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[87] 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[88] 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 sch?n,” 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.
[89]
“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, gn?diges Fr?ulein, 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 pl?tter!) This[90] 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[91] 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 man?uvres, 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,[92] 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[93] 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 ?sthetic element in Kreisler’s life. Love, too, always meant unhappy love for him, with its misunderstandings and wistful separations.[94] 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[95] 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 r?le difficult to refuse him. Sense[96] 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, Fr?ulein?” 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[97] 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[98] 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.