This account, to be brought up to date, must be modified. Since knowing Volker, no woman had come conspicuously to disturb him. Volker had been the ideal element of balance in his life.
But between this state—the minimum degree of friendship possible—a distant and soothing companionship—and more serious states, there was no possible foothold for Kreisler.
Friendship usually dates from unformed years. But Love still remains in full swing long after Kreisler’s age at that time; a sort of spurious and intense friendship.
An uncomfortable thing happened now. He realized suddenly all the possibilities of this chance acquaintanceship, plainly and cinematographically.—He was seized with panic.—He must make a good impression.—From that moment he ran the risk of doing the reverse. For he was unaccustomed to act with calculation.—There he was like some individual who had gone nonchalantly into the presence of a prince; who—just in the middle of the audience—when he would have been getting over his first embarrassment—is overcome with a tardy confusion, the imagination in some way giving a jump. It is the imagination, repressed and as it were slighted, revenging itself.
Casting about desperately for means of handling the situation, he remembered she had spoken of getting a dog to guide her.—What had she meant? Anyway, he grasped at the dog. He could regain possession of himself in romantic stimulus of this figure. He would be her dog! Lie at her feet! He would fill with a merely animal warmth and vivacity the void that must exist in her spirit. His imagination, flattered, came in as ally. This, too, exempted him from the necessity of being victorious. All he asked was to be her dog!—only wished to impress her as a dog! Even if she did not feel much sympathy for him now, no matter.—He would humbly follow her up, put himself at her disposal, not be exigent. It was a rôle difficult to refuse him. Sense of security the humility of this resolution brought about caused him to regain a self-possession. Only it imposed the condition, naturally, of remaining a dog.—Every time he felt his retiring humbleness giving place to another sensation, he anew felt qualms.
“Do you intend studying here, Fräulein?” he asked, with a new deference in his tone—hardly a canine whine, but deep servient bass of the faithful St. Bernard.—She seemed to have noticed this something new already, and Kreisler on all fours evidently astonished her. She was inclined to stroke him, but at the same time to ask what was the matter.
“A year or two ago I escaped from a bourgeois household in an original manner. Shall I tell you about that, Otto?”
Confidence for confidence, he had told Anastasya that he was Otto.
“Please!” he said, with reverent eagerness.
“Well, the bourgeois household was that of my father and mother.—I got out of it in this way.—I made myself such a nuisance to my family that they had to get rid of me.” Otto flung himself back in his chair with dramatic incredulity. “It was quite simple.—I began scribbling and scratching all over the place—on blotting-pads, margins of newspapers, on my father’s correspondence, the wall-paper. I inundated my home with troublesome images. It was like vermin; my multitude of little figures swarmed everywhere. They simply had to get rid of me.—I said nothing. I pretended to be possessed. I got a girl-friend in Münich to write enthusiastic letters: her people lived quite near us when we were in Germany.”