The sudden quiet and idleness of his personality was an awakening after the little nightmare of Suzanne. But it was not a refreshing one at all.
That portmanteau was a disillusion: it 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. With disgust he had cast it beneath the bed, and now observing its strap, he reflected that he and all his goods were rubbish for the gutters.
He sauntered from the window to the bed and back. Whenever he liked, in a sense, he could open the door and go out; but still, until then (and when would he like?) he was a poor prisoner. Outside the Mensch took some strength and importance from others: but truly, in here, he could be said to touch bottom and to realize what the Kreisler-self was, with four walls round it.
The thought of once more going over to the window and gazing down upon the street beneath made him draw back his chair: he sat midway in the room, looking steadily out at the depressing fleece of the stationary clouds, dusty city clouds a little yellow in the joints.
Comrades at the painting school, nodding acquaintances, even waiters and waitresses, were once more run through: but between them this unworthy crowd did not muster, even from the most optimistic angle, a solitary franc.
Perhaps Anastasya had left Paris? At regular intervals he thought of that: this solution had only made his activity during the last few days more pointless and mechanical, it converted it into the pursuit of a shadow.
A quarter of an hour had passed: through a series of difficult clockwork-like actions, he had got once more to Vallet’s to have lunch. With disgust he took what had been latterly his usual seat, at the table in the recess; it was the one place, he was sure, in which Anastasya would never be discovered again, wherever else she might be encountered.
Lunch passed in a dull munching. Got to the coffee, he caught sight of Lowndes.
‘Hi! Master Lowndes!’ he called out—always assuming great bluffness and brutality, as he called it, with english people. ‘How do you do sir!’
The moment his eye had fallen upon Master Lowndes, the probable national opulence of this acquaintance had occurred to him as a tantalizing fact. All the wealth of the Indies festered in the pockets of this Englishman. 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 in his mind and settled the moment and mode of the Angriff. Their acquaintance, such as it was, throve on national antithesis. There was not much in that: but you never knew. He had never tapped an Englishman. Ah! A good start!
Lowndes had finished his own lunch, and was just going off. At the sight of the German he grinned: he had almost forgotten his idea in coming to the Restaurant, that of seeing just this acquaintance. Swaying from side to side on his two superlatively elastic calves, he sat down opposite the good Otto, who leered back, blinking.
Lowndes spoke german fairly well, so they used that, after a little flourish of english.
‘Well, what have you been doing? Working?’
‘No’ replied Kreisler truthfully. Then he added: ‘I’m giving up painting and becoming a business man. My father has offered me a position!’
Lowndes smiled correctly, not suspecting that this statement had any sentimental weight beyond what it purported to tell.
‘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? Why should he not? Kreisler’s new type of touchiness began to operate. The grin he was looking at would not be there were this person conscious of Otto’s designs. Why should it? But oh that offensive prosperity of the English, the smugness of their middleclassishness, the wonderbearing Schweinerei of their shopkeepingness! Pfui!
Kreisler pictured the change that would come over this face when he popped the question. Anger and humiliation at the imagined expression overcame him. The man was an enemy: had they been in a quiet place he would have knocked him on the head and taken his money.
The complacent health and humoristic phlegm with which this kind grinned and perambulated through life charged Kreisler with the contempt natural to his more stiff education. He saw behind Lowndes the long line of all the Englishmen he had ever known. ‘Useless swine!’ he thought. ‘So cheerful over his average middlingness and mean as a peasant I bet!’
‘Oh I was asked for my opinion on a certain matter this morning: someone asked what I thought of german women—!!’
‘What reply did you make Mr. Lowndes?’
‘I didn’t know what to say. I was really stumped. I suggested that my friend should come along and get your opinion.’
‘My opinion as an expert—do I understand you? My fees as an expert are fairly considerable. I charge thirty francs a consultation!’
‘I’m sure he’d have paid that’ Lowndes laughed with innocence. 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 it there must be some time mentioned for paying back—next week say, next week. Where? More likely to lend if he knew where. He must have my address.
‘Come and see me—some time.’ Kreisler blinked. ‘Eighty-eight Boulevard Kreutzberg, fourth floor. It’s beside the Restaurant, just here. You see? Up there.’
‘I will. I looked you up at your old address a month or so ago. Where was that? They said they didn’t know where you’d gone.’
Kreisler stared at him very fixedly. The old address reminded him of several little debts. On that account he had not told the concierge where he was going. The concierge would complain of her old tenant. Even Lowndes might have been shown derelict tradesmen’s bills. Not much encouragement for his proposed victim! Na!
Lowndes was writing on a piece of paper.
‘There’s my address, Rue des Quatre Années.’
Kreisler inspected it fussily and said over—‘cinq, rue des Quatre Années. Lowndes—.’ He hesitated and then 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’ suggested Kreisler. He made up his bill hurriedly.
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 freshens them up, according to him; he said that the majority of people were killed by their names.’
‘Killed, yes.’ Kreisler nodded.
‘I think a name is a man’s soul.’
‘Which? I don’t understand you.’
Kreisler forged ahead, rhythmically and sullenly.
‘If we had numbers, for instance, instead of names, who would take the number thirteen?’
‘I’ said Kreisler.
‘Would you?’
Every minute Kreisler delayed popping the question increased the difficulty because his energy was giving out. Everything depended upon the first shot. It was hit or miss. Your voice had to be so modulated—but he yawned nervously. They were now sitting on the terrace at the Berne. An immense personal neurasthenia had grown up round this simple habit. Borrowing was no longer what it had been! Why Herrgott could he not take! Why petition? He knew that if Lowndes refused he would break out, there would be a scene—he nearly did so as it was.—With disgust and fatigue he lay back in his chair, paying no attention to what Master Bob Wooton 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, and wash out the traces of his earlier civility.
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.
Kreis
ler as he looked doggedly up still saw the expression on the Englishman’s face that he had prefigured as he had prepared to pop the question. Pfui! he with difficulty curbed the desire to spit in it. The nearness they had been to this demand must have affected, he thought, even his thickhided Tor of a companion. He had asked and been refused to all intents and purposes. He got up, left Lowndes standing there, and went into the lavatory of the Café. There he spat and spat and spat. Afterwards he had a hand-wash, and brushed his prickly scalp with vigour. That was good, that was good.
He returned to the Café table: there was no sign of the Englishman. He had gone off bad luck to him! As well for him! Now he could finish his drink in peace, deciding what the next move should be.
Various pursuits suggested themselves. Might he not go and offer himself as model at some big private studios near the Observatoire?* A week’s money might be advanced him. He would dress as a woman and waylay somebody or other on the lonely Boulevards in the early hours: it was often done. He would crouch down and have a big hat. He might steal some money anyway. Vokt was the last: he came just after murder. He would go to Ernst Vokt—Ernst with his little obstinate resolve in the obscurity of his mind no longer to be Kreisler’s acquaintance. The perfectly exasperating thing that this obstinacy was in that weak character, something that was out of place to the nth degree! In people of weak character—what an offence! They have no right to resoluteness, does not tenacity make them look more weak and mean than the strong can bear? The submissive Vokt had broken away, somewhere he was posing as a stranger. This proceeding was indecent—pfui! And again pfui!
The massive wrinkled brow of this ‘thinking’ Mensch exhibited the big-dog pathos of his heavily-thinking german kind, as he sat and experienced this classic disgust, of a spirit against another with whom he has mingled, but which other suddenly covers and decks itself, wishing to regain its strangeness. It was as a protest against this strangeness that he uttered his customary pfui! A strange being suddenly baring itself provokes our pfuis! and the opposite operation has the same effect. Then the imagination wakes and the eye sees best: it is the classical situation when friendship cools and the friend becomes a stranger. His irritated eye fixed upon this transformation, Kreisler watched, through fancy’s telescope, the distant and ill-omened haste of the departing rat: when suddenly he no longer, so it seemed, had need of his far-glass, for the naked eye struck, from where he sat beneath the Café awning, the familiar back of the object of his thoughts. There was the Vokt-back—surely it must be his!—disappearing round a corner, as though trying to avoid a meeting.
The blood rushed into his head with force, his body started, to spring forward in pursuit of this unsociable shape. Rushing words of insult were spawned on his struggling silent lips, he fidgeted in a sort of static fit, gazing blankly at the spot where he had seen the figure. That it was no longer there galled him beyond measure: it was as though he had considered Ernst as in duty bound to remain at the corner, immobile, his back towards him, a visible target and food for his anger. He made a sign to the waiter, to indicate that his drink would go into his ‘tick’ account,* the waiter nodding shortly without moving: he then at full steam headed for Vokt’s house—the direction also that the back had taken—resolved to force something out of him.
Kreisler, letting instinct guide his steps, took the wrong turning, following in fact his customary morning track. Suddenly he found himself some distance beyond Vokt’s street, near Juan Soler’s Academy. He gazed down it towards the Atelier,* then took off his glasses and began carefully wiping them. While doing this he heard words of greeting and found Vokt at his elbow.
‘Hallo! You look rather hot. You nearly knocked me over a minute ago in your haste’ Ernst 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 his disaffected chum and went on rubbing them.
Vokt saw something was wrong. To ‘have it out’ and have done with it would perhaps be best, but he was sluggish.
‘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 chariot.* The large panelled conveyance, full of outlandish red carcases of large draught horses, went rushing down the street, bearing with it an area of twenty yards of deafness. This explosion of sound had a pacifying effect upon Kreisler; it made him smile for some reason or other: and Vokt went on:
‘I don’t know whether I told you about my show.’
‘What show?’ asked Kreisler rudely.
‘In Berlin you know. It has not gone badly. Our compatriots improve—. I believe we’re an artistic nation—what do you think? No? I’ve got a commission to paint the Baroness Wort-Schrenck. What have you been doing lately?’ There was a refractory 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 though they had been two breathless stockbrokers meeting in the street at the busiest period of the day compressing into a few minutes, between two handshakes, a lot of domestic news. He sought to combine conviction that he was very anxious to tell Kreisler all about himself, and (by his hurried air) paralysis of the other’s desire to have an explanation.
‘I am glad you are going to paint the Baroness Wort-Schrenck. I congratulate you Mr. Vokt! I am in a hurry. Good day.’
Kreisler turned and walked towards the Juan Soler Academy. For no reason, except that it was impossible, he could not get money from Vokt: it was as though that money would not be real money at all. Supposing he got some money from him; 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 quite out of the question; it had suddenly become a lesson and exercise that it would be ridiculous to repeat. He was not a schoolboy.
Vokt walked away ruffled: he was mortified now because, through apprehension of a scene, he had been so friendly. The old Otto had scored: he, Vokt, had humiliated himself needlessly, for it was evident Kreisler’s manner had been misinterpreted by him, there had after all been no danger, since he had gone off so quickly of his own accord.
Kreisler had not intended going to Soler’s that day; yet there he was, presumably got there now to avoid Ernst Vokt. Pfui—noch einmal! with astonishment he saw himself starting up from the Berne a quarter of an hour before, steaming away in pursuit of that skulking truant—impetus of angry thought carrying him far beyond his destination; when lo and behold (oh irony of the Schicksal!) Vokt comes along pat and runs him into the painting school! He compared himself to one of those little nursery locomotives that go straight ahead without stopping; that anyone 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 apartment in the midst of a family circle. The irresponsible, the resigned and listless air signified whimsical expectancy. He was a thing, scarcely any longer a Mensch,—though if given a good push he could show what he was made of! Some other figure would now rise up no doubt and turn him streetwards again? He waited.
He was confronted by a fellow statue. A member of the race which has learnt to sleep standing up ‘posed’ upon the throne. He had suddenly come amongst brothers: he was as torpid as the Model was, 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;* she reached stiffly for her chemise. The dozen other figures, who had been slowly pulsing—advancing or retreating, suspended around her mustard red body—now with laboured movements dispersed, relapsing aimlessly here and there, chiefly against walls.
He had been considering a fat hill of flesh, and especiall
y a parting carried half way down the back of the skull. Why should not its owner, and gardener, he had reflected, continue it the entire distance down, dividing his head in half with a line of white scalp? This person now turned upon him sudden, unsurprised, placid eyes. Had he eyes as well as a parting, at the back of his head? He was on the point of enquiring 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 Berne neighbourhood, by the same and most roundabout 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 Liepmann’s after dinner.
CHAPTER 9
OTTO’S compatriots at the Café were sober and thoughtful, with some discipline in their idleness: their monthly monies flowed and ebbed, it was to be supposed, small regular tides frothing monotonously in the form of beer and glasses of cheap sekt. This rather desolate place of chatter newspapers and airy speculative art-business had the charm of absence of gusto, of water-lilies, of the effete lotus.
Kreisler was purer german, of the true antiquated grain. He had experienced suddenly home-sickness, 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 the knack of riding a bicycle or anything learnt in youth, this character was easily resumed. Gradually he was discovering the foundations of his personality: many previous moods and phases of his nature were mounting to the surface, now into a conscious light.
Arrived in front of the 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, whereby he usually entered. All the familiar ugliness of this essential establishment he hated with methodic deliberate hatred; taking things one by one as it were, persons and objects, he hated powerfully. The garçon’s spasmodic running about was like a gnat’s energy above stagnation. The garçon was his enemy.
Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Page 16