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.
“Salot!” she exclaimed, after having read the letter, all through again, putting it down. She turned with coquettish contemptuousness to her frying-pan. “Salot” 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 more femme as she said, but aware that Clara did not regard this as an attainment. Being femme had 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’s[156] way of regarding her as not so much femme as 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 on underneath; 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,’[157] 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 the English 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 her[158] idea; 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 trifle more easily 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, having[159] quarrelled 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.
The femme de ménage came 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 Salot!” Bertha replied, half crying.
“Oh, il ne faut pas dire ?a, mademoiselle. Comment, il est un Salot?” 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.