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[99] 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 Fr?ulein 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 Fr?ulein 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 r?le. 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[100] stream of tepid chatter for an invitation to the dance. Fr?ulein 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 man?uvring, 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.