Tarr’s character at this time performed repeatedly the following man?uvre: his best energies would, once a farce was started, gradually take over the business from the play department and continue it as a serious line of its own. It was as though it had not the go to initiate anything of its own accord. It was content to exploit the clown’s discoveries.

The bellicose visit to Kreisler now projected was launched to a slow blast of Humour, ready, when the time came, to turn into a storm. His contempt for the German would not allow him to enter into anything seriously against him. Kreisler was a joke. Jokes, it had to be admitted (and in that they became more effective than ever), were able to make you sweat.

That Kreisler could be anywhere but at the Café de l’Aigle on the following evening never entered Tarr’s head. As he was on an unpleasant errand, he took it for granted that Fate would on this occasion put everything punctually at his disposal. Had it been an errand of pleasure, he would have instinctively supposed the reverse.

At ten, and at half-past, his rival had not yet arrived. Tarr set out to make rapidly a tour of the other cafés. But Kreisler might be turning over a[239] new leaf. He might be going to bed, as on the previous evening. He must not be again sought, though, on his own territory. The moral disadvantage of this position, on a man’s few feet of most intimate floor space, Tarr had clearly realized.

The Café Souchet, the most frequented café of the Quarter, entered merely in a spirit of German thoroughness, was, however, the one. More alert, and brushed up a little, Tarr thought, Kreisler was sitting with another man, with a bearded, na?f, and rather pleasant face, over his coffee. No pile of saucers this time attended him.

The stranger was a complication. Perhaps the night’s affair should be put off until the conditions were more favourable. But Tarr’s vanity was impatient. His wait in the original café had made him nervous and hardly capable of acting with circumspection. On the other hand, it might come at once. This was an opposite complication. Kreisler might open hostilities on the spot. This would rob him of the subtle benefits to be derived from his gradual strategy. This must be risked. He was not very calm. He crudely went up to Kreisler’s table and sat down. The feeling of the lack of aplomb in this action, and his disappointment at the presence of the other man, chased the necessary good humour out of his face. He had carefully preserved this expression for some time, even walking lazily and quietly as if he were carrying a jug of milk. Now it vanished in a moment. Despite himself, he sat down opposite Kreisler as solemn as a judge, pale, his eyes fixed on the object of his activity with something like a scowl.

But, his first absorption in his own sensations lifted and eased a little, he recognized that something very unusual was in the air.

Kreisler and his friend were not speaking or doing anything visibly. They were just sitting still, two self-possessed malefactors. Nevertheless, Tarr’s arrival to all appearance disturbed and even startled them, as if they had been completely wrapped up in some engrossing game or conspiracy.

[240]

Kreisler had his eyes trained across the room. The other man, too, was turned slightly in that direction, although his eyes followed the tapping of his boot against the ironwork of the table, and he only looked up occasionally.

Kreisler turned round, stared at Tarr without at once taking in who it was; then, as though saying to himself, “It’s only Bertha’s Englishman,” he took up his former wilful and patient attitude, his eyes fixed.

Tarr had grinned a little as Kreisler turned his way, rescued from his solemnity. There was just a perceptible twist in the German’s neck and shade of expression that would have said “Ah, there you are? Well, be quiet, we’re having some fun. Just you wait!”

But Tarr was so busy with his own feelings that he didn’t understand this message. He wondered if he had been seen by Kreisler in the distance, and if this reception had been concerted between him and his friend. If so, why?

Sitting, as he was, with his back to the room, he stared at his neighbour. His late boon companion distinctly was waiting, with absurd patience, for something. The poise of his head, the set of his yellow Prussian jaw, were truculent, although otherwise he was peaceful and attentive. His collar looked new rather than clean. His necktie was one not familiar to Tarr. Boots shone impassibly under the table.

Tarr screwed his chair sideways, and faced the room. It was full of people—very athletically dressed American men, all the varieties of the provincial in American women, powdering their noses and ogling Turks, or sitting, the younger ones, with blameless interest and fine complexions. And there were plenty of Turks, Mexicans, Russians and other “types” for the American ladies! In the wide passage-way into the further rooms sat the orchestra, playing the “Moonlight Sonata,” Dvorak and the “Machiche.”

[241]

In the middle of the room, at Tarr’s back, he now saw a group of eight or ten young men whom he had seen occasionally in the Café Berne. They looked rather German, but smoother and more vivacious. Poles or Austrians, then? Two or three of them appeared to be amusing themselves at his expense. Had they noticed the little drama that he was conducting at his table? Were they friends of Kreisler’s, too?—He was incapable of working anything out. He flushed and felt far more like beginning on them than on his complicated idiot of a neighbour, who had become a cold task. This genuine feeling illuminated for him the tired frigidity of his present employment.

He had moved his chair a little to the right, towards the group at his back, and more in front of Kreisler, so that he could look into his face. On turning back now, and comparing the directions of the various pairs of eyes engaged, he at length concluded that he was without the sphere of interest; just without it.

At this moment Kreisler sprang up. His head was thrust forward, his hands were in rear, partly clenched and partly facilitating his passage between the tables by hemming in his coat tails. The smooth round cloth at the top of his back, his smooth head above that with no back to it, struck Tarr in the way a momentary smell of sweat would. Germans had no backs to them, or were like polished pebbles behind. Tarr mechanically moved his hand upwards from his lap to the edge of the table on the way to ward off a blow. He was dazed by all the details of this meeting, and the peculiar miscarriage of his plan.

But Kreisler brushed past him with the swift deftness of a person absorbed with some strong movement of the will. The next moment Tarr saw the party of young men he had been observing in a sort of noisy blur of commotion. Kreisler was in among them, working on something in their midst. There were two blows—smack—smack; an interval between them. He could not see who had received them.

Tarr then heard Kreisler shout in German:

[242]

“For the second time to-day! Is your courage so slow that I must do it a third time?”

Conversation had stopped in the café and everybody was standing. The companions of the man smacked, too, had risen in their seats. They were expostulating in three languages. Several were mixed up with the gar?ons, who had rushed up to do their usual police work on such occasions. Over Kreisler&............