CHAPTER IV
Tarr crawled towards Bertha that day on the back of a Place St. Michel bus. He did not like his job.
The secret of his visits to Bertha and interminable liaison was that he really never had meant to leave her at all, he reflected. He had not meant to leave her altogether. He was just playing. Or rather, a long debt of disgraceful behaviour was accumulating, that he knew would have to be met. It was deliberately increased by him, because he knew he would not repudiate it. But it would have been absurd not to try to escape.
To-day he must break the fact to Bertha that he could no longer regard himself as responsible. He was faced with the necessity, for the first time, of seriously bargaining. The debt was not to be repudiated, but he must tell her that he only had himself to pay with, and that he had been seized by somebody else.
He passed through her iron gateway with a final stealth, although making his boots sound loudly on the gravel. It was like entering a vault, the trees looked like weeds; the meaning or taste of everything, of course, had died. The concierge looked like a new one.
He had bought a flower for his buttonhole. He kept smelling it as he approached the house.
During the last week or so he had got into the habit of writing his letters at Bertha’s, to fill up the time. Occasionally he would do a drawing of her (a thing he had never done formerly) to vary the monotony. This time there would be no letter-writing. This visit would be more like the old ones.
“Come in, Sorbert,” she said, on opening the door. It was emphasizing the fact of the formality of the terms on which they at present met. Any prerogative of past and more familiar times was proudly rejected.
There was the same depressed atmosphere as the day before, and the days preceding that. She appeared stale, somehow deteriorated and shabby, her worth decreased, and extremely pitiable. Her “reserve” (a natural result of the new equivocal circumstances) removed her to a distance, as it seemed; it also shut her up in herself, in an unhealthy, dreary, and faded atmosphere.
She was shut up with a mass of reserves and secrets, new and old. She seemed sitting on them in rather dismal hen-like fashion, waiting to be asked to come out of herself and reveal something. It was a corpse among other things that she was sitting on, as Kreisler was one of her secrets. Mournfully reproachful, she kept guard over her secrets, a store of bric-à-brac that had gone out of fashion and were getting musty in a neglected shop.
Their meetings sometimes were made painful by activity on Bertha’s part. An attempt at penetration to an intimacy once possessed can be more indecent than the same action on the part of a stranger.
This time he was greeted with long mournful glances. He felt she had thought of what she should say. This interview meant a great deal to her. His friendship meant more to her now than ever. The abject little room seemed to be thrust forward to awaken his memories and ask for pity. An intense atmosphere of Teutonic suicide permeated everything. He could not move an eyelid or a muscle without wounding or slighting something. It was like being in a dark kitchen at night, where you know at every step you will put your foot on a beetle. It had a still closer analogy to this in the disgust he felt for these too naked and familiar things he was treading on. He scowled at Beethoven, who scowled back at him like a reflection in a mirror. It was the fate of both of them to haunt this room. The Mona Lisa was there, and the Breton sabots and jars. She might have a change of scenery sometimes! He felt unreasonably that she must have left things in the same place to reproduce a former mood in him. His photograph was prominent on her writing-table; she seemed to say (with a sort of sickly idiocy), “You see, he is faithful to me!”
She preceded him to her sitting-room. As he looked at her back he thought of her as taking a set number of paces, then turning round abruptly, confronting him. From a typical and similar enervation of the will to that which was at the bottom of his troubles, he could hardly stop himself from putting his arm round her waist while they stood for a moment close to each other. He did not wish to do this as a response to any resuscitating desire. It was only because it was the one thing he must not do. To throw himself into the abyss of perplexity he had just escaped from tempted him. The dykes and simulations of conduct were perpetually threatened by his neurasthenia in this way. He kept his hands in his pockets, however.
When they had reached the room, she turned round, as he had half imagined, and caught hold of his hands.
“Sorbert, Sorbert!”
The words were said separately, each emphatic in significance. The second was a repetition only of the first. She seemed calling him by his name to conjure back his self again. Her face was a strained and anxious mask.
“What is it, Bertha?”
“I don’t know!”
She dropped his hands, drooped her head to the right and turned away.
She sat down; he sat down opposite her.
“Anything new?” he asked.
“Anything new? Yes!” She gazed at him with an insistent meaning.
He concluded this was just over-emphasis, with nothing behind it; or, rather, everything.
“Well, I have something new as well!”
“Have you, Sorbert?”
“First of all, how have my visits struck you lately? What explanation have you found for them?”
“Oh, none. Why find an explanation? Why do you ask?”
“I thought I would explain.”
“Well?”
“My explanation to myself was that I did not want to leave you brusquely, and I thought a blurred interlude of this sort would do no harm to either of us. Our loves could die in each other’s arms.”
She stared with incredulous fixity at the floor, her spirit seeming to be arched like a swan and to be gazing down hypnotically.
“The real reason was simply that, being very fond of you, I could not make up my mind to give you up. I claim that my visits were not frivolous.”
“Well?”
“I would have married you, if you had considered that advisable.”
“Yes? And⸺?”
“I find it very difficult to say the rest.”
“What is difficult?”
“Well, I still like you very much. Yesterday I met a woman. I love her too. I can’t help that. What must I do?”
Bertha turned a slightly stormier white.
“Who is she?”
“You know her. She is Anastasya Vasek.”
The news struck through something else, and, inside, her ego shrank to an almost wizened being. It seemed glad of the protection the cocoon, the something, afforded her.
“You did not—find out what my news was.”
“I didn’t. Have you anything⸺?”
“Yes. I am enceinte.”
He thought about this in a clumsy, incredulous way. It was a Roland for his Oliver! She was going to have a baby! With what regularity he was countered! This event rose up in opposition to the night he had just spent, his new promises and hopes of swagger sex in the future. He was beaten.
“Whose child is it?”
“Kreisler’s.”
“There you are!” he thought.
He got up and stepped over to her with a bright relieved look in his face.
“Poor little girl! That’s a bad business. But don’t worry about it. We can get married and it can always pass as mine—if we do it quickly enough.”
She looked up at him obliquely and sharply, with suspicion grown a habit. When she saw the pleasant, assured expression, she saw that at last things had turned. Sorbert was denying reality! He was ending with miracles, against himself. Her instinct had always told her that generosity would not be wasted!
She did not tell him of the actual circumstances under which the child had come. That would have weakened her happiness and her case.