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. 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 Englishman.
He stopped, paralysed by her appearance. This reality intercepted the course of his imaginary life (of which his pursuit of Soltyk was a portion). He stood like somebody surprised in a questionable act. He had not reckoned on being met by her before his present errand was finished. The next moment he was furious at this interference; at her having the power to draw him up. This imaginary life should grow. Hell and Heaven! he was not going to stop there looking at her. She and her partner had drawn up for a moment just in his way, being stopped by other couples marking time. She had not seen him. He took her partner roughly by the arm, pushing him against her, hustling him, fixing him with his eye. He passed beyond them then, through the passage he had made. His blood was flooding him, and making him expand and sink like a Russian dancer. The young man handled in this manner, shy and unprompt, stared after Kreisler with a “What the devil!” People are seldom so rude in England. Preparation for outbursts of potential rudeness form a part of the training of a German. Kreisler also, without apology, but as if waiting for more vigorous expostulation, was also looking back, while he stepped slowly along the wall towards a door beyond, the one leading to the refreshment-room.
Anastasya freed herself at once from her partner and pale and frowning (but as though waiting) was looking after Kreisler curiously. She would have liked him to stop. He had done something strange and was as suddenly going away. That was unsatisfactory. They looked at each other blankly. He showed no sign of stopping: she just stared. Suddenly it was comic. She burst out laughing. But they had clashed, like people in the dance, and were both disappearing from each other again, the shock hardly over. The contact had been brought about. He was still as surprised at his action, which had been done “in a moment,” as she was. Anastasya felt, too, in what way this had been contact. She felt his hand on her arm as though it had been she he had seized. This rough figure disappeared in the doorway, as incapable of explaining anything. She shivered nervously as she grasped her partner’s arm again, at this merely physical contact. “What’s the matter with that chap?” her partner asked, conscious of a lameness, but of something queer going on. This question had been asked a few minutes before elsewhere. “Herr Kreisler is behaving very strangely. Do you think he’s been drinking?” Fräulein Lipmann had asked Eckhart.
Eckhart was a little drunk himself. He took a very decided view of Kreisler’s case.