Not only had the building been put to every conceivable use itself, but it dragged the Club with it. The members of the Bonnington Club changed and metamorphosed themselves with its changes. They became athletic or sedentary according to the shifts and exigencies of this building’s existence. They turned out in dress clothes or gymnasium get-ups as its 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, so they stippled and vaulted, played table-tennis and listened to debates.
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 hall had been very prettily arranged: the adjoining rooms were hung with the drawings and paintings of the club members.
Kreisler, ever since the occurrence on the Boulevard, had felt a reckless irresponsibility, which he did not care to conceal. His assurance even came to smack of braggadocio.
With his abashed english hostess he carried on a strange conversation full of indirect references to that ‘stately edifice in the Rue de Rennes’* of which he had spoken to Bertha. ‘That stately edifice in the Rue de Rennes—but of course you don’t know it—!’
With smiling german ceremoniousness, with heavy circumlocutions, he bent down to her nervously smiling face, and poured into her startled ear symbols and images of pawn-shops, usury, three gold balls, ‘pious mountains,’* ‘Smokkin’ or ‘Frac’ complets,* 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. A comparative estimate of the facilities for the disposing of a watch in Germany and France had been the subject of his last remarks.
‘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 up to a self-possessed exemplar of mid-victorian lovely womanhood, whose attitude suggested that she might even yet stoop to Folly* if the occasion arose. Mrs. Bevelage could listen to all this, and would be able to cope with a certain disquieting element she recognized in this young German.
He saw the motive of her move: and, looking with ostentatious regret at a long-legged flapper* seated next to them, cast a reproachful glance at his hostess.
Left alone with the widow, he surveyed her prosperous, velvet and cuirassed 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, being german.
‘Do you know that stingy but magnificent edifice—.’
‘Yes—?’
‘That sumptuous home of precarious “Fracs,” situated 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.
The music burst forth, and the club members leapt to their feet to affirm with fire their festive intentions.
‘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 brake 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 not they met the alarmed resistance of a considerable british 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 an interminable intercourse. 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 british family then, with great dignity, disgorged them, and moved on.
The widow had come somewhat under the sudden fascination of Kreisler’s mood: she was really his woman, the goods, had he known it: she felt deliciously rapt in the midst of a simoom*—she had not two connected thoughts. All her worldly Victorian grace and good management of her fat had vanished: her face had become coarsened in those few breathless minutes. But she buzzed back again into the dance, and began a second mad, but this time merely circular, career.
Kreisler took care to provide his actions with some plausible air of purpose: thus: 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-footed at every step. When satisfied with this part of his work, he led Mrs. Bevelage into a sort of improvised conservatory* and talked about pawn-shops for ten minutes or so—in a mixture of french english and german. He then reconducted her, more dead than alive, to her seat, where he left her with great sweeps of his tall figure.
He had during this incident regained his former impassivity. He stalked away now to the conservatory once more, which he regarded as a suitable headquarters.
Bertha had soon been called on to dance vigorously, without much intermission. In the convolutions of the dance, however, she matured a bold and new plan. She whirled and trotted with a preoccupied air.
Would Tarr hear of all this? Now it was done she was alarmed. Also the Liepmann, the van Bencke’s attitude towards the Kreisler kissing was a prospect that cowed her as she got used to it. Undoubtedly she must secure herself. The plan she hit on offered a ‘noble’ rôle that she would, in any circumstances, have found irresistible.
Her scheme was plain and clever: she would simply ‘tell the truth.’ This is how the account would go.
‘She had recognized something distracting in Kreisler’s life, in short the presence of crisis. On an impulse, she had offered him her sympathy. He had taken up her offer immediately but in the brutal manner already seen. (One against him: two for her!) Such lurid sympathy he claimed. She was sorry for him still, but he was very brutal.’
So she jogged out her strategies with theatrically abstracted face and rolling eyes.
At this point of her story she would hint, by an 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 the whole truth.
For such a confession it is true she had many precedents. Only a week ago Fräulein van Bencke herself, inflating 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! Poor luckless Mensch!’ was the idea.
Soltyk surprised one anglo-saxon partner after another with his wonderful english—unnecessarily like the real thing. He exhibited no signs of pleasure (except as much as was t
estified to by his action, merely) at this sort of astonishment.
Only twice did Kreisler observe him with Anastasya. On those occasions he could not, on the strength of what he saw, pin him down as a rival. Yet he was thirsting for conventional figures. His melancholy could only be satisfied by active things, unlike itself. Soltyk’s self-possession, his ready social accomplishment, depressed Kreisler: for it was not in his nature to respect those qualities, yet he felt they were what he had always lacked. The Russian was, more distantly, an attribute of Vokt. How it would satisfy him to dig his fingers into that flesh, and tear it like thick cloth! He Otto Kreisler was ‘for it’:* he was down and out (revolutionary motif): he was being assisted off the stage by this and by that. Why did he not shout? He longed to act: the rusty machine had a thirst for action.
Soltyk liked his soul to be marked with little delicate wounds and wistfulnesses: he enjoyed 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 upon 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. But for Anastasya, Soltyk was one of her many impresarios, who helped her on to and off the scene of Life. He bored her completely, they had something equivalent to pleasant business relations: she had recognized at once his merits as an impresario. There could not therefore have been less material for passion: even Kreisler was nonplussed. He was surrounded by unresponsive shapes.
Conventional figures of drama lacked: Kreisler had in fact got into 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: so far indeed was he successful in this that the Audience took some time to notice him—the vein of scandal running through an otherwise dull performance.
In the conservatory he dug himself in by a cleverly arranged breastwork of chairs. From thence he issued forth on various errands. All his errands showed the gusto of the logic of his personality: he might indeed have been enjoying himself. He invented outrage that was natural to him, and enjoyed slightly the licence and scope of his indifference.
At the first sortie he observed a rather congested, flushed and spectacled young woman, her features set in a spasm of duty. It was a hungry sex in charge of a flustered automaton. Having picked her for a partner, he gained her confidence by his scrupulous german politeness. But he soon got to work. While marking time in a crush, he disengaged his hand and appeared to wish to alter the lie of her bosom, very apologetically and holding her tight with the other hand.
‘Excuse me! it’s awkward—. More to the left—so! Clumsy things and some women are so proud of them! (No: I’m sure you’re not!) No. Allow me. Let it hang to the left!’ The young lady, very red, and snorting almost in his face, escaped brusquely from his clutch and fled towards her nearest friends.
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: but that did not prevent others from following him in.
For the first hour he paid no attention to Anastasya: he prosecuted his antics as though he had forgotten all about her. He knew she was there and left her alone, even in thought; he hid coquettishly behind his solemn laughter-in-action, the pleasant veil of his hysteria, Anastasya was no longer of the least importance: he had realized that she had been all along a mere survival of days when such individuals mattered. Now he was en pleine abstraction*—a very stormy and concrete nothingness.
At length he became generally noticed in the room, although there were a great many people present. The last flapper had screamed and had escaped at the gallop. He had even been observed for a moment, an uncouth faun,* in pursuit, in the flowery mouth of the conservatory. Fräulein Liepmann hesitated now. She thought at length that he was insane. In speaking to him and getting him removed if necessary, a scandalous scene was almost certain to occur.
Again the tall, and in spite of the studied dishevelment, still preternaturally ‘correct,’ satyric* form appeared upon the threshold of the conservatory.—An expectant tremor invaded several backs. But on this occasion he just stalked round on a tour of inspection, as though to see that all was going along as it should. Heavily and significantly he stared at those young ladies who had been his partners, when he came across them: one he abruptly stopped in front of and gazed at severely. She did not denounce him but blushed and even tittered. He left this exhibition of cynicism in disgust, and returned to his 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. He hiccuped. Why did he not go to her?—contact was the essential thing: his thoughts returned to Anastasya. He must bare her soul. If he could insult her enough she would be bare-souled. There would be the naked weibliche Seele.* Then he would spit on it. Soltyk however offered a conventional target for violence: Soltyk was evading him with his indifference. Soltyk! What should be done with Soltyk? 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 gazing fiercely to right and left. But Soltyk was nowhere to be seen.
The dancers were circling rapidly past with athletic elation, talking in the way people do when they are working. Their intelligences floated and flew above the waves of these graceful exercises, but with frequent drenchings, as it were. Each new pair of dancers seemed coming straight for him: their voices were loud, a hole was cut out of the general noise, as it were opening a passage into it. The two or three instruments behind the screen of palms produced the necessary measures to keep this throng of people careering, like the spoon stirring in a saucepan: it stirred and stirred and they jerked and huddled insipidly round and round, in sluggish currents with small eddies here and there.
Kreisler was drawn up short at the first door and had to flatten himself against the wall for a moment. He was just advancing again to work his way round to the next exit when he caught sight of Anastasya dancing with (he supposed) some Englishman. He stopped, paralysed by her appearance: the part she had played in present events gave her a great prestige in his image-life: when in the flesh she burst into his dream she still was able to disturb everything for a moment. Now he stood like somebody surprised in a questionable act. The next moment he was furious at this interference. She and her partner stood in his way: 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. The young man handled in this manner, shy and unprompt, stared after Kreisler with a ‘What the devil!’—People are seldom rude in England. Kreisler, without apology, but as if waiting for more vigorous expostulation, was also looking back, while he stepped slowly along the wall towards the 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 without getting any farther, he showed no sign of stopping: she continued to stare. She burst out laughing. They had clashed (like people in the dance). The contact had been brought about. He was still as surprised at his action 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. Something difficult to understand and which should have been alarming, the sensation of the f
irst tugs of the maelstrom he was producing and conducting all by himself which required her for its heart she had experienced: and then laughed, necessarily; once one was in that atmosphere, like laughing gas with its gusty tickling, it could not be helped.
Now this rough figure of comic mystery disappeared in the doorway, 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 the lameness of this question. Elsewhere Kreisler was now a subject of conversation. ‘Herr Kreisler is behaving very strangely. Do you think he’s been drinking?’ Fräulein Liepmann 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. He only gave it as an opinion, with no sign of particular indignation: he was beaming with greedy generosity at his Great Amoureuse.
‘Ah! here he comes again!’ said Fräulein Liepmann at the door.
So Kreisler disappeared in the doorway after the ‘contact’; he passed through the refreshment room. In a small chamber beyond he sat down by an open window.
When Anastasya had laughed Kreisler’s inner life had for a moment been violently disturbed. He could not respond, or retaliate, 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. Kreisler 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.
Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Page 20