One certain thing amongst many uncertainties about the English club, the Bonnington Club, was that it had not yet found itself quite. Its central room (and that was all there was of it—a shell of a house) reminded you of a public swimming-bath when it was used as a ballroom, and when used as a studio you thought of a concert-hall. But one had a respect for it. It had cost a good deal to build. It was quite phenomenally handsome as seen from the street, and was graceful. It made a cheerful show, with pink, red, and pale blue paper-chains and Chinese lanterns, one week for some festivity; and the next, sparely robed in dark red curtains, would settle itswalls gravely to receive some houseless quartet. In this manner it paid its way. Some phlegmatic but obstinate power had brought it into existence. “Found a club, found a club!” it had reiterated in the depths of certain anonymous minds, with sleepy tenacity. Some one sighed, got up and went round to another, and said perhaps a club had better be founded. The other assented and subscribed something, to get rid of the other. In the course of time a young French architect had been entrusted with the job. A club. Yes. What sort of a club? The architect could not find out. Something to be used for drawing-classes, social functions, a reading-room, etc. He saw he was on the wrong tack. He went away and made his arrangements accordingly. He produced a design of an impressive and to all appearance finished house. It was a sincerely ironic masterpiece, but with a perfect gravity, and even stateliness, of appearance. It was the most non-committing façade, the most absolutely unfinal interior, the most tentative set of doors, ever seen: a monster of reservation.
Not only had it been put to every conceivable use itself, but it dragged the club with it, as it were. The club changed and metamorphosed itself with its changes. The club became athletic or sedentary according to the shifts and exigencies of the building’s existence. The members turned out in dress-clothes or gymnasium get-ups as the building’s destiny prompted, to back it up. One month they would have to prove that itwasa gymnasium, the next that itwasa drawing-school.
The inviting of the German contingent was a business move. They might be enticed into membership, and would in any event spread the fame of the club, getting and subsequently giving some conception of the resources of the club-house building. Thesallewas arranged very prettily. The adjoining rooms were hung with the drawings and paintings of the club members.
Kreisler ever since the scene on the boulevard hadfelt a reckless gaiety and irresponsibility, which he did not conceal.
With his abashed English hostess he carried on a strange conversation full of indirect references to the “stately edifice in the Rue de Rennes.” He had spoken of it to Bertha: “That stately edifice in the Rue de Rennes—but of course you don’t know it!”
With smiling German ceremoniousness, with ingenious circumlocutions, he bent down to his hostess’s nervously smiling face and poured into her startled ear symbols and images of pawnshops, usury, three gold balls, “pious mountains,” “smokkin” or “frac” suits, etc., which he seemed a little to confuse, overwhelmed her with a serious terminology, all in a dialect calculated to bewilder the most acute philologist.
“Yes, itisinteresting,” she said with strained conviction.
“Isn’t it?” Kreisler replied. It was a comparative estimate of the facilities for the disposing of a watch in Germany and France.
“I’m going to introduce you, Herr Kreisler, to a friend of mine—Mrs. Bevelage.”
She wanted to give the German guests a particularly cordial reception. Kreisler did not seem, superficially, a great acquisition to any club, but he was with the others. As a means of concluding this very painful interview—he was getting nearer every minute to the word that he yet solemnly forbade himself the use of—she led him to a self-controlled remnant of beautiful womanhood who had a reputation with her for worldliness. Mrs. Bevelage could listen to all this, and would be able to cope with a certain disquieting element she recognized in the German.
He saw the reason of this measure; and, looking with ostentatious regret at a long-legged flapper seated next door, cast a reproachful glance at his hostess.
Left alone with the widow, he surveyed her ample and worldly form.
“Get thee to a nunnery!” he said dejectedly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Yes. You have omitted ‘my lord.’”
Mrs. Bevelage looked pleased and puzzled. Possibly he was a count or baron.
“Do you know that stingy but magnificent edifice⸺”
“Yes⸺?”
“That handsome home of precarious ‘fracs’ in the Rue de Rennes⸺?”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand—” The widow had not got used to his composite tongue. She liked Kreisler, however.
“Shall we dance?” he said, getting up quickly.
He clasped her firmly in the small of the back and they got ponderously in motion, he stamping a little bit, as though he mistook the waltz for a more primitive music.
He took her twice, with ever-increasing velocity, round the large hall, and at the third round, at breakneck speed, spun with her in the direction of the front door.
The impetus was so great that she, although seeing her peril, could not act sufficiently as a break on her impetuous companion to avert the disaster. Another moment and they would have been in the street, amongst the traffic, a disturbing meteor, whizzing out of sight, had they not met the alarmed resistance of a considerable English family entering the front door as Kreisler bore down upon it. It was one of those large, featureless, human groups built up by a frigid and melancholy pair, uncannily fecund, during interminable years of blankness. They received this violent couple in their midst. The rush took Kreisler and his partner half-way through, and there they stood embedded and unconscious for many seconds. The English family then, with great dignity, disgorged them and moved on.
The widow had come somewhat under the fascination of Kreisler’s mood. She was really his woman, had he known it. She felt wrapt in the midst of a simoon—she had not two connected thoughts. All her worldliness and measured management of her fat had vanished. Her face had become coarsened in afew minutes. But she buzzed back again into the dance and began a second, mad, but this time merely circular career.
Kreisler was very careful, whatever he did, to find a reason for it. “He was abominably short-sighted; he had mistaken the front door for one leading into the third room, merely.” His burden, not in the best condition, was becoming more and more puffed, and heavier every moment. When satisfied with this part of his work he led Mrs. Bevelage into a sort of improvised conservatory and talked about pawnshops for ten minutes or so—in a mixture of French, English, and German. He then reconducted her, more dead than alive, to her seat, and strode off from her with great sweeps of his tall figure.
He had during this incident regained complete impassivity. He stalked away to the conservatory.
Bertha had soon been called on to dance vigorously without much intermission. In the convolutions of the valse, however, she matured a bold and new plan. She whirled and trotted with a preoccupied air.
Would Tarr hear of all this? She was alarmed, now it was done. Also she was cowed and sorry for her action at the thought of Lipmann and Van Bencke’s attitude towards the Kreisler kissing. She undoubtedly must secure herself. The plan she hit on offered a “noble” rôle that she could not, in any circumstances, have resisted.
Her scheme was plain and clever. She would simply “tell the truth.”
“She had recognized something distracting in Kreisler’s life, the presence of crisis.On an impulse, she had offered him her sympathy. He had taken up her offer immediately in an astonishing and brutal manner. (One against him: two for her!) Such direct and lurid sympathy he claimed.”
So she jogged out her strategies in exhilaration of the waltzes.
At this point of her story she would hint, by ambiguous hesitation, that she, in truth, had beenready even for this sacrifice: had made it, if her hearers wished! She would imply rather that from modesty—not wanting to appeartoo“noble”—she refrained from telling them.
It is true that for such a confession she had many precedents. Only a week ago Fräulein Van Bencke herself, inflating proudly her stout handsome person, had told them that while in Berlin she had allowed a young painter to kiss her: she believed “that the caresses of a pure woman would be helpful to him at that juncture of his life.” But this had not been, it was to be supposed, in the middle of the street. No one had ever seen, or ever would see, the young painter in question, or the kiss.
Busy with these plans, Bertha had not much time to notice Kreisler’s further deportment. She came across him occasionally, and keyed her solid face into an intimate flush and such mask as results from any sickly physical straining. “Poormensch!”
Soltyk surprised one Anglo-Saxon partner after another with his wonderful English—unnecessarily like the real thing. He went about surprising people in a cold, tireless way, exhibiting no signs of pleasure, except as much as was testified to by his action, merely.
Kreisler saw him with Anastasya only twice. On those occasions he could not, on the strength of Soltyk’s attitude, pin him down as a rival. Yet he was thirsting for conventional figures. His endless dissatisfaction and depression could only be satisfied byactivethings,unlikeitself. Soltyk’s self-possessed and masterly signs of distinguished camaraderie depressed Kreisler very much. The Russianhad been there onceat the critical moment, and was, more distantly, an attribute of Volker. He did not like him. How it would satisfy him to dig his fingers into that flesh, and tear it like thick cloth! He was “for it”; he was going out. He was being helped off by things. Why did he notshout? He longed toact: the rusty machine had a thirst for action. His energies were repudiating their master.
Soltyk’s analogies with Kreisler worked in the dark to some end of mutual destruction. The nuance of possibility Soltyk liked his friendships with women to have, was a different affair to Kreisler’s heady and thorough-going intrigues. But he liked his soul to be marked with little delicate wounds and wistfulnesses. He liked an understanding, a little melancholy, with a woman. They would just divine in each other possibilities of passion, that was yet toolasseand sad to rise to the winding of Love’s horns that were heard, nevertheless, in adécor Versaillesqueand Polonais. They were people who looked forward as others look back. They would say farewell to the future as most men gaze at the past. At the most they played the slight dawning and disappearing of passion, cutting, fastidiously, all the rest of the piece. So he was often found with women. Life had no lethargic intervals as with Kreisler. It at all times needed “expression” of such sort.
For Anastasya, Soltyk was one of her many impresarios, who helped her on to and off the scene of Life. He bored her usually, but they had something equivalent to pleasant business relations. She appreciated him as an Impresario.
These things arraying themselves in reality after this ordinary unexciting fashion, conventional figures of drama lacked. Kreisler was in the wrong company. But he conformed for the sake of the Invisible Audience haunting life. He emulated the matter-of-factness and aplomb that impressed him in the othersà outrance. So much was this so that the Audience took some time to notice him, the vein of scandal running through the performance.
In the conservatory he established his head-quarters.
From there he issued forth on various errands. All his errands showed the gusto of the logic of his personality, and not despair. He might have been enjoying himself. He invented outrage that wasnatural to him, and enjoyed slightly the licence and scope of his indifference.
He, for instance, at the first sortie, noticed a rather congested, hot, and spectacled young woman, rather constantly fluttered over her womanhood, but overworked by her conscience, her features set by duty. He succeeded in getting her for a partner, and soon won her confidence by his scrupulous German politeness. He then, while marking time in a crush, disengaged his hand, and appeared to wish to alter the lie of her bosom, very apologetically.
“Excuse me! It’s awkward. More to the left—so! Clumsy things and women are so proud of them! (No: I’m sure you’re not!) No. Let it hang to the left!” The young lady, very red, and snorting almost in his face, left him brusquely.
Several young women, and notably a flapper, radiant with heavy inexperience and loaded with bristling bronze curls, he lured into the conservatory. They all came out with scarlet faces.
For the first hour he paid no attention to Anastasya, but prosecuted his antics as though he had forgotten all about her. He knew she was there and left her alone, even in thought, in a grim spirit. He hid coquettishly behind his solemn laughter-in-action, the pleasant veil of his hysteria.
He had become generally noticed in the room, although there were a great many people present. Fräulein Lipmann hesitated. She thought at length that he was mad. In speaking to him and getting him removed, she feared a scandalous scene.
As he appeared on the threshold of the conservatory an expectant or anxious tremor invaded several backs. But he just stalked round this time on a tour of inspection, as though to see that all was going along as it should. He stared heavily and significantly at those young ladies who had been his partners, when he came across them. One he stopped in front of and gazed at severely. He then returned to the conservatory.
In his deck chair, his head stretched back, glasses horizontal and facing the ceiling, he considered the graceless Hamlet that he was.
“Go to a nunnery, Widow!”
He should have been saying that to his Ophelia.
Why did he notgo to her?Contactwas the essential thing, but so difficult to bring about.
He must make her angry, insult her: that would bare her soul. Then he would spit on it. Then he really could insult her. But Soltyk offered a conventional target for violence. Soltyk was evading him with his contempt. Soltyk! What should be done with him? Why (a prolonged and stormily rising “why”), there was no difficulty aboutthat. He got up from his chair, and walked deliberately and quickly into the central room. But Soltyk was nowhere to be seen.
The dancers were circling rapidly past with athletic elation, talking in the way people talk when they are working. Their intelligences floated and flew above the waves of the valse, but with frequent drenchings, as it were, and cessations. The natural strangeness for him of all these English people together did not arrest his mind or lead him to observation, but yet got a little in the way. Couple followed couple, the noise of their feet, or dress, for a moment queerly distinct and near above the rest, as though a yard or two of quiet surrounded Kreisler. They came into this area for a moment, everything distinct and clear cut, and then went out again. Each new pair of dancers seemed coming straight for him. Their voices were loud for a moment. A hole was cut out of the general noise, as it were opening a passage into it. Each new face was a hallucination of separate energy, seeming very distant, laughs, words, movements. They were like trunkless, living heads rolling and bobbing past, a sea of them. The two or three instruments behind the screen of palms produced the necessary measures to keep this throng of people careering, like a spoon stirring in a saucepan.It stirred and stirred and they jerked and huddled insipidly round and round.
Kreisler was drawn up at the first door for a minute. He was just taking a step forward to work his way round to the next, when he caught sight of Anastasya dancing with (he supposed) some Englishman.
He stopped, paralysed by her appearance. This reality intercepted the course of his imaginary life (of which his pursuit of Soltyk was a portion). He stood like somebody surprised in a questionable act. He had not reckoned on being met by her before his present errand was finished. The next moment he was furious at this interference; at her having the power to draw him up. This imaginary lifeshouldgrow. Hell and Heaven! he was not going to stop there looking at her. She and her partner had drawn up for a moment just in his way, being stopped by other couples marking time. She had not seen him. He took her partner roughly by the arm, pushing him against her, hustling him, fixing him with his eye. He passed beyond them then, through the passage he had made. His blood was flooding him, and making him expand and sink like a Russian dancer. The young man handled in this manner, shy and unprompt, stared after Kreisler with a “What the devil!” People are seldom so rude in England. Preparation for outbursts of potential rudeness form a part of the training of a German. Kreisler also, without apology, but as if waiting for more vigorous expostulation, was also looking back, while he stepped slowly along the wall towards a door beyond, the one leading to the refreshment-room.
Anastasya freed herself at once from her partner and pale and frowning (but as though waiting) was looking after Kreisler curiously. She would have liked him to stop. He had done something strange and was as suddenly going away. That was unsatisfactory. They looked at each other blankly. He showed no sign of stopping: she just stared. Suddenly it was comic. She burst out laughing. Butthey had clashed, like people in the dance, and were both disappearing from each other again, the shock hardly over. Thecontacthad been brought about. He was still as surprised at his action, which had been done “in a moment,” as she was. Anastasya felt, too, in what way this had beencontact. She felt his hand on her arm as though it had been she he had seized. This rough figure disappeared in the doorway, as incapable of explaining anything. She shivered nervously as she grasped her partner’s arm again, at this merely physicalcontact. “What’s the matter with that chap?” her partner asked, conscious of a lameness, but of something queer going on. This question had been asked a few minutes before elsewhere. “Herr Kreisler is behaving very strangely. Do you think he’s been drinking?” Fräulein Lipmann had asked Eckhart.
Eckhart was a little drunk himself. He took a very decided view of Kreisler’s case.
“Comme toute la Pologne! As drunk as the whole of Poland!” he affirmed. But he only gave it as an opinion, adding no sign of particular indignation. He was beaming with greedy generosity at his great Amoureuse.
“Ah! here he comes again!” said Fräulein Lipmann at the door. (It was when Kreisler had started up in search of Soltyk).
So Kreisler disappeared in the doorway. He passed through the refreshment-room. In a small room beyond he sat down by an open window.
Anastasya had at last got into line with him. She had been startled, awakened, and had also laughed. This was an exact and complete response to Kreisler at the present. Something difficult to understand and which should have been alarming for a woman, the feel of the first tugs of the maelstrom he was producing and conducting all on his own, and which required her for its heart: and then laughter, necessarily, once one was in that atmosphere, like laughing gas, with its gusty tickling.
But this was not how Kreisler felt about it. Hewas boiling and raging. That laugh had driven him foaming, fugitive and confused, into the nearest chair. He could not turn round and retaliate at the time. The door being in front of him, he vanished as Mephistopheles might sink with suddenness into the floor, at the receipt of some affront, to some sulphurous regions beneath, in a second; come to a stop alone, upright; stick his fingers in his mouth, nearly biting them in two, his eyes staring: so stand stock still, breathless and haggard for some minutes: then shoot up again, head foremost, in some other direction, like some darting and skulking fish, to the face of the earth. He did not even realize that the famouscontactwas established, so furious was he. He would go and strike her across the mouth, spit in her face, kiss her in the middle of the dance, where the laugh had been! Yet he didn’t move, but sat on staring in front of him, quite forgetful where he was and how long he had sat there, in the midst of a hot riot of thoughts.
He suddenly sat up and looked round, like a man who has been asleep and for whom work is waiting; got up with certain hesitation, and again made for the door. Well, life and work (hisbusiness) must he proceeded with all the same. He glanced reflectively and solemnly about, and perceived the Widow talking to a little reddish Englishman.
“May I take the Widow away for a little?” he asked her companion.
He always addressed her as “Widow”: he began all his discourses with a solemn “Widow!” occasionally alternating it with “Derelict!” But this, all uttered in a jumbled tongue, lost some of its significance.
The little Englishman on being addressed gave the English equivalent of a jump—a sudden moving of his body and shuffling of his feet, still looking at the floor, where he had cast his eyes as Kreisler approached.
“What? I⸺”
“Widow! permit me⸺” said Kreisler.
Manipulating her with a leisurely gusto, he circled into the dance.
The band was playing the “Merry Widow” valse.
“MerryWidow!” he said smilingly to his partner. “Yes,MerryWidow!” shaking his head at her.
The music seemed fumbling in a confused mass of memory, but finding nothing definite. All it managed to bring to light was a small cheap photograph, taken at a Bauern Bal, with a flat German student’s cap. The man remained just his photograph. Their hostess also was dancing. Kreisler noted her with a wink of recognition. Dancing very slowly, almost mournfully, he and his partner bumped into her each time as they passed. The Widow felt the impact, but it was only at the third round that she perceived the method and intention inducing these bumps. She realized they were going to collide with the other lady. The collision could not be avoided. But she shrank away, made herself as small and soft as possible, bumped gently and apologized over her shoulder, with a smile and screwing up of the eyes, full of meaning. At the fourth turn of the room, however, Kreisler having increased her speed sensibly, she was on her guard, and in fact already suggesting that she should be taken back to her seat. He pretended to be giving their hostess a wide berth this time, but suddenly and gently swerved, and bore down upon her. The Widow veered frantically, took a false step, tripped on her dress, tearing it, and fell to the ground. They caused a circular undulating commotion throughout the neighbouring dancers like a stone falling in a pond. Several people bent down to help Mrs. Bevelage—Kreisler’s assistance was angrily rejected. His partner scrambled to her feet and went to the nearest chair, followed by one or two people.
“Who is he?”
“He’s drunk.”
“What happened?”
“He ought to be turned out!” people said who had seen the accident.
Kreisler regained the conservatory with great dignity.
But now Fräulein Lippmann, alone, appeared before him as he lay stretched in his chair, and said in a tight, breaking voice:
“I think, Herr Kreisler, you would do well now, as you have done nothing all the evening but render yourself objectionable, to relieve us of your company. I don’t know whether you’re drunk. I hope you are, for⸺”
“You hope I’m drunk, Fräulein?” he asked in an astonished voice.
He remained lolling at full length.
“A lady I was dancing with fell over, owing entirely to her own clumsiness and intractability—but perhaps she was drunk; I didn’t think of that.”
“So you’re not going?”
“Certainly, Fräulein—when you go! We’ll go together.”
“Scheusal!” Hurling hotly this epithet at him—her breath had risen many degrees in temperature at its passage, and her breast heaved in dashing it out (as though, in fact, the word “scheusal” had been the living thing, and she were emptying her breast of it violently), she left the room. His last exploit had been accomplished in a half disillusioned state. He merely went on farcing because he could think of nothing else to do. Anastasya’s laughter had upset and ended everything of his “imaginary life.” He told himself now that hehatedher. “Ich hasse dich! Ich hasse dich!” he hissed over to himself, enjoying the wind of the “hasse” in his moustaches. But (there was no doubt about it) the laugh had crushed him. Ridiculous and hateful had been his goal. But now that he had succeeded he thought chiefly in the latter affair, he was overwhelmed. His vanity was wounded terribly. Inlaughingat him she had puffed out and transformed in an extraordinary way, also, his infatuation. For the first time since he had first set eyes on her he realized her sex. His sensuality had been directlystirred. He wanted tokissher now. He must get his mouth on hers—he must revel in the laugh, where it grew! She wasnéfaste. She was in fact evidentlythe devil.
So hisidée fixehaving suddenly taken body and acquired flesh, now allied to his senses, the vibration became more definitely alarming. He began thinking about her with a slow moistening of the lips. “Ishall possessher!” he laid to himself, seeing himself in the rôle of the old Berserker warrior, ravening and irresistible. The use of the wordshallin that way was enough.
But thisinfernaldance! With the advent of therealfeeling all the artificial ones flew or diminished at once. He was no longer romantically “desperate,” but bored with his useless position there. All his attention was now concentrated on a practical issue, that of the “possession” of Anastasya.
He was tired as though he had been dancing the whole evening. He got up and threw his cigarette away; he even dusted his coat a little with his hand. He then, not being able to get at the white patch on the shoulder, took it off and shook it. A large grey handkerchief was used to flick his boots with.
“So!” he grunted, smartly shooting on his coat.
The central room, when he got into it, appeared a different place. People were standing about and waiting for the next tune. It had been completely changed by his novel and material feeling for Anastasya. Everything, for a second time, was quite ordinary, butnotelectrically ordinary, almost hushed, this time. He had become a practical man, surrounded by facts. But he was much more worried and tired than at the beginning of the evening.
To get away was his immediate thought. But he felt hungry. He went into the refreshment-room. On the same side as the door, a couple of feet to the right, was a couch. The trestle-bar with the refreshments ran the length of the opposite wall. The room was quiet and almost empty. Out of the tail of his eye, as he entered, he became conscious ofsomething. He turned towards the couch. Soltyk and Anastasya were sitting there, and looking at him with the abrupt embarrassment people show when an absentee under discussion suddenly appears. He flushed and was about to turn back to the door. But he flushed still more next moment, at thought of his hesitation. This humiliating full-stop beneath their eyes must be wiped out, anyhow. He walked on steadily to the bar.
A shy consciousness of his physique beset him. He felt again an outcast—of an inferior class, socially. He must not show this. He must be leisurely.
Hewasleisurely. He thought when he stretched his hand out to take his cup of coffee that it would never reach it. Reduced to posing nude for Anastasya and the Russian was the result of the evening! Scores of little sensations, like troublesome imps, herded airily behind him. They tickled him with impalpable fingers.
He munched sandwiches without the faintest sense of their taste. Anastasya’s eyes were scourging him. He felt like a martyr. Suddenly conscious of an awkwardness in his legs, he changed his position. His arms were ludicrously disabled. The sensation of standing neck deep in horrid filth beset him. Compelled to remain in soaking wet clothes and unable to change them, his body gradually drying them, would have been a similar discomfort. The noise of the dancing began again, filled the room. This purified things somewhat. He got red in the face as though with a gigantic effort, but went on staring in front of him.
His anger kept rising. He stood there deliberately longer; in fact on and on, almost in the same position. She should wait his pleasure till he liked to turn round, and—then. He allowed her laughter to accumulate on his back, like a coat of mud. In his illogical vision he felt her there behind him laughing and laughing interminably. Had he gone straight up to her, in a moment of passion, both disembodied as it were, anything in the shape of objective observationdisappearing, he could have avoided this scrutiny. He had preferred to plank himself there in front of her, inevitably ridiculous, a mark for that laugh of hers. Soltyk was sharing it. More and morehislaughter became intolerable. The traditional solution again suggested itself. Laugh! Laugh! He would stand there letting the debt grow, letting them gorge themselves on his back. The attendant behind the bar began observing him with severe curiosity. He had stood in almost the same position for five minutes and kept staring darkly past her, very red in the face. Then suddenly a laugh burst out behind him—a blow, full of insult, in his ears—and he nearly jumped off the ground. After his long immobility the jump was of the last drollery. His fists clenched, his face emptied of every drop of colour, in the mere action he had almost knocked a man, standing beside him, over. The laugh, for him, had risen with tropic suddenness, a simoom of intolerable offence. It had carried him off his legs, or whirled him round rather, in a second. A young English girl, already terrified at Kreisler’s appearance, and a man, almost as much so, stood open-mouthed in front of him. As to Anastasya and Soltyk, they had very completely disappeared, long before, in all probability.
To find that he had been struggling and perspiring in the grasp of a shadow was a fresh offence, merely, for the count of the absentees. Obviously, shadow or not, there or not there, it was they. He felt this a little; but they had disappeared into theEwigkeitfor the moment. He had been again beating the air. This should have been a climax, of blows, words, definite things. But things remained vague. The turmoil of the evening remained his, the solid part of it, unshared by anybody else. He smiled, rather hideously and menacingly, at the two English people near him, and walked away. He was not going in search of Anastasya. They would be met somewhere or other, no doubt. All he wanted now was to get away from the English club as soon as possible.
While he was making towards the vestibule he was confronted again with Fräulein Lipmann. “Herr Kreisler, I wish to speak to you,” he heard her say.
“Go to the devil!” he answered without hesitation or softness.
“Besotted fool! if you don’t go at once, I’ll get⸺”
Turning on her like lightning, with exasperation perfectly meeting hers, his right hand threatening, quickly raised towards his left shoulder, he shouted:
“Lass mich doch—gemeine alte Sau!”
The hissing, thunderous explosion was the last thing in vocal virulence. The muscles all seemed gathered up at his ears like reins, and the flesh tightened and white round his mouth.
Fräulein Lipmann took several steps back. Kreisler with equal quickness turned away, rapped on the counter, while the attendant looked for his hat, and left the Club. Fräulein Lippmann was left with the heavy, unforgettable word “sow” deposited in her boiling spirit, that, boil as it might, would hardly reduce this word to tenderness or digestibility.
With a little scratching (as the concierge pushed it) with the malignity of a little, quiet, sleek animal, the letter from Germany crept under the door the next morning, and lay there through the silence of the next hour or two, until Kreisler woke. Succeeding to his first brutal farewells to his dreams, no hopes leapt on his body, a magnificent stallion’s, uselessly refreshed. Soon he saw the letter. It lay there quiet, unimportant, rather matter of fact and sly.
Kreisler felt it an indignity to have to open it. Until his dressing was finished, it remained where it was. He might have been making some one wait. Then he took it up, and opening it, drew out between his forefinger and thumb, the cheque. This he deposited with as much contempt as possible, and a “phui” on the edge of his washhand stand. Then he turned to the letter. He read the first few lines, pumping at a cigarette, reducing it mathematically to ash. Cold fury entered his mind with a bound at the first words. They were the final words giving notice of a positive stoppage of supplies. This month’s money was sent to enable him to settle up his affairs and come to Germany at once.
He read the first three lines over and over again, going no further, although the news begun in thesefirst lines was developed throughout the two pages of the letter. Then he put it down beside the cheque, and crushing it under his fist, said monotonously to himself, without much more feeling than the sound of the word contained: “Schwein, Schwein, Schwein!”
He got up, and pressed his hand on his forehead; it was wet: he put his hands in his pockets and these came into contact with a cinquante centime piece. He took them out again slowly, went to his box and underneath an old dressing-gown found writing paper and envelopes. Then, referring to his father’s letter for the date, he wrote the following lines:
“7th June 19—“Sir,—I shall not return as you suggest in person, but my body will no doubt be sent to you about the middle of next month. If—keeping to your decision—no money is sent, it being impossible to live without money, I shall on the seventh of July, this day next month, shoot myself.“Otto Kreisler.”
“7th June 19—
“Sir,—I shall not return as you suggest in person, but my body will no doubt be sent to you about the middle of next month. If—keeping to your decision—no money is sent, it being impossible to live without money, I shall on the seventh of July, this day next month, shoot myself.
“Otto Kreisler.”
Within half an hour this was posted. Then he went and had breakfast with more tranquillity and relish than he had known for some days. He sat up stiffly like a dilapidated but apparently in some way satisfied rooster at his café table. This life was now settled, pressure ceased. He had come to a conventional and respectable decision. His conduct the night before, for instance, had not been at all respectable. Death—like a monastery—was before him, with equivalents of a slight shaving of the head merely, a handful of vows, some desultory farewells, very restricted space, but none the worse for that; with something like the disagreeableness of a dive for one not used to deep water. But he had got into life, anyhow, by mistake;il s’était trompé de porte. His life might almost have been regarded as a long and careful preparation for voluntary death. The nightmare of Death, as it haunted the imaginations of the Egyptians, had here been conjured in another way.Death was not to be overcome with embalmings and Pyramids, or fought within the souls of children. It was confronted as some other more uncompromising race (and yet also haunted by this terrible idea) might have been.
Instead of rearing smooth faces of immense stone against it, you imagine an unparalleled immobility in life, a race of statues, throwing flesh in Death’s path instead of basalt. Kreisler would have undoubtedly been a high priest among this people.
In a large fluid but nervous handwriting, the following letter lay, read, as it were: Bertha still keeping her eye on it from a distance:
“Dear Bertha,—I am writing at the Gare St. Lazare, on my way to England. You have made things much easier for me in one way of course, far more difficult in another. Parenthetically, I may mention that the whimsical happenings between you and your absurd countryman in full moonlight are known to me. They were recounted with a wealth of detail that left nothing to the imagination, happily for my peculiar possessive sensitiveness, known to you. I don’t know whether that little red-headed bitch—the colour of Iscariot, so perhaps she is—is a friend of yours? Kreisler! I was offered an introduction to him the other day, which I refused. It seems he has introduced himself!“Before, I had contemplated retiring to a little distance for the purpose of reflection. This lastcoupof yours necessitates a much furtherrecul, withdrawal—a couple of hundred miles at least, I have judged. And as far as I can see I shall be some months—say ten—away. I am not wise enough to take your actionau pied de la lettre;nevertheless, you may consider yourself free as women go. What I mean is you need not trouble to restrain the exuberance of your exploits in future. (What rubbish!) Let them develop naturally, right up tofiançailles, or elsewhere. I have a very German idea. Why should not girls have two or three fiancés? Not two or three husbands. But fiancé, especially nowadays, is an elastic term. Why shouldn’t fiancé take the place of husband? It is a very respectable word: a very respectable state. But my idea was that of a club, organized around the fiancée. You seem to me cut out for such a club. A man might spend quite a pleasant time with the other fiancés. A fine science of women would be developed, perhaps along Oriental lines a little. Then a man would remember the different clubs he had belonged to. Some very beautiful women might have a sort of University settled near them. To have belonged to one of these celebrated but ephemeral institutions would insure a man success with less illustrious queens. ‘He was a fiancé of Fräulein Stück’s, you know,’ would carry prestige. You have Germanized me in a horrible way! Anyhow, you may count on me should you think of starting a little institution of that sort. My address for the next few months will be 10 Waterford Street, London, W.C.—Yours,“Sorbett.”
“Dear Bertha,—I am writing at the Gare St. Lazare, on my way to England. You have made things much easier for me in one way of course, far more difficult in another. Parenthetically, I may mention that the whimsical happenings between you and your absurd countryman in full moonlight are known to me. They were recounted with a wealth of detail that left nothing to the imagination, happily for my peculiar possessive sensitiveness, known to you. I don’t know whether that little red-headed bitch—the colour of Iscariot, so perhaps she is—is a friend of yours? Kreisler! I was offered an introduction to him the other day, which I refused. It seems he has introduced himself!
“Before, I had contemplated retiring to a little distance for the purpose of reflection. This lastcoupof yours necessitates a much furtherrecul, withdrawal—a couple of hundred miles at least, I have judged. And as far as I can see I shall be some months—say ten—away. I am not wise enough to take your actionau pied de la lettre;nevertheless, you may consider yourself free as women go. What I mean is you need not trouble to restrain the exuberance of your exploits in future. (What rubbish!) Let them develop naturally, right up tofiançailles, or elsewhere. I have a very German idea. Why should not girls have two or three fiancés? Not two or three husbands. But fiancé, especially nowadays, is an elastic term. Why shouldn’t fiancé take the place of husband? It is a very respectable word: a very respectable state. But my idea was that of a club, organized around the fiancée. You seem to me cut out for such a club. A man might spend quite a pleasant time with the other fiancés. A fine science of women would be developed, perhaps along Oriental lines a little. Then a man would remember the different clubs he had belonged to. Some very beautiful women might have a sort of University settled near them. To have belonged to one of these celebrated but ephemeral institutions would insure a man success with less illustrious queens. ‘He was a fiancé of Fräulein Stück’s, you know,’ would carry prestige. You have Germanized me in a horrible way! Anyhow, you may count on me should you think of starting a little institution of that sort. My address for the next few months will be 10 Waterford Street, London, W.C.—Yours,
“Sorbett.”
He spelt his name with two T’s because Bertha had never disciplined herself to suppress final consonants.
Bertha was in her little kitchen. It was near the front door. Next to it was her studio orsalon, then bedroom: along a passage at right angles the rooms rented by Clara Goenthner, her friend.
The letter had been laid on the table, by the side of which stood the large gas-stove, like a safe, its gas stars, on top, blasting away luridly at pans and saucepans with Bertha’s breakfast. While busying herself with eggs and coffee, she gazed over her armreflectively at the letter. It was a couple of inches too far away for her to be able to read it.
The postman had come ten minutes before. It was now four days after the dance, and since she had last seen Tarr. She had “felt” he would come on that particular morning. The belief in woman’s intuition is not confined, of course, to men. “Could he have heard anything of the Kreisler incident?” she had asked herself. The possibility of this was terrifying. But perhaps it would be as well if he had. It might at any future time crop up. And what things had happened when other older things had come to light suddenly! She would tell him if he had not already heard. He should hear it from her. The great boulevard sacrifice of the other night had appeared folly, long ago. But peculiarly free from any form of spite—she did not feel unkindly towards Kreisler.
So Sorbert was expected to breakfast, on the authority of her intuition. Bread was being fried in fat. What manner of man would appear, how farrenseigné—or ifnotinformed, still all their other difficulties were there inevitably enough? Experience, however, suggested such breakfast as pleased him. Could fried toast and honey play a part in such troubles? Ah, yes. Troubles often reduced themselves to fried bread and honey: they could sow troubles, why not help to quell troubles? But she had had a second intuition that heknew. Not knowing how stormy their interview might be she neglected no minute precautions—and these were the touching ones—any more than the sailor would neglect to stow away even the smallest of his sails, I suppose, at the sulky approach of a simoom. The simoom, however, had left her becalmed and taken the train for Dieppe instead of coming in her direction.
Bertha went on turning the bread over in the pan, taking the butter from its paper and dropping it into its dish: rinsing and wiping a knife or two, regulating the gas. Frequent truculent exclamations spluttered out if anything went wrong. “Verdammtes Streichholz!” “Donnerwetter!” She used the oaths of Goethe. One eyebrow was raised in humorous reflective irritation. She would flatten the letter out and bend down to examine a sentence, stopping her cooking for a moment.
“Sâlot!” she exclaimed, after having read the letter, all through again, putting it down. She turned with coquettish contemptuousness to her frying-pan. “Sâlot” was, with her, a favourite epithet. Clara’s door opened, and Bertha crumpled the letter into her pocket. Clara entered sleepy-eyed and affecting ill-humour. Her fat body was a softly distributed burden, which she carried with the aplomb and indifference of habit. She had a gracefully bumpy forehead, a nice whistling mouth, soft, good and discreet orbs. Her days were passed in the library of the Place Saint Sulpice.
“Ach, lasse! lass mich doch! Get on with your cooking!” she exclaimed as Bertha began her customary sociable and playful greeting. Bertha always was conscious of her noise, of shallowness and worldliness, with this shrewd, indifferent, slow, and monosyllabic bookworm. She wanted to caper round it, inviting it to cumbrous play, like a small lively dog around a heavy one. She was much morefemmeas she said, but aware that Clara did not regard this as an attainment. Beingfemmehad taken up so much of her energy and life that she could not expect to be so complete in other ways as Clara. With this other woman, who was much less “woman” than she, she always felt impelled to ultra-feminine behaviour. She was childish to the top of her bent. This was insulting to the other: it showed too clearly Bertha’sway of regarding her as not so muchfemmeas herself. Clara felt this and would occasionally show impatience at Bertha’s skittishness: a gruff man-like impatience entering grimly but imperturbably into the man-part, but claiming at the same time its prerogatives.
Clara had had no known love affairs. She regarded Bertha, sometimes, with much curiosity. This “woman’s temperament,” so complacently displayed, soothed and tickled her.
“Clara, Soler has told me to send a picture to the Salon d’Automne.”
“Oh!” Clara was not impressed by “success.” She was preparing her own breakfast and jostled Bertha, usurping more than half the table. Bertha, delighted, retorted with trills of shrill indignation and by recapturing the positions lost by her plates. Her breakfast ready she carried it into her room, pretending to be offended with Clara.
Breakfast over she wrote to Tarr. The letter was written quite easily and directly. She was so sure in the convention of her passion that there was no scratching out or hesitation. “I feel so far away from you.” There was nothing more to be said; as it had been said often before, it came easily and promptly with the pen. All the feeling that could find expression was fluent, large and assured, like the handwriting, and went at once into these conventional forms.
“Let Englishmen thank their stars—the good stars of the Northmen and early seamen—that they have such stammering tongues and such a fierce horror of grandiloquence. They are still primitive and true in their passions, because they are afraid of them, like children. The shocks go onunderneath; they trust their unconsciousness. The odious facility of the South, whether it be their, at bottom, very shrewdly regulated anger (l’art de s’engueuler) or their picture post card perfection of amorous expressiveness; such things these Island mutterers and mutes have escaped. But worst of all is the cult of the ‘Temperament,’all the accent on that poor last syllable, whose home is that dubious middle Empire, so incorrigibly banal. The lacerating and tireless pricking and pushing of this hapless ‘temperament’ is a more harrowing spectacle than the use of dogs in Belgium or women in England.”
This passage, from an article in theEnglish Review, Tarr had shown to Bertha with great pleasure. Bertha had a good share of impoverished and overworked temperament, but in a very genial fashion. It had not, with her, grown crooked and vicious with this constant ill-treatment. It was strenuous but friendly. It served in any case a mistress surprisingly disinterested and gentle.
On the receipt of Tarr’s letter she had felt, to begin with, very indignant and depressed at his having had the strength to go away without coming to see her. So her letter began on that complaint. He had at last, this was certain, gone away, with the first likelihood of permanence since they had known each other. Despite her long preparation for this, and her being even deliberately the cause of it, she was mortified and at the same time unhappy at the sight of her success.
The Kreisler business had been more for herself than anything, for her own private edification. She would free Sorbert by an act, in a sort of impalpable way. It was not destined as yet for publicity. The fact of the women surprising Kreisler and her on the boulevard had put everything at once out of perspective, damaged her illusion of sacrifice. Compelled at once to be practical again, find excuses, repudiate immediately what she had done before she had been able to enjoy or digest it, was like a man being snatched away from table, the last mouthful hardly swallowed. She was the person surprised before some work doing is completed—it still in a rudimentary unshowable state. For once Tarr was not only in the right, but, to her irritation, he had proofs, splendid ocular proofs, a cloud of witnesses.
To end nobly, on her own initiative, had been heridea; to make a last sacrifice to Sorbert in leaving him irrevocably, as she had sacrificed her feelings all along in allowing their engagement to drag suspiciously on, in making her position slightly uncomfortable with her friends (and these social things meant so much to her in addition). And now, instead, everything had been turned into questionable meanness and ridicule; when she had intended to behave with the maximum of swagger, she suddenly found herself relegated to a skulking and unfortunate plane.
Considerations about Fate beset her. Everything was hopelessly unreliable. The best thing to do was to do nothing. She was not her usual energetic too spiritually bustling self. She wrote her letter quite easily and as usual, but she did not (very unusually) believe in its efficacy. She even wrote it a triflemoreeasily than usual for that reason.
It was only a momentary rebellion against the ease with which this protest was done. Perhaps had it not been for the fascination of habit, then some more adequate words would have been written. His letter had come. Empty and futile she had done her task, answered as she must do; “As we all must do!” she would have thought, with an exclamation mark after it. She sealed up her letter and addressed it.
In the drawer where she was putting Sorbert’s latest letter away were some old ones. A letter of the year before she took out and read. With its two sentences it was more cruel and had more meaning than the one she had just received: “Put off that little Darmstadt woman. Let’s be alone.”
It was a note she had received on the eve of an expedition to a village near Paris. She had promised to take a girl down with them, to show her the place, its hotel and other possibilities—she had stayed there once or twice herself. The Darmstadt girl had not been taken. Sorbert and she had spent the night at an inn on the outskirts of the forest. They had come back in the train next day without speaking, havingquarrelled somehow or other in the inn. Chagrin and regret for him struck her a series of sharp blows. She started crying again suddenly, quickly, and vehemently as though surprised by some thought.
The whole morning her work worried her, dusting and arranging. She experienced a revolt against her ceaseless orderliness, a very grave thing in such an exemplary prisoner. At four o’clock in the afternoon, as often happened, she was still dawdling about in her dressing-gown and had not yet had lunch.
Thefemme de ménagecame at about eight in the morning, doing Clara’s rooms first. Bertha was in the habit of discussing politics with Madame Vannier. Sorbert too was discussed.
“Mademoiselle est triste?” this good woman said, noticing her dejection. “C’est encore Monsieur Sorbert qui vous a fait du chagrin?”
“Oui madame, c’est un Sâlot!” Bertha replied, half crying.
“Oh, il ne faut pas dire ça, mademoiselle. Comment, il est un Sâlot?” Madame Vannier worked silently with soft quiet thud of felt slippers. She appeared to regard work as not without dignity. Bertha was playing at life. She admired and liked her as an emblem of Fortune; she respected herself as an emblem of Misfortune. Madame Vannier was given the letter to post at two.
Bertha’s friends looked for her elsewhere, nowadays, than at her rooms. Tarr was always likely to be found there in impolite possession. She made them come as often as she could; her coquetry as regards her carefully arranged rooms needed satisfaction. She suffered in the midst of her lonely tastefulness. But Tarr had certainly made these rooms a rather deserted place. Since the dance none of her women friends had come. She had spent an hour or two with them at the restaurant.
At the dance she had kept rather apart. Dazed, after a shock, and needing self-collection, was the line sketched. Her account of things could not, of course, be blurted out anyhow. It had to grow out of circumstances. It, of course, must be given. She had not yet given it. But haste must be avoided. For its particular type, as long a time as possible must be allowed to elapse before she spoke of what had happened. It must almost seem as though she were going to say nothing; sudden, perfect, and very impressive silence on her part. To accustom their minds to her silence would make speech all the more imposing, when it came. At a café after the dance her account of the thing flowered grudgingly, drawn forth by the ambient heat of the discussion.
They were as yet at the stage of exclamations, nomalveillanttheory yet having been definitely formed about Kreisler.
“He came there on purpose to create a disturbance. Whatever for, I wonder!”
“I expect it was the case of Fräulein Fogs over again.” (Kreisler had, on a former occasion, paid his court to a lady of this name, with resounding unsuccess.)
“If I’d have known what was going on, I’d have dealt with him!” said one of the men.
“Didn’t you say he told a pack of lies, Renée⸺?”
Fräulein Lipmann had been sitting, her eyes fixed on a tram drawn up near by, watching the people evacuating the central platform, and others restocking it. The discussion and exclamations of her friends did not, it would appear, interest her. It would have been, no doubt, scandalously unnatural if Kreisler had not been execrated. But anything they could say was negligible and inadequate to cope with the “Gemeine alte Sau.” The tameness of their reflections on and indignation against Kreisler when compared with the terrific corroding of this epithet (known only to her) made her sulky and impatient.
Applied to in this way directly about the lies, sheturned to the others and said, as it were interposing herself regally at last in their discussion:
“Ecoutez—listen,” she began, leaning towards the greater number of them, seeming to say, “It’s really simple enough, as simple as it is disagreeable: I am going to settle the question for you. Let us then discuss it no more.” It would seem a great effort to do this, too, her lips a little white with fatigue, her eyes heavy with disgust at it all: fighting these things, she was coming to their assistance.
“Listen: we none of us know anything about that man”; this was an unfortunate beginning for Bertha, as thoughts, if not eyes, would spring in her direction no doubt, and Fräulein Lipmann even paused as though about to qualify this: “we none of us, I think, want to know anything about him. Therefore why this idiot—the last sort of beer-drinking brute—treated us to his bestial and—and—wretched foolery⸺”
Fräulein Lipmann shrugged her shoulders with blank, contemptuous indifference. “I assure you it doesn’t interest me the least little bit in the world to knowwhysuch brutes behave like that at certain times. I don’t see any mystery. It seems odd to you thatHerr Kreislershould be an offensive brute?” She eyed them a moment. “To meNOT!”
“We do him too much honour by discussing him, that’s certain,” said one of them. This was in the spirit of Fräulein Lipmann’s words, but was not accepted by her just then as she had something further to say.
“When one is attacked, one does not spend one’s time in consideringwhyone is attacked, but in defending oneself. I am just fresh from thesouillures de ce brute. If you knew the words he had addressed to me.”
Ekhart was getting very red, his eyes were shining, and he was moving rhythmically in his chair something like a steadily rising sea.
“Where does he live, Fräulein Lipmann?” he asked.
“Nein, Ekhart. One could not allow anybody to embroil themselves with that useless brute.” The “Nein, Ekhart” had been drawled fondly at once, as though that contingency had been weighed, and could be brushed aside lightly in advance. It implied as well an “of course” for his red and dutiful face. “I myself, if I meet him anywhere, shall deal with him better than you could. This is one of the occasions for a woman⸺”
So Bertha’s story had come uncomfortably and difficultly to flower. She wished she had not waited so long. But it was impossible now, the matter put in the light that Fräulein Lipmann’s intervention had caused, to delay any longer. She was, there was no doubt about it, vaguely responsible for Kreisler. It was obviously her dutyto explainhim. And now Fräulein Lipmann had just put an embargo on explanations. There were to be no more explanations. In Kreisleriana herapportwas very important: much more definite than the indignation or hypothesis of any of the rest. She had beennearer to him, anyway. She had waited too long, until the sea had risen too high, or rather in a direction extremely unfavourable for launching her contribution. It must be in some way, too, a defence of Kreisler. This would be a very delicate matter to handle.
Yet could she sit on there, say nothing, and let the others in the course of time drop the subject? They had not turned to her in any way for further information or as to one peculiarly susceptible of furnishing interesting data. Maintaining this silence was a solution. But it would be evenbolderthan her first plan. This would be a still more vigorous, more insolent development of her plan of confessing—in her way. But it rather daunted her. They might easily mistake, if they pleased, her silence for the silence of acknowledged, very eccentric, guilt. The subject was drawing perilously near the point where it would be dropped. Fräulein Lipmann was summing up, and doing the final offices of the law over the condemned and already unspeakable Kreisler.No time was to be lost. The breaking in now involved inevitable conflict of a sort with Fräulein Lipmann. She was going to “say a word for Kreisler”afterFräulein Lipmann’s words. (How much better it would have been before!)
So at this point, looking up from the table, Bertha (listened to with uncomfortable unanimity and promptness) began. She was smiling with an affectedly hesitating, timid face, smiling in a flat strained way, the neighbourhood of her eyes suffused slightly with blood, her lips purring the words a little:
“Renée, I feel that I ought to say something—” Her smile was that made with a screwing up of the eyes and slow flowering of the lips, noticed on some people’s faces when some snobbery they cannot help has to be allowed egress from their mouth.
Renée Lipmann turned towards her composedly. This interruption would require argument; consciousness of the peculiar nature of Bertha’s qualifications was not displayed.
“I had not meant to say anything—about what happened to me, that is. I, as a matter of fact, have something particularly to complain of. But I had nothing to say about it. Only, since you are all discussing it, I thought you might not quite understand if I didn’t—I don’t think, Renée, that Herr Kreisler was quite in his right mind this evening. He doesn’t strike me asméchant. I don’t think he was really in any way accountable for his actions. I don’t, of course, know any more about him than you do. This evening was the first time I’ve ever exchanged more than a dozen words with him in my life.”
This was said in the sing-song of quick parentheses, eyebrows lifted, and with little gestures of the hand.
“He caught hold of me—like this.” She made a quick snatching gesture at Fräulein Lipmann, who did not like this attempt at intimidation or velvety defiance. “He was kissing me when you came up,” turning to one or two of the others. This was said with dramatic suddenness and “determination,” asit were: the “kissing” said with a sort of deliberate sententious brutality, and luscious disparting of the lips.
“We couldn’t make outwhateverwas happening⸺” one of them began.
“When you came up I felt quite dazed. I didn’t feel that it was a man kissing me. He was mad. I’m sure he was. It was like being mauled by a brute.” She shuddered, with rather rolling eyes. “Hewasa brute to-night—not a man at all. He didn’t know what he was doing.”
They were all silent, answerless at this unexpected view of the case. It only differed from theirs in supposing that he was notalwaysa brute. She had spoken quickly and drew up short. Their silence became conscious and septic. They appeared as though they had not expected her to stop speaking, and were like people surprised naked, with no time to cover themselves.
“I think he’s in great difficulties—money or something. But all I know for certain is that he wasreallyin need of somebody⸺”
“But what makes you think, Bertha⸺” one of the girls said, hesitating.
“I let him in at Renée’s. He looked strange to me: didn’t you notice? I noticed him first there.”
Anastasya Vasek was still with them. She had not joined in the talk about Kreisler. She listened to it with attention, like a person newly arrived in some community, participating for the first time at one of their discussions on a local and stock subject. Kreisler would, from her expression, have seemed to be some topic peculiar to this gathering of people—they engaged in a characteristic occupation. Bertha she watched as one would watch a very eloquent chief airing his views at a clan-meeting.
“I felt he wasreallyin need of some hand to help him. He seemed just like a child. He was ill, too. He can’t have eaten anything for some time. I am sure he hasn’t. He was walking slower and slower—that’show it was we were so far behind. It was my fault, too—what happened. At least⸺”
The hungry touch was an invention of the moment. “You make him quite a romantic character. I’m afraid he has been working on your feelings, my dear girl. I didn’t see any signs of an empty stomach myself,” said Fräulein van Bencke.
“He refreshed himself extensively at the dance, in any case. You can put your mind at rest as to his present emptiness,” Renée Lipmann said.
Things languished. The Lipmann had taken her stand on boredom. She was committed to the theory of the unworthiness of this discussion. The others not feeling quite safe, Bertha’s speeches raised no more comment. It was all as though she had been putting in her little bit of abuse of the common enemy. Bertha might have interrupted with a “Yes. He outraged me too!”—and this have been met with a dreary, acquiescing silence!
She was exculpating herself, then (heavily), at his expense. The air of ungenerosity this had was displeasing to her.
The certain lowering of the vitality of the party when she came on the scene with her story offended her. There should have been noise. It was not quite the lifelessness of scepticism. But there was an uncomfortable family likeness to the manner of people listening to discourses they do not believe. She persevered. She met with the same objectionable flaccid and indifferent opposition. Her intervention had killed the topic, and they seemed waiting till she had ended her war-dance on its corpse.
The red-headed member of the party had met Tarr by chance. Hearing he had not seen Bertha since the night of the ball, she had said with roguish pleasantness: “He’d better look after her better; why hadn’t he come to the ball?” Tarr did not understand.
“Bertha had had an adventure. All of them, for that matter, had had an adventure, but especially Bertha. Oh, Bertha would tell him all about it.”But, on Tarr insisting, Bertha’s story, in substance, had been told.
So with Bertha, thefactwas still there. Retrospectively, her friends insisted upon passing by the two remarkably unanimous-looking forms on the boulevard in stony silence. She shouted to them and kissed Kreisler loudly. But they refused to take any notice. She sulked. They had been guilty of catching her. She kept to herself day after day. She would make a change in her life. She might go to Germany; she might go to anotherquartier. To go on with her life just as though nothing had happened,that was out of the question. Demonstration of some sort must follow, and change compatible with grief.
Her burly little clock struck four. Hurrying on reform-clothes, she went out to buy lunch. The dairy lay nearly next door to Lejeune’s restaurant. Crossing the road towards it, she caught sight of Kreisler’s steadily marching figure approaching. First she side-stepped and half turned. But the shop would be reached before they met, so she went on, merely quickening her pace. Her eye, covertly fixed on him, calculating distances and speeds, saw him hesitate—evidently having just caught sight ofher—and then turn down a side street nearly beside the dairy she was making for. Unwise pique beset her at this.