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, no malveillant theory 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 Fr?ulein 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??”
Fr?ulein 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, she[161] turned 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 Fr?ulein 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?”
Fr?ulein Lipmann shrugged her shoulders with blank, contemptuous indifference. “I assure you it doesn’t interest me the least little bit in the world to know why such brutes behave like that at certain times. I don’t see any mystery. It seems odd to you that Herr Kreisler should be an offensive brute?” She eyed them a moment. “To me NOT!”
“We do him too much honour by discussing him, that’s certain,” said one of them. This was in the spirit of Fr?ulein 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 considering why one is attacked, but in defending oneself. I am just fresh from the souillures 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, Fr?ulein Lipmann?” he asked.
[162]
“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 Fr?ulein 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 duty to explain him. And now Fr?ulein Lipmann had just put an embargo on explanations. There were to be no more explanations. In Kreisleriana her apport was very important: much more definite than the indignation or hypothesis of any of the rest. She had been nearer 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 even bolder than 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. Fr?ulein Lipmann was summing up, and doing the final offices of the law over the condemned and already unspeakable Kreisler.[163] No time was to be lost. The breaking in now involved inevitable conflict of a sort with Fr?ulein Lipmann. She was going to “say a word for Kreisler” after Fr?ulein 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 as méchant. 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 Fr?ulein 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,” as[164] it were: the “kissing” said with a sort of deliberate sententious brutality, and luscious disparting of the lips.
“We couldn’t make out whatever was 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. “He was a 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 not always a 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 was really in 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 was really in 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’s[165] how 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 Fr?ulein 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.”[166] But, on Tarr insisting, Bertha’s story, in substance, had been told.
So with Bertha, the fact was 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 another quartier. 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 of her—and then turn down a side street nearly beside the dairy she was making for. Unwise pique beset her at this.