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 Café 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.

[66]

Kreisler was in a sense a recluse (although almost certainly the fancy would have gasped and fallen at his contact). But cafés were the luminous caverns where he could be said, most generally, to dwell; with, nevertheless, very little opening of the lips and much recueillement or meditation; therefore not unworthy of some rank among the inferior and less fervent solitudes.

A bed like an overturned cupboard, dark, and with a red billow of cloth and feathers covering it entirely; a tesselated floor of dark red tile; a little rug, made with paint, carpet, cardboard, and horse-hair, to represent a leopard—these, with chair, washstand, easel, and several weeks’ of slowly drifting and shifting garbage, completed its contents.

Kreisler flicked the lather on to a crumpled newspaper, with an irresponsible gesture. Each time his razor was raised he looked at himself with a peering vacancy. His face had long become a piece of troublesome meat. Life did not each day deposit an untidiness that could be whisked off by a Gillette blade, as Nature did its stubble.

His face, it is true, wore like a uniform the frowning fixity of the Prussian warrior. But it was such a rig-out as the Captain of Koepenich must have worn, and would take in nobody but a Teutonic squad. The true German seeks every day, by little acts of boorishness, to keep fresh this trenchant Prussian attitude; just as the German student, with his weekly routine of duels, keeps courage simmering in times of peace, that it may instantly boil up to war pitch at the least sign from his Emperor.

He brushed his clothes in a sulky, vigorous way, like a silent, discontented domestic of a shabby, lonely master. He cleaned his glasses with the absorption and tenderness of the short-sighted. Next moment he was gazing through them, straddled on his flat Slav nose—brushing up whimsical moustaches over pouting mouth. This was done with two tiny ivory brushes taken out of a small leather case—present from a fiancée who had been alarmed that his[67] moustaches showed an unpatriotic tendency to droop.

This old sweetheart just then disagreeably occupied his mind. But he busied himself about further items of toilet with increased precision. To a knock he answered with careful “Come in.” He did not take his eyes from the glass, spotted blue tie being pinched into position. He watched with impassibility above and around his tie the entrance of a young woman.

“Good morning. So you’re up already,” she said in French.

He treated her as coolly as he had his thoughts. Appearing just then, she gave his manner towards the latter something human to play on, with relief. Imparting swanlike undulations to a short stout person, eye fixed quizzingly on Kreisler’s in the glass, she advanced. Her manner was one seldom sure of welcome, a little deprecatingly aggressive. She owned humorously a good-natured face with protruding eyes, gesticulated with, filling her silences with explosive significance. Brows always raised. A soul made after the image of injuries. A skin which would become easily blue in cold weather was matched with a taste in dress inveterately blue. The Pas de Calais had somehow produced her. Paris, shortly afterwards, had put the mark of its necessitous millions on a mean, lively child.

“Are you going to work to-day?” came in a minute or two.

“No,” he replied, putting his jacket on. “Do you want me to?”

“It would be of certain use. But don’t put yourself out,” with grin tightening all the skin of her face, making it pink and bald and her eyes drunken.

“I’m afraid I can’t.” Watched with sort of appreciative raillery, he got down on his knees and dragged a portmanteau from beneath the bed. “Susanna, what can I get on that?” he asked simply, as of an expert.

“Ah, that’s where we are? You want to pawn[68] this? I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps they’d give you fifteen francs. It’s good leather.”

“Perhaps twenty?” he asked. “I must have them!” he clamoured of a sudden, with energy that astonished her.

She grimaced, looked very serious; said, “Je ne sais pas, vous savez!” with several vigorous, yet rhythmical and rich, forward movements of the head. She became the broker: Kreisler was pressing for a sum in excess of regulations. Not for the world, any more than had she been the broker in fact, would she have valued it at a penny over what it seemed likely to fetch.

“Je ne sais pas, vous savez!” she repeated. She looked even worried. She would have liked to please Kreisler by saying more, but her business conscience prevented her.

“Well, we’ll go together.”

This conversation was carried on strictly in dialect. Suzanne understood him, for she was largely responsible for the lingo in which Kreisler carried on conversation with the French. This young woman had no fixed occupation. She disappeared for periods to live with men. She sat as a model.

“Your father hasn’t sent yet?” He shook his head.

“Le cochon!” she stuttered.

“But it will come to-morrow, or the day after, anyway.” The idiosyncrasies of these monthly letters were quite familiar to her. The dress-clothes had been pawned by her on a former occasion.

“What do you need twenty francs for?”

“I must have, not twenty, but twenty-five.”

Her silence was as eloquent as face-muscles and eye-fluid could make it.

“To get the dress-clothes out,” he explained, fixing her stolidly with his eye.

She first smiled slowly, then allowed her ready mirth to grow, by mechanical stages, into laughter. The presence of this small, indifferent, and mercenary acquaintance irritated him. But he remained cool.[69] Just then a church clock began striking. He foreboded it was already ten, but not later. It struck ten and then eleven. He leapt the hour—the clock seemed rushing with him, in a second, to the more advanced hour—without any flurry, quite calmly. Then it struck twelve. He at once absorbed that further hour as he had the former. He lived an hour as easily and carelessly as he would have lived a second. Could it have gone on striking he would have swallowed, without turning a hair, twenty, thirty strokes!

Going out with Suzanne, he turned the key carefully in the door. The concierge or landlord might slip in and fire his things out in his absence.

The portmanteau, whisked up from the floor, flopped along with him like a child’s slack balloon. He frowned at Suzanne and, prepared for surprises, went warily down the stairs.

He had felt a raw twinge of anger as he had opened the door, looking down at the first boards of his room. A half an hour before, on waking, he had sat up in bed and gazed at the crevice at its foot where a letter, thrust underneath by the concierge, usually lay. He had stared as though it had been a shock to find nothing. That little square of rich bright white paper was what he had counted on night to give him—that he had expected to find on waking, as though it were a secretion of those long hours. It made him feel that there had been no night—long, fecund, rich in surprises—but merely a barren moment of sleep. A stale and garish continuation of yesterday, no fresh day at all, had dawned. The chill and phlegmatic appearance of his room annoyed him. It was its inhospitable character that repelled the envelope pregnant with revolutionary joy and serried German marks. Its dead unchangeableness must preclude all innovation. This spell of monotony on his life he could not break. The room cut him off from the world. He gazed around as a man may eye a wife whom he suspects of intercepting his correspondence. There was no reason why the letter[70] with his monthly remittance should have come on that particular morning, already eight days overdue.

“If I had a father like yours!” said Suzanne in menacing, humorous sing-song, eyes bulging and head nodding. At this vista of perpetual blackmail she fell into a reverie.

“Never get your father off on your fiancée, Suzanne!” Kreisler advised in reply.

“Comment?” Suzanne did not understand, and pulled a sour face.

“I had a fiancée.”

“Oui. Très bien. Tu t’es brouillé avec elle?”

“I have quarrelled with her; yes. She married my father. Or I married her, I may say, to my father. That was a mistake.”

“I believe you! That, as you say, was careless! You don’t get on well with her?”

“I never see her.”

“You never go home?”

Kreisler was too proud to reply to Suzanne very often. He marched on, staring severely ahead.

“How long ago is it that you—how long have you had that stepmother?”

“My father married four years ago.”

“Married your—girl??”

“That’s it.”

“And that’s why you have trouble? She makes the trouble. She is at the bottom of the trouble? Ah! You never told me that. Now I understand why. What’s she like? Is she nice?”

“Not bad.”

They got near the Berne.

“Let’s have a cup of coffee,” Kreisler said.

Suzanne sat down—with the hiding of her red hands, her guilty lofty silence, eyebrows raised as though with a slimy pescine enamel, inducing an impression of nefarious hurry and impermanence. Kreisler was sour and full of himself. His bag looked as though it should hold the properties or merchandise of some illicit trade or amusement.

Suzanne seemed to triumph at this information.

[71]

She pressed and pressed in breathless undertone, fascinated by something. Family dramas, of all dramas, she had the expertest interest in.

“You remember the time I had to send three letters to the old devil??”

“Of course! Three months ago, you mean?” Suzanne had taken a near and serious interest in Otto’s financial arrangements. She remembered dates well, apart from that.

Otto did not proceed for some time. She stared quizzingly and patiently past the tip of his nose.

“He then asked me to give up art. He told me of two posts in German firms that were vacant. That was her doing, the swine! One was a station-restaurant business.”

“You refused!”

“I didn’t reply at all.”

In this his methods were very similar to his father’s. The elder Kreisler had repeatedly infuriated his son, calculating on such effect, by sending his allowance only when written for, and even then neglecting his appeal for several days. It came frequently wrapped up in bits of newspapers, and his letters of demand and expostulation were never answered. On two occasions forty marks and thirty marks respectively had been deducted, merely as an irritative measure.

“D?tes! Why don’t you write to your stepmother?”

“Write to her? No, I won’t write to her.”

“P’raps she wants you to. I should. Why don’t you write to her?”

“I shall before—I shall some day!”

“Before what?”

“Oh, before?”

Suzanne once more glimmered into the absurd distance.

“He will send, I suppose?”

“Now—? Yes, I suppose sooner or later it will turn up.”

“If it didn’t what would you do? You think it’s your stepmother who does it? Why don’t you[72] manage her? You are stupid. You must allow me to tell you that.”

Kreisler knew the end was not far off; this might be it. So much the better!

Kreisler’s student days—a lifetime in itself—had unfitted him, at the age of thirty-six, for practically anything. He had only lost one picture so far. This senseless solitary purchase depressed him whenever he thought of it. How dreary that cheque for four pounds ten was! Who could have bought it? It sold joylessly and fatally one day in an exhibition.