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[87] 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[88] 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 Art-fashion 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 sch?n,” 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.
[89]
“Lobster salad, mayonnaise, and a pommes à l’huile, Jeanne,” he called out.
This awakening to beauties of the menu brought with it a survey of his neighbour. Vaguely, she must be connected with lobster salad. How could that be?
First he was surprised that such a beautiful girl should be sitting there. Beautiful people wander dangerously about in life, just like ordinary folk. He appeared to think that they should be isolated like powder magazines or lepers. This man could never leave good luck alone, or reflect that that, too, was a dangerous vagrant. He could not quite grasp that it was a general good luck and easily explained phenomenon.
He had already been examined by the beautiful girl. Throwing an absent far-away look into her eyes, she let them wander over him. Afterwards she cast them down into her soup. As a pickpocket, after brisk work in a crowd, hurries home to examine and evaluate his spoil, so she then examined collectedly what her dreamy eyes had noted. This method was not characteristic of her, but of the category of useful habits bequeathed us, each sex having its own. Perhaps in her cloudy soup she beheld something of the storm and shock that inhabited her neighbour.
Without preliminary reflection Kreisler found himself addressing her, a little abashed when he suddenly heard his voice, and with eerie feeling when it was answered.
“From your hesitation in choosing your lunch, gn?diges Fr?ulein, I suppose you have not been long in Paris?”
“No, I only arrived a week ago, from America.” She settled her elbows on the table for a moment.
“Allow me to give you some idea of what the menu of this restaurant is like.” This was like a lesson. He started ponderously. “At the head of each list you will find simple dishes; elemental dishes, I might call them! (Elementalische pl?tter!) This[90] is the rough material from which the others are evolved. Each list is like an oriental dance. It gets wilder as it goes along. In the last dish you can be sure that the potatoes will taste like tomatoes, and the pork like a sirloin of beef.”
“So!” laughed the young woman, with good German guttural. “I’m glad to say I have ordered dishes that head the list.”
“Garlic is an enemy usually ambushed in gigot.—That is his only quite certain haunt.”
“Good; I will avoid gigot.” She was indulgent to his clowning, and drawled a little in sympathy. Between language and feeding, Kreisler sought to gain the young lady’s confidence, adhering conventionally to the progress of Creation.
He found his neighbour inclined to slight Nature. He, too, was a little overlooked; in waiving of conventions being blandly forestalled. There was something uncomfortable about all this. He must brace himself. He realized with the prophetic logic of his hysteria, racing through the syllogisms his senses divined, sensations now anachronisms, afterwards recognized as they burst out in due course. This precocity in the restaurant took him to the solution of what their coming together might mean.
One plethoric impression of her was received—although from her—instalment of a senseless generosity.
She wore a heavy black burnous, very voluminous and severe; a large ornamental bag was on the chair at her side, which you expected to contain herbs and trinkets, paraphernalia of the witch, rather than powder, lip-cream, and secrets. Her hat was immense and sinuous; generally she implied an egotistic code of advanced order, full of insolent strategies.
Other women in the restaurant appeared dragged down and drained of vitality by their clothes beside her, Kreisler thought, although she wore so much more than they did. Her large square-shouldered and slim body swam in hers like a duck.
When she laughed, this commotion was transmitted to her body as though sharp, sonorous blows had been[91] struck on her mouth. Her lips were long, hard bubbles risen in the blond heavy pool of her face, ready to break, pitifully and gaily. Grown forward with ape-like intensity, they refused no emotion noisy egress if it got so far. Her eyes were large, stubborn, and reflective, brown coming out of blondness. Her head was like a deep white egg in a tobacco-coloured nest. She exuded personality with alarming and disgusting intensity. It was an ostentation similar to diamonds and gold watch-chains. Kreisler felt himself in the midst of a cascade, a hot cascade.
She seemed to feel herself a travelling circus of tricks and wonders, beauty shows and monstrosities. Quite used to being looked at, she had become resigned to inability to avoid performing. She possessed the geniality of public character and the genius of sex. Kreisler was a strange loafer talked to easily, without any consciousness of condescension.
Just as he was most out of his depth, Kreisler had run up against all this! It all had the mellowness of sunset, and boomed in this small alcove infernally.—By the fact of sex this figure seems to offer him a traditional substantiality. He clutches at it eagerly as at something familiar and unmetamorphosed—and somewhat unmetamorphosable—by Fate.
In the first flush he revolves with certain skill in this new champ de man?uvres, executing one or two very pretty gymnastics. He has only to flatter himself on the excellent progress, really, that he makes.
“My name is Anastasya,” she says irrelevantly to him, as if she had stupidly forgotten, before, this little detail.
Whew! his poor ragged eyelashes flutter, a cloud of astonishment passes grotesquely over his face; like the clown of the piece, he looks as though he were about to rub his head, click his tongue, and give his nearest man-neighbour an enthusiastic kick. “Anastasya!” It will be “Tasy” soon!
He outwardly becomes more solemn than ever,[92] like a merchant who sees an incredible dupe before him, and would in some way conceal his exhilaration. But he calls her carefully at regular intervals, Anastasya!
“I suppose you’ve come here to work?” he asked.
“I don’t want to work any more than is absolutely necessary. I am overworked as it is, by living merely.” He could well believe it; she must do some overtime! “If it were not for my excellent constitution?”
This was evidently, Kreisler felt, the moment to touch on the heaviness of life’s burden; as her expression was perfectly even and non-committal.
“Ah, yes,” he sighed heavily, one side of the menu rising gustily and relapsing, “Life gives one work enough.”
She looked at him and reflected, “What work does ‘cet oiseau-là’ perform?”
“Have you many friends here, Anastasya?”
“None.”—She laughed with ostentatious satisfaction at his funniness. “I came here, as a matter of fact, to be alone. I want to see only fresh people. I have had all the gusto ............