His unreadiness, his dislike for action, his fear of ridicule, he treated severely in turn. He thought of everything he could against himself. And he laughed at himself. But it was no good. At last he gave way to the urgency of his vanity and determined not to leave the matter where it was. At once plans for retrieving this discomfort came crowding on him. He would go to the café as usual on the following evening, sit down smilingly at Kreisler’s table as though nothing had happened. In short, he would altogether endorse the opinion that Kreisler had formed of him. And yet why this meanness, even assumed, Tarr asked himself, even while arranging realistically his to-morrow evening’s purification? Always in a contemptuous spirit, some belittlement or unsavoury rôle was suggesting itself. His contempt for everybody degraded him. Still, for a final occasion and since he was going this time to accept any consequences, he would follow his idea. He would be, to Kreisler’s mind for a little, the strange “slaverer and hoverer” who had been kicked out on the previous night. He would even have to “pile it on thick” to be accepted at all, exaggerate in the direction of Kreisler’s unflattering notion of him. Then he would gradually aggravate Kreisler, and with the same bonhomie attack him with resolution. He laughed as he came to this point, as a sensible old man might laugh at himself on arriving at a similar decision. Soothed by the prospect of this rectification of the evening’s blunder, Tarr once more turned to reflect on it, and saw more clearly than ever the parallel morals of his Bertha affair and his Kreisler affair. His sardonic dream of life got him, as a sort of Quixotic dreamer of inverse illusions, blows from the swift arms of windmills and attacks from indignant and perplexed mankind. He, instead of having conceived the world as more chivalrous and marvellous than it was, had conceived it as emptied of all dignity, sense, and generousness. The drovers and publicans were angry at not being mistaken for legendary chivalry or châtelaines. The very windmills resented not being taken for giants! The curse of humour was in him, anchoring him at one end of the see-saw whose movement and contradiction was life. Reminded of Bertha, he did not, however, hold her responsible. But his protectorate would be wound up. Acquaintance with Anastasya would be left where it was, despite the threatened aggression against his nose. PART VI HOLOCAUSTS CHAPTER I Tarr’s character at this time performed repeatedly the following manœuvre: his best energies would, once a farce was started, gradually take over the business from the play department and continue it as a serious line of its own. It was as though it had not the go to initiate anything of its own accord. It was content to exploit the clown’s discoveries.