“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,[101] 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[102] 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.