Tarr left Bertha punctually at seven. She looked very ill. He resolved not to go there any more. He felt upset. Lejeune’s, when he got there, was full of Americans. It was like having dinner among a lot of canny children. Kreisler was not there. He went on a hunt for him afterwards, and ran him to earth at the Café de l’Aigle.

Kreisler was not cordial. He emitted sounds of surprise, shuffled his feet and blinked. But Tarr sat down in front of him on his own initiative. Then Kreisler, calling the gar?on, offered him a drink. Afterwards he settled down to contemplate Bertha’s Englishman, and await developments. He was always rather softer with people with whom he could converse in his own harsh tongue.

The causes at the root of Tarr’s present thrusting of himself upon Kreisler were the same as his later visits at the Lipmann’s. A sort of bath of Germans was his prescription for himself, a voluptuous immersion. To heighten the effect, he was being German himself: being Bertha as well.

But he was more German than the Germans. Many aspects of his conduct were so un-German that Kreisler did not recognize the portrait or hail him as a fellow. Successive lovers of a certain woman fraternizing; husbands hobnobbing with their wives’ lovers or husbands of their unmarried days is a commonplace of German or Scandinavian society.

Kreisler had not returned to Bertha’s. He was too lazy to plan conscientiously. But he concluded that she had better be given scope for anything the return of Tarr might suggest. He, Otto Kreisler, might be supposed no longer to exist. His mind was working up again for some truculent action. Tarr was no obstacle. He would just walk through Tarr like a ghost when he saw fit to “advance” again.

“You met Lowndes in Rome, didn’t you?” Tarr asked him.

[212]

Kreisler nodded.

“Have you seen Fr?ulein Lunken to-day?”

“No.” As Tarr was coming to the point Kreisler condescended to speak: “I shall see her to-morrow morning.”

A space for protest or comment seemed to be left after this sentence, in Kreisler’s still very “speaking” expression.

Tarr smiled at the tone of this piece of information. Kreisler at once grinned, mockingly, in return.

“You can get out of your head any idea that I have turned up to interfere with your proceedings,” Tarr then said. “Affairs lie entirely between Fr?ulein Lunken and yourself.”

Kreisler met this assurance truculently.

“You could not interfere with my proceedings. I do what I want to do in this life!”

“How splendid. Wunderbar! I admire you!”

“Your admiration is not asked for!”

“It leaps up involuntarily! Prosit! But I did not mean, Herr Kreisler, that my desire to interfere, had such desire existed, would have been tolerated. Oh, no! I meant that no such desire existing, we had no cause for quarrel. Prosit!”

Tarr again raised his glass expectantly and coaxingly, peering steadily at the German. He said, “Prosit” as he would have said, “Peep-oh!”

“Pros’t!” Kreisler answered with alarming suddenness, and an alarming diabolical smile. “Prosit!” with finality. He put his glass down. “That is all right. I have no desire,” he wiped and struck up his moustaches, “to quarrel with anybody. I wish to be left alone. That is all.”

“To be left alone to enjoy your friendship with Bertha—that is your meaning? Am I not right? I see.”

“That is my business. I wish to be left alone.”

“Of course it’s your business, my dear chap. Have another drink!” He called the gar?on. Kreisler agreed to another drink.

Why was this Englishman sitting there and talking[213] to him? It was in the German style and yet it wasn’t. Was Kreisler to be shifted, was he meant to go? Had the task of doing this been put on Bertha’s shoulders? Had Tarr come there to ask him, or in the hope that he would volunteer a promise, never to see Bertha again?

On the other hand, was he being approached by Tarr in the capacity of an old friend of Bertha’s, or in her interests or at her instigation?

With frowning impatience he bent forward quickly once or twice, asking Tarr to repeat some remark. Tarr’s German was not good.

Several glasses of beer, and Kreisler became engagingly expansive.

“Have you ever been to England?” Tarr asked him.

“England?—No—I should like to go there! I like Englishmen! I feel I should get on better with them than with these French. I hate the French! They are all actors.”

“You should go to London.”

“Ah, to London. Yes, I should go to London! It must be a wonderful town! I have often meant to go there. Is it expensive?”

“The journey?”

“Well, life there. Dearer than it is here, I have been told.” Kreisler forgot his circumstances for the moment. The Englishman seemed to have hit on a means of escape for him. He had never thought of England! A hazy notion of its untold wealth made it easier for him to put aside momentarily the fact of his tottering finances.

Perhaps this Englishman had been sent him by the Schicksal. He had always got on well with Englishmen!

The peculiar notion then crossed his mind that Tarr perhaps wanted to get him out of Paris, and had come to make him some offer of hospitality in England. In a bargaining spirit he began to run England down. He must not appear too anxious to go there.

“They say, though, things have changed. England’s not what it was,” he said.

[214]

“No. But it has changed for the better.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“Quite true. The last time I was there it had improved so much that I thought of stopping. Merry England is foutu! There won’t be a regular Pub. in the whole country in fifty years. Art will flourish! There’s not a real gipsy left in the country. The sham art-ones are dwindling!”

“Are the Zigeuner disappearing?”

“Je vous crois! Rather!”

“The only Englishmen I know are very sympathisch.”

They pottered about on the subject of England for some time. Kreisler was very tickled with the idea of England.

“English women—what are they like?” Kreisler then asked with a grin. Their relations made this subject delightfully delicate and yet, Kreisler thought, very natural. This Englishman was evidently a description of pander, and no doubt he would be as inclined to be hospitable with his countrywomen in the abstract as with his late fiancée in material detail.

“A friend of mine who had been there told me they were very ‘prett............