A certain lonely and comic ego all people carry about with them, who is always dumb except when they get drunk or become demented. It then talks, never sincerely, but in a sort of representative, pungent way. This ego in Kreisler’s case would not have been shameless and cynical if it had begun to grumble about Volker. It would have said, “Hang that little Ernst! I come to Paris, I am ashamed to say, partly for him. But the little swine-dog has given me the go-by. Hell take his impudence! I don’t like that swine-dog Soltyk! He’s a slimy Russian rascal!” It would not have said: “I’ve lost the access to Ernst’s pocket. The pig-dog Soltyk is sitting there!”
In any case his vanity too was hurt.
Anastasya now provided him with an acceptable platform from which his vexation might spring at Soltyk. There was no money or insignificant male liaison to stuff him down into grumpiness. “Das Weib” was there. All was in order for unbounded inflammation.
He wanted to bury his fear in her hot hair; he wanted to kiss her lips as he had never kissed any woman’s; all the things he wanted—! But what would Soltyk be doing about it? He had met her alone, and that was all right and not impossible with a world made by their solitary meeting in the restaurant. He had lived with her instinctively in this solitary world of he and she. It was quite changed at present. Soltyk had got into it. Soltyk, by implication, brought a host of others, even if he did not mean that he was a definite rival there himself. What was he saying to her now? Sneers and ridicule, oceans of sneers directed at himself, more than ten thousand men could have discharged, he felt, certainly were inundating her ear. His stepmother-fiancée, other tales, were being retailed. Everything that would conceivably prejudice Anastasya, or would not, he accepted as already retailed. There he sat, like a coward. He was furious at their distant insulting equanimity.
A breath of violent excitement struck him, coming from within. He stirred dully beneath it. She was there; he had only put a thin partition between them. His heart beat slowly and ponderously. “On hearing what the swine Soltyk has to say she will remember my conduct in the restaurant and my appearance. She will make it all fit in. And, by God, it does fit in! Himmel! Himmel! there’s nothing to be done! Anything I did, every movement, would only be filling out the figure my ass-tricks have cut for her!”
He was as conscious of the interior, which he could not see from his place on the street, as though, passing through, he had just found the walls, tables, chairs, painted bright scarlet. He felt he had left a wake of seething agitation in his passage of the café. Passing the two people inside there had been the affair of a moment, not yet grasped. This experience, apparently of the past, was still going on. The sense’s picture, even, was not yet complete. New facts, details, were added every moment. He was still passing Anastasya and Soltyk. He sat on, trembling, at the door. There were other exits. She might be gone. But he forgot about them.
How he had worried himself about the pawned suit. Fate had directed him there to the café to save him the trouble of further racking his brains about it. Should he leave Paris? But he was mutinous. The occurrence of this idea filled him with suspicions.
The fit was over; reaction had set in. He was eyeing himself obliquely in the looking-glass behind his head.
He almost jumped away at two voices beside him, and the thrilling sound of a dress; it was as though some one had spoken with his own voice. It seemed all round him, attacking him. The thin, ordinary brushing of a skirt was like the low breathing of a hidden animal to a man in the forest. He felt they were coming to speak to him—just as they had thought that he was. The nerves on that side of his head twitched as though shrinking from a touch.
They were crossing the terrasse to the street. His heart beat a slow march. Her image there had become used. The reality, in its lightning correction of this, dug into his mind. There once more the real figure had its separate and foreign life. He was disagreeably struck by a certain air of depression and cheerlessness in the two figures before him. This one thing that should have been pleasant, displeased him. He was angry as though she had been shamming melancholy.