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, Fr?ulein 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[121] politely her sceptical reception of him by her handsome, wondering eyes.

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

He looked for a place to hang his hat. Fr?ulein 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 Fr?ulein Lipmann, and bending respectfully down, kissed her hand. Then with a na?ve air, but conciliatory, began:

“A thousand pardons, Fr?ulein 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.

Fr?ulein 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[122] about it. I will do like this. I think I’ll do, don’t you, Fr?ulein 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, Fr?ulein? 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 Fr?ulein Lipmann was one of the organizers of the Bonnington Club. Through her they had been invited there. Five minutes later Kreisler found Fr?ulein 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. Fr?ulein 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,[123] 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 Fr?ulein 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, Fr?ulein 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[124] 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, Fr?ulein! 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, Fr?ulein 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.

[125]

Her amusement often had been to disinter in herself the dust and decorations of some ancestress. She would float down the windings of her Great Russian and Little Russian blood, living in some imagined figure for a time as you might in towns on a stream.

“We are new lives for our ancestors, not theirs a playground for us. We are the people who have the Reality.” Tarr lectured her later, to which she replied:

“But they had such prodigious lives! I don’t like being anything out and out, life is so varied. I like wearing a dress with which I can enter into any milieu or circumstances. That is the only real self worth the name.”

Anastasya regarded her woman’s beauty as a bright dress of a harlot; she was only beautiful for that. Her splendid and bedizened state was assumed with shades of humility. Even her tenderness and peculiar heart appeared beneath the common infection and almost disgrace of that state.

The Bonnington Club was not far off and they had decided to walk, as the night was fine. It was about half-past nine when they started. Seven or eight led the way in a suddenly made self-centred group; once outside in the spaciousness of the night streets the party seemed to break up into sections held together in the small lighted rooms within—Soltyk and his friend, still talking, and a quieter group, followed.

Fr?ulein Lunken had stayed behind with another girl, to put out the lights. Instead of running on with her companion to join the principal group, she stopped with Kreisler, whom she had found bringing up the rear alone.

“Not feeling gregarious to-night?” she asked.

Kreisler walked slowly, increasing, at every step, the distance between them and the next group, as though hoping that, should he draw her far enough back in the rear, like an elastic band she would in panic shoot[126] forward. “Did he know many English people?” and she continued in a long eulogy of that race. Kreisler murmured and muttered sceptically. And she seemed then to be saying something about Soler’s, and eventually to be recommending him a new Spanish professor of some sort.

Kreisler cursed this chatterer and her complaisance in accompanying him.

“I must get some cigarettes,” he said briskly, as a bureau de tabac came in sight. “But don’t you wait, Fr?ulein. Catch the others up.”

Having purposely loitered over his purchase, when he came out on the Boulevard again there she was waiting for him. “Aber! aber! what’s the matter with her?” Kreisler asked himself in impatient astonishment.

What was the matter with Bertha? Many things, of course. Among old general things ............