Every minute Kreisler delayed increased the difficulty. His energy was giving out. They were now sitting on the terrasse at the Berne. He had developed a particular antipathy to borrowing. An immense personal neurasthenia had grown up round this habit of his, owing to his late discomfitures. He already heard an awkward voice, saw awkward eyes. Then he suddenly concluded that the fact that Lowndes was not a German made it more difficult, instead of less so, as he had thought. Why could he not take?—why petition? He knew that if Lowndes refused he would break out; he nearly did so as it was. With disgust and fatigue he lay back in his chair, paying no attention to what Lowndes was saying. His mind was made up. He would not proceed with his designs on this dirty pocket. He became rough and monosyllabic. He wished to purify himself in rudeness of his preceding amiability.
Lowndes had been looking at a newspaper. He put it down and said he must go back to “work.” His “morning” had, of course, been interrupted by Tarr!
Kreisler still saw the expression on the Englishman’s face he had imagined, and restrained with difficulty the desire to spit in it. The nearness they had been to this demand must have affected, he thought, even his impervious companion. He had asked and been refused, to all intents and purposes. He got up, left Lowndes standing there, and went into the lavatory at the side of the café, where he had a thorough wash in cold water.
Back at his table, he saw no sign of the Englishman, and sat down to finish his drink, considering what his next move should be.
Various pursuits suggested themselves. He might go and offer himself as model at some big private studios near the Observatoire. He could get a week’s money advanced him? He would dress as a woman and waylay somebody or other on the boulevards. He might steal some money. Volker was the last. He came just after murder. He would go to Ernst Volker—he with his little obstinate resolve in obscurity of his mind no longer to be Kreisler’s acquaintance. Obstinacy in people of weak character is the perfectly exasperating thing. They have no right to their resoluteness—appearing weaker and meaner than ever in anomalous tenacity. Volker, naturally submissive, had broken away and was posing somewhere as a stranger. He felt physical disgust; this proceeding was indecent.
A spirit that has mingled with another, suddenly covering itself and wishing to regain its strangeness, can be as indecent as a strange being suddenly baring itself. A man’s being is never divined so completely and pungently as when his friendship cools and he becomes once more a stranger. This is one of the moments when the imagination, most awake, sees best.
This little rat’s instinctive haste to separate from him was an ill omen: what did he care for omens? he clamoured impatiently.
At this juncture in his reflections, from where he sat on the café terrace he saw Volker’s back, as he supposed, disappearing round a corner, as though trying to avoid a meeting. Blood came to his head with a shock. He nearly sprang forward in pursuit of this unsociable form. Rushing words of insult rose to his lips, he fidgeted on his seat, gazed blankly at the spot where he had seen the figure. That it was no longer there exasperated him beyond measure. It was as though he considered that Ernst should have remained at the corner, immobile, with his back towards him, a visible mark and fuel for anger. He made a sign to the waiter, indicating that his drink would go into his “tick.” He then hurried off in the direction of Volker’s house—the direction also that the back had taken—determined to get something out of him. Kreisler, letting instinct guide his steps, took the wrong turning—following, in fact, his customary morning’s itinerary. He found himself suddenly far beyond the street Volker lived in, near Juan Soler’s atelier. He gazed down the street towards the atelier, then took off his glasses and began carefully wiping them. While doing this he heard words of greeting and found Volker at his elbow.
“Hallo! You look pretty hot. You nearly knocked me over a minute ago in your haste,” he was saying.
Kreisler jumped—as the bravest might if, having stoutly confronted an apparition, it suddenly became a man of flesh and blood. Had his glasses been firmly planted on his nose things might have gone differently. He frowned vacantly at Ernst and went on rubbing them.