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 Café 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 gar?on’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[113] 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 café. 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 fêtes.

The gar?on, 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[114] 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 gar?on 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 gar?on 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[115] 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[116] 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 throug............