Kreisler

“ Kreisler imagined the change that would come over this face when there was question of thirty francs. Estrangement set in on his side already, anger and humiliation at the imagined expression. This was of help. Here was his chance of borrowing that very insignificant but illusive sum. The man was already an enemy. He would willingly have knocked him on the head and taken his money had they been in a quiet place.
The complacent health and humoristic phlegm with which he grinned and perambulated through life charged Kreisler with the contempt natural to his more stiff and human education. ”

“ 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 garçon 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. ”

“ Kreisler began tickling the palm of her hand slightly. When he saw it interrupted her words, he stopped, holding her hand solemnly as though it had been a fish slipped there for some unknown reason. Having her hand—her often-trenchant hand with its favourite gesture of sentimental over-emphasis—captive, made her discourse almost quiet.
“I know you have been wronged and wounded. Treat me as a sister: let me help you. You think my behaviour odd: do you think I’m a funny girl? But, ah! we walk about and torment each other enough! ”

“ So much new matter for anger had been poured into the ear that it wiped out all the earlier impulse. Action must be again begun right down from the root.
Kreisler thrust his mouth forward amorously, his body in the attitude of the eighteenth-century gallant, as though Soltyk had been a woman. ”

“ Between language and feeding, Kreisler sought to gain the young lady’s confidence, adhering conventionally to the progress of Creation.
He found his neighbour inclined to slight Nature. He, too, was a little overlooked; in waiving of conventions being blandly forestalled. There was something uncomfortable about all this. He must brace himself. He realized with the prophetic logic of his hysteria, racing through the syllogisms his senses divined, sensations now anachronisms, afterwards recognized as they burst out in due course. ”

“ Just as he was most out of his depth, Kreisler had run up against all this! It all had the mellowness of sunset, and boomed in this small alcove infernally.—By the fact of sex this figure seems to offer him a traditional substantiality. He clutches at it eagerly as at something familiar and unmetamorphosed—and somewhat unmetamorphosable—by Fate.
In the first flush he revolves with certain skill in this new champ de manœuvres, executing one or two very pretty gymnastics. He has only to flatter himself on the excellent progress, really, that he makes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A casual observer of the progress of Otto Kreisler’s life might have said that the chief events, the crises, consisted of his love affairs—such as that unfortunate one with his present stepmother.—But, in the light of a careful analysis, this would have been an inversion of the truth. When the events of his life became too unwieldy or overwhelming, he converted them into love, as he might have done, with specialized talent, into some art or other. He was a sculptor—a German sculptor of a mock-realistic and degenerate school—in the strange sweethearting of the “free-life.” ”

“ And marriage alone could wrench the woman chosen away from the clinging bunch.
Kreisler, despite his snorting, went again with Volker. The female charm had done its work. This gregarious female personality had shown such frank invitation to Volker that had any separate woman exhibited half as hospitable a front he would have been very alarmed. As it was, it had at first just fulfilled certain bourgeois requirements of his lonely German soul. Kreisler came a few weeks running to the Lipmann soirée. Never finding Volker there, he left off going as well. ”

“ Hurried out on to the pavement, he could still see, at the bottom of a huge placid mirror just inside the café, the wriggling backs of the band of Poles. Drawing out his card-case, he had handed the waiter a visiting-card. The waiter at first refused it. He turned his head aside vaguely, as a dog does when doubtful about some morsel offered him; then he took it. Kreisler saw in the mirror the tearing up of his card. Fury once more—not so much because it was a new slight as that he feared his only hope, Soltyk, might escape him. ”

“ Anastasya had at last got into line with him. She had been startled, awakened, and had also laughed. This was an exact and complete response to Kreisler at the present. Something difficult to understand and which should have been alarming for a woman, the feel of the first tugs of the maelstrom he was producing and conducting all on his own, and which required her for its heart: and then laughter, necessarily, once one was in that atmosphere, like laughing gas, with its gusty tickling. ”

“ Imparting swanlike undulations to a short stout person, eye fixed quizzingly on Kreisler’s in the glass, she advanced. Her manner was one seldom sure of welcome, a little deprecatingly aggressive. She owned humorously a good-natured face with protruding eyes, gesticulated with, filling her silences with explosive significance. Brows always raised. A soul made after the image of injuries. A skin which would become easily blue in cold weather was matched with a taste in dress inveterately blue. ”

“ Kreisler had added himself to the worrying list of her women friends, Tarr, etc., in a disgusting, dumbfounding way, the list of people preying on her mind and pushing her to perpetual fuss, all sorts of explicative, defiant, or other actions. She had stuck Kreisler up as a “cause” against her friends. In a manner of his own, he had betrayed her and placed himself beside her friends. In any case, he had carried out in the fullest fashion their estimate of him. In being virtuous a libelled man can best attack his enemies ”

“ Have you anything to tell us about your compatriots inside there?”
Since his throttling by Soltyk, Kreisler had changed. He knew he was beaten. There was nothing to do but to die. His body ran to the German frontier as a chicken’s does down a yard, headless, from the block. ”

“ Money—that is luck and its power—was the genius of the new world. American clothes were adapted for the finer needs of the Western European.
On the evening following Kreisler’s arrival Volker had an engagement. The morning after that Kreisler turned up at half-past twelve. Volker was painting Fräulein Bodenaar. She was very smartly dressed, in a tight German way. He displayed a disinclination to make Kreisler and his sitter acquainted. He was a little confused. They arranged to meet at dinner-time. He was going to lunch with Fräulein Bodenaar. ”

“ Fräulein Lipmann, the fish he particularly angled for, was backward. They did not seem to want him very much at the dance. Nevertheless, after an hour of indefatigable manœuvring, the exertion of many powers seldom put forth in that salon, he secured the form, not the spirit, of an invitation.
Kreisler saw, in his alarmed fancy, Anastasya becoming welded into this gregarious female personality. The energy and resource of the Devil himself would be required to extricate her. She must be held back from this slough for the moment he needed. ”

“ Sorbert was meant by this. Her continued seeing of Kreisler was known to all now, and she could imagine their reception of that news. Now she could hardly go on talking about Kreisler. This would at once be interpreted as “something having happened.” So more scandal against her name. In examining likelihoods of the future she concluded that she would have to break still more with her friends, to make up for having to retire from her Kreisler positions. To squash and counteract their satisfaction she must accentuate her independence in their direction to insult and contempt. ”

“ Kreisler was pleased to find a permanent vat of German always on tap. His roots mixed sluggishly with Ernst’s in this living lump of the soil of the Fatherland dumped down at the head of the Boulevard Pfeiffer.
The Germans he met here spoke a language and expressed opinions he could not agree with, but with which Volker evidently did. They argued genially over glasses of beer and champagne. He found his ticket at once. He was the vielle barbe of the party.
“Yes, I’ve seen Gauguins. But why go so far as the South Sea Islands unless you are going to make people more beautiful? ”

“ In this manner woman was the æsthetic element in Kreisler’s life. Love, too, always meant unhappy love for him, with its misunderstandings and wistful separations. [94] He issued forth solemnly and the better for it. He approached a love affair as the deutscher Student engages in a student’s duel—no vital part exposed, but where something spiritually of about the importance of a nose might be lost; at least stoically certain that blood would be drawn. ”

“ Kreisler peered up at him and laughed. “You’re a modest fellow. You’re not as ugly as you think! Nach! I like to find⸺”
“But you haven’t told us, Otto, what you call beautiful.”
“I call this young lady here”—and he turned gallantly to a blushing cocotte at his side—“beautiful, very beautiful!” He kissed her amid gesticulation and applause.
“That’s just what I supposed,” his opponent said with appreciation.
He did not get on well with Soltyk. Louis Soltyk was a young Russian, half Polish, who occasionally sat amongst the Germans at the Berne. Volker saw more of him than anybody. ”

“ Kreisler had not intended going to Soler’s that day. Yet there he was, presumably got there now to avoid Ernst Volker. He saw himself starting up from the Berne a quarter of an hour before, steaming away in pursuit of a skulking friend—impetus of angry thought carrying him far beyond his destination; [111] then Volker comes along and runs him into the painting school. He compared himself to one of those little steam toys that go straight ahead without stopping; that any one can take up and send puffing away in the opposite direction. ”

“ With great gravity he set forth his attachment for a “beautiful girl,” the discreditable behaviour of the Russian in seeking to prejudice her against him. In fact, he gave an entirely false picture of the whole situation. His honour must now be satisfied. He would accept nothing less than reparation by arms. Such was Kreisler, but he was himself very cynically. He had explained this to Volker after the following manner: “I am a hundred different things; I am as many people as the different types of people I have lived amongst. ”

“ Volker went on: “I don’t know whether I told you about my show.”
“What show?” Kreisler asked rudely.
“In Berlin, you know. It has not gone badly. Our compatriots improve. I’ve got a commission to paint the Countess Wort. What have you been doing lately?” There was a forbidding pause. “I’ve intended coming round to see you; but I’ve been sticking at home working. Have you been round at the Berne?” He spoke rapidly and confidentially, as two business men meeting in the street and always in a hurry might try and compress into a few minutes, between two handshakes, a lot of personal news. ”

“ Volker stirred his coffee. He immediately showed his hand, for he looked up and with transparent innocence asked:
“By the way, Otto, you remember Blauenstein at Münich⸺?”
“You mean the little Jew from whom everybody used to borrow money?” Kreisler fixed him severely and significantly with his eye and spoke with heavy deliberation.
“Did people borrow money from him? I had forgotten. Yes, that’s the man. He has turned up here; who do you think with? With Irma, the Bohemian girl. They are living together—round the corner there.” ”

“ 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! ”

“ On the receipt of this letter—as on the former occasion a little—she first of all behaved as she would have done had Sorbert been there. She acted silent resignation and going about her work as usual for the benefit of the letter, as though it had been a living person. The reply to this, written an hour or so before Kreisler arrived, had been an exaggerated acquiescence. “Of course, Sorbert: far better that we should part!” But soon this letter began to worry her and threaten her mannerisms. ”