CHAPTER V
Kreisler, on his side, had been only a few paces from his door when he caught sight of Bertha. As his changed route would necessitate a good deal of tiresome circling to bring him back practically to the spot he had started from, he right-about-faced in a minute or two, the danger past, as he thought. The result was that, as she left the shop, there was Kreisler approaching again, almost in the same place as before.
She was greeted affably, as though to say “Caught! both of us!” He was under the impression, however, that she had lain in wait for him. He was so accustomed to think of her in that character! If she had been in full flight he would have imagined that she was only decoying him. She was a woman who could not help adhering.
“How do you do? I’ve just been buying my lunch.”
“So late?”
“I thought you’d left Paris!” She had no information of this sort, but was inclined to rebuke him for not leaving Paris.
“I? Who told you that, I should like to know. I shall never leave Paris; at least⸺”
There was heavy enigmatic meaning in this, said lightly. It did not escape her, sensible to such nuances.
“How are our fair friends?” he asked.
“Our? Oh, Fräulein Lipmann and—Oh, I haven’t seen them since the other night.”
“Indeed! Not since the other night⸺?”
She made her silence swarm with significant meanings, like a glassy shoal with innumerable fish: her eyes even, stared and darted about, glassily.
It was very difficult, now she had stopped, to get away. The part she had more or less played with her friends, of his champion, had imposed itself on her. She could not leave her protégé without something further said. She was flattered, too, at his showing no signs now of desire to escape.
His more plainly brutal instincts woke readily in these vague days. Various appetites had been asserting themselves. So the fact that she was a pretty girl did its work on a rather recalcitrant subject. He felt so modest now, ideals things of the past. Surely for a quiet ordinary existence pleasant little distinctions were suitable?
Without any anxiety about it, he began to talk to Bertha with the idea of a subsequent meeting. He had wished to avoid her because she had embodied for him the evening of the dance, and appeared to him in its disquieting colours. What he sought unconsciously now was a certain quietude, enlivened by healthy appetites. He had disconnected her with his great Night.
“I was cracked the other night. I’m not often in that state,” he said. Bertha’s innuendoes had to be recognized.
“I’m glad of that,” she answered.
As to Bertha, to have been kissed and those things, under however eccentric circumstances, gave a man certain rights on your interest.
“I’m afraid I was rather rude to Fräulein Lipmann before leaving. Did she tell you about it?”
“I think you were rude to everybody!”
“Ah, well⸺”
“I must be going. My lunch⸺”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! Have I kept you from your lunch? I wonder if you would procure me the extreme pleasure of seeing you again?”
Bertha looked at him in doubtful astonishment, taking in this sensational request.
See Kreisler again! The result as regards the Lipmann circle! But this pleaded for Kreisler. It would be carrying out her story. It would be insisting on it, and destroying that subtle advantage, now possessed by her friends, in presenting them with somewhat the same uncompromising spectacle again. In deliberately exposing herself to criticism she would be effacing, in some sense, the extreme involuntariness of the boulevard incident. He asked her simply if he might see her again. The least pretentious request. Would the refusal to do this simple thing be a concession to Lipmann and the rest? Did she want to at all? But it was in a jump of deliberate defiance or “carelessness” that she concluded:
“Yes, of course, if you wish it.”
“You never go to cafés? Perhaps some day⸺”
“Good! Very well!” she answered very quickly, in her trenchant tone, imparting all sorts of particular unnecessary meanings to this simple acceptance. She had answered as men accept a bet or the Bretons clinch a bargain in the fist.
Kreisler was still leisurely. He appeared to regard her vehemence with amusement.
“I should like then to go with you to the Café de l’Observatoire to-morrow evening. I hope I shall be able to efface the rather unusual impression I must have made on you the other night!” (The tone of this remark did not ignore or condemn, however, the kisses.) “When can I meet you?”
“Will you come and fetch me at my house?”
But shivers went down her back as she said it.
She was now thoroughly committed to this new step. She was delighted, or rather excited, at each new further phase of it. Its horrors were scores off her friends. These details of meeting!—these had not been reckoned on. Of course they would have to meet. Kreisler seemed like a physician conducting a little unpleasant operation in a genial, ironical, unhurrying way.
“Well, it’s understood. We shall see each other to-morrow,” he said. And with a smile of half raillery at her rather upset expression, he left her. So much fuss about a little thing, such obstinacy in doing it! What was the terrible thing? Meeting him! His smiling was only natural. She showed without disguise in her face the hazardous quality, as she considered it, of this consent. She would wish him to feel the largeness of the motive that prompted her, and for him to participate too in the certain horror of meeting himself!