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 graceful. 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[133] 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 fa?ade, 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[134] felt a reckless gaiety and irresponsibility, which he did not conceal.

With his abashed English hostess he carried on a strange conversation full of indirect references to the “stately edifice in the Rue de Rennes.” He had spoken of it to Bertha: “That stately edifice in the Rue de Rennes—but of course you don’t know it!”

With smiling German ceremoniousness, with ingenious circumlocutions, he bent down to his hostess’s nervously smiling face and poured into her startled ear symbols and images of pawnshops, usury, three gold balls, “pious mountains,” “smokkin” or “frac” suits, etc., which he seemed a little to confuse, overwhelmed her with a serious terminology, all in a dialect calculated to bewilder the most acute philologist.

“Yes, it is interesting,” she said with strained conviction.

“Isn’t it?” Kreisler replied. It was a comparative estimate of the facilities for the disposing of a watch in Germany and France.

“I’m going to introduce you, Herr Kreisler, to a friend of mine—Mrs. Bevelage.”

She wanted to give the German guests a particularly cordial reception. Kreisler did not seem, superficially, a great acquisition to any club, but he was with the others. As a means of concluding this very painful interview—he was getting nearer every minute to the word that he yet solemnly forbade himself the use of—she led him to a self-controlled remnant of beautiful womanhood who had a reputation with her for worldliness. Mrs. Bevelage could listen to all this, and would be able to cope with a certain disquieting element she recognized in the German.

He saw the reason of this measure; and, looking with ostentatious regret at a long-legged flapper seated next door, cast a reproachful glance at his hostess.

Left alone with the widow, he surveyed her ample and worldly form.

“Get thee to a nunnery!” he said dejectedly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yes. You have omitted ‘my lord.’”

[135]

Mrs. Bevelage looked pleased and puzzled. Possibly he was a count or baron.

“Do you know that stingy but magnificent edifice?”

“Yes??”

“That handsome home of precarious ‘fracs’ in the Rue de Rennes??”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand—” The widow had not got used to his composite tongue. She liked Kreisler, however.

“Shall we dance?” he said, getting up quickly.

He clasped her firmly in the small of the back and they got ponderously in motion, he stamping a little bit, as though he mistook the waltz for a more primitive music.

He took her twice, with ever-increasing velocity, round the large hall, and at the third round, at breakneck speed, spun with her in the direction of the front door.

The impetus was so great that she, although seeing her peril, could not act sufficiently as a break on her impetuous companion to avert the disaster. Another moment and they would have been in the street, amongst the traffic, a disturbing meteor, whizzing out of sight, had they not met the alarmed resistance of a considerable English family entering the front door as Kreisler bore down upon it. It was one of those large, featureless, human groups built up by a frigid and melancholy pair, uncannily fecund, during interminable years of blankness. They received this violent couple in their midst. The rush took Kreisler and his partner half-way through, and there they stood embedded and unconscious for many seconds. The English family then, with great dignity, disgorged them and moved on.

The widow had come somewhat under the fascination of Kreisler’s mood. She was really his woman, had he known it. She felt wrapt in the midst of a simoon—she had not two connected thoughts. All her worldliness and measured management of her fat had vanished. Her face had become coarsened in a[136] few minutes. But she buzzed back again into the dance and began a second, mad, but this time merely circular career.

Kreisler was very careful, whatever he did, to find a reason for it. “He was abominably short-sighted; he had mistaken the front door for one leading into the third room, merely.” His burden, not in the best condition, was becoming more and more puffed, and heavier every moment. When satisfied with this part of his work he led Mrs. Bevelage into a sort of improvised conservatory and talked about pawnshops for ten minutes or so—in a mixture of French, English, and German. He then reconducted her, more dead than alive, to her seat, and strode off from her with great sweeps of his tall figure.

He had during this incident regained complete impassivity. He stalked away to the conservatory.

Bertha had soon been called on to dance vigorously without much intermission. In the convolutions of the valse, however, she matured a bold and new plan. She whirled and trotted with a preoccupied air.

Would Tarr hear of all this? She was alarmed, now it was done. Also she was cowed and sorry for her action at the thought of Lipmann and Van Bencke’s attitude towards the Kreisler kissing. She undoubtedly must secure herself. The plan she hit on offered a “noble” r?le that she could not, in any circumstances, have resisted.

Her scheme was plain and clever. She would simply “tell the truth.”

“She had recognized something distracting in Kreisler’s life, the presence of crisis. On an impulse, she had offered him her sympathy. He had taken up her offer immediately in an astonishing and brutal manner. (One against him: two for her!) Such direct and lurid sympathy he claimed.”

So she jogged out her strategies in exhilaration of the waltzes.

At this point of her story she would hint, by ambiguous hesitation, that she, in truth, had been[137] ready even for this sacrifice: had made it, if her hearers wished! She would imply rather that from modesty—not wanting to appear too “noble”—she refrained from telling them.

It is true that for such a confession she had many precedents. Only a week ago Fr?ulein Van Bencke herself, inflating proudly her stout handsome person, had told them that while in Berlin she had allowed a young painter to kiss her: she believed “that the caresses of a pure woman would be helpful to him at that juncture of his life.” But this had not been, it was to be supposed, in the middle of the street. No one had ever seen, or ever would see, the young painter in question, or the kiss.

Busy with these plans, Bertha had not much time to notice Kreisler’s further deportment. She came across him occasionally, and keyed her solid face into an intimate flush and such mask as results from any sickly physical straining. “Poor mensch!”

Soltyk surprised one Anglo-Saxon partner after another with his wonderful English—unnecessarily like the real thing. He went about surprising people in a cold, tireless way, exhibiting no signs of pleasure, except as much as was testified to by his action, merely.

Kreisler saw him with Anastasya only twice. On those occasions he could not, on the strength of Soltyk’s attitude, pin him down as a rival. Yet he was thirsting for conventional figures. His endless dissatisfaction and depression could only be satisfied by active things, unlike itself. Soltyk’s self-possessed and masterly signs of distinguished camaraderie depressed Kreisler very much. The Russian had been there once at the critical moment, and was, more distantly, an attribute of Volker. He did not like him. How it would satisfy him to dig his fingers into that flesh, and tear it like thick cloth! He was “for it”; he was going out. He was being helped off by things. Why did he not shout? He longed to act: the rusty machine had a thirst for action. His energies were repudiating their master.

[138]

Soltyk’s analogies with Kreisler worked in the dark to some end of mutual destruction. The nuance of possibility Soltyk liked his friendships with women to have, was a different affair to Kreisler’s heady and thorough-going intrigues. But he liked his soul to be marked with little delicate wounds and wistfulnesses. He liked an understanding, a little melancholy, with a woman. They would just divine in each other possibilities of passion, that was yet too lasse and sad to rise to the winding of Love’s horns that were heard, nevertheless, in a décor Versaillesque and Polonais. They were people who looked forward as others look back. They would say farewell to the future as most men gaze at the past. At the most they played the slight dawning and disappearing of passion, cutting, fastidiously, all the rest of the piece. So he was often found with women. Life had no lethargic intervals as with Kreisler. It at all times needed “expression” of such sort.

For Anastasya, Soltyk was one of her many impresarios, who helped her on to and off the scene of Life. He bored her usually, but they had something equivalent to pleasant business relations. She appreciated him as an Impresario.

These things arraying themselves in reality after this ordinary unexciting fashion, conventional figures of drama lacked. Kreisler was in the wrong company. But he conformed for the sake of the Invisible Audience haunting life. He emulated the matter-of-factness and aplomb that impressed him in the others à outrance. So much was this so that the Audience took some time to notice him, the vein of scandal running through the performance.

In the conservatory he established his head-quarters.

From there he issued forth on various errands. All his errands showed the gusto of the logic of his personality, and not despair. He might have been enjoying himself. He invented outrage that was[139] natural to him, and enjoyed slightly the licence and scope of his indifference.

He, for instance, at the first sortie, noticed a rather congested, hot, and spectacled young woman, rather constantly fluttered over her womanhood, but overworked by her conscience, her features set by duty. He succeeded in getting her for a partner, and soon won her confidence by his scrupulous German politeness. He then, while marking time in a crush, disengaged his hand, and appeared to wish to alter the lie of her bosom, very apologetically.

“Excuse me! It’s awkward. More to the left—so! Clumsy things and women are so proud of them! (No: I’m sure you’re not!) No. Let it hang to the left!” The young lady, very red, and snorting almost in his face, left him brusquely.

Several young women, and notably a flapper, radiant with heavy inexperience and loaded with bristling bronze curls, he lured into the conservatory. They all came out with scarlet faces.

For the first hour he paid no attention to Anastasya, but prosecuted his antics as though he had forgotten all about her. He knew she was there and left her alone, even in thought, in a grim spirit. He hid coquettishly behind his solemn laughter-in-action, the pleasant veil of his hysteria.

He had become generally noticed in the room, although there were a great many people present. Fr?ulein Lipmann hesitated. She thought at length that he was mad. In speaking to him and getting him removed, she feared a scandalous scene.

As he appeared on the threshold of the conservatory an expectant or anxious tremor invaded several backs. But he just stalked round this time on a tour of inspection, as though to see that all was going along as it should. He stared heavily and significantly at those young ladies who had been his partners, when he came across them. One he stopped in front of and gazed at severely. He then returned to the conservatory.

[140]

In his deck chair, his head stretched back, glasses horizontal and facing the ceiling, he considered the graceless Hamlet that he was.

“Go to a nunnery, Widow!”

He should have been saying that to his Ophelia.

Why did he not go to her? Contact was the essential thing, but so difficult to bring about.

He must make her angry, insult her: that would bare her soul. Then he would spit on it. Then he really could insult her. But Soltyk offered a conventional target for violence. Soltyk was evading him with his contempt. Soltyk! What should be done with him? Why (a prolonged and stormily rising “why”), there was no difficulty about that. He got up from his chair, and walked deliberately and quickly into the central room. But Soltyk was nowhere to be seen.

The dancers were circling rapidly past with athletic elation, talking in the way people talk when they are working. Their intelligences floated and flew above the waves of the valse, but with frequent drenchings, as it were, and cessations. The natural strangeness for him of all these English people together did not arrest his mind or lead him to observation, but yet got a little in the way. Couple followed couple, the noise of their feet, or dress, for a moment queerly distinct and near above the rest, as though a yard or two of quiet surrounded Kreisler. They came into this area for a moment, everything distinct and clear cut, and then went out again. Each new pair of dancers seemed coming straight for him. Their voices were loud for a moment. A hole was cut out of the general noise, as it were opening a passage into it. Each new face was a hallucination of separate energy, seeming very distant, laughs, words, movements. They were like trunkless, living heads rolling and bobbing past, a sea of them. The two or three instruments behind the screen of palms produced the necessary measures to keep this throng of people careering, like a spoon stirring in a saucepan.[141] It stirred and stirred and they jerked and huddled insipidly round and round.

Kreisler was drawn up at the first door for a minute. He was just taking a step forward to work his way round to the next, when he caught sight of Anastasya dancing with (he supposed) some............