Callously he had been signing his name to a series of brutalities, then, as though he were sure that when the time came he would have a quite sufficient stock of toughness to meet these debts. Yet from the first he had suspected that he had not: eventually he would have to evade them or succumb. The flourishes of the hand and mind had caused Bertha’s mute and mournful attitude. She thought she knew him, but was amazed at his ignorance or pretence.
He had stirred up and brought out into the light during the last hour every imaginable difficulty, and created a number of new ones. They were there in a confused mass before him. The thought of ‘settling everything before he went’ now appeared fantastic. He had at all events started these local monsters and demons, fishing them out stark where they could be seen. Each had a different vocal explosiveness or murmur, inveighing unintelligibly against the other. The only thing to be done was to herd them all together and march them away for inspection at leisure. Sudden herdsman, with the care of a delicate and antediluvian* flock; well!—but what was Bertha to be told? Nothing. He would file out silently with his flock, without any horn-blasts or windings such as he customarily affected.
‘I am going now’ he said at last, getting up.
She looked at him with startled interest.
‘You are leaving me Sorbert?’
‘No. At least, now I am going.’ He stooped down for his hat and cane. ‘I will come and see you to-morrow or the day after.’
Closing the door quietly, with a petty carefulness, he crossed the passage, belittled and guilty. He did not wish to escape this feeling: it would be far better to enhance it while he was about it. For a moment it occurred to him to go back and offer marriage. It was about all he had to offer. He was ashamed of his only gift!—But he did not stop, he opened the front door and went downstairs. Something raw and uncertain he seemed to have built up in the room he had left: how long would it hold together? Again he was acting in secret, his errand and intentions kept to himself. Something followed him like a restless dog.
PART II
DOOMED, EVIDENTLY—THE ‘FRAC’*
CHAPTER 1
FROM a window in the neighbouring Boulevard, the eye of Otto Kreisler* was fixed blankly upon a spot thirty feet above the scene of the Hobson-Tarr dialogue. Kreisler was shaving himself, one eye fixed upon Paris. It beat upon this wall of Paris drearily. Had it been endowed with properties of illumination and had it been directed there earlier in the day, it would have provided a desolate halo for Tarr’s ratiocination.* Kreisler’s watch had been in the Mont-de-Piété* since the beginning of the week, until some clock struck he was in total ignorance of the time of day.
The late spring sunshine flooded, like a bursted tepid star, the pink boulevard: beneath, the black-suited burgesses of Paris crawled like wounded insects hither and thither. A low corner-house terminating the Boulevard Kreutzberg blotted out the lower part of the Café Berne.
Kreisler’s room resembled a funeral chamber. Shallow ill-lighted and extensive, it was placarded with nude archaic images. These were painted on strips of canvas fastened to the wall with drawingpins. Imagining yourself in some primitive necropolis,* the portraits of the deceased covering the holes in which they had respectively been thrust, you would, pursuing your fancy, have seen in Kreisler a devout recluse who had taken up his quarters in this rock-hewn death-house.
Otto Kreisler was in one sense a recluse (although almost certainly the most fanciful mind would have gasped and fallen at his contact). But Cafés were the luminous caverns where he could be said, most generally, to dwell; with, nevertheless, very little opening of the lips and much apparent meditation; therefore not unworthy of some rank among the inferior and less fervent solitudes.
A bed like an overturned cupboard, dark, and with a red billow of foot-deep down covering its surface; a tessellated floor of red tile; a little rug, made with paint carpet cardboard and horse-hair, to represent a leopard—these, with chair, wash-stand, easel, and several weeks of slowly drifting and shifting garbage, completed its contents.
Kreisler gaily flicked the lather on to a crumpled newspaper. But his face emerging from greenish soap, garish where the razor had scraped it, did not satisfy him: life did not each day deposit an untidiness that could be whisked off by a Gillette blade,* as nature did its stubble.
His face, wearing, it is true, like a uniform the frowning fixity of the Prussian warrior, had a neglected look. The true bismarckian Prussian* would seek every day, by little acts of boorishness, to keep fresh this trenchant attitude; like the german student with his weekly routine of duels* which regimen is to keep courage simmering in times of peace, that it may instantly boil up to war pitch at the merest sign from the german War-Master.
He brushed his clothes vigorously; cleaned his glasses with the absorption and tenderness of the near-sighted. Next moment, straddling on his flat slav nose, he was gazing through them at his face again—brushing up whimsical moustaches over pink and pouting mouth. This was done with two tiny ivory brushes taken out of a small leather case—present from a fiancée who had been alarmed that these moustaches showed an unpatriotic tendency to droop.*
This old sweetheart just then disagreeably occupied his mind. But he busied himself about further small details of his toilet with increased precision. Had a person he had wished to snub been sitting there and talking to him he could not have been more elaborately engrossed in a hundred insignificant things, such as adjusting the defective spring-button that secured the moustache-brush case. That morning any reverie or troubling reflections would be treated very cavalierly. To a knock he answered with careful ‘Come in.’ He did not take his eyes from the glass, spotted blue tie being pinched into position by finicky finger-tips, at the end of lanky drooping hands, with extended high-held formal elbows and one knee slightly flexed. Above and around his tie the entrance of a young woman was considered with a high impassibility.
‘Good morning. So you’re up already’ she said in French.
He treated her as coolly as he had his thoughts: appearing at that moment she gave his manner towards the latter something human to play upon with relief. Imparting swanlike undulations to a short stout person, an eye fixed quizzingly upon Kreisler’s in the glass, she advanced. Her manner was one seldom sure of welcome, there was deprecation in her aggressive intrusion. She was not pretty: it was a good-natured face, brows always raised, with protruding eyes. With these she gesticulated, filling her silences with explosive significance. A skin which would become easily blue in cold weather was matched with a taste in dress inveterately blue: the Pas de Calais* had somehow produced her: Paris, shortly afterwards, had put the mark of its necessitous millions on a mean, lively child.
‘Are you going to work to-day?’ came in a minute or two.
‘No’ her taciturn host replied, putting his jacket on. ‘Do you want me to?’
‘It would be of certain use. But don’t put yourself out!’ with grin tightening all the skin of her face, making it pink and bald and her eyes drunken.
‘I’m afraid I can’t.’ Watched with a sort of appreciative raillery, he got down on his knees and dragged a portmanteau from beneath the bed.
‘Susanna, what can I get on that?’ he asked simply, as of an expert.
‘Ah, that’s where we are? You want to pop* this? I don’t know I’m sure. Perhaps they’d give you fifteen francs. It’s good leather.’
‘Perhaps twenty?’ he asked. ‘I must have them!’ he clamoured suddenly, with an energy that startled her.
She grimaced, looked very serious, said, ‘Je ne sais pas vous savez!’* with several vigorous yet rhythmical and rich forward movements of the head. She became the broker: Kreisler was pressing for a sum in excess of regulations. Not for the world, any more than had she been the broker in fact, would she have valued it at a penny over what it seemed likely to fetch.
‘Je ne sais pas vous savez!’ she repeated. She looked even worried. She would have liked to please Kreisler by saying mor
e, but her business conscience prevented her.
‘Well, we’ll go together.’
This conversation was carried on strictly in dialect. Suzanne understood him, for she was largely responsible for the patois in which Kreisler carried on conversation with the French. This young woman had no fixed occupation. She disappeared for irregular periods to live with men. She sat as a model.
‘Your father hasn’t sent yet?’ He shook his head.
‘Le cochon!’ she stuttered.
‘But it will come to-morrow, or the day after anyway.’ The idiosyncrasies of these monthly letters were quite familiar to her. The dress clothes had been pawned by her on a former occasion.
‘What do you need twenty francs for?’
‘I must have not twenty but twenty-five.’
Her silence was as eloquent as face-muscles and eye-fluid could make it.
‘To get the dress clothes out’ he explained, fixing her stolidly with his principal eye.
She first smiled slowly, then allowed her ready mirth to grow, by mechanical stages, into laughter. The presence of this small indifferent and mercenary acquaintance irritated him. But he remained cool and stiffly detached. Just then a church clock began striking the hour. He foreboded it was already ten, but not later. It struck ten, and then eleven. He leapt the hour—the clock seemed rushing with him, in a second, to the more advanced position—without any flurry, quite calmly. Then it struck twelve. He at once absorbed that further hour as he had the former. He lived an hour as easily and carelessly as he would have lived a second. Could it have gone on striking he would have swallowed, without turning a hair, twenty, thirty strokes.
Going out of the door with Suzanne, portmanteau in hand, as he opened it he experienced a twinge of anger. A half-hour before, on waking, he had sat up in bed and gazed at the crevice at its foot where a letter, thrust underneath by the concierge, usually lay. He had stared menacingly as he found nothing there. That little square of rich bright white paper was what he had counted on night to give him—that he had expected to find on waking, as though it were a secretion of those long hours. It made him feel that there had been no night—long, fecund, rich in surprises—but merely a barren moment of sleep. A stale and garish continuation of yesterday, no fresh day at all, had dawned: the chill and phlegmatic appearance of his room annoyed him. Its inhospitable character had repelled the envelope pregnant with revolutionary joy and serried* german marks. Such a dead hole of a place must have some effect; to shut out innovation, scare away anything pleasant. Impossible to break this spell of monotony upon his life. And it was this room, yes, this room that cut him off from the world: he gazed around as a man may eye a wife whom he suspects of intercepting his correspondence. There was no reason why the letter with his monthly remittance should have come on that particular morning however—already eight days overdue.
‘If I had a father like yours!’ said Suzanne in menacing humorous sing-song, eyes bulging and head nodding. At this vista of perpetual blackmail she fell into a reverie.
‘Never get your father off on your fiancée,* Suzanne!’ Kreisler advised in reply.
‘Comment?’ Suzanne did not understand, and pulled a sour face. When would this cursed Prussian learn French? To get your father off on your fiancée! What was that then? Zut!
This is what Kreisler, in a moment of aberration, had done though, exactly: for four years now his father, a widower for nine years, had been married to the lady who had given Otto the brushes for the moustache. His son had only been home once in that period.
Some months before Herr Kreisler Senior had asked Otto to give up art, offering him the choice of two posts in german firms. On a short refusal, the matter had been dropped: but he had infuriated his son, calculating on such effect, by sending his allowance only when written for, and even then neglecting the appeal for several days. On two occasions forty marks and thirty marks had been deducted respectively, merely as an irritative measure, no reason was given in the letter. Otto, on his side, made no remark. The father was jealous contemptuous and sulky, Otto the same, if perhaps you substitute ‘sourly roguish’ for ‘jealous.’
How near was the end? This might be the end. So much the better! Kreisler’s student days—a life-time in itself—embracing a great variety of useless studies of which painting, the last, was far the most useless—had unfitted him, at the age of thirty-six, for practically anything. So far he had only lost one picture. This senseless solitary purchase depressed him whenever he thought of it: how dreary that cheque for four pounds ten was! Who could have bought it? It sold joylessly and fatally one day in an exhibition. What an event!
He turned the key carefully in the door: the concierge or landlord were quite capable of slipping in and firing his things out in his absence.
The portmanteau whisked up from the floor, flopped along with him like a child’s slack balloon. He frowned at Suzanne, and, prepared for surprises, went warily down the marble stairway.
CHAPTER 2
NINE months previously Kreisler had arrived in Paris at the Gare de Lyon,* from Italy. He had left Rome because the italian creditor is such a bad-tempered fellow, and he could never get any sleep after 8—or latterly 7.30—even, in the morning.
‘DEAR COLLEAGUE,
‘Expect me Thursday. I am at last quitting this wretched city, driven out by the Goths and other refuse that have infested it since the second century.* I hope that the room you mentioned is still free. Will come at once to your address. With many hearty greetings,
‘Yours
‘OTTO KREISLER.’
He had despatched this note, before leaving, to a Herr Ernst Vokt. For some time he stood on the Paris platform, ulster thrown back, smoking a lean cigar with a straw stuck in it. He was glad to be in Paris. How busy the women, intent on travel, were! Groups of town-folk, not travellers, stood like people at a show. Each traveller was met by a phalanx of uninterested faces beyond the gangway.
His standing on the platform was a little ceremonious and military. He was taking his bearings. Body and belongings, with him, were always moved about with certain strategy. At last with racial menace he had his things swept together, saying heavily:
‘Un Viagre!’*
Vokt was not in, but had left word he would be there after dinner. It was in a Pension: he rented a studio as well in the garden behind. The house was rather like a provincial Public Baths, two storied, of an unclean purple colour. Kreisler looked up at it. Looking big and idle in their rooms, catching the eye of the stranger on the pavement, he remarked several pensionnaires and was remarked by them. He was led to the studio in rear of the house, and asked to wait.
Several long canvases stood face against the wall. He turned them round and to his astonishment discovered dashing ladies in large hats before him.
‘Ha! Ha! Well I’m damned! Bravo Ernst!’ he exploded in his dull solitude, extremely amused.
Vokt had not done this in Rome. Even there he had given indications of latent virtuosity but had been curbed by classic presences. Since arriving in Paris he had blossomed shamelessly; he dealt out a blatant vitality by the peck to each sitter, and they forgave him for making them comparatively ‘ugly.’ He flung a man or woman on to nine feet of canvas and pummelled them on it for a couple of hours, until they promised to remain there or were incapable of moving, so to speak. He had never been able to treat people like this in any other walk of life and was grateful to painting for the experience. He always appeared to feel he would be expected to apologize for his brutal behaviour as an artist and was determined not to do so.
A half-hour later, upon his return, he was informed by the servant that somebody was waiting in the studio. With face exhibiting the collected look of a man of business arriving at his office, he walked out quickly across the garden.
When he saw Kreisler the bustling business look disappeared. Nothing of his private self remained for the moment: he was engulfed in his friend’s personality.
‘But Ernst! What
beautiful pictures! What pleasant company you left me to wait amongst! How are you? I am glad to see you again!’
‘Had a good journey? Your letter amused me! So Rome became too hot?’
‘A little! My dear chap, it was a business! In this last scuffle I lost literally half the clothes off my back. But chiefly Italian clothes, fortunately.’
‘Why didn’t you write?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t serious enough to call for help’ he dismissed this at once. ‘This is a nice place you’ve got.’ Kreisler looked round as though measuring it. He noticed Vokt’s discomfort: he terminated his examination. Vokt coughed a stilted ‘ahem!’ like a stereotyped remark,
‘Have you dined? I waited until eight. Have you …?’
‘I should like something to eat. Can we get anything here?’
‘I’m afraid not. It’s rather late for this neighbourhood. Let’s take these things to your room—on the way—and go to the Big Boulevards.’*
They stayed till the small hours of the morning, in the midst of the ‘Paris by Night’* of the german bourgeois imagination, drinking champagne and toasting the creditors left behind in Rome.
Kreisler, measured by chairs or doors, was of immoderate physical humanity: he was of that select and strapping minority that bend their heads to enter our dwellings. His long almost perfectly round thighs stuck out like poles: this giant body lounged and poised beside Vokt in massive control and over-reaching of civilized matter. It was in Rome or in Paris—it moved about a great deal: everywhere it sat down or stood up with an air of certain proprietorship. Vokt was stranger in Paris than his companion, who had only just arrived: even he felt a little raw and uncomfortable, almost a tourist. He was being shown ‘Paris by Night’—almost literally, for his inclinations had not taken him much to that side of the town.*
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