Paris hints of sacrifice. — But here we deal with that large dusty facet known to indulgent and congruous kind. It is in its capacity of delicious inn and majestic Baedeker, where western Venuses twang its responsive streets and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen. It is not across its Thébaide that the unscrupulous heroes chase each other’s shadows. They are largely ignorant of all but their restless personal lives.

Inconceivably generous and naive faces haunt the Knackfus Quarter. — We are not, however, in a Selim or Vitagraph camp (though “guns” tap rhythmically the buttocks). — Art is being studied. — Art is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Bohème, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model. But the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

The Knackfus Quarter is given up to Art. — Letters and other things are round the corner. — Its rent is half paid by America. Germany occupies a sensible apartment on the second floor. A hundred square yards at its centre is a convenient space, where the Boulevard du Paradis and Boulevard Pfeifer cross with their electric trams. — In the middle is a pavement island, like vestige of submerged masonry. —  Italian models festoon it in symmetrical human groups ; it is also their club. — The Café Berne, at one side, is the club of the “Grands messieurs Du Berne.” So you have the clap-trap and amorphous Campagnia tribe outside, in the café twenty sluggish     common-sense Germans, a Vitagraph group or two, drinking and playing billiards. These are the most permanent tableaux of this place, disheartening and admonitory as a Tussaud’s of The Flood.

From his window in the neighbouring boulevard Kreisler’s eye was fixed blankly on a spot thirty feet above the scene of the Hobson-Tarr dialogue. He was shaving himself, one eye fixed on Paris. It beat on this wall of Paris drearily. Had it been endowed with properties of illumination and been directed there earlier in the day, it would have served as a desolate halo for Tarr’s ratiocination. For several days Kreisler’s watch had been in the Mont de Piété . 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. The people beneath crawled like wounded insects of cloth. A two-story house terminating the Boulevard Pfeiffer covered the lower part of the Cafe Berne.

Kreisler’s room looked like some funeral vault. Shallow, ill-lighted, and extensive, it was placarded with nude and archaic images, painted on strips of canvas fixed to the wall with drawing-pins. Imagining yourself in some Asiatic dwelling of the dead, with the portraits of the deceased covering the holes in which they had respectively been thrust, you would, following your fancy, have turned to Kreisler seeking to see in him some devout recluse who had taken up his quarters there.

Nine months previously Kreisler had arrived in Paris at the Gare de Lyon, from Italy. He had left Rome, according to his account, 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.

He had dispatched this note before leaving to a Herr Ernst Volker. — 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.

In Paris Ernst Volker had found himself. It seemed especially constructed for him, such a wonderful, large, polite institution. No one looked at him because he was small. For money in Paris represented delicate things, in Germany chiefly gross ones. His money lent him more stature than anything else could, and in a much more dignified and subtle way than elsewhere. His talent benefited for the first time by his money. Heavy temperament, primitive talent, had their big place, but money had at last come into its own and got into the spiritual sphere. A very sensible and soothing spirit reigned in this seat of intelligence. A very great number of sensible, well-dressed figures perambulated all over these suave acres. Large tribes of “ types” prosecuted their primitive enthusiasms in certain cafés, unannoyed by either the populace or the differently minded €lite. The old romantic values he was used to in his Fatherland were all deeply modified. Money  — that is luck and its power — was the genius of the new world. American clothes were adapted for the finer needs of the Western European.

On the evening following Kreisler’s arrival Volker had an engagement. The morning after that Kreisler turned up at half-past twelve. Volker was painting Fraulein Bodenaar. She was very smartly dressed, in a tight German way. He displayed a disinclination to make Kreisler and his sitter acquainted. He was a little confused. They arranged to meet at dinner-time. He was going to lunch with Fraulein Bodenaar.

Kreisler the night before had spent a good deal of money in the German paradise beyond the river. Volker understood by the particular insistent blankness of Kreisler’s eye that money was needed. He was familiar with this look. Kreisler owed him fifteen hundred marks. He had at first made an effort to pay back Volker money borrowed, when   his allowance arrived. But in Rome, and earlier for a short time in Munich, his friend’s money was not of so much value as it was at present. Ernst waived repayment in an eager, sentimental way. The debt grew. Kreisler had felt keenly the financial void caused by Volker’s going off to Paris. He had not formulated to himself the real reason of his following Volker. Nor had he taken the trouble to repudiate it. He was now in the position of a man separated for some months from his wife. He was in a luxurious hurry to see once more the colour of Volker’s gold.

Kreisler was very touchy about money, like many borrowers. He sponged with discrimination. He had not for some time required to sponge at all, as Volker amply met his needs. So he had got rather out of practice. He found this reopening of his account with little friend Ernst a most delicate business. It was worse than tackling a stranger. He realized there might be a modification of Volker’s readiness to lend. He therefore determined to ask for a sum in advance of actual needs, and by boldness at once re-establish continuity.

After dinner he said :

“You remember Ricci ? Where I got my paints the first part of the time. I had some trouble with that devil before I left. He came round and made a great scandal on the staircase. He shouted ‘ Bandit! Ha! ha! Sporca la tua Madonna! ’ — how do you say it ? — ‘ Sporco Tedesco.’ Then he called the neighbours to witness. He kept repeating he was ‘ not afraid of me.’ I took him by the ear and kicked him out I” he ended with florid truculence.

Volker laughed obsequiously but with discomfort. Kreisler solicited his sympathetic mirth with a masterful eye. He laughed himself, unnecessarily heartily. A scene of violence in which a small man was hustled, which Volker would have to applaud, was a clever prelude. Then Otto began to be nice.

“I am sorry for the little devil! I shall have the money soon. I shall send it him. He shall not suffer. Antonio, too. I don’t owe much. I had to   settle most before I left. Himmel! My landlord !” He choked mirthfully over his coffee a little, almost upsetting it, then mincingly adjusted the cup to his moustached lips.

If he had to settle up before he left, he could not have much now, evidently ! There was a disagreeable pause.

Volker stirred his coffee. He immediately showed his hand, for he looked up and with transparent innocence asked:

“By the way, Otto, you remember Blauenstein at Munich——?”

“You mean the little Jew from whom everybody used to borrow money ?” Kreisler fixed him severely and significantly with his eye and spoke with heavy deliberation.

“Did people borrow money from him ? I had forgotten. Yes, that’s the man. He has turned up here; who do you think with ? With Irma, the Bohemian girl. They are living together — round the corner there”

“Hum ! Are they ? She was a pretty little girl. Do you remember the night Von Gerarde was found stripped and tied to his door-handle ? He assured me Irma had done it and had pawned his clothes.”

Was Volker thinking that Blauenstein’s famous and admitted function should be resorted to as an alternative for himself by Kreisler ?

“Volker, I can speak to you plainly; isn’t that so ? You are my friend. What’s more, already we have —” he laughed strongly and easily. “My journey has cost the devil of a lot. I shall be getting my allowance in a week or so. Could you lend me a small sum of money. When my money comes—”

“Of course ! But I am hard up. How much — ?” These were three jerky efforts.

“Oh, a hundred and fifty or two hundred marks.” Volker’s jaw dropped.

“I am afraid, my dear Kreisler, I can’t — just now — manage that. My journey, too, cost me a lot. I’m   very sorry. Let me see. I have my rent next week ? I don’t see how I can manage——”

Volker had a clean-shaven, depressed, and earnest face. He had always been honest and timid.

Kreisler looked sulkily at the tablecloth and knocked the ash sharply off his cigarette into his cup.

He said nothing. Volker became nervous.

“Will a hundred marks be of any use ?”

“Yes.” Kreisler drew his hand over .his chin as though stroking a beard down and then pulled his moustaches up, fixing the waitress with an indifferent eye. “Can you spare that ?”

“Well — I can’t really. But if you are in such a position that——”

This is how he lost Volker. He felt that hundred marks, given him as a favour, was the last serious bite he would get. He only gradually realized of how much more worth Volker’s money now was, and what before was an unorganized mass of specie, in which the professional borrower could wallow, was now a sound and suitably conducted business. He met that night the new manager.

He was taken round to the Berne after dinner. He did not realize what awaited him. He found himself in the head-quarters of many national personalities. Politeness reigned. Kreisler was pleased to find a permanent vat of German always on tap. His roots mixed sluggishly with Ernst’s in this living lump of the soil of the Fatherland dumped down at the head of the Boulevard Pfeiffer.

The Germans he met here spoke a language and expressed opinions he could not agree with, but with which Volker evidently did. They argued genially over glasses of beer and champagne. He found his ticket at once. He was the vielle barbe of the party.

“Yes, I’ve seen Gaugins. But why go so far as the South Sea Islands unless you are going to make people more beautiful ? Why go out of Europe ? Why not save the money for the voyage ?” he would bluster.

“More beautiful ? What do you understand by  the word ‘ beautiful,’ my dear sir ?” would answer a voice in the service of new movements.

“What do I call beautiful ? How would you like your face to be as flat as a pancake, your nostrils like a squashed strawberry, one of your eyes cocked up by the side of your ear ? Would not you be very unhappy to look like that ? Then how can you expect any one but a technique-maniac to care a straw for a picture of that sort — call it Cubist or Fauve or whatever you like ? It’s all spoof. It puts money in somebody’s pocket, no doubt.”

“It’s not a question, unhappily, of how we should like our faces to be. It is how they are. But I do not consider the actual position of my eyes to be any more beautiful than any other position that might have been chosen for them. The almond eye was long held in contempt by the hatchet-eye——”

Kreisler peered up at him and laughed. “You’re a modest fellow. You’re not as ugly as you think ! Nach ! I like to find——”

“But you haven’t told us, Otto, what you call beautiful.”

“I call this young lady here” — and he turned gallantly to a blushing cocotte at his side — “beautiful, very beautiful!” He kissed her amid gesticulation and applause.

“That’s just what I supposed,” his opponent said , with appreciation.

He did not get on well with Soltyk. Louis Soltyk was a young Russian, half Polish, who occasionally sat amongst the Germans at the Berne. Volker saw more of him than anybody. It was he who had superseded Kreisler in the position of influence as regards Volker’s purse. Soltyk did not borrow a hundred marks. His system was far more up to date. Ernst had experienced an unpleasant shock in coming into contact with Kreisler’s clumsy and slovenly, small-scale money habits again! Soltyk physically bore, distantly and with polish, a resemblance to Kreisler. His handsome face and elegance were very different. Kreisler and he disliked each  other for obscure physiological reasons: they had perhaps scrapped in the dressing-rooms of creation for some particular fleshly covering, and each secured only fragments of a coveted garment. In some ways, then, Soltyk was his efficient and more accomplished counterpart, although as empty and unsatisfactory as himself.

“Aber wo ist der deutsche Student ?” Soltyk would ask, referring to him usually like that.

“He’s in good company somewhere!” Volker revealed Kreisler as a lady’s man. This satisfied Soltyk’s antipathy. The Russian kept an eye on Volker’s pocket while Kreisler was about. He had not only recognized in him a mysterious and vexing kinship, with his instinct; his sharper’s sense, also, noted the signs of the professional borrower, the most contemptible and slatternly member of the crook family. In an access of sentiment Ernst asked his new friend to try and sell a painting of Kreisler’s. Soltyk dealt in paintings and art objects. But Soltyk took him by the lapel of the coat and in a few words steadied him into cold sense.

“Non ! Sois pas bête ! Here,” he pulled out a handful of money and chose a dollar-piece. “ Here —  give him this. You buy a picture — if it’s a picture you want to buy — of Krashunine’s. Kreisler has nothing but Kreisler to offer. C’est peu !”

Ernst introduced Kreisler next to another sort of Paris compatriot. It was a large female contingent this time. He took him round to Fraulein Lipmann’s on her evening, when these ladies played the piano and met.

Kreisler felt that he was a victim of strategy. He puffed and swore outside, complained of their music, the coffee, their way of dressing.

The Lipmann circle could have stood as a model for Tarr’s Bourgeois-Bohemians, stood for a group.

For chief characteristic this particular BourgeoisBohemian set had the inseparability of its members. Should a man, joining them, wish to flirt with one                    F particularly, he must flirt with all — flatter all, take all to the theatre, carry the umbrellas and paint-boxes of all. Eventually, should he come to that, it is doubtful if a proposition of marriage could be made otherwise than before the assembled band! And marriage alone could wrench the woman chosen away from the clinging bunch.

Kreisler, despite his snorting, went again with Volker. The female charm had done its work. This gregarious female personality had shown such frank invitation to Volker that had any separate woman exhibited half as hospitable a front he would have been very alarmed. As it was, it had at first just fulfilled certain bourgeois requirements of his lonely German soul. Kreisler came a few weeks running to the Lipmann soiree. Never finding Volker there, he left off going as well. He felt he had been tricked and slighted. The ladies divined what had happened. Fraulein Lipmann, the leader, put a spiteful little mark down to each of their names.

Kreisler pocketed Ernst’s hundred marks and made no further attempt on the formerly hospitable income of his friend. Debts began accumulating. Only he found he had grown suddenly timid with his creditors. The concierge frightened him. He conciliated the garçon at the cafe, to whom he owed money. He even paid several debts that it was quite unnecessary to pay, in a moment of panic and weakness. A straitened week ensued. At the Berne he had lost his nerve in some way; he clowned obsequiously on some evenings, and, depressed and slack the next, perhaps, resented his companions’ encores.

Next he gradually developed the habit of sitting alone. More often than not he would come into the   café and go to a table at the opposite side of the room to that at which the Germans were sitting.

Ridicule is sighted at twenty yards, the spectator then, without the sphere of average immediate magnetism. For once it does not matter, but if persisted in it inevitably results in humour. Those who keep to themselves awaken mirth as a cartwheel running along the road by itself would. People feel with the “lonely” man that he is going about with some eccentric companion — that is himself. Why did he choose this deaf-and-dumb companion ? What do they find to say ? He is ludicrous as two men would be who, perpetually in each other’s company, were never seen to exchange a word — who dined together, went to theatre or café, without ever looking at each other or speaking.

So Kreisler became a lonely figure. It was a strange feeling. He must be quiet and not attract attention. He. was marked in some way as though he had committed a theft. Perhaps it was merely the worry of perpetual “tick” beginning to tell. For the moment he would just put himself aside and see what happened. He was afraid of himself too. Always up till then immersed in that self, now for the first time he stood partly outside it. This slight divorce made him less sure in his actions. A little less careful of his appearance, he went sluggishly about, smoking, reading the paper a great deal, working at the art school fairly often, playing billiards with an Austrian cook whose acquaintance he had made in a café and who disappeared owing him seven francs.

Volker had been a compendious phenomenon in his life, although his cheery gold had attracted him to the more complete discovery. He had ousted women, too, from Kreisler’s daily needs. He had become a superstition for his tall friend.

It was Kreisler’s deadness, his absolute lack of any reason to be confident and yet perfect aplomb,  that mastered his companion. But this acquired eventually its significance as well, for Kreisler. The inertia and phlegm, outward sign of depressing   everyday Kreisler, had found some one for whom they were a charm and something to be envied. Kreisler’s imagination woke shortly after Volker’s. It was as though a peasant who had always regarded his life as the dullest affair, were suddenly inspirited about himself by realizing some townsman’s poetic notion of him. Kreisler’s moody wastefulness and futility had found a raison d’etre and meaning.

Ernst Volker had remained for three vague years becalmed on this empty sea. Kreisler basked round him, never having to lift his waves and clash them together as formerly he had been forced sometimes to do. There had been no appeals to life. Volker had been the guarantor of his peace. His failure was the omen of the sinking ship, the disappearance of the rats!

Then they had never arrived at terms of friendship. It had been only an epic acquaintanceship, and Kreisler had taken him about as a parasite that he pretended not to notice.

There was no question, therefore, of a reproach at desertion. He merely hopped off on to somebody else. Kreisler was more exasperated at this than at the defection of a friend, who could be fixed down, and from whom at last explanation must come. It was an unfair advantage taken. A man had no right to accompany you in that distant and paradoxical fashion, get all he could, become ideally useful, unless it was for life.

He watched Soltyk’s success with distant mockery. Volker’s loves were all husks, of illogical completeness.

A man appeared one day in the Berne who had known Kreisler in Munich. The story of Kreisler’s marrying his fiancee to his father then became known. Other complications were alleged in which Otto’s paternity played a part. The dot of the bride was another obscure matter. It was during his aloofness. He looked the sort of man, the party agreed, who would splice his sweetheart with his papa or reinforce his papa’s affairs with a dot he did not wish to pay for at last with his own person. The Berne was  also informed that Kreisler had to keep seventeen children in Munich alone; that he only had to look at a woman for her to become pregnant. It was when the head of the column, the eldest of the seventeen, emerged into boyhood, requiring instruction, that Kreisler left for Rome. Since then a small society had been founded in Bavaria to care for Kreisler’s offsprings throughout Germany. This great capacity of Otto’s was, naturally, not admired; at the best it could be considered as a misdirected and disordered efficiency. The stories pleased, nevertheless. When he appeared that night his friends turned towards his historic figure with cries of welcome. But he was not gregarious. He missed his opportunity. He took a seat in the passage-way leading to the Bureau de Tabac. As their laughter struck him through his paper he was unstrung enough to be annoyed.

He frowned and puckered up his eyes, and two flushed lines descended from his eyes to his jaw. On their way out one or two of his compatriots greeted him :

“Sacred Otto ! Why so unsociable ?”

“Hush ! He has much to think about. You don’t understand what the cares of——”

, “Come, old Otto, a drink !”

He shook them off with mixture of affected anger and genuine spitting oaths. He avoided their eyes and spat blasphemously at his beer. He avoided the café for some days.

Kreisler then recovered.

At first nothing much happened. He had just gone back again into the midst of his machinery like a bone slipped into its place, with a soft crick. He became rather more firm with his creditors. He changed his rooms (moving then to the Boulevard Pfeiffer), passed an occasional evening with the Germans at the Berne, and started a portrait of Suzanne, who had been sitting at the school.

“How is Herr Volker ? Is he out of Paris ?” Fraulein Lipmann asked him when they met. “ Come round and see us.”

People’s actual or possible proceedings formed in very hard-and-fast mould in Kreisler’s mind, seen not with realism, but through conventions of his suspicious irony. This solicitude as to Volker he contrasted with their probable indifference as regards his old, shabby, and impolite self.

But he went round, his reception being insipid. He had shown no signs of animation or interest in them. Both he and the ladies were rather doubtful as to why he came at all. No pleasure resulted on either side from these visits, yet they doggedly continued. A distinct and steady fall in the temperature could be observed. He sneered, as though the aimlessness of his visits were an insult that had at last been taken up. They would have been for ever discontinued except for a sudden necessity to reopen that channel of bourgeois intercourse.

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   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  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 Artfashion 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 schön,” 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.

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   was a German who, by all rights and rules of the national temperament, should have committed suicide some weeks earlier. Anastasya became an ideé 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 Fraulein 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 Fraulein 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 role. 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  stream of tepid, chatter for an invitation to the dance. Fraulein 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 manoeuvring, 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 reunions 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.

“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,   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 p’us ?”

“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

CHAPTER VIII

The portmanteau fell under the bed; he crushed into the red bulbous cover. Kreisler never sat on his bed except when going to get into it. For another man it would have replaced the absent armchair. In those moments of depression in which he did so he always, at once, felt more depressed, or quite hopeless. Head between hands, he now stared at the floor. Four or five hours! He must raise money, else he could not go to the dance. How absurd, this fuss about such a sum ! All the same, how the devil could he get it ?

“Small as it is, I shan’t get it,” he thought to himself. He began repeating this stupidly, and stuck at word “shan’t.” His brain and mouth clogged up, he stuttered thickly in his mind. He sprang up. But the slovenly, hopeless quality of the bed clung to him. This was a frivolous demonstration. He wandered to the window; stood staring out, nose flattened against the pane.

The sudden quiet and idleness of his personality was an awakening after the little nightmare of Suzanne. But it was not a refreshing one.

His portmanteau had always received certain consideration, as being, next the dress-suit, the most dependable article among those beneath his sway —  to come to his aid if their common existence were threatened. He had now thrown it under the bed with disgust. He and all his goods were rubbish for the streets.

He sauntered from the window to the bed and back. Whenever he liked, in a sense, he would open the door and go out; but still, until then (and when would he “like” ?) he was a poor prisoner. Outside, he took some strength and importance from others. In here he touched bottom and realized what the Kreisler-self was, with four walls round it.

His muscles were still full. They symbolized his uselessness. The thought, so harsh and tyrannical,   of his once more going to the window and gazing down at the street beneath made him draw back his chair. He sat midway in the room, looking steadily out at the housetops. But, like his vigorous muscles and his deadness, there was the same contradiction; his mechanical obstinacy as regards Anastasya and his comic activity at present to get to a dance.

Comrades at painting school, nodding acquaintances, etc., were once more run through. None valued his acquaintance at more than thirty centimes, if that.

Perhaps Anastasya had left Paris ? This solution, occurring sometimes, had only made his activity during the last few days more mad and mechanical —  the pursuit of a shadow.

Ten minutes later, through a series of difficult clockwork-like actions, he had got once more to Lejeune’s to have lunch. With disgust he took what had been his usual seat latterly, at the table in the recess; the one place, he was sure, Anastasya would never be found in again, wherever else she might be found.

Lunch nearly over, he caught sight of Lowndes. “Hi, Master Lowndes!” he called out — always assuming great bluffness and brutality, as he called it, with English people, and laborious opposite to “stiffness.” “How do you do ?”

The moment his eye had fallen on “Master” Lowndes this friend’s probable national opulence had occurred to him as a tantalizing fact. No gross decision could be come to in that moment. Lowndes was called to be kept there a little bit, while he turned things over and made up his mind. This was an acquaintance existing chiefly on chaff and national antithesis. It meant nothing to him. What matter if he were refused ? Lowndes not being a compatriot made it easier. Something must be sacrificed. Lowndes’ acquaintanceship was a possession something equivalent to a cheap ring, a souvenir. He must part with it, if necessary.

Lowndes grinned at sight of Kreisler. He had finished his own lunch and was just going off. He had almost forgotten his idea in coming to the  restaurant, that of seeing his German acquaintance. Swaying from side to side on his two superlatively elastic calves, he sat down opposite the good Otto, who leered back, blinking. He spoke German better than Kreisler any other language, so they used that, after a little flourish of English.

“Well, what have you been doing ? Working ?”

“No,” replied Kreisler. “I’m giving up painting and becoming a business man. My father has offered me a position !”

This subject seemed no more important than his speech made it, and yet it filled his life. Lowndes smiled correctly, not suspecting realities.

“Have you seen Douglas ?” This was a friend through whom they had known each other in Italy.

Why should this fellow lend him thirty francs ? The grin would not be there, he felt, had he been conscious that the other was thinking of the contents of his pocket. Not humour, but a much colder stuff no doubt mounted guard over his pocket-book, guarantee of this easiness and health. Oh, the offensive prosperity of the English, smugness of middle-class affluence ! etc. etc.

Kreisler imagined the change that would come over this face when there was question of thirty francs. Estrangement set in on his side already, anger and humiliation at the imagined expression. This was of help. Here was his chance of borrowing that very insignificant but illusive sum. The man was already an enemy. He would willingly have knocked him on the head and taken his money had they been in a quiet place.

The complacent health and humoristic phlegm with which he grinned and perambulated through life charged Kreisler with the contempt natural to his more stiff and human education. His relations with him hinging on mild racial differences, he saw behind him the long line of all the Englishmen he had ever known. “Useless swine,” he thought, “so pleased with his cursed English face, and mean as a peasant!”

“Oh, I was asked for my opinion on a certain matter this morning. I was asked what I thought of German women !”

“What reply did you make, Mr. Lowndes ?”

“I didn’t know what to say. I suggested that my friend should come along and get your opinion.”

“My opinion as an expert ? My fees as an expert are heavy. I charge thirty francs a consultation !”

“I’m sure he’d have paid that,” Lowndes laughed innocently. Kreisler surveyed him unsympathetically.

“What, then, is your opinion of our excellent females ?” he asked.

“Oh, I have no opinion. I admire your ladies, especially the pure Prussians.”

Kreisler was thinking: “If I borrow the money, there must be some time mentioned for paying back —  next week, say. He would be more likely to lend it if he knew where to find me. He must have my address.”

“Come and see me — some time,” he blinked. “52 Boulevard Pfeiffer, fourth floor, just beside the restaurant here. You see ? Up there.”

“I will. I looked you up at your old address a month or so ago; they didn’t know where you’d gone.”

Kreisler stared fixedly at him — a way of covering discomfiture felt at this news. The old address reminded him of several little debts there. For this reason he had not told them where he was going. The concierge would complain of her old tenant; probably, even, Lowndes might have been shown derelict tradesmen’s bills. Not much encouragement for his proposed victim !

Lowndes was writing on a piece of paper.

“There’s my address : Rue des Flammes.”

Kreisler looked at it rather fussily and said over: “5 Rue des Flammes. Lowndes.” He hesitated and repeated the name.

“R. W. — Robert Wooton. Here, I’ll write it down for you.”

“Are you in a hurry ? Come and have a drink  at the Berne,” Kreisler suggested when he had made up his bill.

On the way Lowndes continued a discourse.

“A novelist I knew told me he changed the names of the characters in a book several times in the course of writing it. It freshened them up, according to him. He said that the majority of people were killed by their names. I think a name is a man’s soul.”

Kreisler forged ahead, rhythmically and sullenly.

“If we had numbers, for instance, instead of names, who would take the number thirteen ?” Lowndes wondered in German.

“I,” said Kreisler.

“Would you ?”

Every minute Kreisler delayed increased the difficulty. His energy was giving out. They were now sitting on the terrasse at the Berne. He had developed a particular antipathy to borrowing. An immense personal neurasthenia had grown up round this habit of his, owing to his late discomfitures. He already heard an awkward voice, saw awkward eyes. Then he suddenly concluded that the fact that Lowndes was not a German made it more difficult, instead of less§ so, as he had thought. Why could he not take ? —  why petition ? He knew that if Lowndes refused he would break out; he nearly did so as it was. With disgust and fatigue he lay back in his chair, paying no attention to what Lowndes was saying. His mind was made up. He would not proceed with his designs on this dirty pocket. He became rough and monosyllabic. He wished to purify himself in rudeness of his preceding amiability.

Lowndes had been looking at a newspaper. He put it down and said he must go back to “ work.” His “morning” had, of course, been interrupted by Tarr!

Kreisler still saw the expression on the Englishman’s face he had imagined, and restrained with difficulty the desire to spit in it. The nearness they had been to this demand must have affected, he thought, even his impervious companion. He had asked and been   refused, to all intents and purposes. He got up, left Lowndes standing there, and went into the lavatory at the side of the cafe, where he had a thorough wash in cold water.

Back at his table, he saw no sign of the Englishman, and sat down to finish his drink, considering what his next move should be.

Various pursuits suggested themselves. He might go and offer himself as model at some big private studios near the Observatoire. He could get a week’s money advanced him ? He would dress as a woman and waylay somebody or other on the boulevards. He might steal some money. Volker was the last. He came just after murder. He would go to Ernst Volker — he with his little obstinate resolve in obscurity of his mind no longer to be Kreisler’s acquaintance. Obstinacy in people of weak character is the perfectly exasperating thing. They have no right to their resoluteness — appearing weaker and meaner than ever in anomalous tenacity. Volker, naturally submissive, had broken away and was posing somewhere as a stranger. He .felt physical disgust; this proceeding was indecent.

A spirit that has mingled with another, suddenly covering itself and wishing to regain its strangeness, can be as indecent as a strange being suddenly baring itself. A man’s being is never divined so completely and pungently as when his friendship cools and he becomes once more a stranger. This is one of the moments when the imagination, most awake, sees best.

This little rat’s instinctive haste to separate from him was an ill omen : what did he care for omens ? he clamoured impatiently.

At this juncture in his reflections, from where he sat on the café terrace he saw Volker’s back, as he supposed, disappearing round a corner, as though trying to avoid a meeting. Blood came to his head with a shock. He nearly sprang forward in pursuit of this unsociable form. Rushing words of insult   rose to his lips, he fidgeted on his seat, gazed blankly at the spot where he had seen the figure. That it was no longer there exasperated him beyond measure. It was as though he considered that Ernst should have remained at the corner, immobile, with his back towards him, a visible mark and fuel for anger. He made a sign to the waiter, indicating that his drink would go into his “tick.” He then hurried off in the direction of Volker’s house — the direction also that the back had taken — determined to get something out of him. Kreisler, letting instinct guide his steps, took the wrong turning — following, in fact, his customary morning’s itinerary. He found himself suddenly far beyond the street Volker lived in, near Juan Soler’s atelier. He gazed down the street towards the atelier, then took off his glasses and began carefully wiping them. While doing this he heard words of greeting and found Volker at his elbow.

“Hallo ! You look pretty hot. You nearly knocked me over a minute ago in your haste,” he was saying.

Kreisler jumped — as the bravest might if, having stoutly confronted an apparition, it suddenly became a man of flesh and blood. Had his glasses been firmly planted on his nose things might have gone differently. He frowned vacantly at Ernst and went on rubbing them.

Volker saw that something was wrong. It would have been to his advantage also to “have out” anything that was there and have done with it. But in his attitude German sluggishness seemed appealing to the same element in Kreisler’s nature, claiming its support and sympathy.

“It’s dreadfully hot!” he said uneasily, looking round as though examining the heat. He stepped up on to the pavement out of the way of a horse-meat cart. The large-panelled conveyance, full of enormous outlandish red carcases, went rushing down the street, carrying an area of twenty yards of deafness with it. This explosion of sound had a pacifying effect on Kreisler; it made him smile for some reason or   other. Volker went on: “I don’t know whether I told you about my show.”

“What show ?” Kreisler asked rudely.

“In Berlin, you know. It has not gone badly. Our compatriots improve. I’ve got a commission to paint the Countess Wort. What have you been doing lately ?” There was a forbidding pause. “I’ve intended coming round to see you; but I’ve been sticking at home working. Have you been round at the Berne ?” He spoke rapidly and confidentially, as two business men meeting in the street and always in a hurry might try and compress into a few minutes, between two handshakes, a lot of personal news. He seemed to wish to combine conviction that he was very anxious to tell Kreisler all about himself and (by his hurried air) paralysis of the other’s intention to have an explanation.

“I am glad you are going to paint the Countess Wort. I congratulate you, Mr. Volker! I am in a hurry. Good day.”

Kreisler turned and walked towards the Atelier Juan Soler. For no reason (except that it was impossible) he could not get money from Volker. It was as though that money would not be real money at all. Supposing he got it; the first place he tried to pass it the man would say, “This is not money.” As for taking him to task, his red, correct face made it impossible; it had suddenly become a lesson and exercise that it would be ridiculous to repeat. He was not a schoolboy.

Volker walked away ruffled. He was mortified that, by apprehension of a scene, he had been so friendly. The old Otto had scored. He, Volker, had humiliated himself needlessly, for it was evident Kreisler’s manner had been misinterpreted by him.

Kreisler had not intended going to Soler’s that day. Yet there he was, presumably got there now to avoid Ernst Volker. He saw himself starting up from the Berne a quarter of an hour before, steaming away in pursuit of a skulking friend — impetus of angry thought carrying him far beyond his destination;

Otto’s compatriots at the Berne were sober and thoughtful, with discipline in their idleness. Their monthly moneys flowed and ebbed, it was to be supposed, small regular tides frothing monotonously in form of beer. This rather desolate place of chatter, papers, and airy, speculative business had the charm of absence of gusto.

Kreisler was ingrainedly antiquated, purer German. He had experienced suddenly home-sickness, that often overtakes voluntary exiles at the turn of their life — his being, not for Germany, exactly, but for the romantic, stiff ideals of the German student of his generation. It was a home-sickness for his early self. Like knack of riding a bicycle or anything learnt in youth, this character was easily assumed. He was gradually discovering the foundations of his personality. Many previous moods and phases of his' nature were mounting to the surface.

Arrived in front of the Cafe Berne, he stood for fifteen minutes looking up and down the street, at the pavement, his watch, the passers-by. Then he chose the billiard-room door to avoid the principal one, where he usually entered.

All the ugly familiarity of this place, he hated with methodic, deliberate hatred; taking things one by one, as it were, persons and objects. "The garçon’s spasmodic running about was like a gnat’s energy over stagnation.

Passing from the billiard-room to a gangway with several tables, his dull, exasperated eye fell on something it did not understand. How could it be expected  to understand ? It was an eye and it stuck. It was simple, though. It was amazed and did not understand.

Anastasya.

Set in the heart of this ennui, it arrested the mind like a brick wall some carter drowsed on his wagon. Stopping dead, Kreisler stared stupidly. Anastasya was sitting there with Soltyk. With Soltyk ! He seemed about to speak to them — they, at least, were under this impression. Quite naturally he was about to do this, like a child. As though in intense abstraction, he fixed his eyes on them. Then he took a step towards them, possibly with the idea of sitting down beside them. Consciousness set in, with a tropic tide of rage, and carried him at a brisk pace towards the door, corresponding to the billiard-room door, on the other side of the cafe. Yet in the midst of this he instinctively raised his hat a little, his eyes fixed now on his feet.

He was in a great hurry to get past the two people sitting there. This could not be done without discovering two inches of the scalp for a moment — as an impatient man in a crush, wishing to pass, pushes another aside, raising his hat at the same time to have the right to be rude.

Same table on terrasse as an hour before. But Kreisler seemed sitting on air, or one of those wooden whirling platforms in the fetes.

The garçon, with a femininely pink, virile face which, in a spirit of fun, he kept constantly wooden and solemn except when, having taken your order, he winked or smiled — came up hastily.

“Was wünschen Sie ?” he asked, wiping the table with a serviette. He had learned a few words of German from the customers. Supposing Kreisler rather a touchy man, he always attempted to put him at his ease, as the running of bills was valuable to him. He had confidence in this client, and wished the bill to assume vague and profitable proportions.

Kreisler’s thoughts dashed and stunned themselves against this waiter. His mind stood stock-still for                several minutes. This pink wooden face paralysed everything. As its owner thought “the young man” was having a joke with him, it became still more humorously wooden. The more wooden it became, the more paralysed became Kreisler’s intelligence. He stared at him more and more oddly, till the garçon was forced to laugh. As a matter of fact, Kreisler mentally was steadying himself on this hard personality. As he had appeared to walk deliberately with hot intention to his seat, so he seemed gazing deliberately at the waiter and choosing his drink. Then the dam gave way. He hated this familiar face; his thought smashed and buffeted it. Such commercial modicum of astute good nature was too much. It was kindness that only equilibrium could ignore. The expression of his own face became distorted. The garçon fixed him with his eye and took a step back, with dog-like doubt, behind the next table.

Anastasya had smiled in a very encouraging way as he passed. This had offended him extremely. Soltyk — Anastasya ; Soltyk — Anastasya. That was a bad coupling ! His sort of persecution mania seized him by the throat. This had done it! Soltyk, who had got hold of Volker and was the something that had interfered between that borrowable quantity and himself, occupied a position not unsimilar to his stepmother. Volker and his father, who had kept him suspended in idleness, and who now both were withdrawing or had withdrawn like diminishing jets of water, did not attract the full force of his indolent, tragic grumpiness.

Behind Ernst and his parent Soltyk and his stepmother stood.

A certain lonely and comic ego all people carry about with them, who is always dumb except when they get drunk or become demented. It then talks, never sincerely, but in a sort of representative, pungent way. This ego in Kreisler’s case would not have been shameless and cynical if it had begun to grumble about Volker. It would have said, “Hang that little  Ernst! I come to Paris, I am ashamed to say, partly for him. But the little swine-dog has given me the go-by. Hell take his impudence! I don’t like that swine-dog Soltyk !He’s a slimy Russian rascal!” It would not have said : “I’ve lost the access to Ernst’s pocket. The pig-dog Soltyk is sitting there!”

In any case his vanity too was hurt.

Anastasya now provided him with an acceptable platform from which his vexation might spring at Soltyk. There was no money or insignificant male liaison to stuff him down into grumpiness. “Das Weib” was there. All was in order for unbounded inflammation.

He wanted to bury his fear in her hot hair; he wanted to kiss her lips as he had never kissed any woman’s; all the things he wanted — ! But what would Soltyk be doing about it ? He had met her alone, and that was all right and not impossible with a world made by their solitary meeting in the restaurant. He had lived with her instinctively in this solitary world of he and she. It was quite changed at present. Soltyk had got into it. Soltyk, by implication, brought a host of others, even if he did not mean that he was a definite rival there himself. What was he saying to her now ? Sneers and ridicule, oceans of sneers directed at himself, more than ten thousand men could have discharged, he felt, certainly were inundating her ear. His stepmother-fiancée, other tales, were being retailed. Everything  that would conceivably prejudice Anastasya, or would not, he accepted as already retailed. There he sat, like a coward. He was furious at their distant insulting equanimity.

A breath of violent excitement struck him, coming from within. He stirred dully beneath it. She was there; he had only put a thin partition between them. His heart beat slowly and ponderously. “On hearing what the swine Soltyk has to say she will remember my conduct in the restaurant and my appearance. She will make it all fit in. And, by  God, it does fit in! Himmel! Himmel! there’s nothing to be done ! Anything I did, every movement, would only be filling out the figure my ass-tricks have cut for her !”

He was as conscious of the interior, which he could not see from his place on the street, as though, passing through, he had just found the walls, tables, chairs, painted bright scarlet. He felt he had left a wake of seething agitation in his passage of the café Passing the two people inside there had been the affair of a moment, not yet grasped. This experience, apparently of the past, was still going on. The sense’s picture, even, was not yet complete. New facts, details, were added every moment. He was still passing Anastasya and Soltyk. He sat on, trembling, at the door. There were other exits. She might be gone. But he forgot about them.

How he had worried himself about the pawned suit. Fate had directed him there to the café to save him the trouble of further racking his brains about it. Should he leave Paris? But he was mutinous. The occurrence of this idea filled him with suspicions.

The fit was over; reaction had set in. He was eyeing himself obliquely in the looking-glass behind his head.

He almost jumped away at two voices beside him, and the thrilling sound of a dress ; it was as though some one had spoken with his own voice. It seemed all round him, attacking him. The thin, ordinary brushing of a skirt was like the low breathing of a hidden animal to a man in the forest. He felt they were coming to speak to him — just as they had thought that he was. The nerves on that side of his head twitched as though shrinking from a touch.

They were crossing the terrasse to the street. His heart beat a slow march. Her image there had become used. The reality, in its lightning correction of this, dug into his mind. There once more the real figure had its separate and foreign life. He was disagreeably struck by a certain air of depression and cheerlessness in the two figures before him. This   one thing that should have been pleasant, displeased him. He was angry as though she had been shamming melancholy.

They were not talking, the best proof of familiarity. A strange figure occurred to him ; he felt like a man, with all organs, bones, tissues complete, but made of cheap perishable stuff, who could only live for a day and then die of use.

This image, reality now before him, had drawn out all his energy, like a distinct being nourished by him. The image, intact in his mind, had returned him more or less the vigour spent. Her listlessness seemed a complement of the weakness he now felt. Energy was ebbing away from both.

He stared with bloodshot eyes. Then he got up and began walking after her. Soltyk, on hearing steps, turned round; but he made no remark to Anastasya. They crossed the street and got into a passing tram. Otto Kreisler went back to the café

It was like returning to some hall where there had been a banquet to find empty chairs, empty bottles, and disorder. The vacant seats around seemed to have been lately vacated. Then there was the sensation of being left behind. The Café Berne was a solitary and antediluvian place. Everything began to thrust itself upon him — the people, street, insignificant incidents — as though this indifferent life of facts, in the vanishing of the life of the imagination, had now become important, being the only thing left. Common life seemed rushing in and claiming him, and emphasizing his defeat and the new condition thus inaugurated. He went to Lejeune’s for dinner. During the whole day he had been in feverish hurry, constantly seeing time narrowing in upon him. Now he had a sensation of intolerable leisure.

The useless ennui of his life presented itself to him for the thousandth time, but now clearly. This fact seemed to have been waiting with irritating calm, as though to say, “As soon as you can give me your attention ? — Well, what are you going to do with me ?” For he had compromised himself irretrievably.

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, Fraulein 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   politely her sceptical reception of him by her handsome, wondering eyes.

“Ah, Herr Kreisler! I wonder where Fraulein Vasek is ?” he heard some one saying.

He looked for a place to hang his hat. Fraulein 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 Fraulein Lipmann, and bending respectfully down, kissed her hand. Then with a naive air, but conciliatory, began :

“A thousand pardons, Fraulein 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.

Fraulein 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   about it. I will do like this. I think I’ll do, don’t you, Fraulein 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, Fraulein ? 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 Fraulein Lipmann was one of the organizers of the Bonnington Club. Through her they had been invited there. Five minutes later Kreisler found Fraulein 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. Fraulein 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,   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 Fraulein 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, Fraulein 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  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, Fraulein! 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, Fraulein 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.

One certain thing amongst many uncertainties about the English club, the Bonnington Club, was that it had not yet found itself quite. Its central room (and that was all there was of it — a shell of a house) reminded you of a public swimming-bath when it was used as a ballroom, and when used as a studio you thought of a concert-hall. But one had a respect for it. It had cost a good deal to build. It was quite phenomenally handsome as seen from the street, and was grateful. It made a cheerful show, with pink, red, and pale blue paper-chains and Chinese lanterns, one week for some festivity ; and the next, sparely robed in dark red curtains, would settle its   walls gravely to receive some houseless quartet. In this manner it paid its way. Some phlegmatic but obstinate power had brought it into existence. “Found a club, found a club !” it had reiterated in the depths of certain anonymous minds, with sleepy tenacity. Some one sighed, got up and went round to another, and said perhaps a club had better be founded. The other assented and subscribed something, to get rid of the other. In the course of time a young French architect had been entrusted with the job. A club. Yes. What sort of a club ? The architect could not find out. Something to be used for drawing-classes, social functions, a reading-room, etc. He saw he was on the wrong tack. He went away and made his arrangements accordingly. He produced a design of an impressive and to all appearance finished house. It was a sincerely ironic masterpiece, but with a perfect gravity, and even stateliness, of appearance. It was the most non-committing façade, the most absolutely unfinal interior, the most tentative set of doors, ever seen: a monster of reservation.

Not only had it been put to every conceivable use itself, but it dragged the club with it, as it were. The club changed and metamorphosed itself with its changes. The club became athletic or sedentary according to the shifts and exigencies of the building’s existence. The members turned out in dress-clothes or gymnasium get-ups as the building’s destiny prompted, to back it up. One month they would have to prove that it was a gymnasium, the next that it was a drawing-school.

The inviting of the German contingent was a business move. They might be enticed into membership, and would in any event spread the fame of the club, getting and subsequently giving some conception of the resources of the club-house building. The salle was arranged very prettily. The adjoining rooms were hung with the drawings and paintings of the club members.

Kreisler ever since the scene on the boulevard had

With a little scratching (as the concierge pushed it) with the malignity of a little, quiet, sleek animal, the letter from Germany crept under the door the next morning, and lay there through the silence of the next hour or two, until Kreisler woke. Succeeding to his first brutal farewells to his dreams, no hopes leapt on his body, a magnificent stallion’s, uselessly refreshed. Soon he saw the letter. It lay there quiet, unimportant, rather matter of fact and sly.

Kreisler felt it an indignity to have to open it. Until his dressing was finished, it remained where it was. He might have been making some one wait. Then he took it up, and opening it, drew out between his forefinger and thumb, the cheque. This he deposited with as much contempt as possible, and a “phui” on the edge of his washhand stand. Then he turned to the letter. He read the first few fines, pumping at a cigarette, reducing it mathematically to ash. Cold fury entered his mind with a bound at the first words. They were the final words giving notice of a positive stoppage of supplies. This month’s money was sent to enable him to settle up his affairs and come to Germany at once.

He read the first three lines over and over again, going no further, although the news begun in these  first lines was developed throughout the two pages of the letter. Then he put it down beside the cheque, and crushing it under his fist, said monotonously to himself, without much more feeling than the sound of the word contained : “Schwein, Schwein, Schwein !”

He got up, and pressed his hand on his forehead; it was wet: he put his hands in his pockets and these came into contact with a cinquante centime piece. He took them out again slowly, went to his box and underneath an old dressing-gown found writing paper and envelopes. Then, referring to his father’s letter for the date, he wrote the following lines :

Within half an hour this was posted. Then he went and had breakfast with more tranquillity and relish than he had known for some days. He sat up stiffly like a dilapidated but apparently in some way satisfied rooster at his café table. This life was now settled, pressure ceased. He had come to a conventional and respectable decision. His conduct the night before, for instance, had not been at all respectable. Death — like a monastery — was before him, with equivalents of a slight shaving of the head merely, a handful of vows, some desultory farewells, very restricted space, but none the worse for that; with something like the disagreeableness of a dive for one not used to deep water. But he had got into life, anyhow, by mistake; il s’était trompé de porte. His life might almost have been regarded as a long and careful preparation for voluntary death. The nightmare of Death, as it haunted the imaginations of the Egyptians, had here been conjured in another way.

Death was not to be overcome with embalmings and Pyramids, or fought within the souls of children. It was confronted as some other more uncompromising race (and yet also haunted by this terrible idea) might have been.

Instead of rearing smooth faces of immense stone against it, you imagine an unparalleled immobility in life, a race of statues, throwing flesh in Death’s path instead of basalt. Kreisler would have undoubtedly been a high priest among this people.

In a large fluid but nervous handwriting, the following letter lay, read, as it were: Bertha still keeping her eye on it from a distance :

“Dear Bertha, — I am writing at the Gare St. Lazare, on my way to England. You have made things much easier for me in one way of course, far more difficult in another. Parenthetically, I may mention that the whimsical happenings between you and your absurd countryman in full moonlight are known to me. They were recounted with a wealth of detail that left nothing to the imagination, happily for my peculiar possessive sensitiveness, known to you. I don’t know whether that little red-headed bitch — the colour of Iscariot, so perhaps she is — is a friend of yours ? Kreisler! I was offered an introduction to him the other day, which I refused. It seems he has introduced himself!

“Before, I had contemplated retiring to a little distance for the purpose of reflection. This last coup of yours necessitates a much further recul, withdrawal — a couple of hundred miles at least, I have judged. And as far as I can see I shall be some months — say ten — away. I am not wise enough to take your action au pied de la lettre-,   nevertheless, you may consider yourself free as women go. What I mean is you need not trouble to restrain the exuberance of your exploits in future. (What rubbish!) Let them develop naturally, right up to fiançailles, or elsewhere. I have a very German idea. Why should not girls have two or three fiancés ? Not two or three husbands. But fiancé, especially nowadays, is an elastic term. Why shouldn’t fiancé take the place of husband ? It is a very respectable word: a very respectable state. But my idea was that of a club, organized around the fiancée. You seem to me cut out for such a club. A man might spend quite a pleasant time with the other fiancés. A fine science of women would be developed, perhaps along Oriental lines a little. Then a man would remember the different clubs he had belonged to. Some very beautiful women might have a sort of University settled near them. To have belonged to one of these celebrated but ephemeral institutions would insure a man success with less illustrious queens. ‘ He was a fiancé of Fraulein Stuck’s, you know,’ would carry prestige. You have Germanized me in a horrible way ! Anyhow, you may count on me should you think of starting a little institution of that sort. My address for the next few months will be 10 Waterford Street, London, W.C. — Yours, “SORBETT.”

He spelt his name with two T’s because Bertha had never disciplined herself to suppress final consonants.

Bertha was in her little kitchen. It was near the front door. Next to it was her studio or salon, then bedroom : along a passage at right angles the rooms rented by Clara Goenthner, her friend.

The letter had been laid on the table, by the side of which stood the large gas-stove, like a safe, its gas stars, on top, blasting away luridly at pans and saucepans with Bertha’s breakfast. While busying herself with eggs and coffee, she gazed over her arm  reflectively at the letter. It was a couple of inches too far away for her to be able to read it.

The postman had come ten minutes before. It was now four days after the dance, and since she had last seen Tarr. She had “felt” he would come on that particular morning. The belief in woman’s intuition is not confined, of course, to men. “Could he have heard anything of the Kreisler incident ?” she had asked herself. The possibility of this was terrifying. But perhaps it would be as well if he had. It might at any future time crop up. And what things had happened when other older things had come to light suddenly ! She would tell him if he had not already heard. He should hear it from her. The great boulevard sacrifice of the other night had appeared folly, long ago. But peculiarly free from any form of spite — she did not feel unkindly towards Kreisler.

So Sorbert was expected to breakfast, on the authority of her intuition. Bread was being fried in fat. What manner of man would appear, how far renseigné — or if not informed, still all their other difficulties were there inevitably enough ? Experience, however, suggested such breakfast as pleased him. Could fried toast and honey play a part in such troubles ? Ah, yes. Troubles often reduced themselves to fried bread and honey: they could sow troubles, why not help to quell troubles ? But she had had a second intuition that he knew. Not knowing how stormy their interview might be she neglected no minute precautions — and these were the touching ones — any more than the sailor would neglect to stow away even the smallest of his sails, I suppose, at the sulky approach of a simoom. The simoom, however, had left her becalmed and taken the train for Dieppe instead of coming in her direction.

Bertha went on turning the bread over in the pan, taking the butter from its paper and dropping it into its dish : rinsing and wiping a knife or two, regulating the gas. Frequent truculent exclamations spluttered out if anything went wrong. “Verdammtes Streichholz !”  “ Donnerwetter !” She used the oaths of Goethe. One eyebrow was raised in humorous reflective irritation. She would flatten the letter out and bend down to examine a sentence, stopping her cooking for a moment.

“Sâlot!” she exclaimed, after having read the letter all through again, putting it down. She turned with coquettish contemptuousness to her frying-pan. “Sâlot” was, with her, a favourite epithet. Clara’s door opened, and Bertha crumpled the letter into her pocket. Clara entered sleepy-eyed and affecting ill-humour. Her fat body was a softly distributed burden, which she carried with the aplomb and indifference of habit. She had a gracefully bumpy forehead, a nice whistling mouth, soft, good and discreet orbs. Her days were passed in the library of the Place Saint Sulpice.

“Ach, lasse ! lass mich doch! Get on with your cooking!” she exclaimed as Bertha began her customary sociable and playful greeting. Bertha always was conscious of her noise, of shallowness and worldliness, with this shrewd, indifferent, slow, and monosyllabic bookworm. She wanted to caper round it, inviting it to cumbrous play, like a small lively dog around a heavy one. She was much more femme as she said, but aware that Clara did not regard this as an attainment. Being femme had taken up so much of her energy and life that she could not expect to be so complete in other ways as Clara. With this other woman, who was much less “woman” than she, she always felt impelled to ultra-feminine behaviour. She was childish to the top of her bent. This was insulting to the other : it showed too clearly Bertha’s  way of regarding her as not so much femme as herself. Clara felt this and would occasionally show impatience at Bertha’s skittishness: a gruff manlike impatience entering grimly but imperturbably into the man-part, but claiming at the same time its prerogatives.

Clara had had no known love affairs. She regarded Bertha, sometimes, with much curiosity. This “woman’s temperament,” so complacently displayed, soothed and tickled her.

“Clara, Soler has told me to send a picture to the Salon d’Automne.”

“Oh !” Clara was not impressed by “success.” She was preparing her own breakfast and jostled Bertha, usurping more than half the table. Bertha, delighted, retorted with trills of shrill indignation and by recapturing the positions lost by her plates. Her breakfast ready she carried it into her room, pretending to be offended with Clara.

Breakfast over she wrote to Tarr. The letter was written quite easily and directly. She was so sure in the convention of her passion that there was no scratching out or hesitation. “I feel so far away from you.” There was nothing more to be said ; as it had been said often before, it came easily and promptly with the pen. All the feeling that could find expression was fluent, large and assured, like the handwriting, and went at once into these conventional forms.

“Let Englishmen thank their stars — the good stars of the Northmen and early seamen — that they have such stammering tongues and such a fierce horror of grandiloquence. They are still primitive and true in their passions, because they are afraid of them, like children. The shocks go on underneath ; they trust their unconsciousness. The odious facility of the South, whether it be their, at bottom, very shrewdly regulated anger (l'art de s’engueuler) or their picture post card perfection of amorous expressiveness; such things those Island mutterers and mutes have escaped. But worst of all is the cult of the ‘ Temperament,’ all the accent on that poor last syllable, whose home is that dubious middle Empire, so incorrigibly banal. The lacerating and tireless pricking and pushing of this hapless ‘ temperament ’ is a more harrowing spectacle than the use of dogs in Belgium or women in England.”

This passage, from an article in the English Review, Tarr had shown to Bertha with great pleasure Bertha had a good share of impoverished and overworked temperament, but in a very genial fashion. It had not, with her, grown crooked and vicious with this constant ill-treatment. It was strenuous but friendly. It served in any case a mistress surprisingly disinterested and gentle.

On the receipt of Tarr’s letter she had felt, to begin with, very indignant and depressed at his having had the strength to go away without coming to see her. So her letter began on that complaint. He had at last, this was certain, gone away, with the first likelihood of permanence since they had known each other. Despite her long preparation for this, and her being even deliberately the cause of it, she was mortified and at the same time unhappy at the sight of her success.

The Kreisler business had been more for herself than anything, for her own private edification. She would free Sorbert by an act, in a sort of impalpable way. It was not destined as yet for publicity. The fact of the women surprising Kreisler and her on the boulevard had put everything at once out of perspective, damaged her illusion of sacrifice. Compelled  at once to be practical again, find excuses, repudiate immediately what she had done before she had been able to enjoy or digest it, was like a man being snatched away from table, the last mouthful hardly swallowed She was the person surprised before some work doing is completed — it still in a rudimentary unshowable state. For once Tarr was not only in the right, but, to her irritation, he had proofs, splendid ocular proofs, a cloud of witnesses.

To end nobly, on her own initiative, had been her

Bertha’s friends looked for her elsewhere, nowadays, than at her rooms. Tarr was always likely to be found there in impolite possession. She made them come as often as she could ; her coquetry as regards her carefully arranged rooms needed satisfaction. She suffered in the midst of her lonely tastefulness. But Tarr had certainly made these rooms a rather deserted place. Since the dance none of her women friends had come. She had spent an hour or two with them at the restaurant.

At the dance she had kept rather apart. Dazed, after a shock, and needing self-collection, was the line sketched. Her account of things could not, of course, be blurted out anyhow. It had to grow out of circumstances. It, of course, must be given. She had not yet given it. But haste must be avoided. For its particular type, as long a time as possible must be allowed to elapse before she spoke of what had happened. It must almost seem as though she were going to say nothing; sudden, perfect, and very impressive silence on her part. To accustom their minds to her silence would make speech all the more imposing, when it came. At a café after the dance her account of the thing flowered grudgingly, drawn forth by the ambient heat of the discussion.

They were as yet at the stage of exclamations, no malveillant theory yet having been definitely formed about Kreisler.

“He came there on purpose to create a disturbance. Whatever for, I wonder !”

“I expect it was the case of Fraulein Fogs over again.” (Kreisler had, on a former occasion, paid his court to a lady of this name, with resounding unsuccess.)

“If I’d have known what was going on, I’d have dealt with him !” said one of the men.

“Didn’t you say he told a pack of lies, René——?”

Fraulein Lipmann had been sitting, her eyes fixed on a tram drawn up near by, watching the people evacuating the central platform, and others restocking it. The discussion and exclamations of her friends did not, it would appear, interest her. It would have been, no doubt, scandalously unnatural if Kreisler had not been execrated. But anything they could say was negligible and inadequate to cope with the “Gemeine alte Sau.” The tameness of their reflections on and indignation against Kreisler when compared with the terrific corroding of this epithet (known only to her) made her sulky and impatient.

Applied to in this way directly about the lies, she

Kreisler, on his side, had been only a few paces from his door when he caught sight of Bertha. As his changed route would necessitate a good deal of tiresome circling to bring him back practically to the spot he had started from, he right-about-faced in a minute or two, the danger past, as he thought. The result was that, as she left the shop, there was Kreisler approaching again, almost in the same place as before.

She was greeted affably, as though to say “Caught! both of us !” He was under the impression, however, that she had lain in wait for him. He was so accustomed to think of her in that character ! If she had been in full flight he would have imagined that she was only decoying him. She was a woman who could not help adhering.

“How do you do ? I’ve just been buying my lunch.”

“So late ?”

“I thought you’d left Paris !” She had no information of this sort, but was inclined to rebuke him for not leaving Paris.

“I ? Who told you that, I should like to know. I shall never leave Paris ; at least——”

There was heavy enigmatic meaning in this, said lightly. It did not escape her, sensible to such nuances.

“How are our fair friends ?” he asked.

“Our ? Oh, Fräulein Lipmann and — Oh, I haven’t seen them since the other night.”

“Indeed ! Not since the other night——?”

She made her silence swarm with significant meanings, like a glassy shoal with innumerable fish: her eyes even, stared and darted about, glassily.

It was very difficult, now she had stopped, to get away. The part she had more or less played with her friends, of his champion, had imposed itself on her. She could not leave her protégé without something further said. She was flattered, too, at his showing no signs now of desire to escape.

His more plainly brutal instincts woke readily in these vague days. Various appetites had been asserting themselves. So the fact that she was a pretty girl did its work on a rather recalcitrant subject. He felt so modest now, ideals things of the past. Surely for a quiet ordinary existence pleasant little distinctions were suitable ?

Without any anxiety about it, he began to talk to Bertha with the idea of a subsequent meeting. He had wished to avoid her because she had embodied

Back in her rooms, she examined, over her lunch, with stupefaction, the things she had been doing —  conversations, appointments, complementary sensations, and all the rest, as she might have sat down before some distinctly expensive, troubling purchase   that she had not dreamt of making an hour before. ‘‘ What a strange proceeding !” — as it might have been — “what sudden disease in my taste made me buy that!”

Had she been enveloped, in a way, by that idle Teutonically smiling manner of his ? But at the bottom of her (for her) dramatic consent was the instantaneous image of Fraulein Lipmann and Company’s disapprobation. The carrying out and so substantiating her story, that notion turned the scale. Kreisler’s easy manner (he was unmistakably “a gentleman!”) contrasted with her friend’s indignant palaver gave him the advantage. He cannot, cannot have behaved so outrageously as they pretended!

These activities as well distracted her from brooding over Sorbert’s going.

Of Kreisler she thought very little. Her women friends held the centre of the stage.

In her thoughts they stared at her supersession: Tarr to Kreisler. From bad to worse, for her friends. There was a strange continuity in her troubled friendship with these women. Always (only more so) at the same point, stretching the cord.

So this was the key to her programme; a person has made some slip in grammar, say. He makes it again deliberately, so that his first involuntary speech may appear deliberate.

She began her customary pottering about in her rooms. Fraulein Elsa Kinderbach, one of the Dresden sisters already spoken of, interrupted her. At the knock she thought of Tarr and Kreisler simultaneously, and welded in one.

“Isn’t it hot ? It’s simply broiling outside. I left the studio quite early.” Fraulein Kinderbach sat down, giving her hat a toss and squinting up at it.

The most evident thing about these sisters was dirt, anaemia, and a sort of soiled, insignificant handsomeness. They explained themselves, roughly, by describing in a cold-blooded lazy way their life at home.

A stepmother, prodigiously smart, well-to-do, neglecting them ; sent first to one place then another (now Paris) to be out of the way. Yet the stepmother supplies them superfluously from her superfluity. — They talked about themselves with a consciously dramatic matter-of-factness, as twin parcels, usually on the way from one place to another, expensively posted here and there, without real destination. They enjoyed nothing at all; painted well (according to Juan Soler); had a sort of wild uncontrollable attachment for the Lipmann.

“Oh ! Bertha, I didn’t know your dear ‘ Sorbert ’ * was going to England.” “Dein Sorbet” was the bantering formula for Tarr. Bertha was perpetually talking about him, to them, to the charwoman, to the greengrocer opposite, to everybody she met. Tarr did not quite bask in this notoriety.

“Didn’t you ? Oh, yes ; he’s gone.”

“You’ve not quarrelled — with your Sorbert ?”

“What’s that to do with you, my dear ?” Bertha gave a brief, indecent laugh she sometimes had. “By the way, I’ve just seen Herr Kreisler. We’ve arranged to go out somewhere to-morrow.”

“Go out — Kreisler! Liebes Kind! — What on earth possessed you — ! — Herr — Kreisler!”

“What’s the matter with Herr Kreisler ? You were .all friendly enough with him a week ago.”

Elsa looked at her with the cold-blooded scrutiny of the precocious urchin.

“But he’s a vicious brute. Besides, there are other reasons for avoiding Herr Kreisler. You know the reason of his behaviour the other night ? It was it appears, because Anastasya Vasek snubbed him. He was nearly the same when the Fogs wouldn’t take an interest in him. He can’t leave women alone. He follows them about and annoys them, and then becomes — well, as you saw him the other night —  when he’s shaken off. He is impossible. He is not a person who can be accepted by anybody.”

“Where did you hear all that ? I don’t think that Fraulein Vasek’s story is true. I am certain——”

People appear with a startling suddenness sometimes out of the fog of Time and Space. Bertha did not visualize Kreisler very readily. She was surprised when she saw him below her windows the next day. He stared up at the house with an eager speculation. He considered the house and studio opposite. Behind the curtains Bertha stood with emotions of an ambushed soldier. She felt on her face the blankness of the wall of the house, its silence and unresponsiveness. He appeared almost to be looking at her face, magnified and exposed. — Then it appeared to her that it was he, the enemy getting in. She wished to stop him there, before he came any further.

In the processes of his uncertainty he was so innocuous and distant, for the moment. His first visit. There he was: so far, a stranger. Why should these little obstacles of strangeness — which gate to enter, which bell to ring — be taken away from this particular individual ? He should remain “stranger” for her, where he came from. But he had burrowed his way through, was at the bell already, and would soon be at herself. She found here, in her room, was very different from she found outside, in restaurant or street. The clothing of this decor was a nakedness.

She struggled for a moment up from the obstinate  dream, made of artificial but tenacious sentiments, shaped by contretemps of all sorts that had been accumulating like a snowball ever since her last interview with Tarr. Still somewhat wrapt in this interview she rolled in its nightmarish, continually metamorphosed, substance through space. Where would it land her, this electric, directionless, vital affair ? This invasion of Indifference and Difference had floated her, successfully, away in some direction.

The bell rang again. She could see him, almost, through the wall, standing phlegmatic and erect. They had not spoken yet. But they had been some minutes “in touch.”

Perhaps he was mad! Elsa, cold, matter-of-fact, but with warnings for her, came into her mind. However much she resisted the facts, there was very little reason for this meeting. It was a now unnecessary, exploded, and objectless impulse, sapped by Anastasya. She was going through with something from laziness and obstinacy mixed, that no longer meant anything.

Already dressed, she walked to the door as the bell rang a third time. Kreisler was serious and a little haggard; different from the day before. He had expected to be asked in. Instead, hardly saying anything, she came out on the narrow landing and closed the door behind her. Surprised, he felt for the first stair. It was eight in the evening, very dark on the staircase, and he stumbled several times. Bertha felt she could not say a single word to him. It was just as though some lawyer’s clerk had come to fetch her for a tragic disagreeable interview, and she, having been sitting fully dressed for unnecessary hours in advance, were now urging him silently and violently before her, following.

That afternoon she had received a second letter from Sorbert.

On the receipt of this letter — as on the former occasion a little — she first of all behaved as she would have done had Sorbert been there. She acted silent resignation and going about her work as usual for the benefit of the letter, as though it had been a living person. The reply to this, written an hour or so before Kreisler arrived, had been an exaggerated acquiescence. “Of course, Sorbert: far better that we should part!” But soon this letter began to worry her and threaten her mannerisms. She was just going to take up a book and read, when, as though something had called her attention, she put it down, got up, her head turned over her shoulder, and then suddenly flung herself on the sofa as though it had been rocks and she plunging on them from a high cliff. She sobbed until she had tired herself out.

So Kreisler and she walked up the street as though compelled by some very strange circumstances, only, to be in each other’s company.

He appeared depressed, and to have come also under the spell of some sort of meaningless duty. His punctuality suggested, too, fatigued and senseless . waiting, careful timing. His temporary destination reached, he delivered himself up indifferently into her hands. He said something about its being hot. They said hardly anything, but walked on away from her house. They showed no pudeur about this peculiar state of mind and their manners.

Before they got to the Cafe de l’Observatoire Kreisler was attempting to make up for his lapse into strangeness, discovering, however, in a little, that he had not been alone.

Bertha looked at the clock inside as they took up their place on the quieter terrasse. When she asked herself how long she would stop she was astonished.

“Who is that, then ?” Kreisler asked, after some moments of gradually changing silence, when Anastasya began to be mentioned by Bertha. He showed no interest.

This meeting had been the only event of the day for him. He had looked forward to it a little at first. But as it approached he got fidgety, began counting the time, and from being a blessed something, it became a burden. The responsibility of this meeting even seemed too much for him. He began to ask himself what useless errand he was on now ? The effort of this simple affair worked lamentably on his nerves. He would not have gone, only the appointment being made and fixed in his mind, and he having felt it in the distance all day, he knew it would irk him more if he did not go. He was compelled, in short, to go, to have done with it. The worrying obsession of not having done it intimidated him. In the empty evening he would have been at the mercy of this thing-not-done, like an itch.

Bertha, for her part, recovered. Kreisler’s complete abstraction and indifference were soothing. He seemed to know as little why he was there as she, or less, and be only waiting for her to disappear again. No, slight was implied. Her vanity stirred a little. She perhaps came through this to bring Fraulein Vasek on the boards as she had originally intended. As to there being anything compromising in this meeting, that might be disposed of. He did not look like suggesting another. — His manner on the day before would not have warranted complete calm. And Elsa’s description of his conduct with women had stuck in her mind. As the hour of meeting approached it helped her uneasiness. But now she felt refreshingly relieved. This was the man who had caused her fresh misgivings! When a dog or cow has passed a trembling child without any signs                 M

of mischief, the child sometimes is inclined to step after it and put forth a caressing hand.

By his manner and its reflection on her feelings he had created a situation not unlike that of the dance night. There they sat, she pressing a little, he civilly apathetic. It seemed for all the world as though Bertha had run after him somewhere and forced a meeting on him, to which he had grudgingly come. She was back in what would always be for him her characteristic role. And so now — and again later continually — she appeared to be following him up, to the discomfort of both, for some unguessable reason.

“No, I don’t know who you mean,” he said, replying to descriptions of Anastasya. “A tall girl you say ? No, I can’t bring to mind——”

He liked fingering over listlessly the thought of Anastasya, but as a stranger. This subject gave him a little more interest in Bertha, just as, for her, it had a similar effect in his favour. She was immediately convinced that Fraulein Vasek had been guilty of the most offensive, self-complacent mistake.

Kreisler had not energy enough left to continue his pursuit of his bespangled dream.

Bertha now had achieved a simplification of the whole matter as follows :

Anastasya, a beautiful and swankily original girl, had arrived, bespangled and beposed, on the scene of her (Bertha’s) simple little life. She had discovered her kissing and being kissed by a ridiculous individual in the middle of the street. Bertha had disengaged herself rapidly, and explained that she had been doing that because he had awoken her pity by his miserable and half-starved appearance; that, even then, he had assaulted her, and she had been found in that delicate situation entirely independent of her own will. Anastasya’s lip had curled, and she had received these explanations in silence. Then, at their nervous repetition, she had said negligently : “You were no doubt being hugged by Herr Kreisler in the middle of the pavement, the motives the ordinary  ones. You might have waited till — But that’s your own business. On the other hand, the reason of his eccentric appearance this evening was this. He had the incredible impudence to wish to make up to me. I sent him about his business, and he ‘ manifested ’ in the way you know.”

Reducing all the confused material of this affair to such essential situation, Bertha saw clearly the essence of her action.

Definite withdrawal from the circle of her friends was now essential. It was accomplished with as much style as possible. Kreisler provided the style.

Her instinct now was to wallow still more in the unbecoming situation in which she had been found, with defiance. She wanted to be seen with Kreisler. The meanness, strangeness, and certain déchéance or come-down, in consorting with this sorry bird, must be heightened into poetry and thick and luscious fiction. They had driven her to this. They were driving her! Very well. She was lasse! She would satisfy them. She would satisfy Sorbert. It was what he wanted, was it not ?

Kreisler, of course, was the central, irreducible element in this mental pie. He was the egg-cup that kept up the crust. She tried to interest herself in Kreisler and satisfy Tarr, her friends, the whole world, more thoroughly.

Destiny has more power over the superstitious. They attract constantly bright fortunes and disasters within their circle. Destiny had laid its trap in the unconscious Kreisler. It fixed it with powerful violent springs. Eight days later (dating from the Observatoire meeting), it snapped down on Bertha.

Kreisler’s windows had been incandescent with steady saffron rays, coming over the roofs of the   quarter. His little shell of a room had breasted them with pretence of antique adventure. The old boundless yellow lights streamed from their abstract El Dorado. They were a Gulf Stream for our little patch of a world, making a people as quiet as the English. Men once more were invited to be the motes in the sunbeam, to play in the sleepy surf on the edge of remoteness.

Now, from within, his windows looked as suddenly harsh and familiar. Unreasonable limitation gave its specific colour to thin glass.

The clock was striking eight. Like eight metallic glittering waves dashing discordantly together in a cavern, its strokes rushed up and down in Bertha’s head. She was leaning on the mantelshelf, head sunk forward, with the action of a person about to be sick. She had struggled up from the bed a moment before — the last vigour at her disposal being spent in getting away from the bed at all costs.

“Oh schwein ! schwein ! Ich hass es — ich hass dich ! Schwein ! Schensal! schensslicher Mensch !”

All the hatred and repulsion of her being, in a raw, indecent heat, seemed turned into this tearful sonority, gushing up like blood. An exasperated falling, deepening singsong in the “ schensslicher Mensch !” something of the disgusting sound of the brutal relishing and gobbling of food. Hatred expresses itself like the satisfaction of an appetite. The outrage was spat out of her body on to him. As she stood there she looked like some one on whom a practical joke had been played, of the primitive and physical order, such as drenching, in some amusing manner, with dirty water. She had been decoyed into swallowing something disgusting. Her attitude was reminiscent of the way people are seen to stand bent awkwardly forward, neck craned out, slowly wiping the dirt off their clothes, or spitting out the remains of their polluted drink, cursing the joker.

This had been, too, a desperate practical joke in its madness and inconsequence. But it was of the solemn and lonely order. At its consummation there  had been no chorus of intelligible laughter. An uncontrolled Satyr-like figure had leapt suddenly away: Bertha, in a struggle that had been outrageous and extreme, fighting with the silence of a confederate beneath the same ban of the world. A joke too deep for laughter, parodying the phrase, alienating sorrow and tears, had been achieved. The victim had been conscious of an eeriness.

A folded blouse lay on the corner of Kreisler’s trunk. Bertha’s arms and shoulders were bare, her hair hanging in wisps and strips, generally — a Salon picture was the result. For purposes of work (he had asked her to sit for him), the blouse had been put aside. A jagged tear in her chemise over her right breast also seemed the doing of a Salon artist of facile and commercial invention.

Kreisler stood at the window. His eyes had a lazy, expressionless stare, his lips were open. Nerves brain and the whole body were still spinning and stunned, his muscles teeming with actions not finished, sharp, when the actions finished. He was still swamped and strung with violence. His sudden immobility, as he stood there, made the riot of movement and will rise to his brain like wine from a weak body. Satisfaction had, however, stilled everything except this tingling prolongation of action.

The inanity of what had happened to her showed as her unique, intelligible feeling. Her being there at all, her eccentric conduct of the last week, what disgusting folly ! Ever since she had known Tarr, her “sentiment” had been castigating her. A watchful fate appeared to be inventing morals to show her the folly of her perpetual romancing. And now this had happened. It was senseless. There was not a single atom of compensation anywhere. She was not one of those who, were there any solid compensation of sentiment and necessity (such as, in the most evident degree, was the case with Tarr), would draw back from natural conclusions. Then conclusive physical matters were a culmination of her romance, and not a separate and disloyal gratification. It never occurred  to her that they could be arrived at without traversing the romance.

Was this to be explained as the boulevard incident had been explained by her ? Was she to proceed with her explanations and her part ? But this time it would be to herself that the explanations would have to be made. That was a different audience ; a dim feeling found its way into her, with a sort of sickening malice. She had a glimpse too of Kreisler’s Bertha —  the woman that you couldn’t shake oft, who, for some unimaginable reason, was always hanging on to you. She even had the strength to admit, distantly, the logic of this act — what had happened to her — still more disgusting and hateful than its illogic. The only thing that might have been found to mitigate, in some sense, the dreary, sudden madness of it, was that she felt practically nothing at all for Kreisler. It was like some violent accident of the high road, the brutality of a tramp. And — as that too would — it partook of the unreality of nightmare.

A few minutes before he had been tranquilly working away at a drawing, she sitting in some pose she had taken up with quick ostentatious intelligence. Startled at his request to draw her shoulders she had immediately condemned this feeling. She had come to sit for him ; the mere idea that there was any danger was so repulsive that she immediately consented. He was an artist, too, of course. While he was working they had not talked. Then he had put down his paper and chalk, stretched, and said:

“Your arms are like bananas!” A shiver of warning had penetrated her at this. But still he was an artist: it was natural — even inevitable — that he should compare her arms to bananas.

“Oh ! I hope you’ve made a good drawing. May I see ?” She intended to emphasize the reason of this exposure.

He had got up, and before she knew what he was doing caught hold of her above the elbow, chafing her arm, saying:

“You have pins and needles, Fraulein ?” The

“Fraulein” used here had some disquieting sound. She drew herself away, now serious and on the defence.

“No, thank you. Now I will put my blouse on, if you have finished.”

They had looked at each other uncertainly for a moment, he with a flushed rather silly fixed smile. She was afraid, somehow, to move away.

“Let me rub your arm.” Then with the fury of a man waking up to some insult, he had seized her. Her tardy words, furious struggling and all her contradictory emotions disappeared in the whirlpool towards which they had, with a strange deliberateness and yet aimlessness, been steering.

He was standing there at the window now as though wishing to pretend that he had done nothing; she “had been dreaming things” merely. The long silence and monotony of the posing had prepared her for the strangeness now. It had been the other extreme out of which she had been flung and into which, at present, she was again flung. She saw side by side and unconnected the silent figure drawing her and the other one full of blindness and violence. Then there were two other figures, one getting up from the chair, yawning, and the present lazy one at the window — four in all, that she could not bring together somehow, each in a complete compartment of time of its own. It would be impossible to make the present idle figure at the window interest itself in these others. A loathsome, senseless event, of no meaning, naturally, to that figure there. It had quietly, indifferently, talked : it had drawn : it had suddenly flung itself upon her and taken her, and now it was standing idly there. It could do all these things. It appeared to her in a series of precipitate states. It resembled in this a switchback, rising slowly, in a steady insouciant way to the top of an incline, and then plunging suddenly down the other. Or a mastiff’s head turning indolently for some seconds and then snapping at a fly, detached again the next moment. Her fury and animal hostility  did not last more than a few minutes. She had come there, got what she did not expect, and now must go away again. There was positively nothing more to be said to Kreisler. She had spasmodic returns of raging. They did not pass her dourly active mind. There never had been anything to say to him. He was a mad beast.

She now had to go away as though nothing had happened. It was nothing. After all what did it matter what became of her now ? Her body was of little importance — ghosts of romantic consolations here ! What was the good (seeing what she knew and everything) of storming against this man * She saw herself coming there that afternoon, talking with amiable affectation of interest in his work, in him (in him !), sitting for him ; a long, uninterrupted stream of amiability, talk, suddenly the wild few minutes, then the present ridiculous hush.

The moral, heavily, too heavily, driven in by her no doubt German fate, found its mark in her mind. What Tarr laughed at her for — that silly and vulgar mush, was the cause of all this. Well!

She had done up her hair; her hat was once more on her head. She went towards the door, her face really haggard, inevitable consciousness of drama too in it. Kreisler turned round, went towards the door also, unlocked it, let her pass without saying anything, and, waiting a moment, closed it indifferently again. She was let out as a workman would have been, who had been there to mend a shutter or rectify a bolt.

Bertha made her way home in a roundabout fashion to avoid the possibility of meeting any one she knew. The streets were loftily ignorant of her affairs. Thin walls dyked in affairs and happenings. Ha ha ! the importance of our actions ! Is it more than the kissing of the bricks ?

She came out with mixed feelings; gratefulness for the enormous indifference and ignorance flowing all round us; anger and astonishment at finding herself walking away in this matter-of-fact manner; suffering at the fact that the customary street scene would not mix with the obsession of her late experience.

No doubt Nature was secret enough. But not to tell this experience of hers to anybody also would be shutting her in with Kreisler, somehow for good. She would never be able to escape the contamination of that room of his. It was one of those things that in some form one should be able to tell. She had a growing wish to make it known at once somewhere, in some shape.

That is, at bottom, she still was inclined to continue things — dreams, fancies, explanations, sacrifices. Would nothing cure her ? The first feeling that this was finally the end of those things, that there was nothing further to be said or thought, was modified. She did not definitely think of telling any one — the moral was wearing off more quickly than it should. But the thought of this simple, unsensational walking away and ending up of everything in connexion with Kreisler irked her more and more. Anger revived spasmodically. Kreisler, by doing this, had made an absolute finishing with Kreisler perhaps impossible.

There was nobody now in any sense on her side, or on whose side she could range herself. Kreisler had added himself to the worrying list of her women friends, Tarr, etc., in a disgusting, dumbfounding way, the list of people preying on her mind and pushing her to perpetual fuss, all sorts of explicative, defiant, or other actions. She had stuck Kreisler up as a “cause ’ ’ against her friends. In a manner of his own, he had betrayed her and placed himself beside her friends. In any case, he had carried out in the fullest fashion their estimate of him. In being virtuous a libelled man can best attack his enemies; in being “ blackguardly,” awaken a warmth of sympathy in corroborating them. Kreisler had acted satanically for her friends.

She had seen Elsa and her sister twice that week, but none of the others. Ungregariousness, keeping to herself, was explained by indisposition. Sorbert was meant by this. Her continued seeing of Kreisler was known to all now, and she could imagine their reception of that news. Now she could hardly go on talking about Kreisler. This would at once be interpreted as “ something having happened.” So more scandal against her name. In examining likelihoods of the future she concluded that she would have to break still more with her friends, to make up for having to retire from her Kreisler positions. To squash and counteract their satisfaction she must accentuate her independence in their direction to insult and contempt.

The last half-hour of senseless outrage still took up all the canvas. Attempts to adjust her mind to a situation containing such an element as this was difficult. What could be done with it ? It took up too much space. Everything must come back and be referred to that. She wanted to tell this somewhere. This getting closed in with Kreisler — a survival, perhaps, of her vivid fear of a little time before, when he had locked the door, and she knew that resisting him would be useless — must be at all costs avoided.

Who could she tell ? Clara ? Madame Vannier ?

Once home, she lay down and cried for some time, but without conjuring any of her trouble.

Kreisler seemed to have suddenly brought confusion everywhere. There was nothing that would quite fit in with that ridiculous, disgusting event. He had even, in the end, driven her friends out of her mind, too. She would have said nothing had one turned up then.

Having left Kreisler so simply and undramatically worried her. Something should have been done. There would have been the natural relief. But her direct human feelings of revenge had been paralysed. She thought of going back at once to his room. She could not begin life clearly again until something had  been done against him, or in some way where he was.

He had been treated by her as a cypher, as something vague to put up against her friends. All along for the last week he had been a shadowy and actually unimportant figure. He had shown no consciousness of this. Rather dazed and machine-like himself, Bertha had treated him as she had found him. Suddenly, without any direct articulateness, he had revenged himself as a machine might do, in a nightmare. At a leap he was in the rigid foreground of her life. He had absorbed all the rest in an immense clashing wink. But the moment following this “ desperateness” he stood, abstracted, distant and baffling as before. It was difficult to realize he was there.

Tarr had been the real central and absorbing figure all along, of course, but purposely veiled. He had been as really all-important, though to all appearance eliminated, as Kreisler had been of no importance, though propped up in the foreground. Sorbert at last could no longer be suppressed and kept from coming forward now in her mind. But his presence, too, was perplexing. She had become so used to regarding him, though seeing him daily, as an uncertain and departing figure, that now he had really gone that did not make much difference. His proceedings, a carefully prepared anaesthesia for himself, had had its effect on her as well, serving for both.

The bell rang. She stood up in one movement and stared towards the door. She looked as though she were waiting for the bell to ring two or three times to find resolution in that, one way or the other. It rang a second and third time. She did not know how much persistence would draw her to the door. But she knew that any definite show of energy would overcome her. Was it Elsa ? She had lighted her lamp, and her visitor could therefore have seen that she was at home.

Bertha went to the door at length with affected  alacrity, in a pretence of not having heard the bell before, and opened it sharply. Kreisler was there. The opening of the door had been like the tearing of a characterless mask off a face. Had he not been looking at her through it all the time ? There did not seem room for them where they were standing. He looked to her like a great terrifying poster, cut out on the melodramatic stairway. She remained stone-still in front of him with a pinched expression, as though about to burst out crying, and something deprecating in her paralysed gesture, like a child. There was an analogy to a laugh struck dead on a child’s face at a rebuff, souring and twisting all the features.

Caricatured and enlarged to her eyes, she wanted to laugh for a moment. The surprise was complete. “What, what——” Her mind formed his image,

rather like a man compelled to photograph a ghost. Kreisler ! It was as though the world were made up of various animals, each of a different kind and physique even, and this were the animal Kreisler, whose name alone conjured up certain peculiar dangerous habits. A wild world, not of uniform men and women, but of very divergent and strangely living animals — Kreisler, Lipmann, Tarr. This man, about to speak to her again, on the same square foot of ground with her: he was not an apparition from any remote Past, but from a Past almost a Present, a half-hour old, much more startling. He had the too raw and too new colours of an image hardly digested, much less faded. When she had last seen him she had been still in the sphere of an intense agitation. His ominous and sudden appearance, so hardly out of that, seemed to swallow up the space and time in between. It was like the chilly return of a circling storm. She had imagined that it depended on her to see him or not, that he was pensive except when persistently approached. But here he was, this time, at last, following !

He took a step forward, her room evidently his destination.

“Mistvich!” Bertha said, at the same time retreating into the passage-way. — “Go !”

Got into the room, he did not seem to know what next to do. So far he had been evidently quite clear as to his purpose. He had been feeling the same necessity as her — he, to see his victim. He had not known what he wanted with her, but the obvious pretext and road for the satisfaction of this impulse was the seeking of pardon.

She had a moment before felt that she must see him again, at once, before going further with her life. — He, more vague but more energetic, had come at the end of twenty minutes. They were now together, quite tongue-tied. Once he was there, the pretext appeared unnecessary. The real reason might be found. The real reason no doubt was an intuition not to lose her absolutely, the wisdom of his appetite counselling.

He stood leaning on his cane, and staring in front of him. — Bertha stood quite still, as she would sometimes do when a wasp entered the room, waiting to see if it would blunder about and then fly out again. He was a dangerous animal, he had got in there, and might in the same manner go off again in a minute or two.

Now was the chance she had been fretting for to wipe out in some way what had happened; — not to seem, anyhow, to have taken it all as a matter of course. — But it was too convenient. She had never reckoned on his actually coming and putting himself at her disposition in this way. He stood there without saying anything, just as though he had been sent for and it were for her to speak. — She would have been inclined to send him back to his room, and then, perhaps, go to him.

Constantly on the point of “throwing him out,” as

Tarr had not gone to England. Kreisler had not been sufficient to accomplish this. He still persisted in his self-indulgent system of easy stages. A bus ride distant, he would be able to keep away. But in any case he did not wish to go to England, nor anywhere else, for that matter. Paris was much the most suitable domicile, independently of Bertha, with his present plans.

In the neighbourhood of the Place Clichy, in an old convent, he found a room big enough for four people. There, on the day of the second of the letters, he arrived in a state of characteristic misgiving. It was the habitual indigestion of Reality. He was very fond of reality. But he was like a man very fond of what did not agree with him. It usually ended, however, by his assimilating it.

The insouciant, adventurous, those needing no preparation to live, he did not admire, but felt he should imitate. — A new room was a thing that had to be fitted into as painfully as a foot into some new                   N and too elegant boot. The things deposited on the floor, the door finally closed on this new area to be devoted exclusively to himself, the blankest discomfort descended on him. To undo and let loose upon the room his portmanteau’s squashed and dishevelled contents — like a flock of birds, brushes, photographs and books flying to their respective places on dressing-table, mantelpiece, shelf or bibliothèque; boxes and parcels creeping dog-like under beds and into corners, taxed his character to the breaking-point. The unwearied optimism of these inanimate objects, the way they occupied stolidly and quickly room after room, was appalling. Then they were packed up things, with the staleness of a former room about them, and the souvenir of a depressing time of tearing up, inspecting, and interring.

This preliminary discomfort was less than ever spared him here. He had cut his way to this decision (to go and live in Montmartre), through a bristling host of incertitudes. A place would have had to be particularly spacious to convince him. This large studio-room was worse than any desert. It had been built for something else, and would never be right. —  A large square whitewashed box was what he wanted to pack himself into. This was an elaborate carved chest of a former age. He would no doubt pack it eventually with consoling memories of work. He started work at once, in fact. This was his sovereign cure for new rooms.

Half an hour after his taking possession, it being already time for the aperitif, he issued forth into the new quarter. There were a few clusters of men. The Spanish men dancers were coloured earth-objects, full of basking and frisking instincts ; the atmosphere of the harlot’s life went with them, and Spanish reasonableness and civility. He chose a café on the Place Clichy. The hideous ennui of large gimcrack shops and dusty public offices pervaded other groups of pink, mostly dark-haired Frenchmen drinking appetizers. They responded with their personalities on the café terraces to the emptiness of the boulevard.

Some days later, in the evening, Tarr was to be found in a strange place. Decidedly his hosts could not have explained how he got there. He displayed no consciousness of the anomaly.

He had introduced himself — now for the second time — into Fraulein Lipmann’s aesthetic saloon, after dining with her and her following at Flobert’s Restaurant. As inexplicable as Kreisler’s former visits, these ones that Tarr began to make were not so perfectly unwelcome. There was a glimmering of meaning in them for Bertha’s women friends. He had just walked in two nights before, as though he were an old and established visitor there, shaken hands and sat down. He then listened to their music, drank their coffee and went away apparently satisfied. Did he consider that his so close connexion with Bertha entitled him to this ? It was at all events a prerogative he had never before availed himself of, except on one or two occasions at first, in her company.

The women’s explanation of this eccentric sudden frequentation was that Tarr was in despair. His separation from Bertha (or her conduct with Kreisler) had hit him hard. He wished for consolation or mediation.

Neither of these guesses was right. It was really something absurder than that that had brought him there.

Only a week or ten days away from his love affair with Bertha, Tarr was now coming back to the old haunts and precincts of his infatuation. He was living it all over again in memory, the central and all the accessory figures still in exactly the same place. Suddenly, everything to do with “those days,” as he thought of a week or two before (or what had ended officially then) had become very pleasing. Bertha’s women friends were delightful landmarks. Tarr could not understand how it was he had not taken an interest in them before. They had so much of the German savour of that life lived with Bertha about them !

But not only with them, but with Bertha herself he was likewise carrying on this mysterious retrospective life. He was so delighted, as a fact, to be free of Bertha that he poetized herself and all her belongings.

On this particular second visit to Fraulein Lipmann's he met Anastasya Vasek. She, at least, was nothing to do with his souvenirs. Yet, not realizing her as an absolute new-comer at once, he accepted her as another proof of how delightful these people in truth were.

He had been a very silent guest so far. They were curious to hear what this enigma should eventually say, when it decided to speak.

“How is Bertha ?” they had asked him.

“She has got a cold,” he had answered. It was a fact that she had caught a summer cold several days before. — “How strange!” they thought. — “So he sees her still!”

“She hasn’t been to Flobert’s lately,” Renée Lipmann said. “I’ve been so busy, or I’d have gone round to see her. She’s not in bed, is she ?”

“Oh, no, she’s just got a slight cold. She’s very well otherwise,” Tarr answered.

Bertha disappears. Tarr turns up tranquilly in her place. Was he a substitute ? What could all this   mean ? Their first flutter over, their traditional hostility for him reawakened. He had always been an arrogant, eccentric, and unpleasant person: “Homme egoiste! Homme sensuel!” in Van Bencke’s famous words.

On seeing him talking with new liveliness, not displayed with them, to Anastasya, suspicions began to germinate. Even such shrewd intuition, a development from the reality, as this : “Perhaps getting to like Germans, and losing his first, he had come here to find another.” Comfortable in his liberty, he was still enjoying, by proxy or otherwise, the satisfaction of slavery.

The arrogance implied by his infatuation for the commonplace was taboo. He must be more humble, he felt, and take an interest in his equals.

He had been “Homme egoiste” so far, but “Homme sensuel” was an exaggeration. His concupiscence had been undeveloped. His Bertha, if she had not been a joke, would not have satisfied him. She did not succeed in waking his senses, although she had attracted them. There was no more reality in their sex relations than in their other relations.

He now had a closer explanation of his attachment to stupidity than he had been able to give Lowndes. It was that his artist’s asceticism could not support anything more serious than such an elementary rival, and, when sex was in the ascendant, it turned his eyes away from the highest beauty and dulled the extremities of his senses, so that he had nothing but rudimentary inclinations left.

But in the interests of his animalism he was turning to betray the artist in him. For he had been saying to himself lately that a more suitable lady-companion must be found ; one, that is, he need not be ashamed of. He felt that the time had arrived for Life to come in for some of the benefits of Consciousness.

Anastasya’s beauty, bangles, and good sense were the very thing.

Despite himself, Sorbert was dragged out of his luxury of reminiscence without knowing it, and  began discriminating between the Bertha enjoyment felt through the pungent German medium of her friends, and this novel sensation. Yet this sensation was an intruder. It was as though a man having wandered sentimentally along an abandoned route, a tactless and gushing acquaintance had been discovered in unlikely possession.

Tarr asked her from what part of Germany she came.

“My parents are Russian. I was born in Berlin and brought up in America. We live in Dresden,” she answered.

This accounted for her jarring on his maudlin German reveries.

“Lots of Russian families have settled latterly in Germany, haven’t they ?” he asked.

“Russians are still rather savage. The more bourgeois a place or thing is the more it attracts them. German watering places, musical centres and so on, they like about as well as anything. They often settle there.”

“Do you regard yourself as a Russian — or a German ?”

“Oh, a Russian. I——”

“I’m glad of that,” said Tarr, quite forgetting where he was, and forgetting the nature of his occupation.

“Don’t you like Germans then ?”

“Well, now you remind me of it, I do : — very much, in fact,” He shook himself with self-reproach and gazed round benignantly and comfortably at his hosts. “Else I shouldn’t be here ! They’re such a nice, modest, assimilative race, with an admirable sense of duty. They are born servants; excellent mercenary troops, I understand. They should always be used as such.”

“I see you know them à fond.” She laughed in the direction of the Lipmann.

He made a deprecating gesture.

“Not much. But they are an accessible and friendly people.”

Tarr had arrived at Bertha’s place about seven in the evening on his first return from Montmartre. He hung about for a little. In ten minutes’ time he had his reward. She came out, followed by Kreisler. Bertha did not see him at first. He followed on the other side of the street, some fifteen yards behind. He did this with sleepy gratification. All was well.

Relations with her were now, it must be clear, substantially at an end. A kind of good sensation of alternating jealousy and regret made him wander along with obedient gratitude. Should she turn round and see him, how uncomfortable she would be ! How naturally alike in their mechanical marching gait she and the German were! He was a distinct third party. Being a stranger, with very different appearance, thrilled him agreeably. By a little manoeuvre of short cuts he would get in front of them. This he did.

Bertha saw him as he debouched from his turning. She stopped dead, and appeared to astonished Kreisler to be about to take to her heels. It was flattering in a way that his mere presence should produce this effect. He went up to her. Her palm a sentimental instrument of weak, aching, heavy tissues, she gave him her hand, face fixed on him in a mask of regret and reproach. Fascinated by the intensity of this, he had been staring at her a little too long, perhaps with some of the reflection of her expression. He turned towards Kreisler. He found a, to him. conventionally German indifferent countenance.

“Herr Kreisler,” Bertha said with laconic energy, as though she were uttering some fatal name. Her “Herr Kreisler” said hollowly, “It’s done !” It also had an inflexion of “What shall I do ?”

A sick energy saturated her face, the lips were indecently compressed, the eyes wide, dull, with red rims.

Tarr bowed to Kreisler as Bertha said his name. Kreisler raised his hat. Then, with a curious feeling of already thrusting himself on these people, he began to walk along beside Bertha. She moved like an unconvinced party to a bargain, who consents to walk up and down a little, preliminary to a final consideration of the affair. “Yes, but walking won’t help matters,” she might have been saying. Kreisler’s indifference was absolute. There was an element of the child’s privilege in Tarr’s making himself of the party (“Sorbet, tu es si jeune”). There was the claim for indulgence of a spirit not entirely serious! The childishness of this turning up as though nothing had happened, with such wilful resolve not to recognize the seriousness of things, Bertha’s drama, the significance of the awful words, “ Herr Kreisler !” and so on, was present to him. Bertha must know the meaning of his rapid resurrection — she knew him too well not to know that. So they walked on, without conversation. Then Tarr inquired if she were “quite well.”

' “Yes, Sorbert, quite well,” she replied, with soft tragic banter.

As though by design, he always found just the words or tone that would give an opening for this sentimental irony of hers.

But the least hint that he had come to reinstate himself must not remain. It must be clearly understood that Kreisler was the principal figure now. He, Tarr, was only a privileged friend.

With unflattering rapidity somebody else had been found. Her pretension to heroic attachment was compromised. Should not he put in for the vacated berth ?

He had an air of welcoming Kreisler. “Make  yourself at home; don’t mind me,” his manner said. As to showing him over the premises he was taking possession of — he had made the inspection, himself, no doubt!

“We have a mutual friend, Lowndes,” Tarr said to Kreisler, pleasantly. “A week or two ago he was going to introduce me to you, but it was fated——”

“Ah, yes, Lowndes,” said Kreisler, “I know him.”

“Has he left Paris, do you know ?”

“I think not. I thought I saw him yesterday, there, in the Boulevard du Paradis.” Kreisler nodded over his shoulder, indicating precisely the spot on which they had met. His gesture implied that Lowndes might still be found thereabout.

Bertha shrank in “subtle” pantomime from their affability. Prom the glances she pawed her German friend with, he must deserve nothing but horrified avoidance. Sorbert’s astute and mischievous way of saddling her with Kreisler, accepting their being together as the most natural thing in life, roused her combativity. Tarr honoured him, clearly out of politeness to her. Very well: all she could do for the moment was to be noticeably distant with Kreisler. She must display towards him the disgust and reprobation that Tarr should feel, and which he refused, in order to vex her.

Kreisler during the last few days had persisted and persisted. He had displayed some cleverness in his choice of means. As a result of overtures and manoeuvres, Bertha had now consented to see him. Her demoralization was complete. She could not stand up any longer against the result, personified by Kreisler, of her idiotic actions. At present she transferred her self-hatred from herself to Kreisler.

Tarr’s former relations with Bertha were known to him. He resented the Englishman’s air of proprietorship, the sort of pleasant “handing-over” that was going on. It had for object, he thought, to cheapen his little success.

“I don’t think, Herr Kreisler, I’ll come to dinner after all.” She stood still and rolled her eyes wildly in several directions, and stuck one of her hands stiffly out from her side.

“Very well, Fraulein,” he replied evenly. — The dismissal annoyed him. His eyes took in Tarr compendiously in passing. Was this a resuscitation of old love at his expense ? Tarr had perhaps come to claim his property. This was not the way that is usually done.

“Adieu, Herr Kreisler,” sounded like his dismissal. A “never let me see you again ; understand that here things end!” was written baldly in her very bald eyes. With irony he bid good day to Tarr.

“I hope we shall meet again” : Tarr shook him warmly by the hand.

“It is likely,” Kreisler replied at once.

As yet Kreisler was undisturbed. He intended not to relinquish his acquaintance with Bertha Lunken. If the Englishman’s amiability were a polite way of reclaiming property left owner-less and therefore susceptible of new rights being deployed as regards it, then in time those later rights would be vindicated. Kreisler’s first impression of Tarr was not flattering. But no doubt they would meet again, as he had said.

Bertha held out her hand brutally, in a sort of spasm of will: said, in the voice of “ finality,”

“Good-bye, Sorbet: good-bye !”

He did not take it. She left it there a moment, saying again, “Good-bye !”

“Good-bye, if you like,” he said at length. “But I see no reason why we should part in this manner. If Kreisler wouldn’t mind” — he looked after him —  “we might go for a little walk. Or will you come and have an aperitif ?”

“No, Sorbert, I’d rather not. — Let us say good-bye at once ; will you ?”

“My dear girl, don’t be so silly'” He took her arm and dragged her towards a cafe, the first on the boulevard they were approaching.

She hung back, prolonging the personal contact, yet pretending to be resisting it with, wonder.

“I can’t, Sorbert. Je ne peux pas !” purring her lips out and rolling her eyes. She went to the café in the end. For some time conversation hung back.

“How is Fraulein Lipmann getting on ?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.”

“Ah!”

Tarr felt he had five pieces to play. He had played one. The other four he toyed with in a lazy way.

“Van Bencke ?”

“I have not seen her.”

That left three.

“How is Isolde ?”

“I don’t know.”

“Seen the Kinderbachs ?”

“One of them.”

“How is Clara ?”

“Clara ? She is quite well, I think.”

The solder for the pieces of this dialogue was a dreary grey matter that Bertha supplied. Their talk was an unnecessary column on the top of which she perched herself with glassy quietude.

She turned to him abruptly as though he had been hiding behind her, and tickling her neck with a piece of feather-grass.

“Why did you leave me, Sorbert ? — Why did you leave me ?”

He filled his pipe, and then said, feeling like a bad actor:

“I went away at that particular moment, as you know, because I had heard that Herr Kreisler——”

“Don’t speak to me about Kreisler — don’t mention his name, I beg you. — I hate that man. — Ugh !”

Genuine vehemence made Tarr have a look at her.

Tarr soon regretted this last anti-climax stage of his adventure. He would have left Kreisler alone in future, but he felt that by frequenting him he could save Bertha from something disagreeable. With disquiet and misgiving every night now he sat in front of his Prussian friend. He watched him gradually imbibing enough spirits to work him up to his pitch of characteristic madness.

“After all, let us hear really what it all means, your Kreisler stunt, and Kreisler ?” he said to her four or five days after his reappearance. “Do you know that I act as a dam, or rather a dyke, to his outrageous flood of liquorous spirits every night ? Only my insignificant form is between you and destruction, or you and a very unpleasant Kreisler, at any rate. — Have you seen him when he’s drunk ?  — What, after all, does Kreisler mean ? Satisfy my curiosity.”

Bertha shuddered and looked at him with dramatically wide-open eyes, as though there were no answer.

“It’s nothing, Sorbert, nothing,” she said, as though Kreisler were the bubonic plague and she were making light of it.

Yet a protest had to be made. He had rather neglected the coincidence of his arrival and Bertha’s refusal to see Kreisler. He must avoid finding himself manoeuvred into appearing the cause. A tranquil and sentimental revenant was the rôle he had chosen. Up to a point he encouraged Bertha to see his boon companion and relax her sudden exclusiveness. He hesitated to carry out thoroughly his part of go-between and reconciler. At length he began to make inquiries. After all, to have to hold   back his successor to the favours of a lady, from going and seizing those rights (presumably temporarily denied him), was a strange situation. At any moment now it seemed likely that Kreisler would turn on him. This would simplify matters. Better leave lovers to fight out their own quarrels and not take up the ungrateful rôle of interferer and voluntary policeman. All his retrospective pleasure was being spoilt. But he was committed to remain there for the present. To get over his sensation of dupe, he was more sociable with Kreisler than he felt. The German interpreted this as an hypocrisy. His contempt and suspicion of the peculiar revenant grew.

Bertha was tempted to explain, in as dramatic a manner as possible, the situation to Tarr. But she hesitated always because she thought it would lead to a fight. She was often, as it was, anxious for Tarr.

“Sorbert, I think I’ll go to Germany at once,” she said to him, on the afternoon of his second visit to Renée Lipmann’s.

“Why, because you’re afraid of Kreisler ?”

“No, but I think it’s better.”

“But why, all of a sudden ?”

“My sister will be home from Berlin, in a day or two——”

“And you’d leave me here to ‘ mind ’ the dog.”

' “No. — Don’t see Kreisler any more, Sorbert. Dog is the word indeed ! He is mad : ganz verucht ! —  Promise me, Sorbert” — she took his hand — “not to go to the café any more !”

“Do you want him at your door at twelve tonight ? — I feel I may be playing the part of — gooseberry, is it——?”

“Don’t, Sorbert. If you only knew ! — He was here this morning, hammering for nearly half an hour. But all I ask you is to go to the café no more. There is no need for you to be mixed up in all this. I only am to blame.”

“I wonder what is the real explanation of Kreisler?” Sorbert said, pulled up by what she had said. “Have  you known him long — before you knew me, for instance ?”

“No, only a week or two — since you went away.”

“I must ask Kreisler. But he seems to have very primitive notions about himself.”

“Don’t bother any more with that man, Sorbert. You don’t do any good. Don’t go to the cafe tonight !”

“Why to-night ?”

“Any night.”

Kreisler certainly was a “new link” — too much. The chief cause of separation had become an element of insidious rapprochement.

He left her silently apprehensive, staring at him mournfully.

So that night, after his second visit to Fraulein Lipmann’s, he did not seek out Kreisler at his usual headquarters with his first enthusiasm.

Already before a considerable pile of saucers, representing his evening’s menu of drink, Kreisler sat quite still, his eyes very bright, smiling to himself. Tarr did not at once ask him “what Kreisler meant.” “Kreisler” looked as though it meant something a little different on that particular evening. He acknowledged Tarr’s arrival slightly, seeming to include him in his reverie. It was a sort of silent invitation to “come inside.” Then they sat without speaking, an unpleasant atmosphere of police-court romance for Tarr.

Tarr still kept his retrospective luxury before him, as it maintained the Kreisler side of the business in a desired perspective. Anastasya, whom he had seen that evening, had come as a diversion. He got back, with her, into the sphere of “real” things again, not fanciful retrospective ones.

This would be a reply to Kreisler (an Anastasya for your Otto) and restore the balance. At present  they were existing on a sort of three-legged affair. This inclusion of the fourth party would make things solid and less precarious again.

To maintain his rôle of intermediary and go on momentarily keeping his eye on Kreisler’s threatening figure, he must himself be definitely engaged in a new direction, beyond the suspicion of hankerings after his old love.

Did he wish to enter into a new attachment with Anastasya ? That could be decided later. He would make the first steps, retain her if possible, and out of this, charming expedient pleasant things might come. He was compelled to requisition her for the moment. She might be regarded as a travelling companion. Thrown together inevitably on a stagecoach journey, anything might happen. Delight, adventure, and amusement was always achieved: as his itch to see his humorous concubine is turned into a “retrospective luxury,” visits to the Lipmann circle, mysterious relationship with Kreisler. This, in its turn, suddenly turning rather prickly and perplexing, he now, through the medium of a beautiful woman, turns it back again into fun; not serious enough for Beauty, destined, therefore, rather for her subtle, rough, satiric sister.

Once Anastasya had been relegated to her place rather of expediency, he could think of her with more freedom. He looked forward with gusto to his work in her direction.

There would be no harm in anticipating a little. She might at once be brought on to the boards, as though the affair were already settled and ripe for publicity.

“Do you know a girl called Anastasya Vasek ? She is to be found at your German friend’s, Fraulein Lipmann’s.”

“Yes, I know her,” said Kreisler, looking up with unwavering blankness. His introspective smile vanished. “What then ?” was implied in his look. What a fellow this Englishman was, to be sure!

Tarr had Anastasya in solitary promenade two days after this. He had worked the first stage consummately. He swam with ease beside his big hysterical black swan, seeming to guide her with a golden halter. They were swimming with august undulations of thought across the Luxembourg Gardens on this sunny and tasteful evening about four o’clock. The Latins and Scandinavians who strolled on the Latin terrace were each one a microscopic hero, but better turned out than the big doubtful heroes of 1840.

The inviolate, constantly sprinkled and shining lawns by the Lycée Henri Trois were thickly fringed with a sort of seaside humanity, who sat facing them and their coolness as though it had been the sea. Leaving these upland expanses to the sedentary swarms of Mammas and Papas, Tarr and Anastasya   crossed over beneath the trees past the children’s carousels grinding out their antediluvian lullabies.

This place represented the richness of four wasted years. Four incredibly gushing, thick years ; what had happened to this delightful muck ? All this profusion had accomplished for him was to dye the avenues of a Park with personal colour for the rest of his existence.

No one, he was quite convinced, had squandered so much stuff in the neighbourhood of these terraces, ponds, and lawns. So this was more nearly his Park than it was anybody else’s. He should never walk through it without bitter and soothing recognition from it. Well: that was what the Man of Action accomplished. In four idle years he had been, when most inactive, trying the man of action’s job. He had captured a Park ! — Well !he had spent himself into the Earth. The trees had his sap in them.

He remembered a day when he had brought a book to the bench there, his mind tearing at it in advance, almost writing it in its energy. He had been full of such unusual faith. The streets around these gardens, in which he had lodged alternately, were so many confluents and tributaries of memory, charging it on all sides with defunct puissant tides. The places, he reflected, where childhood has been spent, or where, later, dreams of energy have been flung away, year after year, are obviously the healthiest spots for a person. But perhaps, although he possessed the Luxembourg Gardens so completely, they were completely possessed by thousands of other people! So many men had begun their childhood of ambition in this neighbourhood. His hopes, too, no doubt, had grown there more softly because of the depth and richness of the bed. A sentimental miasma made artificially in Paris a similar good atmosphere where the mind could healthily exist as was found by artists in brilliant complete and solid times. Paris was like a patent food.

“Elle dit le mot, Anastase, né pour d’éternels  parchemins.” He could not, however, get interested. Was it the obstinate Eighteenth Century animal vision ? When you plunge into these beings, must they be all quivering with unconsciousness, like life with a cat or a serpent ? — But her sex would throw clouds over her eyes. She was a woman. It was no good. Again he must confess Anastasya could only offer him something too serious. He could not play with that. Sex-loyalty to his most habitual lips interfered.

He had the protective instinct that people with a sense of their own power have for those not equals with whom they have been associated. He would have given to Bertha the authority of his own spirit, to prime her with himself that she might meet on equal terms and vanquish any rival. He experienced a slight hostility to Anastasya like a part of Bertha left in himself protesting and jealous. It was chiefly vanity at the thought of this superior woman’s contempt could she see his latest female effort.

“I suppose she knows all about Bertha,” he thought. Kreisler-like, he looked towards the Lipmann women. “Homme sensuel !Homme égoiste !”

She seemed rather shy with him.

“How do you like Paris ?” he asked her.

“I don’t know yet. Do you like it ?” She had a flatness in speaking English because of her education in the United States.

“I don’t like to be quite so near the centre of the world. You can see all the machinery working. It makes you a natural sceptic. But here I am. I find it difficult to live in London.”

“I should have thought everything was so perfected here that the machinery did not obtrude——”

“I don’t feel that. I think that a place like this exists for the rest of the world. It works that the other countries may live and create. That is the rôle France has chosen. The French spirit seems to me rather spare and impoverished at present.”

“You regard it as a mother-drudge ?”

“More of a drudge than a mother. We don’t get much really from France, except tidiness.”

For the first time since his “return” Tarr found no Kreisler at the café “I wonder what that animal’s up to,” he thought. The garçon told him that Kreisler had not been there at all that evening. Tarr reconsidered his responsibilities. He could not return to Montmartre without just informing himself of Kreisler’s whereabouts and state of mind. The “obstacle” had been eluded. It must be transported rapidly “in the way” again, wherever and in whatever direction the sluggish stream was flowing.

Bertha’s he did not intend to go to if he could help it. A couple of hours at tea-time was what he had instituted as his day’s “amount” of her company. Kreisler's room would be better. This he did. There was a light in Kreisler’s room. The window had been pointed out to him. This perhaps was sufficient, Tarr felt. He might now go home, having located  him. Still, since he was there he would go up and make sure. He lighted his way up the staircase with matches. Arrived at the top floor he was uncertain at which door to knock. He chose one with a light beneath it and knocked.

In a moment some one called out “Who is it?” Recognizing the voice Tarr answered, and the door opened slowly. Kreisler was standing there in his shirt-sleeves, glasses on, and a brush in his hand.

“Ah, come in,” he said.

Tarr sat down, and Kreisler went on brushing his hair. When he had finished he put the brush down quickly, turned round, and pointing to the floor said, in a voice suggesting that that was the first of several questions:

“Why have you come here ?”

Tarr at once saw that he had gone a step too far, and either shown bad calculation or chanced on his rival at an unfortunate time. It was felt, no doubt, that — acting more or less as “keeper,” or check, at any rate — he had come to look after his charge, and hear why Kreisler had absented himself from the café

“Why have you come here ?” Kreisler asked again, in an even tone, pointing again with his forefinger to the centre of the floor.

“Only to see you, of course. I thought perhaps you weren’t well.”

’ “Ah, so ! I want you, my dear English friend, now that you are here, to explain yourself a little. Why do you honour me with so much of your company ?”

“Is my company disagreeable to you ?”

“I wish to know, sir, why I have so much of it !” The Deutscher-student was coming to the top. His voice had risen and the wind of his breath appeared to be making his moustaches whistle.

“I, of course, have reasons, besides the charm of your society, for seeking you out.”

Tarr was sitting stretched on one of Kreisler’s two chairs looking up frowningly. He was annoyed at having let himself in for this interview. Kreisler stood in front of him without any expression in   particular, his voice rather less guttural than usual. Tarr felt ill at ease at this sudden breath of storm and kept still with difficulty.

“You have reasons ? You have reasons I Heavens'! Outside! Quick! Out!”

There was no doubt this time that it was in earnest. He was intended rapidly to depart. Kreisler was pointing to the door. His cold grin was slightly on his face again, and an appearance of his hair having receded on his forehead and his ears gone close against his head warned Tarr definitely where he was. He got up. The absurdity in the situation he had got himself into chiefly worried him. He stood a moment in a discouraged way, as though trying to remember something. His desire for a row had vanished with the arrival of it. It had come at such an angle that it was difficult to say anything, and he had a superstition of the vanity about the marks left by hands, or rather his hands.

“Will you tell me what on earth’s the matter with you to-night ?” he asked.

“Yes ! I don’t want to be followed about by an underhand swine like you any longer! By what devil’s impudence did you come here to-night ? For a week I’ve had you in the café. What did you want with me ? If you wanted your girl back, why hadn’t you the courage to say so ? I saw you with another lady to-night. I’m not going to have you hovering and slavering around me. Be careful I don’t come and pull your nose when I see you with that other lady! You’re welcome, besides, to your girl——”

“I recommend you to hold your mouth ! Don’t talk about my girl. I’ve had enough of it. Where her sense was when she alighted on a specimen like you —” Tarr’s German hesitated and suddenly struck, as though for the rest of the night. He had stepped forward with a suggestion of readiness for drama :

“Heraus, schwein !” shouted Kreisler, in a sort of incredulous drawling crescendo, shooting his hand  towards the door and urging his body like the cox of a boat. Like a sheep-dog he appeared to be collecting Tarr together and urging him out.

Tarr stood staring doubtfully at him.

“What—”

“Heraus ! Out! Quicker ! Quicker! ! Quick !” His last word, “Schnell!” dropped like a plummet to the deepest tone his throat was capable of. It was short and so absolutely final that the grace given, even after it had been uttered, for this hateful visitor to remove himself, was a source of astonishment to Tarr. For a man to be ordered out of a room that does not belong to him always puts him at a disadvantage. Should he insist, forcibly and successfully, to remain, it can only be for a limited time. He will have to go sooner or later, and make his exit, unless he establish himself there and make it his home henceforth; a change of lodging most people are not, on the spur of the moment, prepared to decide on. The room, somehow, too, seems on its owner’s side, and to be vomiting forth the intruder. The civilized man’s instinct of ownership makes it impossible for any but the most indelicate to resist a feeling of hesitation before the idea of resistance in another man’s shell! All Tarr’s attitude to this man had been made up of a sort of comic hypocrisy. Neither comedy nor hypocrisy were usable for the moment.

Had Tarr foreseen this possible termination of his rôle of “obstacle ?” And ought he, he would ask himself, to have gone on with this half-farce if he were not prepared to meet the ultimate consequences ? Kreisler was quite unworthy to stand there, with perfect reason, and to be telling him to “get out.” It was absurd to exalt Kreisler in that way! But Tarr had probably counted on being equal to any emergency, and baffling or turning Kreisler’s violence in some genial manner.

He stood for a few seconds in a tumultuous hesitation, when he saw Kreisler run across the room, bend forward and dive his arm down behind his box. He   watched with uncomfortable curiosity this new move, as one might watch a surgeon’s haste at the crisis of an operation, searching for some necessary implement, mislaid for the moment. He felt schoolboy-like, left waiting there at Kreisler’s disposition. It was as a reaction against this unpleasant feeling that he stepped towards the door. The wish not to “obey” or to seem to turn tail either had alone kept him where he was. He had just found the door when Kreisler, with a bound, was back from his box, flourishing an old dog-whip in his hand.

“Ah, you go ? Look at this !” He cracked the whip once or twice. “This is what I keep for hounds like you !” Crack ! He cracked it again in rather an inexperienced way with a certain difficulty. He frowned and stopped in his discourse, as though it had been some invention he were showing off, that would not quite work at the proper moment, necessitating concentration. .

“If you wish to see me again, you can always find me here. You won’t get off so easily next time !” He cracked the whip smartly and then slammed the door.

Tarr could imagine him throwing it down in a corner of the room, and then going on with his undressing.

When Kreisler had jumped to the doorway Tarr had stepped out with a half-defensive, half-threatening gesture and then gone on with strained slowness, lighting a match at the head of the stairs. He felt like a discomfited pub-loafer as he raised the match to an imaginary clay pipe rising in his mind. There was the ostentatious coolness of the music-hall comedian.

The thing that had chiefly struck him in Kreisler under this new aspect was a kind of nimbleness, a pettiness in his behaviour and movements, where perhaps he had expected more stiffness and heroics ; the clown-like gibing form his anger took, a frigid disagreeable slyness and irony, a juvenile quickness and coldness.

Tarr was extremely dissatisfied with the part he had played in this scene. First of all he felt he had  withdrawn too quickly at the appearance of the whip, although he had in fact got under way before it had appeared. Then, he argued, he should have stopped at the appearance of this instrument of disgrace. To stop and fight with Kreisler, what objection was there to that, he asked himself ? A taking Kreisler too seriously ? But what less serious than fighting ? He had saved himself an unpleasantness, something ridiculous, merely to find himself outside Kreisler’s door, a feeling of primitive dissatisfaction in him. Had he definitely been guilty of a lack of pluck or pride, it would have been better.

There was something mean and improper in all this that he could not reason away or mistake. He had undoubtedly insulted this man by his attitude, s'en était fiché de lui; and when the other turned, whip in hand, he had walked away. What really should he have done ? He should, no doubt, he thought, having humorously instituted himself Kreisler’s keeper, have humorously struggled with him, when the idiot became obstreperous. At that point his humour had stopped. Then his humour had limitations ?

Once and for all and certainly : he had no right to treat a man as he had treated Kreisler and yet claim, when he turned and resented this treatment, immunity .from action on the score of Kreisler’s idiocy. In allowing the physical struggle any importance he allowed Kreisler an importance, too, that made his former treatment of him unreal and unjustified. In Kreisler’s eyes he was a blagueur, without resistance at a pinch, who walks away when turned on. This opinion was of no importance, since he had not a shadow' of respect for Kreisler. Again he turned on himself. If he was so weak-minded as to care what trash like Kreisler thought or felt! He wandered in the direction of the Café de l’Aigle, gripped in this ratiocination.

His unreadiness, his dislike for action, his fear of ridicule, he treated severely in turn. He thought of everything he could against himself. And he laughed   at himself. But it was no good. At last he gave way to the urgency of his vanity and determined not to leave the matter where it was. At once plans for retrieving this discomfort came crowding on him. He would go to the café as usual on the following evening, sit down smilingly at Kreisler’s table as though nothing had happened. In short, he would altogether endorse the opinion that Kreisler had formed of him. And yet why this meanness, even assumed, Tarr asked himself, even while arranging realistically his to-morrow evening’s purification? Always in a contemptuous spirit, some belittlement or unsavoury rôle was suggesting itself. His contempt for everybody degraded him.

Still, for a final occasion and since he was going this time to accept any consequences, he would follow his idea. He would be, to Kreisler’s mind for a little, the strange “slaverer and hoverer” who had been kicked out on the previous night. He would even have to “pile it on thick” to be accepted at all, exaggerate in the direction of Kreisler’s unflattering notion of him. Then he would gradually aggravate Kreisler, and with the same bonhomie attack him with resolution. He laughed as he came to this point, as a sensible old man might laugh at himself on arriving at a similar decision.

Soothed by the prospect of this rectification of the evening’s blunder, Tarr once more turned to reflect on it, and saw more clearly than ever the parallel morals of his Bertha affair and his Kreisler affair. His sardonic dream of life got him, as a sort of Quixotic dreamer of inverse illusions, blows from the swift arms of windmills and attacks from indignant and perplexed mankind. He, instead of having conceived the world as more chivalrous and marvellous than it was, had conceived it as emptied of all dignity, sense, and generousness. The drovers and publicans were angry at not being mistaken for legendary chivalry or chatelaines. The very windmills resented not being taken for giants! The curse of humour was in him, anchoring him at one end of the  see-saw whose movement and contradiction was life.

Reminded of Bertha, he did not, however, hold her responsible. But his protectorate would be wound up. Acquaintance with Anastasya would be left where it was, despite the threatened aggression against his nose.

Tarr’s character at this time performed repeatedly the following manoeuvre: his best energies would, once a farce was started, gradually take over the business from the play department and continue it as a serious line of its own. It was as though it had not the go to initiate anything of its own accord. It was content to exploit the clown’s discoveries.

The bellicose visit to Kreisler now projected was launched to a slow blast of Humour, ready, when the time came, to turn into a storm. His contempt for the German would not allow him to enter into anything seriously against him. Kreisler was a joke. Jokes, it had to be admitted (and in that they became more effective than ever), were able to make you sweat.

That Kreisler could be anywhere but at the café de l’Aigle on the following evening never entered Tarr’s head. As he was on an unpleasant errand, he took it for granted that Fate would on this occasion put everything punctually at his disposal. Had it been an errand of pleasure, he would have instinctively supposed the reverse.

At ten, and at half-past, his rival had not yet arrived. Tarr set out to make rapidly a tour of the other cafés. But Kreisler might be turning over a   new leaf. He might be going to bed, as on the previous evening. He must not be again sought, though, on his own territory. The moral disadvantage of this position, on a man’s few feet of most intimate floor space, Tarr had clearly realized.

The Cafe Souchet, the most frequented café of the Quarter, entered merely in a spirit of German thoroughness, was, however, the one. More alert, and brushed up a little, Tarr thought, Kreisler was sitting with another man, with a bearded, naif, and rather pleasant face, over his coffee. No pile of saucers this time attended him.

The stranger was a complication. Perhaps the night’s affair should be put off until the conditions were more favourable. But Tarr’s vanity was impatient. His wait in the original cafe had made him nervous and hardly capable of acting with circumspection. On the other hand, it might come at once. This was an opposite complication. Kreisler might open hostilities on the spot. This would rob him of the subtle benefits to be derived from his gradual strategy. This must be risked. He was not very calm. He crudely went up to Kreisler’s table and sat down. The feeling of the lack of aplomb in this action, and his disappointment at the presence of the other man, chased the necessary good humour out of his face. He had carefully preserved this expression for some time, even walking lazily and quietly as if he were carrying a jug of milk. Now it vanished in a moment. Despite himself, he sat down opposite Kreisler as solemn as a judge, pale, his eyes fixed on the object of his activity with something like a scowl.

But, his first absorption in his own sensations lifted and eased a little, he recognized that something very unusual was in the air.

Kreisler and his friend were not speaking or doing anything visibly. They were just sitting still, two self-possessed malefactors. Nevertheless, Tarr’s arrival to all appearance disturbed and even startled them, as if they had been completely wrapped up in some engrossing game or conspiracy.

Kreisler’s afternoon encounter with Anastasya and Soltyk had resembled Tarr’s meeting with him and Bertha. Kreisler had seen Anastasya and his new cafe friend one day from his window. His reference to possible nose-pulling was accounted for by this. The next day he had felt rather like seeing Anastasya again somewhere. With this object, he had patrolled the neighbourhood. About four o’clock, having just bought some cigarettes at the “Berne,” he was standing outside considering a walk in the Luxemburg, when Fraulein Vasek appeared in this unshunnable circus of the Quartier du Paradis. Soltyk was with her. He went over at once. With urbane timidity, as though they had been alone, he offered his hand. She looked at Soltyk, smiling. But she showed no particular signs of wanting to escape. They began strolling along the Boulevard, Soltyk showing every sign of impatience. She then stopped.

“Mr. Soltyk and I were just going to have the ‘ five o’clock ’ somewhere,” she said.

Soltyk looked pointedly down the Boulevard, as though that had been an improper piece of information to communicate to Kreisler.

“If you consent to my accompanying you, Fraulein, it would give me the greatest pleasure to remain in your company a little longer.”

She laughed. “Where were we going, Louis ? Didn’t you say there was a place near here ?”

“There is one over there. But I’m afraid, Fraulein Vasek, I must leave you. — I have——”

“Oh, must you ? I’m sorry.”

Soltyk was astonished and mortified. He did not go, looking at her doubtfully. At this point Kreisler had addressed him.

“I said nothing, sir, when a moment ago, you failed to return my salute. I understand you were going to have tea with Fraulein Vasek. Now you deprive her suddenly of the pleasure of your company.

CHAPTER III

The indignation and flurry subsided; but the child of this eruption remained. The Polish party found the legacy of the uproar as cold as its cause had been hot. Bitzenko inspired respect as he scratched his beard, which smelt of Turkish tobacco, and wrinkled up imperturbably small grey eyes.

Then, the excitement over, the red mark on Soltyk’s cheek became merely a fact. One or two of his friends found themselves examining it obliquely, as a relic, with curiosity.

He had had his face smacked earlier in the day, as well. How much longer was his face going to go on being smacked ? Here was this Russian still there. There was the chance of an affair. A duel —  a duel, for a change, in our civilized life; c'était une idée.

Who was the girl the Russian kept mentioning ?

They went over to a small, gaudy, quiet café opposite, Kreisler watching them, but still with his eye on the door near at hand.

Tarr was amused now at his position of dummy. He enjoyed crossing the road under Kreisler’s eye, in his service. The evening’s twists were very comic. 

Imaginative people are easy to convince of the naturalness of anything; and the Russian was the prophet of the necessity of this affair. Stephen was not convinced; but he soon made up his mind that Bitzenko was either Kreisler’s accomplice in some scheme or at least had made up his mind that there could only be one ending to the matter.

He went back to the café and, sitting down beside Soltyk again, said:

“I’m afraid I was mistaken, Louis. Your German means to fight you or else he has some little game. If you’re sure there’s nothing in it, you must tell him and his little Russian to go to the devil.”

While Stephen Staretsky had been away one of Soltyk’s friends told them about Bitzenko.

“Don’t you know him, Louis ? Maiewski used to know him. He lives in one of those big studios, Rue Ulm, near the Invalides. Il a du pognon, il parait.”

Soltyk began patting his cheek gently. But his vanity ached steadily inside.

“What is his name ?” asked another.

“Bitzenko. He once had a duel and blinded a man.”

Soltyk looked up and stopped patting his cheek. “How ? Blinded him ?” somebody asked. “ Yes, blinded him.”

- The blows began to take effect, the atmosphere becoming somehow congenial to them. When Stephen Staretsky delivered his message Soltyk was losing his self-control. The opportunity of killing this obnoxious figure offered him so obstinately by Bitzenko — whom he disliked even more — began to recommend itself to him. This commis voyageur sent to press the attractions of destruction had won his point.

Soltyk had been silent. He had been twisting up the comers of a newspaper on the table before him, and appeared struck lazy, into a kind of sullen sleepiness and detachment resembling despair.

“Ask him,” he said suddenly to Staretsky, “what he wants.”

“What do you mean ?”

Soltyk answered irritably, “Why, what they want: what sort of a duel he wants and when.” “ Duel” was said as though it were a common object. “Settle it quickly and let’s get all this nonsense over, since you have begun negotiations.”

Stephen Staretsky stared at him.

“You don’t mean — ? I have not been negotiating. I simply——”

The others once more clamoured, after a moment of astonishment.

“You don’t mean to say, Louis, you’re going——?”

“What nonsense, what utter nonsense ! What can you be thinking of ?”

“If Bitzenko comes in again, pay no attention to him! What possesses you, Louis ! Whatever possesses you, Louis !”,

Soltyk looked angrily at his friends without replying.

“Staretsky, arrange that, do you mind ?” he said when the exclamations stopped. “But for Heaven’s sake get it finished quickly. This is becoming boring.”

Staretsky said, leaning on the back of Soltyk’s chair, with authority:

“Don’t be absurd, Louis : don’t be absurd. You must refuse to listen to him. All that rot about libelling and the ‘ beautiful girl ’: my God, man, you’re not going to take that seriously ?”

“Of course not. But I shall fight the German clown. I want to. This is becoming ridiculous.”

Soltyk had made up his mind. He would never have armed himself and shot Kreisler in the street. That would have been too ridiculous. It would have had the touch of passion and intimacy of a crime passionel. It would only have been dignified for an inhabitant of Nevada.

He did not regard this as a duel, but a brawl, ordered by the rules of “affairs of honour.” If a drunken man or an apache attacked you the best thing to do would be to fight. If he offered to “fight you fair”  — putting it in that way — then that would, be the best thing, too, no doubt.

But Bitzenko really had brought him to this. Kreisler alone could never have hoped to compass anything approaching a duel with him.

Stephen Staretsky overwhelmed him with expostulation — even reproaches. His voice rose and fell in a microscopic stream of close-packed sound. His face became shiny and the veins appeared in it. He begged Soltyk to think of his friends ! He gathered his arguments up in the tips of his fingers in little nervous bunches and held them under his friend’s nose, as though asking him to smell them. And then, with a spasm of the body, a vibrating twang on some deep chord in his throat, he dashed his gathered fingers towards the floor.

In face of this attack it was impossible, even had he wished to do so, for Soltyk to reconsider his decision. The others, too, sat for the most part watching him.

Bitzenko appeared again. Soltyk became pale at the sight of this sinister figure, so bourgeois, prepossessing, and bearded, with its legend of blindings and blood and uncanny tenacity as a second.

He turned to a good-looking, sleek, sallow companion at his elbow.

“Khudin, will you act for me, as Stephen won’t ?”

Stephen Staretsky rose. A superfine sweat moistened his skin. His extraordinary volubility was tucked away somewhere in him in a flash, in a satisfied and polished acrobatic, and he faced the Russian. Khudin rose at the same time. Bitzenko had won.

Tarr was astonished at the rapid tragic trend of these farcical negotiations.

“How angry that man must be to do that,” he thought. But he had not been smacked the evening before; yet he remembered he had been passably angry.

CHAPTER V

Otto Kreisler, when he had entered the café Souchet, had been anxious. His eyes had picked out Soltyk in a delicate flurry. He had been afraid that he might escape him. Soltyk looked so securely bedded in life, and he wanted to wrench him out. He was not at all bad-tempered at the moment. He would have extracted him quite “painlessly” if required. But bleeding and from the roots, he must come out! (Br-r-rr. The Bersaker rage!)

He was quite quiet and well-behaved; above all things, well-behaved ! The mood he had happened on for this particular phase of his action was a virulent snobbery. He was a painful and blushing snob! He had, at his last public appearance, taken the rôle of a tramp-comedian. He had invited every description of slight and indignity. The world seemed to wish to perpetuate this part for him. But he would not play ! He refused ! A hundred times, he refused!

He remembered with eagerness that he was a German gentleman, with a university education ; who had never worked ; a member of an honourable family ! He remembered each detail socially to his advantage, realizing methodically things he had from childhood accepted and never thought of examining. But he had gone a step further. He had arbitrarily revived the title of Frei-Herr that, it was rumoured in his family, his ancestors had borne. With Bitzenko he had referred to himself as the Frei-Herr Otto Kreisler. Had the occasion allowed, he would have been very courteous and gentle with Soltyk, merely to prove what a gentleman he was! But, alas, nothing but brutality (against the grain — the noble grain — as this went!) would achieve his end.

And the end was still paramount. His snobbery was the outcome of this end, of his end. It was, in this obsession of disused and disappearing life, the wild assertion of vitality, the clamour for  recognition that life and the beloved self were still there, that brought out the reeking and brand-new snob. He was almost dead (he had promised his father his body for next month, and must be punctual), but people already had begun treading on him and striking matches on his boots. As to fighting with a man who was practically dead, to all intents and purposes, one mass of worms — a worm, in short — that was not to be expected of anybody.

So he became a violent snob.

It was Soltyk’s rude behaviour on the day before in the presence of Anastasya that had set him raving on this subject. The Russian Pole was up against a raving snob whose social dignity he had wounded.

Bitzenko and Kreisler came out to get Louis Soltyk like two madmen, full of solemn method and with miraculous solidarity. Their schemes and energies flew direct from mind to mind, without the need for words. Bitzenko with his own hand had brushed the back of Kreisler’s coat; on tiptoe doing this he looked particularly childlike. They were together there in Kreisler’s room before they started like two little boys dressing up in preparation for some mischief.

Kreisler had fixed his eyes on Soltyk from his table with alert offensiveness. The prosperous appearance of the Poles annoyed him deeply. Their watches were all there, silk handkerchiefs slipped up their sleeves ; they looked sleek and new. A gentle flame of social security and ease danced in their eyes and gestures. He was out in the dark, they were in a lighted room ! He wished their fathers’ affairs might deteriorate and their fortunes fall to pieces; that their watches could be stolen, and their restaurant tick attacked by insidious reports! And as he watched them he felt more and more an outcast, shabbier and shabbier. He saw himself the little official in a German provincial town that his father’s letter foreshadowed.

One or two of them pointed him out to Soltyk, and it was a wounding laugh of the latter’s that brought him to his feet.

As he was slapping his enemy he woke up out of his nightmare. He was like a sleeper having the first inkling of his solitude when he is woken by the climax of his dream, still surrounded by tenacious influences. But had any one struck him then, the blow would have had as little effect as a blow aimed at a waking man by a phantom of his sleep. The noise around him was a receding accompaniment.

Then he felt hypnotized by Soltyk’s quietness. The sweet white of the face made him sick. To. overcome this he stepped forward again to strike the dummy once more, and then it moved suddenly. As he raised his hand his glasses almost slipped off, and at that point he was seized by the garçons. Hurried out on to the pavement, he could still see, at the bottom of a huge placid mirror just inside the cafe, the wriggling backs of the band of Poles. Drawing out his card-case, he had handed the waiter a visiting-card. The waiter at first refused it. He turned his head aside vaguely, as a dog does when doubtful about some morsel offered him ; then he took it. Kreisler saw in the mirror' the tearing up of his card. Fury once more — not so much because it was a new slight as that he feared his only hope, Soltyk, might escape him.

The worry of this hour or so in which Bitzenko was negotiating told on him so much that when at last his emissary announced that an arrangement, had been come to in the sense he wished, he questioned him incredulously. He felt hardly any satisfaction, reaction setting in immediately.

Bitzenko went back to Kreisler’s door with him and, promising to return within half an hour, left him. Tarr having, as he had stipulated, left when the talking was over, Bitzenko first went in search of a friend to serve as second. The man he decided on was already in bed, and at once, half asleep, without preparation of any sort, consented to do what was asked of him.

“Will you be a second in a duel to-morrow morning at half-past six ?”

“Yes.”

“At half-past six ?”

“Yes.” And after a minute or two, “Is it you ?”

“No, a German friend of mine.”

“All right.”

“You will have to get up at five.”

Bitzenko’s friend was a tall, powerfully built young Russian painter, who, with his great bow-legs, would take up some straggling and extravagantly twisted pose of the body and remain immobile for minutes together, with an air of ridiculous detachment. This combination of a tortured, restless attitude, and at the same time statuesque tendency, suggested something like a contemplative acrobat or contortionist. A mouth of almost anguished attention and little calm indifferent eyes, produced similar results in the face.

Bitzenko’s next move was to go to his rooms, put a gently ticking little clock, with an enormous alarum on the top, under his arm, and then walk round once more to Otto Kreisler’s. He informed his friend of these last arrangements made in his interests. He suggested that it would be better for him to sleep there that night, to save time in the morning. In short, he attached himself to Kreisler’s person. Until it were deposited in the large cemetery near by, or else departed from the Gare du Nord in a deal box for burial in Germany, it should not leave him. In the event of victory, and he being no longer responsible for it, it should disappear as best it could. The possible subsequent conflict with the police was not without charm for Bitzenko. He regarded the police force, its functions and existence, as a pretext for adventure.

The light was blown out. Bitzenko curled himself up on the floor. He insisted on this. Kreisler must be fresh in the morning and do him justice. The Russian could hear the bed shaking for some time. Kreisler was trembling violently. A sort of exultation at the thought of his success caused this nervous attack. He had been quite passive since he had heard that all was well.

At about half-past four in the morning Kreisler was dreaming of Volker and a pact he had made with him in his sleep never to divulge some secret, which there was never any possibility of his doing in any case, as he had completely forgotten what it was. He was almost annihilated by a terrific explosion. With his eyes suddenly wide open, he saw the little clock quivering in the mantelpiece beneath its large alarum. When it had stopped Kreisler could hardly believe his ears, as though this sound had been going to accompany life, for that day at least, as a destructive and terrifying feature. Then he saw the Russian, already on his feet. His white and hairy little body had apparently risen energetically out of the scratch bedclothes simultaneously with the “going off” of his clock, as though it were a mechanism set for the same hour.

They both dressed without a word. Kreisler wrote a short letter to his father, entrusting it to his second.

Kreisler’s last few francs were to be spent on a taxi to take them to the place arranged on, outside the fortifications.

They found the other second sound asleep. Bitzenko more or less dressed him. They set out in their taxi to the rendezvous by way of the Bois.

The chilly and unusual air of the early morning, the empty streets and shuttered houses, destroyed all feeling of reality of what was happening for Kreisler. Had the duel been a thing to fear it would have had an opposite effect. His errand did not appear as an inflexible reality, either, following upon events that there was no taking back. It was a whim, a caprice, they were pursuing, as though, for instance, they had woken up in the early morning and decided to go fishing. They were carrying it out with a dogged persistency, with which our whims are often served.

He kept his thought away from Soltyk. He seemed a very long way off; it would be fatiguing for the mind to go in search of him.

When the scientist’s nature, with immense fugue,  has induced a man to marry some handsome young lady — this feat accomplished, Nature leaves him practically alone, only coming back to give him a prod from time to time — assured that, like a little trickling stream, his life will go steadily on in the bed gauged for it by this upheaval. Nature, in Kreisler’s case, had done its work of another description. But she had left the Russian with him to see that all was carried out according to her wishes. Kreisler’s German nature that craved discipline, a course marked out, had got more even than it asked for. It had been presented with a mimic Fate.

But Bitzenko evidently took his pleasure morosely. The calm and assurance of the evening before had given place to a brooding humour. He was only restored to a silent and intense animation on hearing his “Browning” speak. He produced this somewhere in the Bois, and insisted on his principal having a little practice as they had plenty of time to ' spare. This was a very imprudent step. It might draw attention to their movements. Kreisler proved an excellent shot. Then the Russian himself, with impassible face, emptied a couple of chambers into a tree-trunk. He put his “Browning” back into his pocket hastily after this, as though startled at his own self-indulgence.

A piece of waste land, on the edge of a wood, well hidden on all sides, had been chosen for the duel.

The enemy was not on the ground. Kreisler’s passivity still subsisted. So far he had felt that Accident had been dealt a shrewd blow and brought to its knees. He was in good hands. Until this was all over he had nothing to worry about.

Fresh compartment. The duel became for him, as he stood on the damp grass, conventional. It was a duel like another. He was seeking reparation by arms. He had been libelled and outraged. “A beautiful woman” was at the bottom of it. Life had no value for him ! Tant pis for the other man who had been foolhardy enough to cross his path. His coat-collar turned up, he looked sternly towards   the road, his moustaches blowing a little in the wind. He asked Bitzenko for a cigarette. That gentleman did not smoke, but the other Russian produced a khaki cigarette with a long mouthpiece. He struck a light. As Kreisler lit his cigarette at it, his hand resting against the other’s, a strange feeling shot through him at the contact of this flesh. He moistened his lips and spat out a piece of the mouthpiece he had bitten through.

The hour arranged came round and there was still no sign of anybody. The possibility of a hitch in the proceedings dawned on Kreisler. Personal animosity for Soltyk revived. That idea of obstinacy in a caprice, instead of merely carrying out something prearranged and unavoidable, despite his passivity, had proved really the wakefulness of his will. He looked towards his companions, alone there on the ground of the encounter. They were an unsatisfactory pair, after all. They did not look a winning team. He reproached himself for having hit just on this Russian for assistance.

Bitzenko, on the other hand, was deep in thought. He was rehearsing his part of second. The duel in which he had blinded his adversary was a figment of his boyish brain, confided with tears in his voice one evening to a friend. His only genuine claim to activity was that, in a perfect disguise, he had assisted the peasants of his estate to set fire to his. little Manor House during the revolution of 1906 for the fun of the thing and in an access of revolutionary sentiment. Afterwards he had assisted the police with information in the investigation of the affair, also anonymously. All this he kept to himself. He referred to his past in Russia in a way that conjured up more luridness than the flames of his little chateau (which did not burn at all well) warranted.

Bitzenko was quite in his element climatically; whereas Kreisler felt his hands getting so cold that he thought they might fail him in the duel.

But a car was heard beyond the trees on the Paris road. This sound in the listless blur of nature was   masterful in its significance. It struck steadily and at once into brutish apathy. It so plainly knew what it wanted. It had perhaps outstripped men in that. Men in their soft bodies still contained the apathy of the fields. Their mind had burst out of them and taken these crawling pulps up on its rigid back.

It was Staretsky’s car. With its load of hats it drew up. The four members of the other party came on to the field, the fourth a young Polish doctor. They walked quickly. Bitzenko went to meet them. Staretsky protested energetically that the duel must not proceed.

“It must — not — go — on ! Should anything happen — you must allow me to say, should anything happen  — the blood of whoever falls will be at your door!” But he felt all the same that the prospect of having a little pond of blood at his door was an alluring one for Bitzenko.

“Has not your principal seen that in accepting this duel, M. Soltyk had proved his respect for Herr Kreisler’s claim ? The attitude your principal attributed to him is not his attitude——”

Bitzenko stiffened.

“Is there anything in Herr Kreisler that would justify M. Soltyk in considering that he was condescending——?”

The little Russian kept up his cunning and baffling wrangle. Soltyk’s eyes steadily avoided Kreisler’s person. He hoped this ridiculous figure might make some move enabling them to abandon the duel. But the idea of a favour coming from such a quarter was repellent. His stomach had been out of order the day before — he wondered if it would surge up, disgrace him. He might be sick at any moment. He saw himself on tiptoe, in an ignominious spasm, the proceedings held up, friends and enemies watching. He kept his eyes off Kreisler as a man on board ship keeps his eyes off a dish of banana fritters or a poached egg.

Kreisler, from twenty yards off, stared through his glasses at the group of people he had assembled, as though he had been examining the enemy through binoculars. Obediently, erect and still, he appeared rather amazed at what was occurring. Soltyk, in rear of the others, struggled with his bile. He slipped into his mouth a sedative tablet, oxide of bromium and heroin. This made him feel more sick. For a few moments he stood still in horror, expecting to vomit at every moment. The blood rushed to his head and covered the back of his neck with a warm liquid sheet.

Kreisler’s look of surprise deepened. He had seen Soltyk slipping something into his mouth, and was puzzled and annoyed, like a child. What was he up to ? Poison was the only guess he could give. What on earth——?

Having taken part in many mensurs he knew that for this very serious duel his emotions were hardly adequate. His nervous system was as quiescent as a corpse’s. He became offended with his phlegm. All this instinctive resistance to the idea of Death, the indignity of being nothing, was rendered empty by his premature insensitiveness. He tried to visualize and feel. In a few minutes he might be dead! That had so little effect that he almost laughed.

Then he reflected that that man over there might in a few minutes be wiped out. He would become a disintegrating mess, uglier than any vitriol or syphilis could make him. All that organism he, Kreisler, would be turning into dung, as though by magic. He, Kreisler, is insulted. The sensations and energies of that man deny him equality of existence. He, Kreisler, lifts his hand, presses a little bar of steel, and the other is swept away into the earth. Heaven knows where the insulting spirit goes to. But the physical disfigurement at least is complete. He went through it laboriously. But it fell flat as well. He was too near the event to benefit by his fancy. Possibilities were weakened by the nearness of Certainty.

His momentary resentment with Bitzenko survived, and he next became annoyed at being treated like an object, as he felt it. He was not deliberately conscious of much. But, try as he would to elude the disgraces and besmirchings of death, people refused to treat him as anything but a sack of potatoes.

There four or five men had been arguing about him for the last five minutes, and they had not once looked his way. But clearly Bitzenko was defending Ms duel.

Why should Bitzenko go on disposing of him in this fashion ? He took everything for granted ; he never so much as appealed to him, even once. Had Bitzenko been commissioned to hustle him out of existence ?

But Soltyk. There was that fellow again slipping something into his mouth! A cruel and fierce sensation of mixed real and romantic origin rose hotly round his heart. He loved that man! But because he loved him he wished to plunge a sword into him, to plunge it in and out and up and down 1 Why had pistols been chosen ?

He would let him off for two pins ! He would let him off if—— Yes! He began pretending to

himself that the duel might after all not take place. That was the only way he could get anything out of it.

He laughed ; then shouted out in German :

“Give me one !”

They all looked round. Soltyk did not turn, but the side of his face became crimson.

Kreisler felt a surge of active passion at the sight of the blood in his face.

“Give me one,” Kreisler shouted again, putting out the palm of his hand, and laughing in a thick, insulting, hearty way. He was now a Knabe. He was young and cheeky. His last words had been said with quick cleverness. The heavy coquetting was double-edged.

“What do you mean ?” Bitzenko called back.

“I want a jujube. Ask Herr Soltyk !”

Five days after this, in the morning, Otto Kreisler mounted the steps of the police-station of a small town near the German frontier. He was going to give himself up.

Bitzenko had pictured his principal, in the event of his succeeding against Soltyk, seeking rapidly by train the German frontier, disguised in some extraordinary manner. Had the case been suggested to him of a man in this position without sufficient money in his pocket to buy a ticket, he would then have imagined a melodramatic figure hurrying through France, dodging and dogged by the police, defying a thousand perils. Whether Kreisler were still under the spell of the Russian or not, this was the course, more or less, he took. He could be trusted not to go near Paris. That city dominated all his maledictions.

The police disturbing the last act of his sanguinary farce was a similar contretemps to Soltyk’s fingers in his throat. At the last moment everything had begun to go wrong. He had not prepared for it, because, as though from cunning, the world had shown no tendency up till then to interfere.

Soltyk had died when his back was turned, so to speak. He got the contrary of comfort out of the thought that he could claim to have done the deed.. The police had rushed in and broken things off short, swept everything away, ended the banquet in a brutal raid. A deep sore, a shocked and dislocated feeling remained in Kreisler’s mind. He had been hurried so much! He had never needed leisure, breathing space, so much. The disaster of Soltyk’s death was raw on him ! Had he been given time —  only a little time — he might have put that to rights. (This sinister regret could only imply a possible mutilation of the corpse.)

A dead man has no feeling. He can be treated as an object and hustled away. But a living man needs time ! — time!

Does not a living man need so much time to develop his movements, to lord it with his thoughtful body, to unroll his will ? Time is what he needs !

As a tramp being hustled away from a cafe protests, at each jerk the waiter gives him, that he is a human being, probably a free human being — yes, probably free; so Kreisler complained to his fate that he was a living man, that he required time — that above all it was time he needed — to settle his affairs and withdraw from life. But his fate was a harsh Prussian gendarme. He whined and blustered to no effect.

He was superstitious as well in the usual way about this decease. In his spiritless and brooding tramp he questioned if it were not he that had died and not Soltyk, and if it were not his ghost that was now wandering off nowhere in particular.

One franc and a great many coppers remained to him. As he jumped from field to road and road to field again, in his flight, they rose and fell in a little leaden wave in his pocket, breaking dully on his thigh. This little wave rose and fell many times, till he began to wait for it, and its monotonous grace. It was like a sigh. It heaved and clashed down in a foiled way.

He spent the money that evening on a meal in a village. The night was dry and was passed in an empty barge. Next day, at four in the afternoon, he arrived at Meaux. Here he exchanged his entire wardrobe for a very shabby workman’s outfit, gaining seven francs and fifty centimes on the exchange. He caught the early train for Rheims, travelling thirty-five kilometres of his journey at a sou a kilometre, got a meal near the station, and took another ticket to Verdun. Believing himself nearer the frontier than he actually was, he set out on foot. At the next large town, Pontlieux, he had too hearty a meal. He had exhausted his stock of money long before the frontier was reached. For two days he had eaten hardly anything; and tramped on in a dogged and careless spirit.

The nearness of the German frontier began to rise like a wall in front of him. This question had to be answered : Did he want to cross it after all ?

His answer was to mount the steps of the local gendarmerie.

His Prussian severity of countenance, now that he was dressed in every point like a vagabond, without hat and his hair disordered, five days’ beard on his chin — this sternness of the German warrior gave him the appearance of a scowling ruffian. The agent on duty, who barred his passage brutally before the door of the inner office, scowling too, classed him as a depraved cut-throat vagabond, and considered his voluntary entrance into the police-station as an act not only highly suspicious and unaccountable in itself, but of the last insolence.

“Qu’est-ce qu’il te faut ?”

“Foir le Commissaire,” returned Kreisler.

“Tu ne peux pas le voir. Il n’y est pas.”

A few more laconic sentences followed, the agent reiterating sulkily that the magistrate was not there. But he was eyeing Kreisler doubtfully and turning something over in his mind.

The day before, two Germans had been arrested in the neighbourhood as spies, and were now locked up in this building until further evidence should be collected on the affair. It is extremely imprudent for a German to loiter on the frontier on entering France. It is much wiser for him to push on at once — neither looking to right nor left — pretending especially not to notice hills, unnatural military looking protuberances, ramparts, etc. — to hurry on as rapidly as possible to the interior. But the two men in question were carpenters by profession, and both carried huge foot-rules in their pockets. The local authorities on this discovery were in a state of the deepest consternation. They shut them up, with their implements, in the most inaccessible depths of the local police-station. And it was in the doorway of this building — all the intermittent inhabitants of which were in a state of hysterical speculation, that Kreisler had presented himself.

The agent, who had recognized a German by his accent and manner, at last turned and disappeared through the door, telling him to wait. He reappeared with several superiors. All of them crowded in the doorway and surveyed Kreisler blankly. One asked in a voice of triumphant suspicion :

“And what are you doing there, my good fellow ?”

“I had tuel, and killed the man ; I have walked for more days—”

“Yes, we know all about that!”

“So you had a duel, eh ?” asked another, and they all laughed with nervous suddenness at the picture of this vagabond defending his honour at twenty paces.

“Well, is that all you have to say ?”

“I would eat.”

“Yes! your two friends inside also have big appetites. But come to the point. Have you anything to tell us about your compatriots inside there ?”

Since his throttling by Soltyk, Kreisler had changed. He knew he was beaten. There was nothing to do but to die. His body ran to the German frontier as a chicken’s does down a yard, headless, from the block.

Kreisler did not understand the official. He muttered that he was hungry. He could hardly stand. Leaning his shoulder against the wall, he stood with his eyes on the ground. He was making himself at home !  “What a nerve !”

“Va t’en ! If you don’t want to tell us anything, clear out. Be quick about it! A pretty lot of trouble you cursed Germans are giving us. You’ll none of you speak when it comes to the point. You all stand staring like boobies. But that won’t pay here. Off you go !”

They all turned back into the office, and slammed the door. The agent stood before it again, looking truculently at Kreisler, He said:

“Passez votre chemin! Don’t stand gaping there!”                     .

Then, giving him a shake, he hustled him to the  top of the steps. A parting shove sent him staggering down into the road.

Kreisler walked on for a little. Eventually, in a quiet square, near the entrance to the town, he fell on a bench, drew his legs up and went to sleep.

At ten o’clock, the town lethargically retiring, all its legs moving slowly, like a spent insect, heavily boarding itself in, an agent came gradually along the square. Kreisler’s visit to the police-station was not known to this one. He stopped opposite the sleeping Kreisler, surveying him with lawful indignation.

“En voila un joli gigolo !” He swayed energetically up to him.

“Eh ! le copain ! Tu voudrais coucher a la belle étoile ?”

He shook him.

“Oh, la ! Tu ne peux pas dormir ici! Houp ! Dépêches-toi. Mets-toi debout !”

Kreisler responded only by a tired movement as though to bury his skull in the bench. A more violent jerk rolled him on the ground.

He woke up and protested in German, with a sort of dull asperity. He got on to his feet.

At the sound of the familiar gutturals of the neighbouring Empire, the agent became differently angry. Kreisler stood there, muttering partly in German and partly in French ; he was very tired. He was telling bitterly of his attempt to get into the police-station, and of his inhospitable reception. The agent understood several words of German — notably “ ja” and “lager beer” and “essen.” The consequence was that he always thought he understood more than was really said in that language. However much might be actually intended on any given occasion by the words of that profound and teeming tongue, it could never equal in scope, intensity, and meaning what he heard.

So he was convinced that Kreisler was threatening an invasion, and scoffed loudly in reply. He understood Kreisler to assert that the town in which they stood would soon belong to Germany, and that he   would then sleep, not on a bench, but in the best bed their dirty little hole of a village could offer. He approached him threateningly. And eventually the functionary distinctly heard himself apostrophized as a “sneaking ‘ flic ’,” a “dirty peeler.” At that he laid his hand on Kreisler’s collar, and threw him in the direction of the police-station. He had miscalculated the distance. Kreisler, weak for want of food, fell at his feet; but, getting up, scuffled a short time. Then, it occurring to him that here was an unhoped for way of getting a dinner, and being lodged after all in the bureau de police, he suddenly became passive and complaisant.

Arrived at the police-station — with several revolts against the brutal handling to which he was subjected  — he was met at the door by the same inhospitable man. Exasperated beyond measure at this unwelcome guest turning up again, the man sent his comrade into the office to report, while he held Kreisler. He held him as a restive horse is held, and jerked him several times against the wall, as if he had been showing signs of resistance.

Two men, one that he had formerly seen, came and looked at him. No effort was made to discover if he were really at fault or not. By this time they were quite convinced that he was a desperate character, and if not a spy, then anyway a murderer, although they were inclined to regard him as a criminal mystery. At all events they no longer could question his right to a night’s lodging.

Kreisler was led to a cell, given some bread and water at his urgent request, and left alone.

On the following morning he was taken up before the commissaire de police. When Kreisler was brought in, this gentleman had just finished cross-examining for the fifteenth time the two German carpenters who were retained as spies. They were not let alone for an instant. They would be dragged out of their cells three times in the course of an afternoon, as often as a new and brilliant idea should strike one of the numerous staff of the police-station. 

They would be confronted with their foot-rules, and watched in breathless silence; or be keenly cross-questioned, confused and contradicted as to the exact hour at which they had lunched the day before their arrest. The commissaire was perspiring all over with the intensity of his last effort to detect something. Kreisler was led in, and prevented from finishing any sentence or of becoming in any way intelligible during a quarter of an hour by the furious interruptions of the enraged officer. At last he succeeded in asserting that he was quite unacquainted with the two carpenters; moreover, that all he needed was food ; that he had decided to give himself up and await the decision of the Paris authorities as regards the deed. If they were not going to take any action, he would return to Paris — at least, as soon as he had received a certain letter; and he gave his address. The commissaire considered him with exhausted animosity and he was sent back to his cell.

He slept the greater part of the day, but the next he spent nervous and awake. In the afternoon a full confirmation of his story reached the authorities. It was likely that the following morning he would be sent to Paris. It meant, then, that he was going to be tried as a kind of murderer. He could not allege complete accident. The thought of Paris, the vociferous courts, the ennuis of a criminal case about this affair, so thoroughly ended and boringly out of date, disturbed him extremely. Then the Russian —  he would have to see him again. Kreisler felt that he was being terribly worried once more. Sorrow for himself bowed him down. This journey to Paris resembled his crossing of the German frontier. He had felt that it was impossible to see his father. That represented an effort he would do anything to avoid. Resentment against his parent had vanished. It was this that made a meeting so difficult. It was a stranger, with an ill will that had survived his own, awaiting him. Noise, piercing noise, effort, awaited him revengefully. He knew exactly what his father  would do and say. If there had been a single item that he could not forecast! — But there was not the least item. Paris was the same. The energy and obstinacy of the rest of the world, the world that would question him and drag him about, these frightened him as something mad. Bitzenko appealed most to this new-born timidity. Bitzenko was like some favourite dish a man has one day eaten too much of, and will never be able again to enjoy, or even support.

On the other hand, he became quite used to his cell. His mind was sick, and this room had a clinical severity. It had all the economical elements of a place in which a human operation might be performed. He became fond of it as patients get an appetite for the leanness of convalescent life. He lay on his bed. He turned over the shell of many empty and depressing hours he had lived. He took particular pleasure in these listless concave shapes. His “good times” were avoided. Days spent with his present stepmother, before his father knew her, gave him a particularly numbing and nondescript feeling.

He sat up, listening to the noises from the neighbouring rooms and corridors. It began to sound to him like one steady preparation for his removal. Steps bustled about getting this ready and getting that ready.

The police-station had cost him some trouble to enter. But they had been attracted to each other from the start. Something in the form of an illicit attachment now existed between them. Buildings are female. There is no such thing as a male building. This practical and pretentious small modern edifice was having its romance. Otto Kreisler was its romance.

It was now warning him. It echoed sharply and insistently the feet of its policemen.

After his evening meal he took up his bed in his arms and placed it on the opposite side of the cell, under the window. He sat there for some time as  though resting after this effort. The muttering of two children on a doorstep in the street below came to him on the evening light with melodramatic stops and emptiness. It bore with it an image, like an old picture, bituminous and with a graceful, queer formality. It fixed itself before him like a mirage. He watched it muttering.

He began slowly drawing off his boots. He took out the laces, and tied them together for greater strength. Then he tore several strips off his shirt, and made a short cord of them. He went through these actions deliberately and deftly, as though it were a routine and daily happening. He measured the drop from the bar of the ventilator, calculating the necessary length of cord, like a boy preparing the accessories of some game. It was only a game, too. He realized what these proceedings meant, but shunned the idea that it was serious. Just as an unmoral man with a disinclination to write a necessary letter takes up the pen, resolving to begin it merely and writes more and more until it is, in fact, completed, so Kreisler proceeded with his task.

Standing on his bed, he attached the cord to the ventilator. He tested its strength by holding it some inches from the top, and then, his shoulders hunched, swaying his whole weight languidly on it for a moment.

Adjusting the noose, he smoothed his hair back after he had slipped it over his head. He made as though to kick the bed away, playfully, then stood still, staring in front of him. The last moment must be one of realization. He was not a coward. His caution was due to his mistrust of some streaks of him, the sex streak the powerfullest.

A sort of heavy confusion burst up as he withdrew the restraint. It reminded him of Soltyk’s hands on this throat. The same throttling feeling returned. The blood bulged in his head. He felt dizzy; it was the Soltyk struggle over again. But, as with Soltyk, he did not resist. He gently worked the bed outwards from under him, giving it a last steady shove.

The sight of Bertha’s twistings and turnings, her undignified rigmarole, had irritated Anastasya. This was why she had brutally announced, as though to cut short all that, that Kreisler’s behaviour was due simply to the fact that he fancied himself in love with her, Anastasya. “He was not worrying about Fraulein Lunken. He was in love with me;” the statement amounted to that. There was no disdainful repudiation or self-reference in her statement; only a piece of information.

Bertha’s intuitions and simplifications had not been without basis. This “hostile version” had contained a certain amount of hostile intention.

But Anastasya had another reason for this immodest explicitness. She personally liked Kreisler. The spectacle of Bertha excusing herself, and in the process   putting Kreisler in a more absurd and unsatisfactory light, annoyed her extremely.

How could Tarr consort with Bertha,she questioned ? Her aristocratic woman’s sense did not appreciate the taste for a slut, a miss or a suburban queen. The apache, the coster girl, fisher-lass, all that had character, oh, yes. Her romanticism, in fact, was of the same order as Butcher’s only better.

Bertha was still being taken in carefully prepared doses of an hour a day: from half-past four to a quarter to six. Any one else would have found this much of Bertha insupportable under any conditions. But Tarr’s eccentric soul had been used to such far greater doses that this was the minimum he considered necessary for a cure.

Tarr came to her every day with the regularity of an old gentleman at a German “Bad” taking his spring water at the regulation hour. But the cure was finishing. There were signs of a new robustness, (hateful to her) equivalent to a springy walk and a contented and sunny eye, that heralded departure. His daily visits, with their brutal regularity, did her as much harm as they did him good.

The news of Soltyk’s death, then Kreisler’s, affected the readily melodramatic side of her nature peculiarly. Death had made himself de la partie. Kreisler had left her alone for a few days. This is what had occupied him. The sensational news, without actually pushing her to imitation, made her own case, and her own tragic sensations, more real. They had received, in an indirect and cousin-thrice-removed sort of way, the authority of Death. Death — real living Death — was somewhere on the scene. His  presence was announced, was felt. He had struck down somebody among them.

In the meantime this disposed of Kreisler for ever. Tarr as well appeared to feel that they were left in tête-à-tête. A sort of chaperon had been lost in Kreisler. His official post as protector or passive “obstacle” had been a definite status. If he stayed on, it would have to be as something else. On the day on which the news of Kreisler’s end arrived, he talked of leaving for England. Her more drawn face, longer silences, sharp glances, once more embarrassed him.

He did not go to England at once. In the week or two succeeding his meeting with Anastasya in the restaurant he saw her frequently. So a chaperon was found. Bertha was officially presented to her successor. When she learnt that Anastasya had been chosen, her energy reformed. She braced herself for a substantial struggle.

The apparition at the window of the restaurant was her first revived activity.

On August the tenth Tarr had an appointment with Anastasya at his studio in Montmartre. They had arranged to dine in Montmartre. It was their seventh meeting. He had just done his daily cure. He hurried back and found her lounging against the door, reading the newspaper.

“Ah, there you are ! You’re late, Mr. Tarr.”

“Am I ? I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long ?”

“Not very. Fraulein Lunken——”

“She — I couldn’t get away.”

“No, it is difficult to get away, apparently.”

He let her in. He was annoyed at the backwardness of his senses. His mind stepped in, determined to do their business for them. He put his arm round   her waist, and planting his lips fully on hers, began kissing her. He slipped his hands sideways beneath her coat, and pressed an athletic, sinuous hulk against him. The various bulging and retreating contact of her body brought monotonous German reminders.

It was the first time he had kissed her. She showed no bashfulness or disinclination, but no return. Was she in the unfortunate position of an unawakened mass; and had she so rationalized her intimate possessions that there was no precocious fancy left until mature animal ardour was set up? He felt as though he were embracing a tiger, who was not unsympathetic, but rather surprised. Perhaps he had been too sudden. He ran his hand upwards along her body. All was statuesquely genuine. She took his hand away.

“We haven’t come to that yet,” she said.

“Haven’t we !”

“I didn’t think we had.”

Smiling at each other, they separated.

“Let me take your coat off. You’ll be hot in here.”

Her coat was all in florid redundancies of heavy cloth, like a Tintoretto dress. Underneath she was wearing a very plain dark blouse and skirt, like a working girl, which exaggerated the breadth and straightness of her shoulders. Not to sentimentalize it, she had open-work stockings on underneath, such as the genuine girl would have worn on her night out, at one and eleven-three the pair.

“You look very well,” Tarr said.

“I put these on for you.”

Tarr had, while he was kissing her, found his senses again. They had flared up in such a way that the reason had been offended, and resisted. Hence some little conflict. They were not going to have the credit——!

He became shy. He was ashamed of his sudden interest, which had been so long in coming, and instinctively hid it. He was committed to the rôle of a reasonable man.

He went slowly up the stairs feeling for his key. He arrived at the door without having found it. The door was ajar. At first this seemed natural to him, and he continued the search for the key. Then he suddenly dropped that occupation, pushed the door open and went into his studio. The moonlight came heavily through the windows. In a part of the room where it did not strike he became aware of an apparition of solid white. It was solid white flowed round by Naples yellow. It crossed into the moonlight and faced him, its hands placed   like a modest statue’s. The hair reached below the waist, and flowed to the right from the head. This tall nudity began laughing with a harsh sound like stone laughing.

“Close the door !” it shouted, “there’s a draught. You took a long time to consider my words. I’ve been waiting. Forgive me, Tarr. My words were acidulated whores, but my heart” — she put her hand on the skin roughly above that organ — “my heart was completely full of sugar! The acidulated demi-mondaine was a trick. It occupied your mind. You didn’t notice me take your key !”

His vanity was soothed. The key in her possession, which could only have been taken in the café, seemed to justify the harsh dialogue.

She stood before him now with her arms up, hands joined behind her head. This impulse to take her clothes off had the cultural hygienic touch so familiar to him. The Naples yellow of the hair was the same colour as Bertha’s, only it was coarser and thicker, Bertha’s being fine. Anastasya’s dark face, therefore, had the appearance almost of a mask.

“Will you engage me as your model ? Je fais de la reclame pour les Grecs.”

“You are very Ionian — hardly Greek. But I don’t require a model. I never use nude models.”

“Well, I must dress again, I suppose.” She turned towards a chair where her clothes were piled. But Tarr had learnt the laws of cultural emancipation.

' He shouted, “I accept, I accept!” He lifted her up in his arms, kissing her in the mass, as it were, and carried her through the door at the back of the studio leading to his bedroom.

“Tarr, be my love. I don’t want to give you up.”

This was said next morning, the sunlight having taken the place of the moonlight, but striking on the opposite side of the house.

“You won’t hear marriage talked about by me. I want to rescue you from your Bertha habits. Allow yourself to be rescued ! We’re very well  together, aren’t we ? I’m not doing Bertha a bad turn, either, really. I admit my motive is quite selfish. What do you say ?”

“I am your slave !”

Anastasya rolled up against him with the movement of a seal.

“Thank you, Tarr. That’s better than having a slave, isn’t it ?”

“Yes, I think everything is in order.”

“Then you’re my efficient chimpanzee ?”

“No, I’m the new animal; we haven’t found a name for it yet. It will succeed the Superman. Back to the Earth !”

“Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kiss me !”

Tarr crawled towards Bertha that day on the back of a Place St. Michel bus. He did not like his job.

The secret of his visits to Bertha and interminable liaison was that he really never had meant to leave her at all, he reflected. He had not meant to leave her altogether. He was just playing. Or rather, a long debt of disgraceful behaviour was accumulating, that he knew would have to be met. It was deliberately increased by him, because he knew he would not repudiate it. But it would have been absurd not to try to escape.

To-day he must break the fact to Bertha that he could no longer regard himself as responsible. He ' was faced with the necessity, for the first time, of seriously bargaining. The debt was not to be repudiated, but he must tell her that he only had himself to pay with, and that he had been seized by somebody else.

He passed through her iron gateway with a final stealth, although making his boots sound loudly on the gravel. It was like entering a vault, the trees looked like weeds; the meaning or taste of everything, of course, had died. The concierge looked like a new one.

He had bought a flower for his buttonhole. He kept smelling it as he approached the house.

During the last week or so he had got into the habit of writing his letters at Bertha’s, to fill up the time. Occasionally he would do a drawing of her (a thing he had never done formerly) to vary the monotony. This time there would be no letter-writing. This visit would be more like the old ones.

“Come in, Sorbert,” she said, on opening the door. It was emphasizing the fact of the formality of the terms on which they at present met. Any prerogative of past and more familiar times was proudly rejected.

There was the same depressed atmosphere as the day before, and the days preceding that. She appeared stale, somehow deteriorated and shabby, her worth decreased, and extremely pitiable. Her “reserve” (a natural result of the new equivocal circumstances) removed her to a distance, as it seemed; it also shut her up in herself, in an unhealthy, dreary, and faded atmosphere.

She was shut up with a mass of reserves and secrets, new and old. She seemed sitting on them in rather dismal hen-like fashion, waiting to be asked to come out of herself and reveal something. It was a corpse among other things that she was sitting on, as Kreisler was one of her secrets. Mournfully reproachful, she kept guard over her secrets, a store of bric-a-brac that had gone out of fashion and were getting musty in a neglected shop.

Their meetings sometimes were made painful by activity on Bertha’s part. An attempt at penetration to an intimacy once possessed can be more indecent than the same action on the part of a stranger.

This time he was greeted with long mournful glances. He felt she had thought of what she should say. This interview meant a great deal to her. His friendship meant more to her now than ever. The  abject little room seemed to be thrust forward to awaken his memories and ask for pity. An intense atmosphere of Teutonic suicide permeated everything. He could not move an eyelid or a muscle without wounding or slighting something. It was like being in a dark kitchen at night, where you know at every step you will put your foot on a beetle. It had a still closer analogy to this in the disgust he felt for these too naked and familiar things he was treading on. He scowled at Beethoven, who scowled back at him like a reflection in a mirror. It was the fate of both of them to haunt this room. The Mona Lisa was there, and the Breton sabots and jars. She might have a change of scenery sometimes ! He felt unreasonably that she must have left things in the same place to reproduce a former mood in him. His photograph was prominent on her writing-table ; she seemed to say (with a sort of sickly idiocy), “You see, he is faithful to me !”

She preceded him to her sitting-room. As he looked at her back he thought of her as taking a set number of paces, then turning round abruptly, confronting him. From a typical and similar enervation of the will to that which was at the bottom of his troubles, he could hardly stop himself from putting his arm round her waist while they stood for a moment close to each other. He did not wish to do this as a response to any resuscitating desire. It was only because it was the one thing he must not do. To throw himself into the abyss of perplexity he had just escaped from tempted him. The dykes and simulations of conduct were perpetually threatened by his neurasthenia in this way. He kept his hands in his pockets, however.

When they had reached the room, she turned round, as he had half imagined, and caught hold of his hands.

“Sorbert, Sorbert!”

The words were said separately, each emphatic in significance. The second was a repetition only of the first. She seemed calling him by his name to   conjure back his self again. Her face was a strained and anxious mask.

“What is it, Bertha ?”

“I don’t know !”

£?She dropped his hands, drooped her head to the right and turned away.

She sat down ; he sat down opposite her.

“Anything new ?” he asked.

“Anything new ? Yes!” She gazed at him with an insistent meaning.

He concluded this was just overemphasis, with nothing behind it; or, rather, everything.

“Well, I have something new as well!”

“Have you, Sorbert ?”

“First of all, how have my visits struck you lately ? What explanation have you found for them ?”

“Oh, none. Why find an explanation ? Why do you ask ?”

“I thought I would explain.”

“Well ?”

“My explanation to myself was that I did not want to leave you brusquely, and I thought a blurred interlude of this sort would do no harm to either of us. Our loves could die in each other’s arms.”

She stared with incredulous fixity at the floor, her spirit seeming to be arched like a swan and to be gazing down hypnotically.

“The real reason was simply that, being very fond of you, I could not make up my mind to give you up. I claim that my visits were not frivolous.”

“Well ?”

“I would have married you, if you had considered that advisable.”

“Yes ? And—?”

“I find it very difficult to say the rest.”

“What is difficult ?”

“Well, I still like you very much. Yesterday I met a woman. I love her too. I can’t help that. What must I do ?”

Bertha turned a slightly stormier white.

CHAPTER V

When he got outside Bertha’s house, Bertha waving to him from the window with tears in her eyes, he came in for the counter-attack.

Anastasya and he were dining that night in Montmartre as usual. His piece of news hovered over their conversation like a bird hesitating as to the right spot at which to establish its nest.

“I saw Bertha to-day,” he said, forcing the opening at last.

“You still see her then.”

“Yes. I married her this afternoon.”

“You what ? What do you mean ?”

. “What I say, my dear. I married her.”

“You mean you—’” She put an imaginary ring

on her finger.

“Yes. I married her at the Mairie.”

Anastasya looked blankly into him, as though he contained cheerless stretches where no living thing could grow.

“You mean to say you’ve done that'”

“Yes; I have.” '

“Why ?”

Tarr stopped a moment.

“Well, the alleged reason was that she is enceinte.” “But — whose is the child ?”