This is how he lost Volker. He felt that hundred marks, given him as a favour, was the last serious bite he would get. He only gradually realized of how much more worth Volker’s money now was, and what before was an unorganized mass of specie, in which the professional borrower could wallow, was now a sound and suitably conducted business. He met that night the new manager.
He was taken round to the Berne after dinner. He did not realize what awaited him. He found himself in the head-quarters of many national personalities. Politeness reigned. 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? Why go out of Europe? Why not save the money for the voyage?” he would bluster.
“More beautiful? What do you understand by the word ‘beautiful,’ my dear sir?” would answer a voice in the service of new movements.
“What do I call beautiful? How would you like your face to be as flat as a pancake, your nostrils like a squashed strawberry, one of your eyes cocked up by the side of your ear? Would not you be very unhappy to look like that? Then how can you expect any one but a technique-maniac to care a straw for a picture of that sort—call it Cubist or Fauve or whatever you like? It’s all spoof. It puts money in somebody’s pocket, no doubt.”
“It’s not a question, unhappily, of how we should like our faces to be. It is how they are. But I do not consider the actual position of my eyes to be any more beautiful than any other position that might have been chosen for them. The almond eye was long held in contempt by the hatchet-eye⸺”
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.