Kreisler pressed the bell. It was a hoarse low z-like blast, braying softly into the crowded room. Kreisler still stood safely outside the door.
There was a rush in the passage: the hissing and spitting sounds inseparable from the speaking of the German tongue. Some one was spitting louder than the rest, and squealing dully as well. They were females disputing among themselves the indignity of door-openers. The most anxious to please gained the day.
The door was pulled ajar; an arch voice said:
“Wer ist das?”
“Ich bin’s, Fr?ulein Lunken.”
The roguish and vivacious voice died away, however. The opening of the door showed in the dark vestibule Bertha Lunken with her rather precious movements and German robustness.
His disordered hair, dusty boots and white patch on the jacket had taken effect.
“Who is it?” a voice cried from within.
“It’s Herr Kreisler,” Bertha answered with dramatic quietness. “Come in Herr Kreisler; there are still one or two to come.” She spoke in a businesslike way, and bustled to close the door, to efface[121] politely her sceptical reception of him by her handsome, wondering eyes.
“Ah, Herr Kreisler! I wonder where Fr?ulein Vasek is?” he heard some one saying.
He looked for a place to hang his hat. Fr?ulein Lunken preceded him into the room. Her expression was that of an embarrassed domestic foreseeing horror in his master’s eye. Otto appeared in his turn. The chatter seemed to him to swerve a little bit at his right. Bowing to two or three people he knew near the door, he went over to Fr?ulein Lipmann, and bending respectfully down, kissed her hand. Then with a na?ve air, but conciliatory, began:
“A thousand pardons, Fr?ulein Lipmann, for presenting myself like this. Volker and I have been at Fontenay-aux-Roses all the afternoon. We made a mistake about the time of the trains and I have only just got back; I hadn’t time to change. I suppose it doesn’t matter? It will be quite intime and bohemian, won’t it? Volker had something to do. He’s coming on to the dance later if he can manage it.”
This cunning, partly affected, with a genuinely infantile glee, served him throughout the evening. While waiting at the door he had hit on this ridiculous fib. Knowing how welcome Volker was and almost sure of his not turning up, he would use him to cover the patch from the whitewashed wall. But he would get other patches and find other lies to cover them up till he could hardly move about for this plastering of small falsehoods.
Fr?ulein Lipmann had been looking at him with indecision.
“I am glad Herr Volker’s coming. I haven’t seen him for some weeks. You’ve plenty of time to change, you know, if you like. Herr Ekhart and several others haven’t turned up yet. You live quite near, don’t you, Herr Kreisler?”
“Yes, third to the right and second to the left, and keep straight on! But I don’t think I’ll trouble[122] about it. I will do like this. I think I’ll do, don’t you, Fr?ulein Lipmann?” He took a couple of steps and looked at himself complacently in a glass.
“You are the best judge of that.”
“Yes, that is so, isn’t it, Fr?ulein? I have often thought that. How curious the same notion should come to you!” Again Kreisler smiled, and affecting to consider the question as settled turned to a man standing near him, with whom he had worked at Juan Soler’s. His hostess moved away, in doubt as to whether he intended to go and change or not. He was, perhaps, just talking to his friend a moment before going.
The company was not “mondain” but “interesting.” It was rather on its mettle on this occasion, both men and women in their several ways, dressed. An Englishwoman who was friendly with Fr?ulein Lipmann was one of the organizers of the Bonnington Club. Through her they had been invited there. Five minutes later Kreisler found Fr?ulein Lipmann in his neighbourhood again.
This lady had a pale fawn-coloured face, looking like the protagonist of a crime passionel. She multiplied her social responsibilities at every turn. But her manner implied that the quite ordinary burdens of life were beyond her strength. The two rooms with folding doors, which formed her salon and where her guests were now gathered, had not been furnished at haphazard. The “Concert” of Giorgione did not hang there for nothing. The books lying about had been flung down by a careful hand. Fr?ulein Lipmann required a certain sort of admiration. But she had a great contempt for other people, and so drew up, as it were, a list of her attributes, carefully and distinctly underlining each. With each new friend she went over again the elementary points, as a schoolmistress would go over with each new pupil the first steps of grammar or geography, position of his locker, where the rulers were put, etc. She took up her characteristic attitudes,[123] one after the other, as a model might; that is, those simplest and easiest to grasp.
Her room, dress and manner were a sort of chart to the way to admire Fr?ulein Lipmann; the different points in her soul one was to gush about, the different hints one was to let fall about her “rather” tragic life-story, the particular way one was to regard her playing of the piano. You felt that there was not a candlestick, or antimacassar in the room but had its lesson for you. To have two or three dozen people, her “friends,” repeating things after her in this way did not give her very much satisfaction. But she had a great many of the characteristics of the “school-marm,” and she continued uninterruptedly with her duties teaching “Lipmann” with the solemnity, resignation and half-weariness, with occasional bursts of anger, that a woman would teach “twice two are four, twice three are six.” Her best friends were her best pupils, of course.
The rooms were furnished with somewhat the severity of the schoolroom, a large black piano—for demonstrations—corresponded more or less to the blackboard.
“Herr Schnitzler just tells me that dress is de rigueur. Miss Bennett says it doesn’t matter; but it would be awkward if you couldn’t get in.” She was continuing their late conversation. “You see it’s not so much an artists’ club as a place where the English Société permanente in Paris meet.”
“Yes, I see; of course, that makes a difference! But I asked, I happened to ask, an English friend of mine to-day—a founder of the club, Master Lowndes” (this was a libel on Lowndes), “he told me it didn’t matter a bit. You take my word for it, Fr?ulein Lipmann, it won’t matter a bit,” he reiterated a little boisterously, nodding his head sharply, his eyelids flapping like metal shutters rather than winking. Then, in a maundering tone, yawning a little and rubbing his glasses as though they had now idled off into gossip and confidences:
“I’d go and dress only I left my keys at Soler’s. I[124] shall have to sleep out to-night, I shan’t be able to get my keys till the morning.” Suddenly in a new tone, the equivalent of a vulgar wink:
“Ah, this life, Fr?ulein! It’s accidents often separate one from one’s ‘smokkin’ for days; sometimes weeks. My ‘smokkin’ leads a very independent life. Sometimes it’s with me, sometimes not. It was a very expensive suit. That has been its downfall.”
“Do you mean you haven’t got a frac?”
“No, not that. You misunderstand me.” He reflected a moment.
“Ah, before I forget, Fr?ulein Lipmann! If you still want to know about that little matter: I wrote to my mother the other day. In her reply she tells me that Professor Heymann is still at Karlsruhe. He will probably take a class in the country this summer as usual. The remainder of the party!” he added as the bell again rang.
He could not be brutally prevented from accompanying them to the dance. But with his remark about Volker he felt as safe as if he had a ticket or passe-partout in his pocket.
Kreisler was standing alone nearly in the middle of the room, his arms folded and staring at the door. He would use this fictitious authority and licence to its utmost limit. Some of the others were conscious of something unusual in his presence besides his dress and the disorder even of that. They supposed he had been drinking.
There were rustlings and laughter in the hall for some minutes. Social facts, abstracted in this manner, appealed to the mind with the strangeness of masks, each sense, isolated, being like a mask on another. Anastasya appeared. She came out of that social flutter astonishingly inapposite, like a mask come to life. The little fanfare of welcome continued. She was much more outrageous than Kreisler could ever hope to be: bespangled and accoutred like a princess of the household of Peter the Great jangling and rumbling like a savage showman through abashed capitals.
[125]
Her amusement often had been to disinter in herself the dust and decorations of some ancestress. She would float down the windings of her Great Russian and Little Russian blood, living in some imagined figure for a time as you might in towns on a stream.
“We are new lives for our ancestors, not theirs a playground for us. We are the people who have the Reality.” Tarr lectured her later, to which she replied:
“But they had such prodigious lives! I don’t like being anything out and out, life is so varied. I like wearing a dress with which I can enter into any milieu or circumstances. That is the only real self worth the name.”
Anastasya regarded her woman’s beauty as a bright dress of a harlot; she was only beautiful for that. Her splendid and bedizened state was assumed with shades of humility. Even her tenderness and peculiar heart appeared beneath the common infection and almost disgrace of that state.
The Bonnington Club was not far off and they had decided to walk, as the night was fine. It was about half-past nine when they started. Seven or eight led the way in a suddenly made self-centred group; once outside in the spaciousness of the night streets the party seemed to break up into sections held together in the small lighted rooms within—Soltyk and his friend, still talking, and a quieter group, followed.
Fr?ulein Lunken had stayed behind with another girl, to put out the lights. Instead of running on with her companion to join the principal group, she stopped with Kreisler, whom she had found bringing up the rear alone.
“Not feeling gregarious to-night?” she asked.
Kreisler walked slowly, increasing, at every step, the distance between them and the next group, as though hoping that, should he draw her far enough back in the rear, like an elastic band she would in panic shoot[126] forward. “Did he know many English people?” and she continued in a long eulogy of that race. Kreisler murmured and muttered sceptically. And she seemed then to be saying something about Soler’s, and eventually to be recommending him a new Spanish professor of some sort.
Kreisler cursed this chatterer and her complaisance in accompanying him.
“I must get some cigarettes,” he said briskly, as a bureau de tabac came in sight. “But don’t you wait, Fr?ulein. Catch the others up.”
Having purposely loitered over his purchase, when he came out on the Boulevard again there she was waiting for him. “Aber! aber! what’s the matter with her?” Kreisler asked himself in impatient astonishment.
What was the matter with Bertha? Many things, of course. Among old general things was a state hardly of harmony with the Lipmann circle. She was rather suspect for her too obvious handsomeness. It was felt that she was perhaps a little too interested in the world. She was not quite obedient enough in spirit to the Lipmann. Even nuances of disrespect had been observed. Then Tarr had turned up nearly at the commencement of her incorporation. This was an eternal thorn in their sides, and chronic source of difficulty. Tarr was uncompromisingly absent from all their gatherings, and bowed to them, when met in the street, as it seemed to them, narquoisement, derisively, even. He had been excommunicated long ago, most loudly by Fr?ulein Van Bencke.
“Homme sensuel!” she had called him. She averred she had caught his eye resting too intently on her well-filled-out bosom.
“Homme égoiste!” (this referred to his treatment of Bertha, supposed and otherwise).
Tarr considered that these ladies were partly induced to continue their friendship for Bertha in a hope of disgusting her of her fiancé, or doing as much harm to both as possible.
[127]
Bertha alternately went to them a little for sympathy, and defied them with a display of his opinions.
Kreisler had lately been spoken about uncharitably among them. By inevitable analogy he had, in her mind, been pushed into the same boat with Tarr. She always felt herself a little without the circle.
So, Bertha, still in this unusual way clinging to him (although she had ceased plying him with conversation) they proceeded along the solitary backwater of Boulevard in which they were. Pipes lay all along the edge of excavations to their left, large flaccid surface-machinery of the City. They tramped on under the small uniform trees Paris is planted with, a tame and insipid obsession.
Kreisler ignored his surroundings. He was transporting himself, self-guarded Siberian exile, from one cheerless place to another. To Bertha Nature still had the usual florid note. The immediate impression caused by the moonlight was implicated with a thousand former impressions: she did not discriminate. It was the moon illumination of several love affairs. Kreisler, more restless, renovated his susceptibility every three years or so. The moonlight for him was hardly nine months old, and belonged to Paris, where there was no romance. For Bertha the darkened trees rustled with the delicious and tragic suggestions of the passing of time and lapse of life. The black unlighted windows of the tall houses held within, for her, breathless and passionate forms, engulfed in intense eternities of darkness and whispers. Or a lighted one, in its contrast to the bland light of the moon, so near, suggested something infinitely distant. There was something fatal in the rapid never-stopping succession of their footsteps—loud, deliberate, continual noise.
Her strange companion’s dreamy roughness, this romantic enigma of the evening, suddenly captured her fancy. The machine and indiscriminate side of her awoke.
She took his hand—rapid, soft and humble, she[128] struck the deep German chord, vibrating rudimentarily in the midst of his cynicism.
“You are suffering! I know you are suffering. I wish I could do something for you. Cannot I?”
Kreisler began tickling the palm of her hand slightly. When he saw it interrupted her words, he stopped, holding her hand solemnly as though it had been a fish slipped there for some unknown reason. Having her hand—her often-trenchant hand with its favourite gesture of sentimental over-emphasis—captive, made her discourse almost quiet.
“I know you have been wronged and wounded. Treat me as a sister: let me help you. You think my behaviour odd: do you think I’m a funny girl? But, ah! we walk about and torment each other enough! I knew you were not drunk, but were half-cracked with something—Perhaps you had better not come on to this place?”
He quickened his steps, and still gazing stolidly ahead, drew her by the hand.
“I only should like you to feel I am your friend,” she said.
“Right!” with promptness came through his practical moustache.
“You’re afraid I—” she looked at the ground, he ahead.
“No,” he said, “but you shall know my secret! Why should not I avail myself of your sympathy? You must know that my frac—useful to waiters, that is why I get so much for the poor suit—this frac is at present not in my lodgings. No. That seems puzzling to you? Have you ever noticed an imposing edifice in the Rue de Rennes, with a foot-soldier perpetually on guard? Well, he mounts guard, night and day, over my suit!” Kreisler pulled his moustache with his free hand—“Why keep you in suspense? My frac is not on my back because—it is in pawn! Now, Fr?ulein, that you are acquainted with the cause of my slight, rather wistful, meditative appearance, you will be able to sympathize adequately with me!”
[129]
She was crying a little, engrossed directly, now, in herself.
He thought he should console her.
“Those are the first tears ever shed over my frac. But do not distress yourself, Fr?ulein Lunken. The gar?ons have not yet got it!”
Kreisler did not distinguish Bertha much from the others. At the beginning he was distrustful in a mechanical way at her advances. If not “put up” to doing this, she at least hailed from a quarter that was conspicuous for Teutonic solidarity. Now he accepted her present genuineness, but ill-temperedly substituted complete boredom for mistrust, and at the same time would use this little episode to embellish his programme.
He had not been able to shake her off: it was astonishing how she had stuck: and here she still was; he was not even sure yet that he had the best of it. His animosity for her friends vented itself on her. He would anyhow give her what she deserved for her disagreeable persistence. He shook her hand again. Then suddenly he stopped, put his arm round her waist, and drew her forcibly against him. She succumbed to the instinct to “give up,” and even sententiously “destroy.” She remembered her resolve—a double one of sacrifice—and pressed her lips, shaking and wettened, to his. This was not the way she had wished: but, God! what did it matter? It mattered so little, anything, and above all she! This was what she had wanted to do, and now she had done it!
The “resolve” was a simple one. In hazy, emotional way, she had been making up her mind to it ever since Tarr had left that afternoon. He wished to be released, did not want her, was irked, not so much by their formal engagement as by his liking for her (this kept him, she thought she discerned). A stone hung round his neck, he fretted the whole time, and it would always be so. Good. This she understood. Then she would release him. But since it was not merely a question of words, of saying[130] “we are no longer engaged” (she had already been very free with them), but of acts and facts, she must bring these substantialities about. By putting herself in the most definite sense out of his reach and life—far more than if she should leave Paris, their continuance of relations must be made impossible. Somebody else—and a somebody else who was at the same time nobody, and who would evaporate and leave no trace the moment he had served her purpose—must be found. She must be able to stare pityingly and resignedly, but silently, if he were mentioned. Kreisler exactly filled this ticket. And he arose not too unnaturally.
This idea had been germinating while Tarr was still with her that morning.
So, a prodigality and profusion of self-sacrifice being offered her in the person of Kreisler, she behaved as she did.
This clear and satisfactory action displayed her Prussian limitation; also her pleasure with herself, that done. Should Tarr wish it undone, it could easily be so. The smudge on Kreisler’s back was a guarantee, and did the trick in more ways than he had counted on. But in any case his whole personality was a perfect alibi for the heart, to her thinking. At the back of her head there may have been something in the form of a last attempt here. With the salt of jealousy, and a really big row, could Tarr perhaps he landed and secured even now?
In a moment, the point so gained, she pushed Kreisler more or less gently away. It was like a stage-kiss. The needs of their respective r?les had been satisfied. He kept his hands on her biceps. She was accomplishing a soft withdrawal. They had stopped at a spot where the Boulevard approached a more populous and lighted avenue. As they now stood a distinct, yet strangely pausing, female voice struck their ears.
“Fr?ulein Lunken!”
Some twenty yards away stood several of her companions, who, with fussy German sociableness,[131] had returned to carry her forward with them, as they were approaching the Bonnington Club. Finding her not with them, and remembering she had lagged behind, with some wonderment they had walked back to the head of the Boulevard. They now saw quite plainly what was before them, but were in that state in which a person does not believe his eyes, and lets them bulge until they nearly drop out, to correct their scandalous vision. Kreisler and Bertha were some distance from the nearest lamp and in the shade of the trees. But each of the spectators would have sworn to the identity and attitude of their two persons.
Bertha nearly jumped out of her skin, broke away from Kreisler, and staggered several steps. He, with great presence of mind, caught her again, and induced her to lean against a tree, saying curtly: “You’re not quite well, Fr?ulein. Lean—so. Your friends will be here in a moment.”
Bertha accepted his way out. She turned, indeed, rather white and sick, and even succeeded so far as to half believe her lie, while the women came up. Kreisler called out to the petrified and quite silent group at the end of the avenue. Soon they were surrounded by big-eyed faces. Hypocritical concern soon superseded the masks of scandal.
“She was taken suddenly ill.” Kreisler coughed conventionally as he said this, and flicked his trousers as though he had been scuffling on the ground.
Indignant glances were cast at him. Whatever attitude they might take up towards their erring friend, there was no doubt as to their feeling towards him. He was to blame from whichever way you looked at it. They eventually, with one or two curious German glances into her eyes, slow, dubious, incredulous questions, with a drawing back of the head and dying away of voice, determined temporarily to accept her explanation. To one of them, very conversant with her relations with Tarr, vistas of possible ruptures and commotions opened. Here[132] was a funny affair! With Kreisler, of all people—Tarr was bad enough!
Bertha would at once have returned home, carrying out the story of sudden indisposition. But she felt the only thing was to brave it out. She did not want to absent herself at once. The affair would be less conspicuous with her not away. Her friends must at once ratify their normal view of this little happening. The only thing she thought of for the moment was to hush up and obliterate what had just happened. Her heroism disappeared in the need for action. So they all walked on together, a scandalized silence subsisting in honour chiefly of Kreisler.
Again he was safe, he thought with a chuckle. His position was precarious, only he held Fr?ulein Lunken as hostage! Exception could not openly be taken to him, without reflecting on their friend. He walked along with perfect composure, mischievously detached and innocent.
Fr?ulein Lipmann and the rest had already gone inside. Several people were arriving in taxis and on foot. Kreisler got in without difficulty. He was the only man present not in evening-dress.