A certain Fifi lay heavy on his soul.
But that petered out soon. He told me Breuer had been in love with Pat for years.
"Really?" said I.
He sniggered.
I silenced him with a Prairie Oyster.
But it stuck in my head, what he had said.
It annoyed me that I should come in on it.
It annoyed me that I cared.
And it annoyed me that I did not bring my fist down on the table.
But somewhere I felt a cold lust for destruction that turned not against others, only against myself.
The bald head was soon speechless and disappeared. I remained sitting.
Suddenly I felt a hard, firm breast against my arm.
It was one of the women Breuer had introduced.
She was sitting close beside me.
Her oblique, grey-green eyes caressed me slowly.
It was a look that left nothing more to be said—only something to be done.
"Wonderful to be able to drink like that," said she after a while.
I said nothing.
She stretched out a hand to my glass.
The hand was like a lizard, glittering with jewels, dry and sinewy.
It moved very slowly, as if it crawled.
I knew what was coming.
I'll soon settle you, thought I. You underestimate me, because you see I'm annoyed.
But you're mistaken.
I'm through with women already—it is love I'm not through with.
It is the unrealisable that is making me miserable.
The woman began to talk.
She had a glassy, brittle voice.
I saw Pat looking across.
I took no notice. But I took no notice either of the woman beside me.
I had the feeling of slipping down a smooth bottomless pit.
It had nothing to do with Breuer and the people. It had nothing to do with Pat even.
It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life—and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems.
I looked stealthily across at Pat.
There she moved in her silver dress, young and lovely, a bright flame of life; I loved her, and if I should say to her
"Come," she would come; nothing stood between us; we could be as near as only human beings can—and yet occasionally everything would in some puzzling way be overcast and full of torment, I could not free her from the circle of things, not tear her out from the contact of the existence that was above us and in us and compelled us to its laws, the breathing and the passing, the questionable glamour of the present immediately falling back into nothingness, the shimmering illusion of passion which in the possession is already lost again.
It was never to be checked, never.
Never would be loosed the rattling chain of time; never out of restlessness come rest—out of seeking, stillness; to falling come a halt.
Not even from chance could I free her, from what had been before I knew her, from the thousand thoughts, memories, from all that had fashioned her before I was there, not even from these people here could I free her. . .
Beside me the woman was talking in her brittle voice.
She was seeking a companion for the night, a bit of unfamiliar life to whet the appetite, in order to forget herself and the all too painful, too evident fact that nothing ever remained, no I and no You and least of all a We.
Wasn't she at bottom seeking the same thing as I?
A companion, in order to forget the loneliness of life, a comrade to withstand the meaninglessness of existence?
"Come," said I, "we want to go back. It is hopeless— what you want—and what I want."
She looked at me a moment. Then she threw back her head and laughed.
We went to a few other places.
Breuer was heated, talkative and hopeful.
Pat had become quieter.
She asked me no questions, she made no reproaches, she did not attempt to explain anything, she was simply there; sometimes she danced and it was as if she were a still, lovely, graceful ship gliding amid a swarm of marionettes and caricatures, and sometimes she smiled at me.
The folly of the night clubs wiped its grey-yellow hands over walls and faces.