CHAPTER VI
Back in her rooms, she examined, over her lunch, with stupefaction, the things she had been doing—conversations, appointments, complementary sensations, and all the rest, as she might have sat down before some distinctly expensive, troubling purchase that she had not dreamt of making an hour before. “What a strange proceeding!”—as it might have been—“what sudden disease in my taste made me buy that!”
Had she been enveloped, in a way, by that idle Teutonically smiling manner of his? But at the bottom of her (for her) dramatic consent was the instantaneous image of Fräulein Lipmann and Company’s disapprobation. The carrying out and so substantiating her story, that notion turned the scale. Kreisler’s easy manner (he was unmistakably “a gentleman!”) contrasted with her friend’s indignant palaver gave him the advantage. He cannot, cannot have behaved so outrageously as they pretended!
These activities as well distracted her from brooding over Sorbert’s going.
Of Kreisler she thought very little. Her women friends held the centre of the stage.
In her thoughts they stared at her supersession: Tarr to Kreisler. From bad to worse, for her friends. There was a strange continuity in her troubled friendship with these women. Always (only more so) at the same point, stretching the cord.
So this was the key to her programme; a person has made some slip in grammar, say. He makes it again deliberately, so that his first involuntary speech may appear deliberate.
She began her customary pottering about in her rooms. Fräulein Elsa Kinderbach, one of the Dresden sisters already spoken of, interrupted her. At the knock she thought of Tarr and Kreisler simultaneously, and welded in one.
“Isn’t it hot? It’s simply broiling outside. I left the studio quite early.” Fräulein Kinderbach sat down, giving her hat a toss and squinting up at it.
The most evident thing about these sisters was dirt, anæmia, and a sort of soiled, insignificant handsomeness. They explained themselves, roughly, by describing in a cold-blooded lazy way their life at home.
A stepmother, prodigiously smart, well-to-do, neglecting them; sent first to one place then another (now Paris) to be out of the way. Yet the stepmother supplies them superfluously from her superfluity.—They talked about themselves with a consciously dramatic matter-of-factness, as twin parcels, usually on the way from one place to another, expensively posted here and there, without real destination. They enjoyed nothing at all; painted well (according to Juan Soler); had a sort of wild uncontrollable attachment for the Lipmann.
“Oh! Bertha, I didn’t know your dear ‘Sorbert’ was going to England.” “Dein Sorbet” was the bantering formula for Tarr. Bertha was perpetually talking about him, to them, to the charwoman, to the greengrocer opposite, to everybody she met. Tarr did not quite bask in this notoriety.
“Didn’t you? Oh, yes; he’s gone.”
“You’ve not quarrelled—with your Sorbert?”
“What’s that to do with you, my dear?” Bertha gave a brief, indecent laugh she sometimes had. “By the way, I’ve just seen Herr Kreisler. We’ve arranged to go out somewhere to-morrow.”
“Go out—Kreisler! Liebes Kind!—What on earth possessed you—!—Herr—Kreisler!”
“What’s the matter with Herr Kreisler? You were all friendly enough with him a week ago.”
Elsa looked at her with the cold-blooded scrutiny of the precocious urchin.
“But he’s a vicious brute. Besides, there are other reasons for avoiding Herr Kreisler. You know the reason of his behaviour the other night? It was it appears, because Anastasya Vasek snubbed him. He was nearly the same when the Fogs wouldn’t take an interest in him. He can’t leave women alone. He follows them about and annoys them, and then becomes—well, as you saw him the other night—when he’s shaken off. He is impossible. He is not a person who can be accepted by anybody.”
“Where did you hear all that? I don’t think that Fräulein Vasek’s story is true. I am certain⸺”
“Well, he once was like that with me. He began hanging round, and—You know the story of his engagement?”
“What engagement?”
“He was engaged to a girl and she married his father instead of marrying him.”
Bertha struggled a moment, a little baffled.
“Well, what is there in that? I’ve known several cases⸺”
“Yes. That by itself⸺”
Elsa Kinderbach was quite undisturbed. Her information had been coldly given. She had argued sweepingly, as though talking to a child, and following some reasonable resolve formed during her earlier silent scrutiny.—In a few moments Bertha returned to the charge.
“Did Fräulein Vasek give that particular explanation of Herr Kreisler’s behaviour?”
“No. We put two and two together. She did say something—yes, she did as a matter of fact say that she thought she had been the cause of Kreisler’s behaviour.”
“How funny! I can’t stand that girl; she’s so unnatural, she’s such a poseuse. Don’t you think, Elsa?—What a funny thing to say? You can depend on it that that, anyhow, is not the explanation.”
“Sorbert has a rival perhaps?”
This remark was met in staring silence. It was a mixing of elements, an unnecessary bringing in of something as unapropos, as unmanageable; that deserved only no words at all. She did not wish to concede the light tone required.
Elsa had admitted that Fräulein Vasek was responsible for the statement, “I was the cause of Kreisler’s behaviour,” etc. That was one of those things (there being no evidence to confirm or even suggest it) which at once puts a woman on a peculiar pinnacle of bad taste, incomprehensibleness, and horridness. Bertha’s personal estimation of Kreisler received a complex fillip. This ridiculous version—coming after her version—was a rival version, believed in by her friends.
Bertha took some minutes to digest Elsa’s news. She flushed. The more she thought of this rival version of Fräulein Vasek’s, the more reprehensible it appeared. It was a startlingly novel and uncompromising version, giving proof of a perfect immodesty. It charged hers full tilt.
This version of hers had been the great asset of existence for three days. Some one had coolly set up shop next door, to sell an article in which she, and she alone, had specialized. Here was an unexpected, gratuitous, new inventor of versions coming along. And what a version to begin with!
Bertha’s version had been a vital matter, Fräulein Vasek’s evidently was a matter of vanity. The contempt of the workman, sweating for a living, for the amateur, possessed her.
But there was a graver aspect to the version of this poaching Venus. In discrediting Bertha’s suggested account of how things happened, it attacked indirectly her action, proceeding, ostensibly, from these notions.
Her meeting Kreisler at present depended for its reasonableness and existence even on the “hunger” theory; or, if that should fail, something equally touching and primitive. Were she forced, as Elsa readily did, to accept the snub-by-Anastasya theory, with its tale of ridiculous reprisals, further dealings with Kreisler would show in a bare and ugly light. Her past conduct also would have its primitive slur renewed.
Her defiance to Elsa had been delivered with great satisfaction. “I am meeting Herr Kreisler to-morrow!” The shine had soon been taken off that.
All Bertha’s past management of the boulevard scene had presupposed that she was working in an element destined to obscurity: malleable, therefore, to any extent. Anastasya had risen up calm, contradictory, a formidable and perplexing enemy, with her cursed version. The weak point in it was the rank immodesty of the form it took.
Her obstinacy awoke. This new turn coming from the other camp solidified two or three degrees more, in a twinkling, her partisanship of Kreisler. She had a direct interest now in their meeting. She was curious to hear what he had to say as to his alleged attempt in Fräulein Vasek’s direction.
“Well, I’m going to Renée’s now, to fetch her for dinner. Are you coming?” Elsa said, getting up.
“No. I’m going to dine here to-night,” and Bertha accompanied her to the door.