Kreisler, despite his snorting, went again with Volker. The female charm had done its work. This gregarious female personality had shown such frank invitation to Volker that had any separate woman exhibited half as hospitable a front he would have been very alarmed. As it was, it had at first just fulfilled certain bourgeois requirements of his lonely German soul. Kreisler came a few weeks running to the Lipmann soirée. Never finding Volker there, he left off going as well. He felt he had been tricked and slighted. The ladies divined what had happened. Fräulein Lipmann, the leader, put a spiteful little mark down to each of their names. CHAPTER IV Kreisler pocketed Ernst’s hundred marks and made no further attempt on the formerly hospitable income of his friend. Debts began accumulating. Only he found he had grown suddenly timid with his creditors. The concierge frightened him. He conciliated the garçon at the café, to whom he owed money. He even paid several debts that it was quite unnecessary to pay, in a moment of panic and weakness. A straitened week ensued. At the Berne he had lost his nerve in some way; he clowned obsequiously on some evenings, and, depressed and slack the next, perhaps, resented his companions’ encores. Next he gradually developed the habit of sitting alone. More often than not he would come into the café and go to a table at the opposite side of the room to that at which the Germans were sitting. Ridicule is sighted at twenty yards, the spectator then, without the sphere of average immediate magnetism. For once it does not matter, but if persisted in it inevitably results in humour. Those who keep to themselves awaken mirth as a cartwheel running along the road by itself would. People feel with the “lonely” man that he is going about with some eccentric companion—that is himself. Why did he choose this deaf-and-dumb companion? What do they find to say? He is ludicrous as two men would be who, perpetually in each other’s company, were never seen to exchange a word—who dined together, went to theatre or café, without ever looking at each other or speaking. So Kreisler became a lonely figure. It was a strange feeling. He must be quiet and not attract attention. He was marked in some way as though he had committed a theft. Perhaps it was merely the worry of perpetual “tick” beginning to tell. For the moment he would just put himself aside and see what happened. He was afraid of himself too. Always up till then immersed in that self, now for the first time he stood partly outside it. This slight divorce made him less sure in his actions. A little less careful of his appearance, he went sluggishly about, smoking, reading the paper a great deal, working at the art school fairly often, playing billiards with an Austrian cook whose acquaintance he had made in a café and who disappeared owing him seven francs.