PART VI
HOLOCAUSTS
CHAPTER I
Tarr’s character at this time performed repeatedly the following manœuvre: 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 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, naïf, 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.