Kreisler looked at her rather dully, and smiled solemnly, with really something of the misplaced and unaccountable pathos and protest of dogs (although still with a slavish wagging of the tail) at some pleasantry of the master.—Her expansiveness, as a fact, embarrassed him very much at this point. He was divided between his inclination to respond to it in some way, and mature their acquaintance at once, and his determination to be merely a dog. Yet he felt that her familiarity, if adopted, in turn, by him, might not be the right thing. And yet, as it was, he would appear to be holding back, would seem “reserved” in his mere humility. He was a very perplexed dog for some time.
He remained dumb, smiling up at her with appealing pathos from time to time. She wondered if he had indigestion or what. He made several desperate dog-like sorties. But she saw he was clearly in difficulties—As her lunch was finished, she called the waitress.—Her bill was made out, Kreisler scowling at her all the while. Her attitude, suggesting, “Yes, you are funny, you know you are. I’d better go, then you’ll be better,” was responded to by him with the same offended dignity as the drunken man displays when his unsteadiness is observed. He repudiated sulkily the suggestion that there was anything wrong. Then he grew angry with her. His nervousness was her doing.—All was lost. He was very near some violence.—But when she stood up, he was so impressed that he sat gaping after her. He remained cramped in his place until she had left the restaurant.
He moved in his chair stiffly; he ached as though he had been sitting for his portrait. The analogy struck him. Had he been sitting for his portrait? These people dining near him as though they had suddenly appeared out of the ground—he was embarrassed at finding himself alone with them. They knew all that had happened, but were pretending not to. He had not noticed that they were there all round him, overbearing and looking on. It was as though he had been talking to himself, and had just become aware of it. A tide of magnetism had flowed away, leaving him bare and stranded.—He cursed his stupidity. He then stopped this empty mental racket abruptly.—Only a few minutes had passed since Anastasya’s departure. He seized hat and stick and hurried up to the desk.—Once outside he gave his glasses an adjusting pull, gazed up and down the boulevard in all directions. No sign of the tall figure he was pursuing. He started off, partly at a run, in the likeliest direction.—At the Café Berne corner, where several new vistas opened, there she was, some way down the Boulevard du Paradis, on the edge of the side-walk, waiting till a tram had passed to cross. Having seen so much, should he not go back? For there was nothing else to be done. To catch her up and force himself on her could have only one result, he thought. He might, perhaps, follow a little way. That was being done already.
They went on for some hundred yards, she a good distance ahead on the other side of the boulevard. Walking for a moment, his eyes on the ground, he looked up and caught her head pivoting slowly round. She no doubt had seen him.—With shame he realized what was happening.—“Here I am following this girl as though we were strangers! This is what I began in the restaurant. I am putting the final touch by following her in the street, as though we had never spoken!” Either he must catch her up at once or vanish. He promptly turned up a side street, and circled round to his starting-point.
CHAPTER VI
His nature would probably have sought to fill up the wide, shallow gap left by Ernst and earlier ties either by another Ernst or, more likely, a variety of matter. It would have been only a temporary stopping. Now a gold crown, regal person, had fallen on the hollow.
But his nature was an effete machine and incapable of working on all that glory. Desperate at dullness, he betook himself to self-lashings. He would respond to utmost of weakened ability; with certainty of failure, egotistically, but not at a standstill. Kreisler was a German who, by all rights and rules of the national temperament, should have committed suicide some weeks earlier. Anastasya became an idée fixe. He was a machine, dead weight of old iron, that, started, must go dashing on. His little-dog simile was veritably carried out in his scourings of the neighbourhood, in hope of crossing Anastasya. But these “courses” gave no result. Benignant apparition, his roughness had scared it away, and off the earth, for ever. He entered, even infested, all painting schools of the quarter. He rapidly pursued distant equivocal figures in streets and gardens. Each rendered up its little quota of malignant hope, then presented him with a face of monotonous strangeness.
It was Saturday when Kreisler was found preparing to take his valise to the Mont de Piété. On the preceding evening he had paid one of his unaccountable calls on Fräulein Lipmann, the first for some time. He had a good reason for once. This salon was the only place of comparatively public assembly in the quarter he had not visited. Entering with his usual slight air of mystification, he bent to kiss Fräulein Lipmann’s hand in a vaguely significant fashion.
The blank reciprocal indifference of these calls was thus relieved. It awoke a vague curiosity on one side, a little playful satisfaction on the other. This might even have ripened into a sort of understanding and bonhomie. He did not pursue it or develop the rôle. After a half-hour of musing on the brink of a stream of conversation and then music, he suddenly recognized something, flotsam bobbing past. It had bobbed past before several times. He gradually became steadily aware of it. A dance at the Bonnington Club, that would take place the following evening, was the event that arrested him. Why was this familiar? Anastasya! Anastasya had spoken of it. That was all he could remember. Would she be there? He at once, and as though he had come there to do so, fished delicately in this same stream of tepid chatter for an invitation to the dance. 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.