had not been there! Whatever he asked at the present

moment would draw a softly thudding answer, heavy German reproach

concealed in it with tireless ingenuity. These photographs would under

other circumstances have been produced on his arrival with considerable

noise.

Tarr had looked rather askance at this portrait and Bertha’s occupation.

There was his photograph, calmly, with an air of permanence, taking up

its position on her writing-table, just as he was preparing to vanish for

good.

“Let’s see yours,” he said, still holding the photograph.

What strange effects all this complicated activity inside had on the

surface, his face. A set sulky stagnation, every violence dropping an

imperceptible shade on to it, the features overgrown with this strange

stuff—that twist of the head that was him, and that could only be got rid

of by breaking.

“They’re no good,” she said, closing the drawer, handing her photographs,

sandwiched with tissue-paper, to Sorbert. “That one”—a sitting pose,

face yearning from photograph, lighted, not with a smile, but a sort of

sentimental illumination, the drapery arranged like a poster—“I don’t

think that’s so bad,” she said slangily, meant to be curt and “cheeky.”

“What an idiot!” he thought; “what a face!”

A consciously pathetic ghost of a smile, a clumsy sweetness, the

energetic sentimental claim of a rather rough but frank self.

There was a photograph of her in riding habit. This was the best of them.

He softened.

Then came a photograph of them together.

How strangely that twist of his, or set angle of the head, fitted in with

the corresponding peculiarities of the woman’s head and bust. What abysms

of idiocy! Rubbishy hours and months formed the atmosphere around these

two futile dolls!

He put the photographs down and looked up. She was sitting on the edge

of the table. The dressing-gown was open, and one large thigh, with ugly

whiteness, slid half out of it. It looked dead, and connected with her

like a ventriloquist’s dummy with its master. It was natural to wonder

where his senses had gone in looking at these decorous photographs. This

exhibition appeared to be her explanation of the matter. The face was not

very original. But a thigh cannot be stupid to the same degree.

He gazed surlily. Her musing expression at this moment was supremely

absurd. He smiled and turned his face to the window. She pretended to

become conscious suddenly of something amiss. She drew the dressing-gown

round her.

“Have you paid the man yet? What did he charge? I expect⸺”

Tarr took up the packet again.

“Oh, these are six francs. I forget what the big ones are. I haven’t paid

him yet. He’s coming to photograph Miss Goenthner to-morrow.”

They sat without saying anything.

He examined the room as you do a doctor’s waiting-room.

He had just come there to see if he could turn his back on it. That

appeared at first sight a very easy matter. That is why he so far had

not succeeded in doing so. Never put on his mettle, his standing army

of will was not sufficient to cope with it. But would this little room

ever appear worth turning his back on? It was the purest distillation

of the commonplace. He had become bewitched by its strangeness. It was

the height of the unreal. Bertha was like a fairy that he visited, and

“became engaged” to in another world, not the real one. It was so much

the real ordinary world that for him with his out-of-the-way experience

it was a phantasmagoria. Then what he had described as his disease of

sport was perpetually fed. Sex even with him, according to his analysis,

being a sort of ghost, was at home in this gross and buffonic illusion.

Something had filled up a blank and become saturated with the blankness.

How much would Bertha mind a separation? Tarr saw in her one of those

clear, humorous, superficial natures, a Venetian or a Viennese, the easy

product of a cynical and abundant life. He under-rated the potency of his

fascination. Secondly, he miscalculated the depths of obedient attachment

he had wakened.

They sat impatiently waiting. A certain formality had to be observed.

Then the business of the day could be proceeded with. They were both

bored with the part imposed by the punctilious and ridiculous god of

love. Bertha, into the bargain, wanted to get on with her cooking. She

would have cut considerably the reconciliation scene. All her side of the

programme had been conscientiously done.

“Berthe, tu es une brave fille!”

“Tu trouves?”

“Oui.”

More inaction followed on Tarr’s part. She sometimes thought he enjoyed

these ceremonies.

Through girlhood her strong senses had churned away at her, and claimed

an image from her gentle and dreamy mind. In its turn the mind had

accumulated its impressions of men, fancies from books and conversations,

and made its hive. So her senses were presented with the image that was

to satisfy and rule them. They flung themselves upon it as she had flung

herself upon Tarr.

This image left considerable latitude. Tarr had been the first to

fit—rather paradoxically, but all the faster for that.

This “high standard Aryan female,” as Tarr described her, had arrived,

with him, at the full and headlong condition we agree to name “love.” The

image, or type, was thrown away. The individual took its place.

Bertha had had several sweethearts before Tarr. They had all left the

type-image intact. At most it had been a little blurred by them. It had

almost been smashed for one man, physically resembling Tarr. But he had

never got quite near enough to do that. Tarr had characteristically

supposed this image to have little sharpness of outline left. He thought

it would not be a very difficult matter for any one to extort its

recognitions.

“Vous êtes à mon goût, Sorbet. Du bist mein gesmack,” she would say.

Tarr was not demonstrative when she said this. He could not reciprocate.

And he could not help reflecting whether to be “her taste” was very

flattering. There _must_ be something the matter with him.

All her hope centred in his laziness. She watched his weaknesses with

a loving eye. He had much to say about his under-nature. She listened

attentively.

“It is the most dangerous quality of all to possess,” and he would

sententiously add—“only the best people possess it, in common with the

obscure and humble. It is like a great caravanserai in which scores of

people congregate. It is a disguise in which such a one, otherwise Pasha,

circulates among unembarrassed men. He brings away stores of wisdom,

with much diversion by the way.” He saw, however, the danger of these

facilities. The Pasha had been given a magic mask of humbleness. But

the inner nature seemed flowing equally to the mask and the unmasked

magnificence. He was as yet unformed, but wished to form wholly Pasha.

This under-nature’s chief use was as a precious _villégiature_ for his

energy. Bertha was the country wench the more exalted incarnation had met

while on its holidays, or, wandering idle Khalife, in some concourse of

his surreptitious life.

* * * * *

His three days’ unannounced and uncommented “leave” had made Bertha very

nervous. She suffered from the incomplete, unsymmetrical appearance her

life now presented. Everything spread out palpably before her, that she

could arrange like a roomful of furniture, was how she liked it. Even in

her present shakedown of a life, Tarr had noticed the way he was treated

as material for “arrangement.” But she had never been able to indulge

this idiosyncrasy much in the past. This was not the first time that she

had found herself in a similar position. Hence her certain air of being

at home in these casual quarters, which belied her.

The detested temporary dwelling in the last few days had been given a

new coat of sombre thought. Found in accidental quarters, had she not

been over-delicate in not suggesting an immediate move into something

more homelike and permanent. People would leave her there for the rest

of her natural life unless she were a little brutal and got _herself_

out somehow. No shadow of un-nice feeling ever tainted her abject

genuineness. Cunning efforts to retain him abounded. But she never blamed

or turned on him. She had given herself long ago, at once, without

ceremony. She awaited his thanks or no thanks simply.

But the itch of action was on her.

Tarr’s absences were like light. His presence was a shadow. They were

both stormy. The last absence had illuminated the undiscipline of her

life. During the revealing luridness, she got to work. Reconstruction was

begun. She had trusted too much in Fate and obedient waiting Hymen.

So Bertha had a similar ferment to Tarr’s.

Anger with herself, dreary appetite for action, would help her over

farewells. She was familiar enough with them, too, in thought. She

would not stir a hand to change things. He must do that. She would only

facilitate things in all directions for him. The new energy delivered

attack after attack upon her hope. She saw nothing beyond Tarr but

measures of utility. The “heart” had always been her most cherished

ornament. _That_ Tarr would take with him, as she would keep his ring and

the books he had given her. She could not now get it back for the asking.

She did not want it! She must indulge her mania for tasteful arrangement

in future without this. Or rather what heart she had left would be rather

like one of those salmon-coloured, corrugated gas office-stoves, compared

to a hearth with a fire of pine.

Tarr had not brought his indifference there to make it play tricks,

perform little feats. Nor did he wish to press it into inhuman actions.

It was a humane “indifference,” essentially. So with reluctance he got

up, and went over to her.

“You haven’t kissed me yet,” he said, in imitation of her.

“Why kiss you, Sorbet?” she managed to say before her lips were closed.

He drew her ungraciously and roughly into his arms, and started kissing

her on the mouth. She covered him, docilely, with her inertia. He was

supposed to be performing a miracle of bringing the dead to life. Gone

about too crudely, the willing mountebank, Death, had been offended.

It is not thus that great spirits are prevailed upon to flee. Her

“indifference”—the great, simulated, and traditional—would not be ousted

by an upstart and younger relative. By Tarr himself, grown repentant,

yes. But not by another “indifference.” Then his brutality stung her

offended spirit, that had been pursing itself up for so many hours. Tears

began rolling tranquilly out of her eyes in large dignified drops. They

had not been very far back in the wings. He received them frigidly. She

was sure, thought he, to detect something unusual during this scene.

Then with the woman’s bustling, desperate, possessive fury, she suddenly

woke up. She disengaged her arms wildly and threw them round his neck,

tears becoming torrential. Underneath the poor comedian that played such

antics with such phlegmatic and exasperating persistence, this distressed

being thrust up its trembling mask, like a drowning rat. Its finer head

pierced her blunter wedge.

“Oh! dis, Sorbet! Est-ce que tu m’aime? M’aime-tu? Dis!”

“Yes, you know. Don’t cry.”

A wail, like the buzzing on a comb covered with paper followed.

“Oh, dis; m’aimes-tu? Dis que tu m’aime!”

A blurting, hurrying personality rushed right up into his face. It was

like the sightless clammy charging of a bat. More eloquent regions

had ambushed him. Humbug had mysteriously departed. It was a blast of

knifelike air in the middle of their hot-house. He stared at her face

groping up as though it scented troubles in his face. It pushed to right

and then to left and rocked itself. Intelligent and aware, it lost this

intensity.

A complicated image developed in his mind as he stood with her. He was

remembering Schopenhauer. It was of a Chinese puzzle of boxes within

boxes, or of insects’ discarded envelopes. A woman had in the middle of

her a kernel, a sort of very substantial astral baby. This baby was apt

to swell. She then became _all_ baby. The husk he held was a painted

mummy-case. He was a mummy-case too. Only he contained nothing but

innumerable other painted cases inside, smaller and smaller ones. The

smallest was not a substantial astral baby, however, or live core, but a

painting like the rest. His kernel was a painting. That was as it should

be!

He was half sitting on the table. He found himself patting her back. He

stopped doing this. His face looked heavy and fatigued. A dull, intense

infection of her despair had filled it.

He held her head gently against his neck. Or he held her skull against

his neck. She shook and sniffed softly.

“Bertha, stop crying. I know I’m a brute. But it’s fortunate for you that

I am. I’m only a brute. There’s nothing to cry for.”

He over-estimated deafness in weepers. And when women flooded their

country he always sat down and waited. Often as this had happened to him,

he had never attempted to circumvent it. He felt like a person who is

taking a little dog for a walk at the end of a string. His voice appeared

husky and artificial near her ear.

Turned towards the window, he looked at the green stain of the foliage

outside. Something was explained. Nature was not friendly to him; its

metallic tints jarred. Or anyhow, it was the same for all men. The

sunlight seen like an adventurous stranger in the streets was intimate

with Bertha. The scrap of crude forest had made him want to be away

unaccompanied. But it was tainted with her. If he went away now he would

only be _playing_ at liberty. He had been right in not accepting the

invitations of the spring. The settlement of this question stood between

him and pleasure. A momentary well-being had been accepted. The larger

spiritual invitation he had rejected. He would only take that when he

was free. In its annual expansion Nature sent its large unstinting

invitations. But Nature loved the genius and liberty in him. Tarr felt

the invitation would not have been so cordial had he proposed taking a

wife and family!

He led her passively protesting to the sofa. Like a sick person, she was

half indignant at being moved. He should have remained, a perpendicular

bed for her, till the fever had passed. Revolted at the hypocrisy

required, he left her standing at the edge of the sofa. She stood

crouching a little, her face buried in her hands, in indignant absurdity.

The only moderately clean thing to do would be to walk out of the door

at once and never come back. With his background of months of different

behaviour this could not be done.

She sank down on the sofa, head buried in the bilious cushions. She

lay there like an animal, he thought, or some one mad, a lump of

half-humanity. On one side of him Bertha lay quite motionless and silent,

and on the other the little avenue was equally still. The false stillness

within, however, now gave back to the scene without its habitual

character. It still seemed strange to him. But all its strangeness now

lay in its everyday and natural appearance. The quiet inside, in the

room, was what did not seem strange to him. He had become imbued with

that. Bertha’s numb silence and abandon was a stupid _tableau vivant_ of

his own mood. In this impasse of arrested life he stood sick and useless.

They progressed from stage to stage of this weary farce. Confusion

increased. It resembled a combat between two wrestlers of mathematically

equal strength. Neither could win. One or other of them was usually

wallowing warily or lifelessly on his stomach, the other tugging at him

or examining and prodding his carcass. His liking, contempt, realization

of her love for him, his confused but exigent conscience, dogged

preparation to say farewell, all dovetailed with precision. There she lay

a deadweight. He could take his hat and go. But once gone in this manner

he could not stay.

He turned round, and sitting on the window-sill began again staring at

Bertha.

Women’s stormy weakness, psychic discharges, always affected him as the

sight of a person being seasick. It was the result of a weak spirit, as

the other was the result of a weak stomach. They could only live on the

retching seas of their troubles on the condition of being quite empty.

The lack of art or illusion in actual life enables the sensitive man

to exist. Likewise the phenomenal lack of nature in the average man’s

existence is lucky and necessary for him.

Tarr in some way gathered strength from contemplation of Bertha. His

contradictory and dislocated feelings were brought into a new synthesis.

Launching himself off the window-sill, he stood still as though suspended

in thought. He then sat down provisionally at the writing-table, within

a few feet of the sofa. He took up a book of Goethe’s poems that she

had given him. In cumbrous field-day dress of Gothic characters, squad

after squad, these poems paraded their message. He had left it there on a

former visit. He came to the ode named “Ganymed,”

_Wie im Morgenglanze_

_Du rings much anglühst_

_Frühling, Geliebter!_

_Mit tausendfacher Liebeswonne_

_Sich an mein Herz drängt_

_Deiner ewigen Wärme_

_Heilig, Gefühl,_

_Unendliche Schöne!_

He put it in his breast-pocket. As soldiers go into battle sometimes with

the Bible in their pocket, he prepared himself for a final combat, with

Goethe upon his person. Men’s lives have been known to have been saved

through a lesser devoutness.

He was engaging battle again with the most chivalrous sentiments.

The reserves had been called up, his nature mobilized. As his will

gathered force and volume (in its determination to “fling” her) he

unhypocritically keyed up its attitude. It resembled extreme cunning. He

had felt, while he had been holding her, at a disadvantage because of

his listless emotion. With emotion equal to hers, he could accomplish

anything. Leaving her would be child’s play. He appeared to be projecting

the manufacture of a more adequate sentiment.

Any indirectness was out of the question. A “letting her down softly,”

kissing and leaving in an hour or two, as though things had not changed,

that must now be eschewed—oh, yes. The genuine section of her, of which

he had a troubled glimpse, mattered, nothing else. He must appeal

obstinately to that. Their coming together had been prosecuted on his

side with a stupid levity. He would retrieve this in the parting. He

wished to do everything most opposite to his previous lazy conduct. He

frowned on Humour.

The first skirmish of his comic Armageddon had opened with the advance of

his mysterious and _goguenard_ “indifference.” This dwindled away at the

first onset. A new and more powerful thing had taken its place. This was,

in Bertha’s eyes, a _difference_ in Tarr.

* * * * *

“Something has happened; he is _different_,” she said to herself. “He has

met somebody else,” had been her rapid provisional conclusion.

She suddenly got up without speaking. Rather spectrally, she went over to

the writing-table for her handkerchief. She had not moved an inch or a

muscle until quite herself again, dropping steadily down all the scale

of feeling to normal. With matter-of-factness she got up, easily and

quietly, making Sorbert a little dizzy.

Her face had all the drama wrung out of it. It was hard, clear, and

garishly white, like her body.

If he were to have a chance of talking he must clear the air of

electricity completely. Else at his first few words storm might return.

Once lunch had swept through the room, things would be better. He would

send the strawberries ahead to prepare his way. It was like fattening a

lamb for the slaughter. This idea pleased him. Now that he had accepted

the existence of a possible higher plane of feeling as between Bertha

and himself, he was anxious to avoid display. So he ran the risk of

outdoing his former callousness. Tarr was saturated with morbid English

shyness, that cannot tolerate passion and its nakedness. This shyness,

as he contended, in its need to show its heart, discovers subtleties and

refinements of expression, opposites and between shades, unknown to less

gauche and delicate people. But if he were hustled out of his shell the

anger that co-existed with his modesty was the most spontaneous thing he

possessed. Bertha had always left him alone.

* * * * *

He got up, obsequiously reproducing in his own movements and expression

her new normality.

“Well, how about lunch? I’ll come and help you with it.”

“There’s nothing to do. I’ll get it.”

Bertha had wiped her eyes with the attentiveness a man bestows on his

chin after a shave, in little brusque hard strokes. She did not look at

Tarr. She arranged her hair in the mirror, then went to the kitchen. For

her to be so _perfectly natural_ offended him.

The intensity of her past feeling carried her on for about five minutes

into ordinary life. Her seriousness was tactful for so long. Then her

nature began to give way. It broke up again into fits and starts of

self-consciousness. The mind was called in, did its work clumsily as

usual. She became her usual self. Sitting on the stool by the window,

in the act of eating, Tarr there in front of her, it was more than ever

impossible to be natural. She resented the immediate introduction of

lunch in this way. The resentment increased her artificiality.

To counterbalance the acceptance of food, she had to throw more pathos

into her face. With haggard resignation she was going on again; doing

what was asked of her, partaking of this lunch. She did so with

unnecessary conscientiousness. Her strange wave of dignity had let her in

for this? Almost she must make up for that dignity! Life was confusing

her again; it was useless to struggle.

“Aren’t these strawberries good? These little hard ones are better than

the bigger strawberries. Have some more cream?”

“Thank you.” She should have said no. But being greedy in this matter she

accepted it, with heavy air of some subtle advantage gained.

“How did the riding lesson go off?” She went to a riding school in the

mornings.

“Oh, quite well, thank you. How did _your_ lesson go off?” This referred

to his exchange of languages with a Russian girl.

“Admirably, thank you.”

The Russian girl was a useful feint for her.

“What is the time?” The time? What cheek! He was almost startled.

He took his heavy watch out and presented its face to her ironically.

“Are you in a hurry?” he asked.

“No, I just wondered what the time was. I live so vaguely.”

“You are sure you are not in a hurry?”

“Oh, no!”

“I have a confession to make, my dear Bertha.” He had not put his watch

back in his pocket. She had asked for the watch; he would use it. “I came

here just now to test a funny mood—a quite _new_ mood. My visit is a

sort of trial trip of this mood. It was connected with you. I wanted to

find out what it meant, and how it would be affected by your presence.”

Bertha looked up with mocking sulky face, a shade of hopeful curiosity.

“_It was a feeling of complete indifference as regards yourself!_”

He said this solemnly, with the pomp with which a weighty piece of news

might be delivered by a solicitor in conversation with his client.

“Oh, is _that_ all?” The new barbaric effort was met by Bertha scornfully.

“No, that is not all.”

Catching at the professional figure his manner had conjured up, he ran

his further remarks into that mould. The presence of his watch in his

hand had brought some image of the family physician or gouty attorney. It

all centred round the watch, and her interest in the time of day.

“I have found that this was only another fraud on my too credulous

sensibility.” He smiled with professional courtesy. “At sight of you, my

mood evaporated. But what I want to talk about is what is left. It would

be well to bring our accounts up to date. I’m afraid the reckoning is

enormously against me. You have been a criminally indulgent partner⸺”

He had now got the image down to the more precise form of two partners,

perhaps comfortable wine merchants, going through their books.

“My dear boy, I know that. You needn’t trouble to go any further. But why

are you going into these calculations, and sums of profit and loss?”

“Because my sentimental finances, if I may use that term, are in a bad

state.”

“Then they only match your worldly ones.”

“In my worldly ones I have no partner,” he reminded her.

She cast her eyes about in swoops, full of self-possessed wildness.

“I exonerate you, Sorbet,” she said, “you needn’t go into details. What

is _yours_ and what is _mine_. My God! What does it matter? Not much!”

“I know you to be generous⸺”

“Leave that then! Leave these calculations! All that means so _little_

to me! I feel at the end of my strength—_au bout de force_!” She always

heaved this out with much energy. “If you’ve made up your mind to go—do

so, Sorbet. I release you! You owe me nothing. It was all my fault. But

spare me a reckoning. I can’t stand any more⸺”

“No, I insist on being responsible. We can’t leave things upside down—our

books in an endless muddle, our desks open, and just walk away for

ever—and perhaps set up shop somewhere else?”

“I do not feel in any mood to ‘set up shop somewhere else,’ I can assure

you!”

The unbusinesslike element in the situation she had allowed to develop

for obvious reasons. She now resisted his dishonest attempt to set this

right, and benefit first, as he had done, by disorder, and lastly by

order.

“We can’t, in any case, improve matters by talking. I—I, you needn’t fear

for me, Sorbet. I can look after myself, only don’t let us wrangle,” with

appealing gesture and saintlily smiling face, “let us part friends. Let

us be worthy of each other.”

Bertha always opposed to Tarr’s images her Teutonic lyricism, usually

repeating the same phrases several times.

This was degenerating into their routine of wrangle. Always confronted by

this imperturbable, deaf and blind “generosity,” the day would end in the

usual senseless “draw.” His words still remained unsaid.

“Bertha, listen. Let us, just for fun, throw all this overboard. I mean

the cargo of inflated soul-stuff that makes us go statelily, no doubt,

but—Haven’t we quarrelled enough, and said these things often enough?

Our quarrels have been our undoing. A long chain of little quarrels has

bound us down. We should neither of us be here if it hadn’t been for

them.”

Bertha gazed at Tarr half wonderingly. She realized that something out of

the ordinary was on foot.

Tarr proceeded.

“I have accepted from you a queer sentimental dialect of life, I

should have insisted on your expressing yourself in a more logical and

metropolitan speech. Let us drop it. There is no need to talk negro,

baby-talk, or hybrid drivel from no-man’s-land. I don’t think we should

lead a very pleasant married life—naturally. In the second place, you are

not a girl who wants an intrigue, but to marry. I have been playing at

fiancé with a certain pleasure in the novelty, but I experience a genuine

horror at the possible consequences. I have been playing with you!”

He said this eagerly, as though it were a point in his argument—as it

was. He paused, for effect apparently.

“You, for your part, Bertha, don’t do yourself justice when you

are acting. I am in the same position. I feel this. My ill-humour

occasionally falls in your direction—yours, for its part, falling in mine

when I criticize _your_ acting. We don’t act well together, and that’s a

fact; though I’m sure we should be smooth enough allies off the boards of

love. Your heart, Bertha, is in the right place; ah, ça⸺”

“You are too kind!”

“But—but I will go further! At the risk of appearing outrageously

paradoxical. This heart in question is so much part of your intelligence,

too⸺”

“Thanks! Thanks!”

“—despite your execrable fatuity as an actress! Your shrewdness and

goodness give each other the hand.—But to return to my point. I had

always till I met you regarded marriage as a thing beyond all argument

_not_ for me. I was unusually isolated from this idea, anyway; I had

never even reflected what marriage was. You introduced me to marriage!

In so doing you are responsible for all our troubles. The approach of

this horrible thing, so _surprisingly_ pleasant and friendly at nearer

sight, caused revulsion of feeling beyond my control, resulting in

sudden _fiançailles_. Like a woman luxuriously fingering some merchant’s

goods, too dear for her, or not wanted enough for the big price, so I

philandered with the idea of marriage.”

This simplification put things, merely, in a new callous light. Tarr felt

that she must naturally be enjoying, too, his points. He forgot to direct

his exposition in such a way as to hurt her least. This trivial and

tortured landscape had a beauty for him he could have explained, where

her less developed sense saw nothing but a harrowing reality.

The lunch had had the same effect on him that it was intended to have on

his victim; not enough to overthrow his resolution, but enough to relax

its form.

As to Bertha, this seemed, in the main, “Sorbet all over.” There was

nothing new. There was the “difference.” But it was the familiar

process; he was attempting to convince himself, heartlessly, on her.

Whether he would ever manage it was problematic. There was no sign of

his being likely to do so more to-day than any other day. She listened;

sententiously released him from time to time.

Just as she had seemed strange to him in some way when he came in, seen

through his “indifference,” so he had appeared a little odd to her.

This had wiped off the dullness of habit for a moment. This husband she

obstinately wanted had been recognized. She had seized him round the

shoulders and clung to him, as though he had been her child that some

senseless force were about to snatch.

As to his superstition about marriage—was it not merely restlessness of

youth, propaganda of Liberty, that a year or so would see in Limbo? For

was he not a “marrying man”? She was sure of it! She had tried not to

frighten him, and to keep “Marriage” in the background.

So Tarr’s disquisition had no effect except for one thing. When he

spoke of _pleasure he derived from idea of marriage_, she wearily

pricked up her ears. The conviction that Tarr was a domesticated animal

was confirmed from his own lips. The only result of his sortie was to

stimulate her always vigilant hope and irony, both, just a little. He had

intended to prepare the couch for her despair!

His last words, affirming Marriage to be a game not worth the candle,

brought a faint and “weary” smile to her face. She was once more,

obviously, _au bout de force_.

“Sorbert; I understand you. Do realize that. There is no necessity for

all this rigmarole With me. If you think you shouldn’t marry—why, it’s

quite simple! Don’t think that I would force you to marry! Oh, no!” (The

training guttural unctuous accent she had in speaking English filled

her discourse with natural emphasis.) “I always said that you were too

young. You need a wife. You’ve just said yourself about your feeling for

marriage. But you are _so_ young!” She gazed at him with compassionate,

half-smiling moistened look, as though there were something deformed

about being _so_ young. A way she had was to treat anything that

obviously pointed to her as the object of pity, as though it manifestly

indicated, on the contrary, _him_. “Yes, Sorbet, you are right,” she

finished briskly. “I think it would be _madness_ for us to marry!”

A suggestion that their leisurely journey towards marriage was perhaps a

mistake was at once seriously, and with conviction far surpassing that

he had ventured on, taken up by her. She would immediately call a halt,

pitch tents preliminary to turning back. A pause was necessary before

beginning the return journey. Next day they would be jogging on again in

the same disputed direction.

Tarr now saw at once what had happened. His good words had been lost, all

except his confession to a weakness for the matronly blandishments of

Matrimony. He had an access of stupid, brief, and blatant laughter.

As people have wondered what was at the core of the world, basing

their speculations on what deepest things occasionally emerge, with

violence, at its holes, so Bertha often conjectured what might be at

the heart of Tarr. Laughter was the most apparently central substance

that, to her knowledge, had incontrollably appeared. She had often heard

_grondements_, grumblings, quite literally, and seen unpleasant lights,

belonging, she knew, to other categories of matter. But they never broke

cover.

At present this gaiety was interpreted as proof that she had been right.

There was nothing in what he had said. It had been only one of his bad

fits of rebellion.

But laughter Tarr felt was retrogression. Laughter must be given up. He

must in some way, for both their sakes, lay at once the foundations of an

ending.

For a few minutes he played with the idea of affecting her weapons.

Perhaps it was not only impossible to overcome, but even to approach, or

to be said to be on the same field with, this peculiar amazon, without

such uniformity of engines of attack or defence. Should not he get

himself a mask like hers at once, and follow suit with some emphatic

sentence? He stared uncertainly at her. Then he sprang to his feet. He

intended, as far as he could see beyond this passionate movement (for he

must give himself up to the mood, of course) to pace the room. But his

violence jerked out of him a shout of laughter. He went stamping about

the floor roaring with reluctant mirth. It would not come out properly,

too, except the first outburst.

“Ay. That’s right! Go on! Go on!” Bertha’s patient irony seemed to gibe.

This laughter left him vexed with himself, like a fit of tears. “Humour

and pathos are such near twins, that Humour may be exactly described as

the most feminine attribute of man, and the only one of which women show

hardly any trace! Jokes are like snuff, a slatternly habit,” said Tarr to

Butcher once, “whereas tragedy (and tears) is like tobacco, much drier

and cleaner. Comedy being always the embryo of Tragedy, the directer

nature weeps. Women are of course directer than men. But they have not

the same resources.”

Butcher blinked. He thought of his resources, and remembered his

inclination to tears.

* * * * *

Tarr’s disgust at this electric rush of sound made him turn it on her. He

was now put at a fresh disadvantage. How could he ever succeed in making

Bertha believe that a person who laughed immoderately meant what he said?

Under the shadow of this laugh all his ensuing acts or words must toil,

discredited in advance.

Desperately ignoring accidents, he went back beyond his first explosion,

and attacked its cause—indicting Bertha, more or less, as responsible for

the disturbance.

He sat down squarely in front of her, hardly breathed from his paroxysm,

getting launched without transition. He hoped, by rapid plunging from one

state to another, to take the wind out of the laugh’s sails. It should be

left towering, spectral, but becalmed, behind.

“I don’t know from which side to approach you, Bertha. You frequently

complain of my being thoughtless and spoilt. But your uncorked solemnity

is far more frivolous than anything I can manage.—Excuse me, of course,

for speaking in this way!—Won’t you come down from your pedestal just for

a few minutes?” And he “sketched,” in French idiom, a gesture, as though

offering her his hand.

“My dear Sorbert, I feel far from being on any pedestal! There’s too

little of the pedestal, if anything, about me. Really, Sorbet,” (she

leant towards him with an abortive movement as though to take his hand)

“I _am_ your friend; _believe me_!” (Last words very quick, with nod of

head and blink of eyes.) “You worry yourself far too much. Don’t do so.

You are in no way bound to me. If you think we should part—_let us part_!”

The “let us part!” was precipitate, strenuous Prussian, almost truculent.

Tarr thought: “Is it cunning, stupidity, disease or what?”

She continued of a sudden, shunting on to another track of generosity:

“But I agree. Let us be franker. We waste too much time talking, talking.

You are different to-day, Sorbet. What is it? If you have met somebody

else⸺”

“If I had I’d tell you. There is besides _nobody else_ to meet. You are

unique!”

“Some one’s been saying something to you⸺”

“No. I’ve been saying something to somebody else. But it’s the same

thing.”

With half-incredulous, musing, glimmering stare she drew in her horns.

Tarr meditated. “I should have known that. I am asking her for something

that she sees no reason to give up. Next her _goût_ for me, it is the

most valuable thing she possesses. It is indissolubly mixed up with the

_goût_. The poor heightened self she laces herself into is the only

consolation for _me_ and all the troubles I spring on her. And I ask her

brutally to ‘come down from her pedestal.’ I owe even a good deal to

that pedestal, I expect, as regards her _goût_. This blessed protection

Nature has given her, I, a minute or two before leaving her, make a last

inept attempt to capture or destroy. Her good sense is contemptuous and

indignant. It is only in defence of this ridiculous sentimentality that

she has ever shown her teeth. This illusion has enabled her to bear

things so long. It now stands ready with Indian impassibility to manœuvre

her over the falls or rapids of Parting. The scientific thing to do, I

suppose, my intention being generous, would be to flatter and increase

in some way this idea of herself. I should give her some final and

extraordinary opportunity of being ‘noble.’”

He looked at her a moment, in search of inspiration.

“I must not be too vain. I exaggerate the gravity of the hit. As to my

attempted rape—see how I square up when she shows signs of annexing _my_

illusion. We are really the whole time playing a game of grabs and dashes

at each other’s fairy vestment of Imagination. Only hers makes her very

fond of me, whereas mine makes me see any one but her. Perhaps this is

why I have not been more energetic in my prosecution of the game, and

have allowed her to remain in her savage semi-naked state of pristine

balderdash. Why has she never tried to modify herself in direction of my

‘taste’? From not daring to leave this protective fanciful self, while I

still kept all _my_ weapons? Then her initiative. She does nothing it is

the man’s place to do. She remains ‘woman’ as she would say. Only she is

so intensely alive in her passivity, so maelstromlike in her surrender,

so cataclysmic in her sacrifice, that very little remains to be done. The

man’s position is a mere sinecure. Her charm for me.”

To cover reflection, he set himself to finish lunch. The strawberries

were devoured mechanically, with unhungry itch to clear the plate. He had

become just a devouring-machine, restless if any of the little red balls

still remained in front of it.

Bertha’s eyes sought to carry her out of this Present. But they had

broken down, depositing her, so to speak, somewhere half-way down the

avenue.

Tarr got up, a released automaton, and walked to the cloth-covered

box where he had left his hat and stick. Then he returned in some way

dutifully and obediently to the same seat, sat there for a minute, hat

on knee. He had gone over and taken it up without thinking. He only

realized, once back, what it meant. Nothing was settled, he had so far

done more harm than good. The presence of the hat and stick on his knees,

however, was like the holding open of the front door already. Anything

said with them there could only be like words said as an afterthought, on

the threshold. It was as though, hat on head, he were standing with his

hand on the door-knob, about to add some trifle to a thing already fixed.

He got up, walked back to where he had picked up the hat and stick,

placed them as they were before, then returned to the window.

What should be done now? He seemed to have played all his fifty-two

cards. Everything to “be done” looked behind him, not awaiting him at

all. That passive pose of Bertha’s was not encouraging. It had lately

withstood stoically a good deal, was quite ready to absorb still more.

There was something almost pugnacious in so much resignation.

But when she looked up at him there was no sign of combat. She appeared

stilled to something simple again, by some fluke of a word. For the

second time that day she had jumped out of her skin.

Her heart beat in a delicate, exhausted way, her eyelids became moistened

underneath, as she turned to her unusual fiancé. They had wandered, she

felt, into a drift of silence that hid a distant and unpleasant prospect

at the end of it. It seemed suddenly charged with some alarming fancy

that she could not grasp. There was something more unusual than her

fiancé. The circular storm, in her case, was returning.

“Well, Sorbet?”

“Well. What is it?”

“Why don’t you go? I thought you’d gone. It seems so funny to see you

standing there. What are you staring at me for?”

“Don’t be silly.”

She looked down with a wild demureness, her head on one side.

Her mouth felt some distance from her brain. Her voice stood on tiptoe

like a dwarf to speak. She became very much impressed by her voice, and

was rather afraid to say anything more. Had she fainted? Sorbert was a

stranger. The black stubble on his chin and brown neck appeared like the

symptoms of a disease that repelled her. She noticed something criminal

and quick in his eyes. She became nervous, as though she had admitted

somebody too trustingly to her rooms. This fancy played on her hysteria,

and she really wanted him to go.

“Why don’t you go?” she repeated, in a pleasant voice.

Tarr remained silent, seemingly determined not to answer.

Meantime he looked at her with a doubtful dislike.

What is _love_? he began reasoning. It is either _possession_ or a

possessive madness. In the case of men and women, it is the obsession of

a personality. He had presumably been endowed with the power of awaking

love in her. He had something to accuse himself of. He had been _afraid

of giving up_ or repudiating this particular madness. To give up another

person’s love is a mild suicide; like a very bad inoculation as compared

to the full disease. His tenderness for Bertha was due to her having

purloined some part of himself, and covered herself superficially with

it as a shield. Her skin at least was Tarr. She had captured a bit of

him, and held it as a hostage. She was rapidly transforming herself, too,

into a slavish dependency. She worked with all the hypocrisy of a great

instinct.

People can wound by loving; the sympathy of this affection is

interpenetrative. Love performs its natural miracle, and they become part

of us; it is a dismemberment to cast them off. Our own blood flows out

after them when they go.

Or love was a malady; it was dangerous to live with those consumed by

it. He felt an uneasiness. Might not a wasting and restlessness ensue?

It would not, if he caught it, be recognizable as love. Perhaps he had

already got it slightly. That might account for his hanging about her. He

evidently was suffering from something that came from Bertha.

Everybody, however, all personality, was catching. We all are sicknesses

for each other. Such contact as he had with Bertha was particularly

risky. Their photographs he had just been looking at displayed an

unpleasant solidarity. Was it necessary to allege “love” at all? The word

was superfluous in his case. The fact was before him.

He felt suddenly despondent and afraid of the Future. He had fallen

beneath a more immediate infection.

He looked attentively round the room. His memory already ached. She had

loved him with all this. She had loved him with the plaster cast of

Beethoven, attacked him with the Klingers, ambushed him from the Breton

jars, in a funny, superficial, absorbing way. Her madness had muddled

everything with his ideal existence. It wasn’t like leaving an ordinary

room you had spent pleasant hours in and would regret. You would owe

nothing to that, and it could not pursue you with images of wrong. This

room he was wronging, and left it in a different way. She seemed, too,

so humble in it, or through it. The appeal of the _little_ again. If he

could only escape from _scale_. The price of preoccupation with the large

was this perpetual danger from the _little_. He wished he could look

coldly on mere littleness, and not want to caress and protect it when it

was human. Brutality was no doubt necessary for people like him. Love was

too new to him. He was not inoculated enough with love.

He had callously been signing his name to a series of brutalities, then,

as though he were sure that when the time came he would have a quite

sufficient stock of coldness to meet these debts. Yet he had known from

the first that he had not. Eventually he would have to evade them or

succumb. The flourishes of the hand and mind had caused Bertha’s mute

and mournful attitude. She thought she knew him, but was amazed at his

ignorance or pretence.

So he had now brought this new element into relief. For the last hour he

had been accumulating difficulties, or rather unearthing some new one at

every step. Impossible to tackle _en masse_, they were all there before

him. The thought of “settling everything before he went,” now appeared

monstrous. He had, anyhow, started these local monsters and demons,

fishing them to the light. Each had a different vocal explosiveness or

murmur, inveighing unintelligibly against each other. The only thing to

be done was to herd them all together and march them away for inspection

at leisure.

Sudden herdsman, with the care of a delicate and antediluvian flock;

well!—But what was Bertha to be told? Nothing. He would file out silently

with his flock, without any hornblasts or windings such as he customarily

affected.

“I am going now,” he said at last, getting up.

She looked at him with startled interest.

“You are leaving me, Sorbet?”

“No. At least, now I am going.” He stooped down for his hat and cane. “I

will come and see you to-morrow or the day after.”

Closing the door quietly, with a petty carefulness, he crossed the

passage, belittled and guilty. He did not wish to escape this feeling.

It would be better to enhance it. For a moment it occurred to him to go

back and offer marriage. It was about all he had to offer. He was ashamed

of his only gift! But he did not stop, he opened the front door and went

downstairs. Something raw and uncertain he seemed to have built up in the

room he had left. How long would it hold together? Again he was acting in

secret, his errand and intentions kept to himself. Something followed him

like a restless dog.

PART II

DOOMED, EVIDENTLY. THE “FRAC”

CHAPTER I

From his window in the neighbouring boulevard Kreisler’s eye was fixed

blankly on a spot thirty feet above the scene of the Hobson-Tarr

dialogue. He was shaving himself, one eye fixed on Paris. It beat on

this wall of Paris drearily. Had it been endowed with properties of

illumination and been directed there earlier in the day, it would have

served as a desolate halo for Tarr’s ratiocination. For several days

Kreisler’s watch had been in the Mont de Piété. Until some clock struck

he was in total ignorance of the time of day.

The late spring sunshine flooded, like a bursted tepid star, the pink

boulevard. The people beneath crawled like wounded insects of cloth. A

two-story house terminating the Boulevard Pfeiffer covered the lower part

of the Café Berne.

Kreisler’s room looked like some funeral vault. Shallow, ill-lighted,

and extensive, it was placarded with nude and archaic images, painted on

strips of canvas fixed to the wall with drawing-pins. Imagining yourself

in some Asiatic dwelling of the dead, with the portraits of the deceased

covering the holes in which they had respectively been thrust, you would,

following your fancy, have turned to Kreisler seeking to see in him some

devout recluse who had taken up his quarters there.

Kreisler was in a sense a recluse (although almost certainly the fancy

would have gasped and fallen at his contact). But cafés were the

luminous caverns where he could be said, most generally, to dwell; with,

nevertheless, very little opening of the lips and much _recueillement_ or

meditation; therefore not unworthy of some rank among the inferior and

less fervent solitudes.

A bed like an overturned cupboard, dark, and with a red billow of cloth

and feathers covering it entirely; a tesselated floor of dark red tile;

a little rug, made with paint, carpet, cardboard, and horse-hair, to

represent a leopard—these, with chair, washstand, easel, and several

weeks’ of slowly drifting and shifting garbage, completed its contents.

Kreisler flicked the lather on to a crumpled newspaper, with an

irresponsible gesture. Each time his razor was raised he looked at

himself with a peering vacancy. His face had long become a piece of

troublesome meat. Life did not each day deposit an untidiness that could

be whisked off by a Gillette blade, as Nature did its stubble.

His face, it is true, wore like a uniform the frowning fixity of the

Prussian warrior. But it was such a rig-out as the Captain of Koepenich

must have worn, and would take in nobody but a Teutonic squad. The true

German seeks every day, by little acts of boorishness, to keep fresh this

trenchant Prussian attitude; just as the German student, with his weekly

routine of duels, keeps courage simmering in times of peace, that it may

instantly boil up to war pitch at the least sign from his Emperor.

He brushed his clothes in a sulky, vigorous way, like a silent,

discontented domestic of a shabby, lonely master. He cleaned his glasses

with the absorption and tenderness of the short-sighted. Next moment he

was gazing through them, straddled on his flat Slav nose—brushing up

whimsical moustaches over pouting mouth. This was done with two tiny

ivory brushes taken out of a small leather case—present from a fiancée

who had been alarmed that his moustaches showed an unpatriotic tendency

to droop.

This old sweetheart just then disagreeably occupied his mind. But he

busied himself about further items of toilet with increased precision. To

a knock he answered with careful “Come in.” He did not take his eyes from

the glass, spotted blue tie being pinched into position. He watched with

impassibility above and around his tie the entrance of a young woman.

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

He treated her as coolly as he had his thoughts. Appearing just then,

she gave his manner towards the latter something human to play on, with

relief. Imparting swanlike undulations to a short stout person, eye fixed

quizzingly on Kreisler’s in the glass, she advanced. Her manner was one

seldom sure of welcome, a little deprecatingly aggressive. She owned

humorously a good-natured face with protruding eyes, gesticulated with,

filling her silences with explosive significance. Brows always raised. A

soul made after the image of injuries. A skin which would become easily

blue in cold weather was matched with a taste in dress inveterately blue.

The Pas de Calais had somehow produced her. Paris, shortly afterwards,

had put the mark of its necessitous millions on a mean, lively child.

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

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

“It would be of certain use. But don’t put yourself out,” with grin

tightening all the skin of her face, making it pink and bald and her eyes

drunken.

“I’m afraid I can’t.” Watched with sort of appreciative raillery, he

got down on his knees and dragged a portmanteau from beneath the bed.

“Susanna, what can I get on that?” he asked simply, as of an expert.

“Ah, that’s where we are? You want to pawn this? I don’t know, I’m sure.

Perhaps they’d give you fifteen francs. It’s good leather.”

“Perhaps twenty?” he asked. “I must have them!” he clamoured of a sudden,

with energy that astonished her.

She grimaced, looked very serious; said, “Je ne sais pas, vous savez!”

with several vigorous, yet rhythmical and rich, forward movements of the

head. She became the broker: Kreisler was pressing for a sum in excess of

regulations. Not for the world, any more than had she been the broker in

fact, would she have valued it at a penny over what it seemed likely to

fetch.

“Je ne sais pas, vous savez!” she repeated. She looked even worried. She

would have liked to please Kreisler by saying more, but her business

conscience prevented her.

“Well, we’ll go together.”

This conversation was carried on strictly in dialect. Suzanne understood

him, for she was largely responsible for the lingo in which Kreisler

carried on conversation with the French. This young woman had no fixed

occupation. She disappeared for periods to live with men. She sat as a

model.

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

“Le cochon!” she stuttered.

“But it will come to-morrow, or the day after, anyway.” The

idiosyncrasies of these monthly letters were quite familiar to her. The

dress-clothes had been pawned by her on a former occasion.

“What do you need twenty francs for?”

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

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

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

his eye.

She first smiled slowly, then allowed her ready mirth to grow,

by mechanical stages, into laughter. The presence of this small,

indifferent, and mercenary acquaintance irritated him. But he remained

cool. Just then a church clock began striking. He foreboded it was

already ten, but not later. It struck ten and then eleven. He leapt the

hour—the clock seemed rushing with him, in a second, to the more advanced

hour—without any flurry, quite calmly. Then it struck twelve. He at

once absorbed that further hour as he had the former. He lived an hour

as easily and carelessly as he would have lived a second. Could it have

gone on striking he would have swallowed, without turning a hair, twenty,

thirty strokes!

Going out with Suzanne, he turned the key carefully in the door. The

concierge or landlord might slip in and fire his things out in his

absence.

The portmanteau, whisked up from the floor, flopped along with him like a

child’s slack balloon. He frowned at Suzanne and, prepared for surprises,

went warily down the stairs.

He had felt a raw twinge of anger as he had opened the door, looking down

at the first boards of his room. A half an hour before, on waking, he

had sat up in bed and gazed at the crevice at its foot where a letter,

thrust underneath by the concierge, usually lay. He had stared as though

it had been a shock to find nothing. That little square of rich bright

white paper was what he had counted on night to give him—that he had

expected to find on waking, as though it were a secretion of those long

hours. It made him feel that there had been no night—long, fecund, rich

in surprises—but merely a barren moment of sleep. A stale and garish

continuation of yesterday, no fresh day at all, had dawned. The chill and

phlegmatic appearance of his room annoyed him. It was its inhospitable

character that repelled the envelope pregnant with revolutionary joy

and serried German marks. Its dead unchangeableness must preclude all

innovation. This spell of monotony on his life he could not break. The

room cut him off from the world. He gazed around as a man may eye a wife

whom he suspects of intercepting his correspondence. There was no reason

why the letter with his monthly remittance should have come on that

particular morning, already eight days overdue.

“If I had a father like yours!” said Suzanne in menacing, humorous

sing-song, eyes bulging and head nodding. At this vista of perpetual

blackmail she fell into a reverie.

“Never get your father off on your fiancée, Suzanne!” Kreisler advised in

reply.

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

“I had a fiancée.”

“Oui. Très bien. Tu t’es brouillé avec elle?”

“I have quarrelled with her; yes. She married my father. Or I married

her, I may say, to my father. That was a mistake.”

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

with her?”

“I never see her.”

“You never go home?”

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

staring severely ahead.

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

“My father married four years ago.”

“Married your—girl⸺?”

“That’s it.”

“And that’s why you have trouble? She makes the trouble. She is at the

bottom of the trouble? Ah! You never told me that. Now I understand why.

What’s she like? Is she nice?”

“Not bad.”

They got near the Berne.

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

Suzanne sat down—with the hiding of her red hands, her guilty lofty

silence, eyebrows raised as though with a slimy pescine enamel, inducing

an impression of nefarious hurry and impermanence. Kreisler was sour and

full of himself. His bag looked as though it should hold the properties

or merchandise of some illicit trade or amusement.

Suzanne seemed to triumph at this information.

She pressed and pressed in breathless undertone, fascinated by something.

Family dramas, of all dramas, she had the expertest interest in.

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

“Of course! Three months ago, you mean?” Suzanne had taken a near and

serious interest in Otto’s financial arrangements. She remembered dates

well, apart from that.

Otto did not proceed for some time. She stared quizzingly and patiently

past the tip of his nose.

“He then asked me to give up art. He told me of two posts in German

firms that were vacant. That was her doing, the swine! One was a

station-restaurant business.”

“You refused!”

“I didn’t reply at all.”

In this his methods were very similar to his father’s. The elder Kreisler

had repeatedly infuriated his son, calculating on such effect, by sending

his allowance only when written for, and even then neglecting his appeal

for several days. It came frequently wrapped up in bits of newspapers,

and his letters of demand and expostulation were never answered. On two

occasions forty marks and thirty marks respectively had been deducted,

merely as an irritative measure.

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

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

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

“I shall before—I shall some day!”

“Before what?”

“Oh, before⸺”

Suzanne once more glimmered into the absurd distance.

“He will send, I suppose?”

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

“If it didn’t what would you do? You think it’s your stepmother who does

it? Why don’t you manage her? You are stupid. You must allow me to tell

you that.”

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

better!

Kreisler’s student days—a lifetime in itself—had unfitted him, at the age

of thirty-six, for practically anything. He had only lost one picture so

far. This senseless solitary purchase depressed him whenever he thought

of it. How dreary that cheque for four pounds ten was! Who could have

bought it? It sold joylessly and fatally one day in an exhibition.

CHAPTER II

Nine months previously Kreisler had arrived in Paris at the Gare de Lyon,

from Italy. He had left Rome, according to his account, because the

Italian creditor is such a bad-tempered fellow, and he could never get

any sleep after 8—or latterly 7.30—even, in the morning.

“DEAR COLLEAGUE,—Expect me Thursday. I am at last quitting this

wretched city. I hope that the room you mentioned is still

free. Will come at once to your address. With many hearty

greetings,—Yours,

OTTO KREISLER.”

He had dispatched this note before leaving to a Herr Ernst Volker.—For

some time he stood on the Paris platform, ulster thrown back, smoking

a lean cigar, with a straw stuck in it. He was glad to be in Paris.

How busy the women, intent on travel, were! Groups of town-folk, not

travellers, stood like people at a show. Each traveller was met by a

phalanx of uninterested faces beyond the gangway.

His standing on the platform was a little ceremonious and military. He

was taking his bearings. Body and belongings with him were always moved

about with certain strategy. At last, with racial menace, he had his

things swept together, saying heavily:

“Un viagre!”

Ernst Volker was not in, but had left word he would be there after

dinner. It was in a pension. He rented a studio as well in the garden

behind. The house was rather like a French Public Baths, two-storied,

of a dirty purple colour. Kreisler looked up at it and felt that a very

public sort of people must live there, looking big and idle in their

rooms and constantly catching the eye of the stranger on the pavement. He

was led to the studio in rear of the house, and asked to wait.

He turned round several long canvases and was astonished to find dashing

ladies in large hats before him.

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

solitude, extremely amused.

Volker had not done this in Rome.—Even there he had given indications

of latent virtuosity, but had been curbed by classic presences. Since

arriving in Paris he had blossomed prodigiously. He dealt out a vulgar

vitality by the peck to each sitter, and they forgave him for making them

comparatively “ugly.” He flung a man or woman on to nine feet of canvas

and pummelled them on it for a couple of hours, until they promised to

remain there or were incapable of moving, so to speak. He had never been

able to treat people like this in any other way of life, and was grateful

to painting for the experience. He always appeared to feel he would be

expected to apologize for his brutal behaviour as an artist, and was

determined not to do so.

A half-hour later, on his return, the servant told him somebody was

waiting in the studio. With face not exhibiting joyful surprise, but

rather the collected look of a man of business arriving at his office, he

walked out quickly across the garden.

When he saw Kreisler the business look disappeared. Nothing of his

private self remained for the moment, all engulfed in his friend’s

personality.

“But, Ernst! What beautiful pictures! What pleasant company you left me

to wait amongst!—How are you? I am glad to see you again!”

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

“A little! My dear chap, it was eine ganz verdammte klemme! In this last

scuffle I lost—but I _lost_!—half the clothes off my back! But chiefly

Italian clothes; that is fortunate!”

“Why didn’t you write?”

“Oh, it wasn’t serious enough to call for help.” He dismissed the

out-of-date notion at once!—“This is a nice place you’ve got.”—Kreisler

looked round as though measuring it. He noticed Volker’s discomfort. He

felt he was examining something more intimate than the public aspect

of a dwelling. It was as though his friend were expecting a wife, whom

Kreisler had not met, to turn up suddenly.

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

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

“I’m afraid not.—It’s rather late for this neighbourhood. Let’s take

these things to your room—on the way—and go to the Grands Boulevards.”

They stayed till the small hours of the morning, in the midst of “Paris

by Night” of the German bourgeois imagination, drinking champagne and

toasting the creditors Kreisler had left behind in Rome.

Kreisler, measured by chairs or doors, was of immoderate physical

humanity. He was of that select section, corporally, that exceed the

mean. His long round thighs stuck out like poles. This large body

lounged and poised beside Volker in massive control and over-reaching of

civilized matter. It was in Rome or in Paris. It had an air of possession

everywhere. Volker was stranger in Paris than his companion, who had

only just arrived. He felt a little raw and uncomfortable, almost a

tourist. He was being shown “Paris by Night”; almost literally, for his

inclinations had not taken him much to that side of the town.

Objects—cocottes, newsvendors, waiters—flowed through Kreisler’s

brain without trouble or surprise. His heavy eyes were big gates of a

self-centred city. It was just a procession. There was no trade in the

town.

He was a property of Nature, or a favourite slave, untidy and aloof.

Kreisler so real and at home was like a ghost sitting there beside him,

for Ernst Volker. He had not had the time to solidify yet in Paris by all

rights, and yet was so solid and accustomed at once. _This body was in

Paris now!_—with an heroic freedom.

Volker began looking for himself. He was only made of cheap thin stuff.

He picked up the pieces quietly. This large rusty machine of a man

smashed him up like an egg-shell at every meeting. His shell grew quickly

again, but never got hard enough.

He was glad to see him again! Kreisler was a good fellow.—Despite himself

Ernst Volker was fidgety at the lateness of the hour. The next day

Fräulein Bodenaar, who was sitting for him, was due at 9.30. But the

first night of seeing his friend again—He drank rather more than usual,

and became silent, thinking of his Westphalian home and his sister who

was not very well. She had had a bicycle accident, and had received a

considerable shock. He might spend the summer with her and his mother at

Berck-sur-Mer or Calais. He would have gone home for a week or so now,

only an aunt he did not like was staying there.

“Well, let’s get back!” said Kreisler, rather thoughtful, too, at all the

life he had seen.

CHAPTER III

In Paris Ernst Volker had found himself. It seemed especially constructed

for him, such a wonderful, large, polite institution. No one looked at

him because he was small. For money in Paris represented delicate things,

in Germany chiefly gross ones. His money lent him more stature than

anything else could, and in a much more dignified and subtle way than

elsewhere. His talent benefited for the first time by his money. Heavy

temperament, primitive talent, had their big place, but money had at last

come into its own and got into the spiritual sphere. A very sensible and

soothing spirit reigned in this seat of intelligence. A very great number

of sensible, well-dressed figures perambulated all over these suave

acres. Large tribes of “types” prosecuted their primitive enthusiasms in

certain cafés, unannoyed by either the populace or the differently minded

élite. The old romantic values he was used to in his Fatherland were

all deeply modified. Money—that is luck and its power—was the genius of

the new world. American clothes were adapted for the finer needs of the

Western European.

On the evening following Kreisler’s arrival Volker had an engagement.

The morning after that Kreisler turned up at half-past twelve. Volker

was painting Fräulein Bodenaar. She was very smartly dressed, in a tight

German way. He displayed a disinclination to make Kreisler and his

sitter acquainted. He was a little confused. They arranged to meet at

dinner-time. He was going to lunch with Fräulein Bodenaar.

Kreisler the night before had spent a good deal of money in the German

paradise beyond the river. Volker understood by the particular insistent

blankness of Kreisler’s eye that money was needed. He was familiar with

this look. Kreisler owed him fifteen hundred marks. He had at first made

an effort to pay back Volker money borrowed, when his allowance arrived.

But in Rome, and earlier for a short time in Münich, his friend’s money

was not of so much value as it was at present. Ernst waived repayment

in an eager, sentimental way. The debt grew. Kreisler had felt keenly

the financial void caused by Volker’s going off to Paris. He had not

formulated to himself the real reason of his following Volker. Nor had he

taken the trouble to repudiate it. He was now in the position of a man

separated for some months from his wife. He was in a luxurious hurry to

see once more the colour of Volker’s gold.

Kreisler was very touchy about money, like many borrowers. He sponged

with discrimination. He had not for some time required to sponge at all,

as Volker amply met his needs. So he had got rather out of practice.

He found this reopening of his account with little friend Ernst a most

delicate business. It was worse than tackling a stranger. He realized

there might be a modification of Volker’s readiness to lend. He therefore

determined to ask for a sum in advance of actual needs, and by boldness

at once re-establish continuity.

After dinner he said:

“You remember Ricci? Where I got my paints the first part of the time. I

had some trouble with that devil before I left. He came round and made

a great scandal on the staircase. He shouted ‘Bandit! Ha! ha! Sporca la

tua Madonna!’—how do you say it?—‘Sporco Tedesco.’ Then he called the

neighbours to witness. He kept repeating he was ‘not afraid of me.’ I

took him by the ear and kicked him out!” he ended with florid truculence.

Volker laughed obsequiously but with discomfort. Kreisler solicited his

sympathetic mirth with a masterful eye. He laughed himself, unnecessarily

heartily. A scene of violence in which a small man was hustled, which

Volker would have to applaud, was a clever prelude. Then Otto began to be

nice.

“I am sorry for the little devil! I shall have the money soon. I shall

send it him. He shall not suffer. Antonio, too. I don’t owe much. I had

to settle most before I left. Himmel! My landlord!” He choked mirthfully

over his coffee a little, almost upsetting it, then mincingly adjusted

the cup to his moustached lips.

If he had to _settle up_ before he left, he could not have much now,

evidently! There was a disagreeable pause.

Volker stirred his coffee. He immediately showed his hand, for he looked

up and with transparent innocence asked:

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

“You mean the little Jew from whom everybody used to borrow money?”

Kreisler fixed him severely and significantly with his eye and spoke with

heavy deliberation.

“Did people borrow money from him? I had forgotten. Yes, that’s the man.

He has turned up here; who do you think with? With Irma, the Bohemian

girl. They are living together—round the corner there.”

“Hum! Are they? She was a pretty little girl. Do you remember the night

Von Gerarde was found stripped and tied to his door-handle? He assured me

Irma had done it and had pawned his clothes.”

Was Volker thinking that Blauenstein’s famous and admitted function

should be resorted to as an alternative for himself by Kreisler?

“Volker, I can speak to you plainly; isn’t that so? You are my friend.

What’s more, already we have—” he laughed strongly and easily. “My

journey has cost the devil of a lot. I shall be getting my allowance in a

week or so. Could you lend me a small sum of money. When my money comes⸺”

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

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

Volker’s jaw dropped.

“I am afraid, my dear Kreisler, I can’t—just now—manage that. My journey,

too, cost me a lot. I’m very sorry. Let me see. I have my rent next

week? I don’t see how I can manage⸺”

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

been honest and timid.

Kreisler looked sulkily at the tablecloth and knocked the ash sharply off

his cigarette into his cup.

He said nothing. Volker became nervous.

“Will a hundred marks be of any use?”

“Yes.” Kreisler drew his hand over his chin as though stroking a beard

down and then pulled his moustaches up, fixing the waitress with an

indifferent eye. “Can you spare that?”

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

This is how he lost Volker. He felt that hundred marks, given him as

a favour, was the last serious bite he would get. He only gradually

realized of how much more worth Volker’s money now was, and what before

was an unorganized mass of specie, in which the professional borrower

could wallow, was now a sound and suitably conducted business. He met

that night the new manager.

He was taken round to the Berne after dinner. He did not realize what

awaited him. He found himself in the head-quarters of many national

personalities. Politeness reigned. Kreisler was pleased to find a

permanent vat of German always on tap. His roots mixed sluggishly with

Ernst’s in this living lump of the soil of the Fatherland dumped down at

the head of the Boulevard Pfeiffer.

The Germans he met here spoke a language and expressed opinions he could

not agree with, but with which Volker evidently did. They argued genially

over glasses of beer and champagne. He found his ticket at once. He was

the _vielle barbe_ of the party.

“Yes, I’ve seen Gauguins. But why go so far as the South Sea Islands

unless you are going to make people more beautiful? Why go out of Europe?

Why not save the money for the voyage?” he would bluster.

“More beautiful? What do you understand by the word ‘beautiful,’ my dear

sir?” would answer a voice in the service of new movements.

“What do I call beautiful? How would you like your face to be as flat as

a pancake, your nostrils like a squashed strawberry, one of your eyes

cocked up by the side of your ear? Would not you be very unhappy to look

like that? Then how can you expect any one but a technique-maniac to care

a straw for a picture of that sort—call it Cubist or Fauve or whatever

you like? It’s all spoof. It puts money in somebody’s pocket, no doubt.”

“It’s not a question, unhappily, of how we should _like_ our faces to be.

_It is how they are._ But I do not consider the actual position of my

eyes to be any more _beautiful_ than any other position that might have

been chosen for them. The almond eye was long held in contempt by the

hatchet-eye⸺”

Kreisler peered up at him and laughed. “You’re a modest fellow. You’re

not as ugly as you think! Nach! I like to find⸺”

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

“I call this young lady here”—and he turned gallantly to a blushing

cocotte at his side—“_beautiful_, very beautiful!” He kissed her amid

gesticulation and applause.

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

He did not get on well with Soltyk. Louis Soltyk was a young Russian,

half Polish, who occasionally sat amongst the Germans at the Berne.

Volker saw more of him than anybody. It was he who had superseded

Kreisler in the position of influence as regards Volker’s purse. Soltyk

did not borrow a hundred marks. His system was far more up to date.

Ernst had experienced an unpleasant shock in coming into contact with

Kreisler’s clumsy and slovenly, small-scale money habits again! Soltyk

physically bore, distantly and with polish, a resemblance to Kreisler.

His handsome face and elegance were very different. Kreisler and he

disliked each other for obscure physiological reasons: they had perhaps

scrapped in the dressing-rooms of creation for some particular fleshly

covering, and each secured only fragments of a coveted garment. In some

ways, then, Soltyk was his efficient and more accomplished counterpart,

although as empty and unsatisfactory as himself.

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

usually like that.

“He’s in good company somewhere!” Volker revealed Kreisler as a lady’s

man. This satisfied Soltyk’s antipathy. The Russian kept an eye on

Volker’s pocket while Kreisler was about. He had not only recognized in

him a mysterious and vexing kinship, with his instinct; his sharper’s

sense, also, noted the signs of the professional borrower, the most

contemptible and slatternly member of the crook family. In an access

of sentiment Ernst asked his new friend to try and sell a painting of

Kreisler’s. Soltyk dealt in paintings and art objects. But Soltyk took

him by the lapel of the coat and in a few words steadied him into cold

sense.

“Non! Sois pas bête! Here,” he pulled out a handful of money and chose a

dollar-piece. “Here—give him this. You buy a _picture_—if it’s a picture

you want to buy—of Krashunine’s. Kreisler has nothing but _Kreisler_ to

offer. C’est peu!”

* * * * *

Ernst introduced Kreisler next to another sort of Paris compatriot. It

was a large female contingent this time. He took him round to Fräulein

Lipmann’s on her evening, when these ladies played the piano and met.

Kreisler felt that he was a victim of strategy. He puffed and swore

outside, complained of their music, the coffee, their way of dressing.

The Lipmann circle could have stood as a model for Tarr’s

Bourgeois-Bohemians, stood for a group.

For chief characteristic this particular Bourgeois-Bohemian set had the

inseparability of its members. Should a man, joining them, wish to flirt

with one particularly, he must flirt with all—flatter all, take all to

the theatre, carry the umbrellas and paint-boxes of all. Eventually,

should he come to that, it is doubtful if a proposition of marriage could

be made otherwise than before the assembled band! And marriage alone

could wrench the woman chosen away from the clinging bunch.

Kreisler, despite his snorting, went again with Volker. The female charm

had done its work. This gregarious female personality had shown such

frank invitation to Volker that had any separate woman exhibited half as

hospitable a front he would have been very alarmed. As it was, it had

at first just fulfilled certain bourgeois requirements of his lonely

German soul. Kreisler came a few weeks running to the Lipmann soirée.

Never finding Volker there, he left off going as well. He felt he had

been tricked and slighted. The ladies divined what had happened. Fräulein

Lipmann, the leader, put a spiteful little mark down to each of their

names.

CHAPTER IV

Kreisler pocketed Ernst’s hundred marks and made no further attempt on

the formerly hospitable income of his friend. Debts began accumulating.

Only he found he had grown suddenly timid with his creditors. The

concierge frightened him. He conciliated the garçon at the café, to whom

he owed money. He even paid several debts that it was quite unnecessary

to pay, in a moment of panic and weakness. A straitened week ensued. At

the Berne he had lost his nerve in some way; he clowned obsequiously on

some evenings, and, depressed and slack the next, perhaps, resented his

companions’ encores.

Next he gradually developed the habit of sitting alone. More often than

not he would come into the café and go to a table at the opposite side

of the room to that at which the Germans were sitting.

Ridicule is sighted at twenty yards, the spectator then, without the

sphere of average immediate magnetism. For once it does not matter,

but if persisted in it inevitably results in humour. Those who keep to

themselves awaken mirth as a cartwheel running along the road by itself

would. People feel with the “lonely” man that he is going about with some

eccentric companion—that is himself. Why did he choose this deaf-and-dumb

companion? What do they find to say? He is ludicrous as two men would be

who, perpetually in each other’s company, were never seen to exchange a

word—who dined together, went to theatre or café, without ever looking at

each other or speaking.

So Kreisler became a lonely figure. It was a strange feeling. He must

be quiet and not attract attention. He was marked in some way as though

he had committed a theft. Perhaps it was merely the worry of perpetual

“tick” beginning to tell. For the moment he would just put himself aside

and see what happened. He was afraid of himself too. Always up till then

immersed in that self, now for the first time he stood partly outside

it. This slight divorce made him less sure in his actions. A little less

careful of his appearance, he went sluggishly about, smoking, reading

the paper a great deal, working at the art school fairly often, playing

billiards with an Austrian cook whose acquaintance he had made in a café

and who disappeared owing him seven francs.

Volker had been a compendious phenomenon in his life, although his cheery

gold had attracted him to the more complete discovery. He had ousted

women, too, from Kreisler’s daily needs. He had become a superstition for

his tall friend.

It was Kreisler’s deadness, his absolute lack of any reason to be

confident and yet perfect aplomb, that mastered his companion. But this

acquired eventually its significance as well, for Kreisler. The inertia

and phlegm, outward sign of depressing everyday Kreisler, had found some

one for whom they were a charm and something to be envied. Kreisler’s

imagination woke shortly after Volker’s. It was as though a peasant

who had always regarded his life as the dullest affair, were suddenly

inspirited about himself by realizing some townsman’s poetic notion of

him. Kreisler’s moody wastefulness and futility had found a _raison

d’être_ and meaning.

Ernst Volker had remained for three vague years becalmed on this empty

sea. Kreisler basked round him, never having to lift his waves and clash

them together as formerly he had been forced sometimes to do. There had

been no appeals to life. Volker had been the guarantor of his peace. His

failure was the omen of the sinking ship, the disappearance of the rats!

Then they had never arrived at terms of friendship. It had been only an

epic acquaintanceship, and Kreisler had taken him about as a parasite

that he pretended not to notice.

There was no question, therefore, of a reproach at desertion. He merely

hopped off on to somebody else. Kreisler was more exasperated at this

than at the defection of a friend, who could be fixed down, and from whom

at last explanation must come. It was an unfair advantage taken. A man

had no right to accompany you in that distant and paradoxical fashion,

get all he could, become ideally useful, unless it was for life.

He watched Soltyk’s success with distant mockery. Volker’s loves were all

husks, of illogical completeness.

A man appeared one day in the Berne who had known Kreisler in Münich.

The story of Kreisler’s marrying his fiancée to his father then became

known. Other complications were alleged in which Otto’s paternity played

a part. The dot of the bride was another obscure matter. It was during

his aloofness. He looked the sort of man, the party agreed, who would

splice his sweetheart with his papa or reinforce his papa’s affairs with

a dot he did not wish to pay for at last with his own person. The Berne

was also informed that Kreisler had to keep seventeen children in Münich

alone; that he only had to look at a woman for her to become pregnant.

It was when the head of the column, the eldest of the seventeen, emerged

into boyhood, requiring instruction, that Kreisler left for Rome.

Since then a small society had been founded in Bavaria to care for

Kreisler’s offsprings throughout Germany. This great capacity of Otto’s

was, naturally, not admired; at the best it could be considered as a

misdirected and disordered efficiency. The stories pleased, nevertheless.

When he appeared that night his friends turned towards his historic

figure with cries of welcome. But he was not gregarious. He missed his

opportunity. He took a seat in the passage-way leading to the Bureau de

Tabac. As their laughter struck him through his paper he was unstrung

enough to be annoyed.

He frowned and puckered up his eyes, and two flushed lines descended

from his eyes to his jaw. On their way out one or two of his compatriots

greeted him:

“Sacred Otto! Why so unsociable?”

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

of—”

“Come, old Otto, a drink!”

He shook them off with mixture of affected anger and genuine spitting

oaths. He avoided their eyes and spat blasphemously at his beer. He

avoided the café for some days.

Kreisler then recovered.

At first nothing much happened. He had just gone back again into the

midst of his machinery like a bone slipped into its place, with a soft

crick. He became rather more firm with his creditors. He changed his

rooms (moving then to the Boulevard Pfeiffer), passed an occasional

evening with the Germans at the Berne, and started a portrait of Suzanne,

who had been sitting at the school.

“How is Herr Volker? Is he out of Paris?” Fräulein Lipmann asked him when

they met. “Come round and see us.”

People’s actual or possible proceedings formed in very hard-and-fast

mould in Kreisler’s mind, seen not with realism, but through conventions

of his suspicious irony. This solicitude as to Volker he contrasted with

their probable indifference as regards his old, shabby, and impolite self.

But he went round, his reception being insipid. He had shown no signs

of animation or interest in them. Both he and the ladies were rather

doubtful as to why he came at all. No pleasure resulted on either side

from these visits, yet they doggedly continued. A distinct and steady

fall in the temperature could be observed. He sneered, as though the

aimlessness of his visits were an insult that had at last been taken up.

They would have been for ever discontinued except for a sudden necessity

to reopen that channel of bourgeois intercourse.

CHAPTER V

On the first day of his letter being overdue, a convenient way of

counting, Otto rose late, from a maze of shallow dreams, and was soon

dressed, wanting to get out of his room.

As the clock struck one he slammed his door and descended the stairs

alertly. The concierge, on the threshold of her “loge,” peered up at him.

“Good morning, Madame Leclerc; it’s a fine day,” said Kreisler, in his

heavy French, his cold direct gaze incongruously ornamented by a cheerful

smile.

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

faint amiability.

“Yes, I have lost all sense of time. J’ai perdu le temps! Ha ha!” He

grinned mysteriously. The watch had gone the way of the dress clothes

some days already.

She followed him slowly along the passage, become extremely grave. “Quel

original! quel genre!” With a look of perplexed distrust she watched

him down the street.—This German good humour and sudden expansiveness

has always been a portentous thing to French people. Latin races are as

scandalized at northern amenities, the badness of our hypocrisies or

manners and total immodesty displayed, as the average man of Teutonic

race is with the shameful perfection of and ease in deceit shown by the

French neighbour. Kreisler, still beneath the eye of the concierge, with

his rhythmic martial tread, approached the restaurant. A few steps from

the threshold he slowed down, dragging his long German boots, which acted

as brakes.

The Restaurant Lejeune, like many others in Paris, had been originally a

clean, tranquil little creamery, consisting of a small shop a few feet

either way.—Then one customer after another had become more gluttonous.

He had asked, in addition to his daily glass of milk, for beefsteak and

spinach, or some other terrific nourishment, which the decent little

business at first supplied with timid protest. But perpetual scenes of

sanguine voracity—weeks of compliance with the most brutal and unbridled

appetites of man—gradually brought about a change in its character.—It

became frankly a place where the most carnivorous palate might be

palled. As trade grew, the small business had burrowed backwards into

the house—the victorious flood of commerce had burst through walls

and partitions, flung down doors, discovered many dingy rooms in the

interior that it instantly filled with serried cohorts of eaters. It had

driven out terrified families, had hemmed the apoplectic concierge in

her “loge,” it had broken out on to the court at the back in shed-like

structures. And in the musty bowels of the house it had established

a broiling, luridly-lighted, roaring den, inhabited by a rushing and

howling band of slatternly savages.—The chef’s wife sat at a desk

immediately fronting the entrance door. When a diner had finished, adding

up the bill himself on a printed slip of paper, he paid it there on his

way out. In the first room a tunnel-like and ill-lit recess furnished

with a long table formed a cul-de-sac to the left. Into this Kreisler

got. At the right-hand side the passage led to the inner rooms.

A mind feeling the need for things clean and clear cut would have been

better content, although demurring, with Kreisler’s military morning

suit, slashed with thick seams; carefully cut hair, short behind, a

little florid and bunched on the top; his German high-crowned bowler hat,

and plain cane, than the Charivari of the Art-fashion and uniform of The

Brush in those about him, chiefly students from the neighbouring Art

schools.

He was staring at the bill of fare when some one took the seat in front

of him.—He looked up, put down the card. A young woman was sitting there,

who now seemed waiting, as though Kreisler might be expected, after a

rest, to take up the menu again and go on reading it.

“Have you done with⸺? May I⸺?”

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

her, spoke in German.

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

He ordered his soup.—Usually this meal passed in surly impassible

inspection of his neighbours and the newspaper. Staring at and through

the figure in front of him, he spent several minutes. He seemed making up

his mind.

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

his order.

Contrary to custom, he sought for some appetizing dish, to change the

routine. Appetite had not woken, but he had become restless before

the usual dull programme. There were certain tracts of menu he never

explored. His eye always guided him at once to the familiar place where

the “plat du jour” was to be found, and the alternative sweets heading

the list. He now plunged his eye down the long line of unfamiliar dishes.

He fixed his eye on Jeanne with indecision too, and picked up the menu.

“My vis-à-vis is pretty!” he thought.

“Lobster salad, mayonnaise, and a pommes à l’huile, Jeanne,” he called

out.

This awakening to beauties of the menu brought with it a survey of his

neighbour. Vaguely, she must be connected with lobster salad. How could

that be?

First he was surprised that such a beautiful girl should be sitting

there. Beautiful people wander dangerously about in life, just like

ordinary folk. He appeared to think that they should be isolated like

powder magazines or lepers. This man could never leave good luck alone,

or reflect that that, too, was a dangerous vagrant. He could not quite

grasp that it was a _general_ good luck and easily explained phenomenon.

He had already been examined by the beautiful girl. Throwing an absent

far-away look into her eyes, she let them wander over him. Afterwards

she cast them down into her soup. As a pickpocket, after brisk work in

a crowd, hurries home to examine and evaluate his spoil, so she then

examined collectedly what her dreamy eyes had noted. This method was not

characteristic of her, but of the category of useful habits bequeathed

us, each sex having its own. Perhaps in her cloudy soup she beheld

something of the storm and shock that inhabited her neighbour.

Without preliminary reflection Kreisler found himself addressing her, a

little abashed when he suddenly heard his voice, and with eerie feeling

when it was answered.

“From your hesitation in choosing your lunch, gnädiges Fräulein, I

suppose you have not been long in Paris?”

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

the table for a moment.

“Allow me to give you some idea of what the menu of this restaurant is

like.” This was like a lesson. He started ponderously. “At the head of

each list you will find simple dishes; elemental dishes, I might call

them! (Elementalische plätter!) This is the rough material from which

the others are evolved. Each list is like an oriental dance. It gets

wilder as it goes along. In the last dish you can be sure that the

potatoes will taste like tomatoes, and the pork like a sirloin of beef.”

“_So!_” laughed the young woman, with good German guttural. “I’m glad to

say I have ordered dishes that head the list.”

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

certain haunt.”

“Good; I will avoid gigot.” She was indulgent to his clowning, and

drawled a little in sympathy. Between language and feeding, Kreisler

sought to gain the young lady’s confidence, adhering conventionally to

the progress of Creation.

He found his neighbour inclined to slight Nature. He, too, was a little

overlooked; in waiving of conventions being blandly forestalled. There

was something uncomfortable about all this. He must brace himself. He

realized with the prophetic logic of his hysteria, racing through the

syllogisms his senses divined, sensations now anachronisms, afterwards

recognized as they burst out in due course. This precocity in the

restaurant took him to the solution of what their coming together might

mean.

One plethoric impression of her was received—although _from_

her—instalment of a senseless generosity.

She wore a heavy black burnous, very voluminous and severe; a large

ornamental bag was on the chair at her side, which you expected to

contain herbs and trinkets, paraphernalia of the witch, rather than

powder, lip-cream, and secrets. Her hat was immense and sinuous;

generally she implied an egotistic code of advanced order, full of

insolent strategies.

Other women in the restaurant appeared dragged down and drained of

vitality by their clothes beside her, Kreisler thought, although she wore

so much more than they did. Her large square-shouldered and slim body

swam in hers like a duck.

When she laughed, this commotion was transmitted to her body as though

sharp, sonorous blows had been struck on her mouth. Her lips were

long, hard bubbles risen in the blond heavy pool of her face, ready to

break, pitifully and gaily. Grown forward with ape-like intensity, they

refused no emotion noisy egress if it got so far. Her eyes were large,

stubborn, and reflective, brown coming out of blondness. Her head was

like a deep white egg in a tobacco-coloured nest. She exuded personality

with alarming and disgusting intensity. It was an ostentation similar to

diamonds and gold watch-chains. Kreisler felt himself in the midst of a

cascade, a hot cascade.

She seemed to feel herself a travelling circus of tricks and wonders,

beauty shows and monstrosities. Quite used to being looked at, she

had become resigned to inability to avoid performing. She possessed

the geniality of public character and the genius of sex. Kreisler

was a strange loafer talked to easily, without any consciousness of

condescension.

Just as he was most out of his depth, Kreisler had run up against all

this! It all had the mellowness of sunset, and boomed in this small

alcove infernally.—By the fact of sex this figure seems to offer him a

traditional substantiality. He clutches at it eagerly as at something

familiar and unmetamorphosed—and somewhat unmetamorphosable—by Fate.

In the first flush he revolves with certain skill in this new _champ de

manœuvres_, executing one or two very pretty gymnastics. He has only to

flatter himself on the excellent progress, really, that he makes.

“My name is Anastasya,” she says irrelevantly to him, as if she had

stupidly forgotten, before, this little detail.

Whew! his poor ragged eyelashes flutter, a cloud of astonishment passes

grotesquely over his face; like the clown of the piece, he looks as

though he were about to rub his head, click his tongue, and give his

nearest man-neighbour an enthusiastic kick. “Anastasya!” It will be

“Tasy” soon!

He outwardly becomes more solemn than ever, like a merchant who sees

an incredible dupe before him, and would in some way conceal his

exhilaration. But he calls her carefully at regular intervals, Anastasya!

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

“I don’t want to work any more than is absolutely necessary. I am

overworked as it is, by living merely.” He could well believe it; she

must do some overtime! “If it were not for my excellent constitution⸺”

This was evidently, Kreisler felt, the moment to touch on the heaviness

of life’s burden; as her expression was perfectly even and non-committal.

“Ah, yes,” he sighed heavily, one side of the menu rising gustily and

relapsing, “Life gives one work enough.”

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

“Have you many friends here, Anastasya?”

“None.”—She laughed with ostentatious satisfaction at his funniness.

“I came here, as a matter of fact, to be alone. I want to see only

fresh people. I have had all the gusto and illusion I had lent all

round steadily handed back to me where I come from. ‘I beg your pardon!

Your property, ma’am!’ The result is that I am amazingly rich!—I am

tremendously rich!” She opened her eyes wide; Kreisler pricked up his

ears and wondered if this were to be taken in another sense. He cast down

his eyes respectfully. “I have the sort of feeling that I have enough to

go all round.—But perhaps I haven’t!”

Kreisler lingered over her first observation: “wanted to be alone.” The

indirect compliment conveyed (and he felt, when it was said, that he was

somewhere near the frontier, surely, of a German confidence) was rather

mitigated by what followed. The “having enough to go all round”; that was

very universal, and included him too easily in its sweep.

“Do you want to go all round?” he asked, with heavy plagiarism of her

accent, and solemn sentimental face.

“I don’t want to be mean.”

His eyes struggled with hers; he was easily thrown.

But she had the regulation feminine foible of charity, he reassured

himself, by her answer.

Kreisler’s one great optimism was a belief in the efficacy of women.—You

did not deliberately go there—at least, he usually did not—unless you

were in straits. But there they were all the time, vast dumping-ground

for sorrow and affliction—a world-dimensioned pawnshop, in which you

could deposit not your dress-suit or garments, but yourself, temporarily,

in exchange for the gold of the human heart. Their hope consisted, no

doubt, in the reasonable uncertainty as to whether you would ever be able

to take yourself out again. Kreisler had got in and out again almost as

many times as his “smokkin” in _its_ pawnshop.

Women were Art or expression for him in this way. They were Man’s

Theatre. The Tragedies played there purged you periodically of the too

violent accumulations of desperate life. There its burden of laughter

as well might be exploded.—Woman was a confirmed _Schauspielerin_ or

play-actress; but coming there for illusion he was willingly moved. Much

might be noticed in common between him and the drunken navvy on Saturday

night, who comes home bellicosely towards his wife, blows raining gladly

at the mere sight of her. He may get practically all the excitement and

exertion he violently needs, without any of the sinister chances a more

real encounter would present. His wife is “his little bit” of unreality,

or play. He can declaim, be outrageous to the top of his bent; can be

maudlin too; all conducted almost as he pleases, with none of the shocks

of the real and too tragic world. In this manner woman was the æsthetic

element in Kreisler’s life. Love, too, always meant unhappy love for

him, with its misunderstandings and wistful separations. He issued

forth solemnly and the better for it. He approached a love affair as the

_deutscher Student_ engages in a student’s duel—no vital part exposed,

but where something spiritually of about the importance of a nose might

be lost; at least stoically certain that blood would be drawn.

A casual observer of the progress of Otto Kreisler’s life might have said

that the chief events, the crises, consisted of his love affairs—such as

that unfortunate one with his present stepmother.—But, in the light of a

careful analysis, this would have been an inversion of the truth. When

the events of his life became too unwieldy or overwhelming, he converted

them into love, as he might have done, with specialized talent, into some

art or other. He was a sculptor—a German sculptor of a mock-realistic

and degenerate school—in the strange sweethearting of the “free-life.”

The two or three women he had left about the world in this way—although

perhaps those symbolic statues had grown rather characterless in Time’s

weather and perhaps lumpish—were monuments of his perplexities. After

weeks of growing estrangement, he would sever all relations suddenly one

day—usually on some indigestible epigram, that worried the poor girl

for the rest of her days. Being no adept in the science of his heart,

there remained a good deal of mystery for him about the appearance of

“Woman” in his life. He felt that she was always connected with its

important periods; he thought, superstitiously, that his existence was

in some way implicated with _dem Weib_. She was, in any case, for him,

a stormy petrel. He would be killed by a woman, he sometimes thought.

This superstition had flourished with him before he had yet found for it

much _raison d’être_.—A serious duel having been decided on in his early

student days, this reflection, “I am quite safe; it is not thus that I

shall die,” had given him a grisly coolness. His opponent nearly got

himself killed, because he, for his part, had no hard and fast theory

about the sort of death in store for him.

This account, to be brought up to date, must be modified. Since knowing

Volker, no woman had come conspicuously to disturb him. Volker had been

the ideal element of balance in his life.

But between this state—the minimum degree of friendship possible—a

distant and soothing companionship—and more serious states, there was no

possible foothold for Kreisler.

Friendship usually dates from unformed years. But Love still remains in

full swing long after Kreisler’s age at that time; a sort of spurious and

intense friendship.

* * * * *

An uncomfortable thing happened now. He realized suddenly all

the possibilities of this chance acquaintanceship, plainly and

cinematographically.—He was seized with panic.—He must make a good

impression.—From that moment he ran the risk of doing the reverse. For

he was unaccustomed to act with calculation.—There he was like some

individual who had gone nonchalantly into the presence of a prince;

who—just in the middle of the audience—when he would have been getting

over his first embarrassment—is overcome with a tardy confusion, the

imagination in some way giving a jump. It is the imagination, repressed

and as it were slighted, revenging itself.

Casting about desperately for means of handling the situation, he

remembered she had spoken of getting a dog _to guide her_.—What had she

meant? Anyway, he grasped at the dog. He could regain possession of

himself in romantic stimulus of this figure. He would be her dog! Lie at

her feet! He would fill with a merely animal warmth and vivacity the void

that _must_ exist in her spirit. His imagination, flattered, came in as

ally. This, too, exempted him from the necessity of being victorious.

All he asked was to be her dog!—only wished to impress her as a dog!

Even if she did not feel much sympathy for him now, no matter.—He would

humbly follow her up, put himself at her disposal, not be exigent. It was

a rôle difficult to refuse him. Sense of security the humility of this

resolution brought about caused him to regain a self-possession. Only it

imposed the condition, naturally, of remaining a dog.—Every time he felt

his retiring humbleness giving place to another sensation, he anew felt

qualms.

“Do you intend studying here, Fräulein?” he asked, with a new deference

in his tone—hardly a canine whine, but deep servient bass of the faithful

St. Bernard.—She seemed to have noticed this something new already, and

Kreisler on all fours evidently astonished her. She was inclined to

stroke him, but at the same time to ask what was the matter.

“A year or two ago I escaped from a bourgeois household in an original

manner. Shall I tell you about that, Otto?”

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

“Please!” he said, with reverent eagerness.

“Well, the bourgeois household was that of my father and mother.—I got

out of it in this way.—I made myself such a nuisance to my family that

they had to get rid of me.” Otto flung himself back in his chair with

dramatic incredulity. “It was quite simple.—I began scribbling and

scratching all over the place—on blotting-pads, margins of newspapers,

on my father’s correspondence, the wall-paper. I inundated my home with

troublesome images. It was like vermin; my multitude of little figures

swarmed everywhere. They simply _had_ to get rid of me.—I said nothing.

I pretended to be possessed. I got a girl-friend in Münich to write

enthusiastic letters: her people lived quite near us when we were in

Germany.”

Kreisler looked at her rather dully, and smiled solemnly, with really

something of the misplaced and unaccountable pathos and protest of dogs

(although still with a slavish wagging of the tail) at some pleasantry of

the master.—Her expansiveness, as a fact, embarrassed him very much at

this point. He was divided between his inclination to respond to it in

some way, and mature their acquaintance at once, and his determination to

be merely a dog. Yet he felt that her familiarity, if adopted, in turn,

by him, might not be the right thing. And yet, as it was, he would appear

to be holding back, would seem “reserved” in his mere humility. He was a

very perplexed dog for some time.

He remained dumb, smiling up at her with appealing pathos from time

to time. She wondered if he had indigestion or what. He made several

desperate dog-like sorties. But she saw he was clearly in difficulties—As

her lunch was finished, she called the waitress.—Her bill was made out,

Kreisler scowling at her all the while. Her attitude, suggesting, “Yes,

you _are_ funny, you know you are. I’d better go, then you’ll be better,”

was responded to by him with the same offended dignity as the drunken

man displays when his unsteadiness is observed. He repudiated sulkily

the suggestion that there was anything wrong. Then he grew angry with

her. His nervousness was her doing.—All was lost. He was very near some

violence.—But when she stood up, he was so impressed that he sat gaping

after her. He remained cramped in his place until she had left the

restaurant.

He moved in his chair stiffly; he ached as though he had been sitting

for his portrait. The analogy struck him. Had he been sitting for his

portrait? These people dining near him as though they had suddenly

appeared out of the ground—he was embarrassed at finding himself alone

with them. They knew all that had happened, but were pretending not to.

He had not noticed that they were there all round him, overbearing and

looking on. It was as though he had been talking to himself, and had just

become aware of it. A tide of magnetism had flowed away, leaving him

bare and stranded.—He cursed his stupidity. He then stopped this empty

mental racket abruptly.—Only a few minutes had passed since Anastasya’s

departure. He seized hat and stick and hurried up to the desk.—Once

outside he gave his glasses an adjusting pull, gazed up and down the

boulevard in all directions. No sign of the tall figure he was pursuing.

He started off, partly at a run, in the likeliest direction.—At the Café

Berne corner, where several new vistas opened, there she was, some way

down the Boulevard du Paradis, on the edge of the side-walk, waiting till

a tram had passed to cross. Having seen so much, should he not go back?

For there was nothing else to be done. To catch her up and force himself

on her could have only one result, he thought. He might, perhaps, follow

a little way. That was being done already.

They went on for some hundred yards, she a good distance ahead on the

other side of the boulevard. Walking for a moment, his eyes on the

ground, he looked up and caught her head pivoting slowly round. She no

doubt had seen him.—With shame he realized what was happening.—“Here I

am following this girl as though we were strangers! This is what I began

in the restaurant. I am putting the final touch by following her in the

street, as though we had never spoken!” Either he must catch her up at

once or vanish. He promptly turned up a side street, and circled round to

his starting-point.

CHAPTER VI

His nature would probably have sought to fill up the wide, shallow gap

left by Ernst and earlier ties either by another Ernst or, more likely,

a variety of matter. It would have been only a temporary stopping. Now a

gold crown, regal person, had fallen on the hollow.

But his nature was an effete machine and incapable of working on all that

glory. Desperate at dullness, he betook himself to self-lashings. He

would respond to utmost of weakened ability; with certainty of failure,

egotistically, but not at a standstill. Kreisler was a German who, by

all rights and rules of the national temperament, should have committed

suicide some weeks earlier. Anastasya became an _idée fixe_. He was a

machine, dead weight of old iron, that, started, must go dashing on.

His little-dog simile was veritably carried out in his scourings of the

neighbourhood, in hope of crossing Anastasya. But these “courses” gave

no result. Benignant apparition, his roughness had scared it away, and

off the earth, for ever. He entered, even infested, all painting schools

of the quarter. He rapidly pursued distant equivocal figures in streets

and gardens. Each rendered up its little quota of malignant hope, then

presented him with a face of monotonous strangeness.

It was Saturday when Kreisler was found preparing to take his valise

to the Mont de Piété. On the preceding evening he had paid one of his

unaccountable calls on Fräulein Lipmann, the first for some time. He had

a good reason for once. This _salon_ was the only place of comparatively

public assembly in the quarter he had not visited. Entering with his

usual slight air of mystification, he bent to kiss Fräulein Lipmann’s

hand in a vaguely significant fashion.

The blank reciprocal indifference of these calls was thus relieved. It

awoke a vague curiosity on one side, a little playful satisfaction on

the other. This might even have ripened into a sort of understanding and

bonhomie. He did not pursue it or develop the rôle. After a half-hour

of musing on the brink of a stream of conversation and then music, he

suddenly recognized something, flotsam bobbing past. It had bobbed past

before several times. He gradually became steadily aware of it. A dance

at the Bonnington Club, that would take place the following evening, was

the event that arrested him. Why was this familiar? Anastasya! Anastasya

had spoken of it. That was all he could remember. Would she be there?

He at once, and as though he had come there to do so, fished delicately

in this same stream of tepid chatter for an invitation to the dance.

Fräulein Lipmann, the fish he particularly angled for, was backward. They

did not seem to want him very much at the dance. Nevertheless, after an

hour of indefatigable manœuvring, the exertion of many powers seldom

put forth in that _salon_, he secured the form, not the spirit, of an

invitation.

Kreisler saw, in his alarmed fancy, Anastasya becoming welded into this

gregarious female personality. The energy and resource of the Devil

himself would be required to extricate her. She must be held back from

this slough for the moment he needed.

Was it too late to intercept her? But he felt he might do it. The eyes of

these ladies, so far dull with indifference, would open. He would be seen

as a being with a new mysterious function. He felt that Volker’s absence

from their _réunions_ was due to his not wishing to meet him. They, too,

must see that. Now the enigmatical and silent doggedness of these visits

would seem explained. He would appear like some unwieldy, deliberate

parasite got on to their indivisible body. The invitation given, he made

haste to go. If he stayed much longer it would be overlaid with all sorts

of offensive and effacing matter, and be hardly fit for use. A defiant

and jeering look on his face, he withdrew with an “Until to-morrow.”

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

CHAPTER VII

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

Suzanne stood at attention before him in the hall of the Mont de Piété.

If she had been inexorable before, she was now doubly so beneath the eyes

of the veritable officials. The sight of them, and the half-official

status of go-between and interpreter, urged her to ape-like importance.

With flushed and angry face, raised eyebrows, shocked at his questioning

the verdict, she repeated, “Five francs; it’s the most.”

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

She gave it him in silence, eyebrows still raised, eyes fixed, staring

with intelligent disapproval right in front of her. She did not look at

her eminent countrymen behind the large counter. But her intelligent and

significant stare, lost in space, was meant to meet and fraternize with

probable similar stares of theirs, lost in the same intelligent void.

Her face fixed in distended, rubicund, discontentedly resigned mask, she

walked on beside him, the turkey-like backward-forward motion of fat neck

marking her ruffled state. Kreisler sat down on a bench of the Boulevard

du Paradis, she beside him.

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

Kreisler was tired. He got up.

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

pawnbrokers.”

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

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

He pushed his moustache up and frowned pathetically.

“Où est Monsieur Volker?” she asked.

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

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

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

The portmanteau dragged along, he strode past a distant figure. Suzanne

saw him turn round and examine the stranger’s face. Then she lost sight

of them round a corner of the boulevard.

“Quel type!” she exclaimed to herself, nearly as the concierge had done.

She sauntered back home, giving Kreisler the benefit of several sour

reflections.

In a little room situated behind the Rue de la Gaieté, she pulled open

one of two drawers in her washstand, which contained a little bread,

tea, potatoes, and a piece of cold fish. She spread out a sheet of the

_Petit Parisian_ beside the basin. Having peeled the potatoes and put

them on the gas, she took off those outdoor things that just enabled

her to impart a turkey-like movement to her person. Then, dumpy, in a

salmon-check petticoat, her legs bowed backwards and her stomach stuck

out, she stood moodily at the window. A man she knew, now in the Midi,

sent her now and then a few francs.

This rueful spot, struck in image of this elementary dross of humanity,

was Kreisler’s occasional haunt. Cell of the unwieldy, tragic brain of

the city, with million other similar cells, representing overwhelming

uniform force of brooding in that brain, attracted him like a desert or

ocean.

He would listen solemnly, like a great judge, to Suzanne’s perpetual

complaints, sitting on the edge of her bed, hat on head. She was

so humble and so pretentious. Her imagination was arrogant and

constantly complaining. The form her complaints took was always that

of lies—needless, dismal lies. She could not grumble without inventing

and she never stopped grumbling. This, then, was one of Kreisler’s

dwellings. He lived at large. Some of his rooms, such as this, the Café

de Berne, and Juan Soler’s School of Art, he shared with others. On

very troubled days his body, like the finger of a weather-glass, would

move erratically. When found in Suzanne’s room it might be taken as an

indication of an unsettled state. A tendency to remain at home, on the

contrary, denoted mostly a state of equilibrium and peace.

CHAPTER VIII

The portmanteau fell under the bed; he crushed into the red bulbous

cover. Kreisler never sat on his bed except when going to get into it.

For another man it would have replaced the absent armchair. In those

moments of depression in which he did so he always, at once, felt more

depressed, or quite hopeless. Head between hands, he now stared at the

floor. Four or five hours! He must raise money, else he could not go to

the dance. How absurd, this fuss about such a sum! All the same, how the

devil could he get it?

“Small as it is, I shan’t get it,” he thought to himself. He began

repeating this stupidly, and stuck at word “shan’t.” His brain and mouth

clogged up, he stuttered thickly in his mind. He sprang up. But the

slovenly, hopeless quality of the bed clung to him. This was a frivolous

demonstration. He wandered to the window; stood staring out, nose

flattened against the pane.

The sudden quiet and idleness of his personality was an awakening after

the little nightmare of Suzanne. But it was not a refreshing one.

His portmanteau had always received certain consideration, as being,

next the dress-suit, the most dependable article among those beneath his

sway—to come to his aid if their common existence were threatened. He

had now thrown it under the bed with disgust. He and all his goods were

rubbish for the streets.

He sauntered from the window to the bed and back. Whenever he liked,

in a sense, he would open the door and go out; but still, _until_ then

(and _when_ would he “like”?) he was a poor prisoner. Outside, he took

some strength and importance from others. In here he touched bottom and

realized what the Kreisler-self was, with four walls round it.

His muscles were still full. They symbolized his uselessness. The

thought, so harsh and tyrannical, of his once more going to the window

and gazing down at the street beneath made him draw back his chair. He

sat midway in the room, looking steadily out at the housetops. But, like

his vigorous muscles and his deadness, there was the same contradiction;

his mechanical obstinacy as regards Anastasya and his comic activity at

present to get to a dance.

Comrades at painting school, nodding acquaintances, etc., were once more

run through. None valued his acquaintance at more than thirty centimes,

if that.

Perhaps Anastasya had left Paris? This solution, occurring sometimes,

had only made his activity during the last few days more mad and

mechanical—the pursuit of a shadow.

Ten minutes later, through a series of difficult clockwork-like actions,

he had got once more to Lejeune’s to have lunch. With disgust he took

what had been his usual seat latterly, at the table in the recess; the

one place, he was sure, Anastasya would never be found in again, wherever

else she might be found.

Lunch nearly over, he caught sight of Lowndes. “Hi, Master Lowndes!” he

called out—always assuming great bluffness and brutality, as he called

it, with English people, and laborious opposite to “stiffness.” “How do

you do?”

The moment his eye had fallen on “Master” Lowndes this friend’s

probable national opulence had occurred to him as a tantalizing fact.

No gross decision could be come to in that moment. Lowndes was called

to be kept there a little bit, while he turned things over and made

up his mind. This was an acquaintance existing chiefly on chaff and

national antithesis. It meant nothing to him. What matter if he were

refused? Lowndes not being a compatriot made it easier. Something must

be sacrificed. Lowndes’ acquaintanceship was a possession something

equivalent to a cheap ring, a souvenir. He must part with it, if

necessary.

Lowndes grinned at sight of Kreisler. He had finished his own lunch and

was just going off. He had almost forgotten his idea in coming to the

restaurant, that of seeing his German acquaintance. Swaying from side

to side on his two superlatively elastic calves, he sat down opposite

the good Otto, who leered back, blinking. He spoke German better than

Kreisler any other language, so they used that, after a little flourish

of English.

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

“No,” replied Kreisler. “I’m giving up painting and becoming a business

man. My father has offered me a position!”

This subject seemed no more important than his speech made it, and yet it

filled his life. Lowndes smiled correctly, not suspecting realities.

“Have you seen Douglas?” This was a friend through whom they had known

each other in Italy.

Why should this fellow lend him thirty francs? The grin would not be

there, he felt, had he been conscious that the other was thinking of

the contents of his pocket. Not humour, but a much colder stuff no

doubt mounted guard over his pocket-book, guarantee of this easiness

and health. Oh, the offensive prosperity of the English, smugness of

middle-class affluence! etc. etc.

Kreisler imagined the change that would come over this face when there

was question of thirty francs. Estrangement set in on his side already,

anger and humiliation at the imagined expression. This was of help. Here

was his chance of borrowing that very insignificant but illusive sum. The

man was already an enemy. He would willingly have knocked him on the head

and taken his money had they been in a quiet place.

The complacent health and humoristic phlegm with which he grinned and

perambulated through life charged Kreisler with the contempt natural

to his more stiff and human education. His relations with him hinging

on mild racial differences, he saw behind him the long line of all the

Englishmen he had ever known. “Useless swine,” he thought, “so pleased

with his cursed English face, and mean as a peasant!”

“Oh, I was asked for my opinion on a certain matter this morning. I was

asked what I thought of German women!”

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

“I didn’t know what to say. I suggested that my friend should come along

and get your opinion.”

“My opinion as an _expert_? My fees as an expert are heavy. I charge

thirty francs a consultation!”

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

surveyed him unsympathetically.

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

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

Prussians.”

Kreisler was thinking: “If I borrow the money, there must be some time

mentioned for paying back—next week, say. He would be more likely to lend

it if he knew where to find me. He must have my address.”

“Come and see me—some time,” he blinked. “52 Boulevard Pfeiffer, fourth

floor, just beside the restaurant here. You see? Up there.”

“I will. I looked you up at your old address a month or so ago; they

didn’t know where you’d gone.”

Kreisler stared fixedly at him—a way of covering discomfiture felt at

this news. The old address reminded him of several little debts there.

For this reason he had not told them where he was going. The concierge

would complain of her old tenant; probably, even, Lowndes might have been

shown derelict tradesmen’s bills. Not much encouragement for his proposed

victim!

Lowndes was writing on a piece of paper.

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

Kreisler looked at it rather fussily and said over: “5 Rue des Flammes.

Lowndes.” He hesitated and repeated the name.

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

“Are you in a hurry? Come and have a drink at the Berne,” Kreisler

suggested when he had made up his bill.

On the way Lowndes continued a discourse.

“A novelist I knew told me he changed the names of the characters in a

book several times in the course of writing it. It freshened them up,

according to him. He said that the majority of people were killed by

their names. I think a name is a man’s soul.”

Kreisler forged ahead, rhythmically and sullenly.

“If we had numbers, for instance, instead of names, who would take the

number thirteen?” Lowndes wondered in German.

“I,” said Kreisler.

“Would you?”

Every minute Kreisler delayed increased the difficulty. His energy was

giving out. They were now sitting on the _terrasse_ at the Berne. He

had developed a particular antipathy to borrowing. An immense personal

neurasthenia had grown up round this habit of his, owing to his late

discomfitures. He already heard an awkward voice, saw awkward eyes. Then

he suddenly concluded that the fact that Lowndes was not a German made it

more difficult, instead of less so, as he had thought. Why could he not

take?—why petition? He knew that if Lowndes refused he would break out;

he nearly did so as it was. With disgust and fatigue he lay back in his

chair, paying no attention to what Lowndes was saying. His mind was made

up. He would not proceed with his designs on this dirty pocket. He became

rough and monosyllabic. He wished to purify himself in rudeness of his

preceding amiability.

Lowndes had been looking at a newspaper. He put it down and said he must

go back to “work.” His “morning” had, of course, been interrupted by Tarr!

Kreisler still saw the expression on the Englishman’s face he had

imagined, and restrained with difficulty the desire to spit in it. The

nearness they had been to this demand must have affected, he thought,

even his impervious companion. He _had_ asked and been refused, to all

intents and purposes. He got up, left Lowndes standing there, and went

into the lavatory at the side of the café, where he had a thorough wash

in cold water.

* * * * *

Back at his table, he saw no sign of the Englishman, and sat down to

finish his drink, considering what his next move should be.

Various pursuits suggested themselves. He might go and offer himself

as model at some big private studios near the Observatoire. He could

get a week’s money advanced him? He would dress as a woman and waylay

somebody or other on the boulevards. He might steal some money. Volker

was the last. He came just after murder. He would go to Ernst Volker—he

with his little obstinate resolve in obscurity of his mind no longer

to be Kreisler’s acquaintance. Obstinacy in people of weak character

is the perfectly exasperating thing. They have no right to their

resoluteness—appearing weaker and meaner than ever in anomalous tenacity.

Volker, naturally submissive, had broken away and was posing somewhere as

a stranger. He felt physical disgust; this proceeding was indecent.

A spirit that has mingled with another, suddenly covering itself and

wishing to regain its strangeness, can be as indecent as a strange being

suddenly baring itself. A man’s being is never divined so completely

and pungently as when his friendship cools and he becomes once more a

stranger. This is one of the moments when the imagination, most awake,

sees best.

This little rat’s instinctive haste to separate from him was an ill omen:

what did he care for omens? he clamoured impatiently.

At this juncture in his reflections, from where he sat on the café

terrace he saw Volker’s back, as he supposed, disappearing round a

corner, as though trying to avoid a meeting. Blood came to his head with

a shock. He nearly sprang forward in pursuit of this unsociable form.

Rushing words of insult rose to his lips, he fidgeted on his seat, gazed

blankly at the spot where he had seen the figure. That it was no longer

there exasperated him beyond measure. It was as though he considered that

Ernst should have remained at the corner, immobile, with his back towards

him, a visible mark and fuel for anger. He made a sign to the waiter,

indicating that his drink would go into his “tick.” He then hurried off

in the direction of Volker’s house—the direction also that the back had

taken—determined to get something out of him. Kreisler, letting instinct

guide his steps, took the wrong turning—following, in fact, his customary

morning’s itinerary. He found himself suddenly far beyond the street

Volker lived in, near Juan Soler’s atelier. He gazed down the street

towards the atelier, then took off his glasses and began carefully wiping

them. While doing this he heard words of greeting and found Volker at his

elbow.

“Hallo! You look pretty hot. You nearly knocked me over a minute ago in

your haste,” he was saying.

Kreisler jumped—as the bravest might if, having stoutly confronted an

apparition, it suddenly became a man of flesh and blood. Had his glasses

been firmly planted on his nose things might have gone differently. He

frowned vacantly at Ernst and went on rubbing them.

Volker saw that something was wrong. It would have been to his advantage

also to “have out” anything that was there and have done with it. But in

his attitude German sluggishness seemed appealing to the same element in

Kreisler’s nature, claiming its support and sympathy.

“It’s dreadfully hot!” he said uneasily, looking round as though

examining the heat. He stepped up on to the pavement out of the way

of a horse-meat cart. The large-panelled conveyance, full of enormous

outlandish red carcases, went rushing down the street, carrying an

area of twenty yards of deafness with it. This explosion of sound had

a pacifying effect on Kreisler; it made him smile for some reason or

other. Volker went on: “I don’t know whether I told you about my show.”

“What show?” Kreisler asked rudely.

“In Berlin, you know. It has not gone badly. Our compatriots improve.

I’ve got a commission to paint the Countess Wort. What have you been

doing lately?” There was a forbidding pause. “I’ve intended coming round

to see you; but I’ve been sticking at home working. Have you been round

at the Berne?” He spoke rapidly and confidentially, as two business men

meeting in the street and always in a hurry might try and compress into a

few minutes, between two handshakes, a lot of personal news. He seemed to

wish to combine conviction that he was very anxious to tell Kreisler all

about himself and (by his hurried air) paralysis of the other’s intention

to have an explanation.

“I am glad you are going to paint the Countess Wort. I congratulate you,

Mr. Volker! I am in a hurry. Good day.”

Kreisler turned and walked towards the Atelier Juan Soler. For no reason

(except that it was impossible) he could not get money from Volker. It

was as though that money would not be real money at all. Supposing he

got it; the first place he tried to pass it the man would say, “This is

not money.” As for taking him to task, his red, correct face made it

impossible; it had suddenly become a lesson and exercise that it would be

ridiculous to repeat. He was not a schoolboy.

Volker walked away ruffled. He was mortified that, by apprehension of a

scene, he had been so friendly. The old Otto had scored. He, Volker, had

humiliated himself needlessly, for it was evident Kreisler’s manner had

been misinterpreted by him.

Kreisler had not intended going to Soler’s that day. Yet there he

was, presumably got there now to avoid Ernst Volker. He saw himself

starting up from the Berne a quarter of an hour before, steaming away in

pursuit of a skulking friend—impetus of angry thought carrying him far

beyond his destination; then Volker comes along and runs him into the

painting school. He compared himself to one of those little steam toys

that go straight ahead without stopping; that any one can take up and

send puffing away in the opposite direction. Humouring this fancy, he

entered the studio with the gaze a man might wear who had fallen through

a ceiling and found himself in a strange room in midst of a family

circle. The irresponsible, resigned, and listless air signified whimsical

expectancy. Some other figure would rise up, no doubt, and turn him

streetwards again?

A member of the race which has learnt to sleep standing up posed on the

throne. He had suddenly come amongst brothers. He was as torpid as she,

as indifferent as these mechanical students. The clock struck. With a

glance at the _massier_, the model slowly and rhythmically abandoned her

rigid attitude, coming to life as living statues do in ballets; reached

stiffly for her chemise. The dozen other figures, who had been slowly

pulsing—advancing or retreating, suspended around her yellowness—now

laboriously moved, relapsing aimlessly here and there, chiefly against

walls.

He had been considering a fat back and especially a parting carried

half-way down the back of the head. Why should not its owner, and

gardener, he had reflected, continue it the whole distance down, dividing

his head in half with a line of white scalp? This man now turned on him

sudden, unsurprised, placid eyes. Had he _eyes_, as well as a parting, at

the back of his head? Kreisler felt on the verge of courteous discussion

as to whether that parting should or should not be gone on with till it

reached the neck.

Three had struck. He left and returned to the neighbourhood of the Berne

by the same and longest route, as though to efface in some way his

previous foolish journey.

Every three or four hours vague hope recurred of the delayed letter, like

hunger recurring at the hour of meals. He went up to the loge of his

house and knocked.

“Il n’y a rien pour vous!”

Four hours remained. The German party was to meet at Fräulein Lipmann’s

after dinner.

CHAPTER IX

Otto’s compatriots at the Berne were sober and thoughtful, with

discipline in their idleness. Their monthly moneys flowed and ebbed,

it was to be supposed, small regular tides frothing monotonously in

form of beer. This rather desolate place of chatter, papers, and airy,

speculative business had the charm of absence of gusto.

Kreisler was ingrainedly antiquated, purer German. He had experienced

suddenly home-sickness, that often overtakes voluntary exiles at the

turn of their life—_his_ being, not for Germany, exactly, but for the

romantic, stiff ideals of the German student of his generation. It was

a home-sickness for his early self. Like knack of riding a bicycle or

anything learnt in youth, this character was easily assumed. He was

gradually discovering the foundations of his personality. Many previous

moods and phases of his nature were mounting to the surface.

Arrived in front of the Café Berne, he stood for fifteen minutes looking

up and down the street, at the pavement, his watch, the passers-by. Then

he chose the billiard-room door to avoid the principal one, where he

usually entered.

All the ugly familiarity of this place, he hated with methodic,

deliberate hatred; taking things one by one, as it were, persons and

objects. The _garçon’s_ spasmodic running about was like a gnat’s energy

over stagnation.

Passing from the billiard-room to a gangway with several tables, his

dull, exasperated eye fell on something it did not understand. How could

it be expected to understand? It was an eye and it stuck. It was simple,

though. It was amazed and did not understand.

_Anastasya._

Set in the heart of this ennui, it arrested the mind like a brick

wall some carter drowsed on his wagon. Stopping dead, Kreisler stared

stupidly. Anastasya was sitting there with Soltyk. With Soltyk! He seemed

about to speak to them—they, at least, were under this impression. Quite

naturally he was about to do this, like a child. As though in intense

abstraction, he fixed his eyes on them. Then he took a step towards them,

possibly with the idea of sitting down beside them. Consciousness set in,

with a tropic tide of rage, and carried him at a brisk pace towards the

door, corresponding to the billiard-room door, on the other side of the

café. Yet in the midst of this he instinctively raised his hat a little,

his eyes fixed now on his feet.

He was in a great hurry to get past the two people sitting there. This

could not be done without discovering two inches of the scalp for a

moment—as an impatient man in a crush, wishing to pass, pushes another

aside, raising his hat at the same time to have the right to be rude.

Same table on _terrasse_ as an hour before. But Kreisler seemed sitting

on air, or one of those wooden whirling platforms in the fêtes.

The _garçon_, with a femininely pink, virile face which, in a spirit of

fun, he kept constantly wooden and solemn except when, having taken your

order, he winked or smiled—came up hastily.

“Was wünschen Sie?” he asked, wiping the table with a serviette. He had

learned a few words of German from the customers. Supposing Kreisler

rather a touchy man, he always attempted to put him at his ease, as the

running of bills was valuable to him. He had confidence in this client,

and wished the bill to assume vague and profitable proportions.

Kreisler’s thoughts dashed and stunned themselves against this waiter.

His mind stood stock-still for several minutes. This pink wooden face

paralysed everything. As its owner thought “the young man” was having a

joke with him, it became still more humorously wooden. The more wooden

it became, the more paralysed became Kreisler’s intelligence. He stared

at him more and more oddly, till the _garçon_ was forced to laugh. As

a matter of fact, Kreisler mentally was steadying himself on this hard

personality. As he had appeared to walk deliberately with hot intention

to his seat, so he seemed gazing deliberately at the waiter and choosing

his drink. Then the dam gave way. He hated this familiar face; his

thought smashed and buffeted it. Such commercial modicum of astute good

nature was too much. It was kindness that only equilibrium could ignore.

The expression of his own face became distorted. The _garçon_ fixed him

with his eye and took a step back, with dog-like doubt, behind the next

table.

Anastasya had smiled in a very encouraging way as he passed. This

had offended him extremely. Soltyk—Anastasya; Soltyk—Anastasya. That

was a bad coupling! His sort of persecution mania seized him by the

throat. This had done it! Soltyk, who had got hold of Volker and was

the something that had interfered between that borrowable quantity and

himself, occupied a position not unsimilar to his stepmother. Volker and

his father, who had kept him suspended in idleness, and who now both were

withdrawing or had withdrawn like diminishing jets of water, did not

attract the full force of his indolent, tragic grumpiness.

Behind Ernst and his parent Soltyk and his stepmother stood.

A certain lonely and comic ego all people carry about with them, who is

always dumb except when they get drunk or become demented. It then talks,

never sincerely, but in a sort of representative, pungent way. This ego

in Kreisler’s case would not have been shameless and cynical if it had

begun to grumble about Volker. It would have said, “Hang that little

Ernst! I come to Paris, I am ashamed to say, partly for him. But the

little swine-dog has given me the go-by. Hell take his impudence! I don’t

like that swine-dog Soltyk! He’s a slimy Russian rascal!” It would not

have said: “I’ve lost the access to Ernst’s pocket. The pig-dog Soltyk is

sitting there!”

In any case his vanity too was hurt.

Anastasya now provided him with an acceptable platform from which his

vexation might spring at Soltyk. There was no money or insignificant male

liaison to stuff him down into grumpiness. “Das Weib” was there. All was

in order for unbounded inflammation.

He wanted to bury his fear in her hot hair; he wanted to kiss her lips

as he had never kissed any woman’s; all the things he wanted—! But what

would Soltyk be doing about it? He had met her alone, and that was all

right and not impossible with a world made by their solitary meeting in

the restaurant. He had lived with her instinctively in this solitary

world of he and she. It was quite changed at present. Soltyk had got into

it. Soltyk, by implication, brought a host of others, even if he did

not mean that he was a definite rival there himself. What was he saying

to her now? Sneers and ridicule, oceans of sneers directed at himself,

more than ten thousand men could have discharged, he felt, certainly

were inundating her ear. His stepmother-fiancée, other tales, were being

retailed. _Everything_ that would conceivably prejudice Anastasya, or

would not, he accepted as already retailed. There he sat, like a coward.

He was furious at their distant insulting equanimity.

A breath of violent excitement struck him, coming from within. He stirred

dully beneath it. She was there; he had only put a thin partition between

them. His heart beat slowly and ponderously. “On hearing what the swine

Soltyk has to say she will remember my conduct in the restaurant and

my appearance. She will make it all fit in. And, by God, it does fit

in! Himmel! Himmel! there’s nothing to be done! Anything I did, every

movement, would only be filling out the figure my ass-tricks have cut for

her!”

He was as conscious of the interior, which he could not see from his

place on the street, as though, passing through, he had just found the

walls, tables, chairs, painted bright scarlet. He felt he had left a

wake of seething agitation in his passage of the café. Passing the two

people inside there had been the affair of a moment, not yet grasped.

This experience, apparently of the past, was still going on. The sense’s

picture, even, was not yet complete. New facts, details, were added every

moment. He was still passing Anastasya and Soltyk. He sat on, trembling,

at the door. There were other exits. She might be gone. But he forgot

about them.

How he had worried himself about the pawned suit. Fate had directed him

there to the café to save him the trouble of further racking his brains

about it. Should he leave Paris? But he was mutinous. The occurrence of

this idea filled him with suspicions.

The fit was over; reaction had set in. He was eyeing himself obliquely in

the looking-glass behind his head.

He almost jumped away at two voices beside him, and the thrilling sound

of a dress; it was as though some one had spoken with his own voice.

It seemed all round him, attacking him. The thin, ordinary brushing of

a skirt was like the low breathing of a hidden animal to a man in the

forest. He felt they were coming to speak to him—just as they had thought

that he was. The nerves on that side of his head twitched as though

shrinking from a touch.

They were crossing the _terrasse_ to the street. His heart beat a slow

march. Her image there had become used. The reality, in its lightning

correction of this, dug into his mind. There once more the real figure

had its separate and foreign life. He was disagreeably struck by a

certain air of depression and cheerlessness in the two figures before

him. This one thing that should have been pleasant, displeased him. He

was angry as though she had been shamming melancholy.

They were not talking, the best proof of familiarity. A strange figure

occurred to him; he felt like a man, with all organs, bones, tissues

complete, but made of cheap perishable stuff, who could only live for a

day and then die of use.

This image, reality now before him, had drawn out all his energy, like

a distinct being nourished by him. The image, intact in his mind, had

returned him more or less the vigour spent. Her listlessness seemed a

complement of the weakness he now felt. Energy was ebbing away from both.

He stared with bloodshot eyes. Then he got up and began walking after

her. Soltyk, on hearing steps, turned round; but he made no remark to

Anastasya. They crossed the street and got into a passing tram. Otto

Kreisler went back to the café.

It was like returning to some hall where there had been a banquet to

find empty chairs, empty bottles, and disorder. The vacant seats around

seemed to have been lately vacated. Then there was the sensation of

being left behind. The Café Berne was a solitary and antediluvian

place. Everything began to thrust itself upon him—the people, street,

insignificant incidents—as though this indifferent life of facts, in the

vanishing of the life of the imagination, had now become important, being

the only thing left. Common life seemed rushing in and claiming him, and

emphasizing his defeat and the new condition thus inaugurated. He went to

Lejeune’s for dinner. During the whole day he had been in feverish hurry,

constantly seeing time narrowing in upon him. Now he had a sensation of

intolerable leisure.

The useless ennui of his life presented itself to him for the

thousandth time, but now clearly. This fact seemed to have been waiting

with irritating calm, as though to say, “As soon as you can give me

your attention?—Well, what are you going to do with me?” For he had

compromised himself irretrievably. He knew that sooner or later he must

marry and settle down with this stony fact, multiply its image. Things

had gone too far.

And how about his father? What was that letter going to contain? His

father had got a certain amount of pleasure out of him. Otto had

satisfied in him in turn the desire of possession (that objects such

as your watch, your house, which could equally well belong to anybody,

do not satisfy), of authority (that servants do not satisfy), of

self-complacency (that self does not): had been to him, later, a kind

of living cinematograph and travel-book combined; and, finally, had

inadvertently lured with his youth a handsome young woman into the

paternal net. But he knew that he could procure no further satisfaction

to this satiated parent. He could be henceforth a source only of

irritation and expense.

After dinner he walked along the boulevard. The dark made him

adventurous. He peered into cafés as he passed. He noticed it was already

eight. Supposing he should meet some of the women on the way to Fräulein

Lipmann’s? He made a movement as though to turn down a side-street

and hide himself at thought of possible confrontation. Next moment he

was walking on obstinately in the direction of the Lipmann’s house.

His weakness drew him on, back into the vortex. Anything, death, and

annihilation, was better than going back into that terrible colourless

mood. His room, the café, waited for him like executioners. He had

escaped from it for a time. Late agitations had given him temporary

freedom, to which he was now committed. Dressed as he was, extremely

untidy, he would go to Fräulein Lipmann’s flat. Only humiliation he knew

awaited him in that direction. If Anastasya were there (he would have

it that she would be found wherever he least would care to see her)

then anything might happen. But he wanted to suffer still more by her;

_physically_, as it were, under her eyes. That would be a relief from

present suffering. He must look in her eyes; he must excite in her the

maximum of contempt and dislike. He wanted to be in her presence again,

with full consciousness that his mechanical idyll was barred by Fate. Not

strong enough to leave things as they were, he could not go away with

this incomplete and, physically, uncertain picture behind him. It was as

though a man had lost a prize and wanted written and stamped statement

that he had lost it. He wished to shame her. If he did not directly

insult her, he would at least insult her by thrusting himself on her.

Then, at height of her disgust, he would pretend again to make advances.

As to the rest of the party, a sour glee possessed him at thought of

_their_ state by the time he had done with them. He already saw their

faces in fancy when he should ring their bell and present himself,

old morning suit, collar none too clean, dusty boots. All this

self-humiliation and suffering he was preparing for himself was wedded

with the thought of retaliation. Kreisler’s schooldays could have

supplied him with a parallel if he could have thought just then. He saw a

curious scene proceeding beneath a desk in class. The boy next to him had

jabbed his neighbour in the hand with a penknife. The latter, pale with

fury, held his hand out in sinister invitation, hissing, “Do it again!

do it again!” The boy next to Kreisler complied. “Do it again!” came

still fiercer. He seemed to want to see his hand a mass of wounds and

delect himself with the awful feeling of his own rage. Kreisler did not

know how he should wipe out this debt with the world, but he wanted it

bigger, more crushing. The bitter fascination of suffering drew him on to

substitute real wounds for imaginary.

Near Fräulein Lipmann’s house he rubbed his shoulder against a piece of

whitewashed wall with a grin. He went rapidly up the stairs leading to

her flat on the entresol, considering a scheme for the commencement of

the evening. This seemed so happy that he felt further resourcefulness in

misconduct would not be wanting.

PART III

BOURGEOIS-BOHEMIANS

CHAPTER I

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.

CHAPTER II

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.

PART IV

A JEST TOO DEEP FOR LAUGHTER

CHAPTER I

With a little scratching (as the concierge pushed it) with the malignity

of a little, quiet, sleek animal, the letter from Germany crept under the

door the next morning, and lay there through the silence of the next hour

or two, until Kreisler woke. Succeeding to his first brutal farewells

to his dreams, no hopes leapt on his body, a magnificent stallion’s,

uselessly refreshed. Soon he saw the letter. It lay there quiet,

unimportant, rather matter of fact and sly.

Kreisler felt it an indignity to have to open it. Until his dressing was

finished, it remained where it was. He might have been making some one

wait. Then he took it up, and opening it, drew out between his forefinger

and thumb, the cheque. This he deposited with as much contempt as

possible, and a “phui” on the edge of his washhand stand. Then he turned

to the letter. He read the first few lines, pumping at a cigarette,

reducing it mathematically to ash. Cold fury entered his mind with a

bound at the first words. They were the final words giving notice of a

positive stoppage of supplies. This month’s money was sent to enable him

to settle up his affairs and come to Germany at once.

He read the first three lines over and over again, going no further,

although the news begun in these first lines was developed throughout

the two pages of the letter. Then he put it down beside the cheque, and

crushing it under his fist, said monotonously to himself, without much

more feeling than the sound of the word contained: “Schwein, Schwein,

Schwein!”

He got up, and pressed his hand on his forehead; it was wet: he put his

hands in his pockets and these came into contact with a cinquante centime

piece. He took them out again slowly, went to his box and underneath an

old dressing-gown found writing paper and envelopes. Then, referring to

his father’s letter for the date, he wrote the following lines:

“_7th June 19—_

“SIR,—I shall not return as you suggest in person, but my

body will no doubt be sent to you about the middle of next

month. If—keeping to your decision—no money is sent, it being

impossible to live without money, I shall on the seventh of

July, this day next month, shoot myself.

“OTTO KREISLER.”

Within half an hour this was posted. Then he went and had breakfast

with more tranquillity and relish than he had known for some days. He

sat up stiffly like a dilapidated but apparently in some way satisfied

rooster at his café table. This life was now settled, pressure ceased.

He had come to a conventional and respectable decision. His conduct the

night before, for instance, had not been at all respectable. Death—like

a monastery—was before him, with equivalents of a slight shaving of

the head merely, a handful of vows, some desultory farewells, very

restricted space, but none the worse for that; with something like the

disagreeableness of a dive for one not used to deep water. But he had got

into life, anyhow, by mistake; _il s’était trompé de porte_. His life

might almost have been regarded as a long and careful preparation for

voluntary death. The nightmare of Death, as it haunted the imaginations

of the Egyptians, had here been conjured in another way. Death was not

to be overcome with embalmings and Pyramids, or fought within the souls

of children. It was confronted as some other more uncompromising race

(and yet also haunted by this terrible idea) might have been.

Instead of rearing smooth faces of immense stone against it, you imagine

an unparalleled immobility in life, a race of statues, throwing flesh in

Death’s path instead of basalt. Kreisler would have undoubtedly been a

high priest among this people.