CHAPTER VII
People appear with a startling suddenness sometimes out of the fog of Time and Space. Bertha did not visualize Kreisler very readily. She was surprised when she saw him below her windows the next day. He stared up at the house with an eager speculation. He considered the house and studio opposite. Behind the curtains Bertha stood with emotions of an ambushed soldier. She felt on her face the blankness of the wall of the house, its silence and unresponsiveness. He appeared almost to be looking at her face, magnified and exposed.—Then it appeared to her that it was he, the enemy getting in. She wished to stop him there, before he came any further.
In the processes of his uncertainty he was so innocuous and distant, for the moment. His first visit. There he was: so far, a stranger. Why should these little obstacles of strangeness—which gate to enter, which bell to ring—be taken away from this particular individual? He should remain “stranger” for her, where he came from. But he had burrowed his way through, was at the bell already, and would soon be at herself. She found here, in her room, was very different from she found outside, in restaurant or street. The clothing of this décor was a nakedness.
She struggled for a moment up from the obstinate dream, made of artificial but tenacious sentiments, shaped by contretemps of all sorts that had been accumulating like a snowball ever since her last interview with Tarr. Still somewhat wrapt in this interview she rolled in its nightmarish, continually metamorphosed, substance through space. Where would it land her, this electric, directionless, vital affair? This invasion of Indifference and Difference had floated her, successfully, away in some direction.
The bell rang again. She could see him, almost, through the wall, standing phlegmatic and erect. They had not spoken yet. But they had been some minutes “in touch.”
Perhaps he was mad! Elsa, cold, matter-of-fact, but with warnings for her, came into her mind. However much she resisted the facts, there was very little reason for this meeting. It was a now unnecessary, exploded, and objectless impulse, sapped by Anastasya. She was going through with something from laziness and obstinacy mixed, that no longer meant anything.
Already dressed, she walked to the door as the bell rang a third time. Kreisler was serious and a little haggard; different from the day before. He had expected to be asked in. Instead, hardly saying anything, she came out on the narrow landing and closed the door behind her. Surprised, he felt for the first stair. It was eight in the evening, very dark on the staircase, and he stumbled several times. Bertha felt she could not say a single word to him. It was just as though some lawyer’s clerk had come to fetch her for a tragic disagreeable interview, and she, having been sitting fully dressed for unnecessary hours in advance, were now urging him silently and violently before her, following.
That afternoon she had received a second letter from Sorbert.
“My dear Bertha.—Excuse me for the blague I wrote the other day. There is nothing to be gained in conforming to our old convention of vagueness. I think we had better say, finally, that we will try and get used to not seeing each other, and give up our idea of marriage. Do you agree with me? As you will see, I am still here, in Paris. I am going to England this afternoon.
“Toujours affectueusement,
“Votre Sorbert.”
On the receipt of this letter—as on the former occasion a little—she first of all behaved as she would have done had Sorbert been there. She acted silent resignation and going about her work as usual for the benefit of the letter, as though it had been a living person. The reply to this, written an hour or so before Kreisler arrived, had been an exaggerated acquiescence. “Of course, Sorbert: far better that we should part!” But soon this letter began to worry her and threaten her mannerisms. She was just going to take up a book and read, when, as though something had called her attention, she put it down, got up, her head turned over her shoulder, and then suddenly flung herself on the sofa as though it had been rocks and she plunging on them from a high cliff. She sobbed until she had tired herself out.
So Kreisler and she walked up the street as though compelled by some very strange circumstances, only, to be in each other’s company.
He appeared depressed, and to have come also under the spell of some sort of meaningless duty. His punctuality suggested, too, fatigued and senseless waiting, careful timing. His temporary destination reached, he delivered himself up indifferently into her hands. He said something about its being hot. They said hardly anything, but walked on away from her house. They showed no pudeur about this peculiar state of mind and their manners.
Before they got to the Café de l’Observatoire Kreisler was attempting to make up for his lapse into strangeness, discovering, however, in a little, that he had not been alone.
Bertha looked at the clock inside as they took up their place on the quieter terrasse. When she asked herself how long she would stop she was astonished.
“Who is that, then?” Kreisler asked, after some moments of gradually changing silence, when Anastasya began to be mentioned by Bertha. He showed no interest.
This meeting had been the only event of the day for him. He had looked forward to it a little at first. But as it approached he got fidgety, began counting the time, and from being a blessed something, it became a burden. The responsibility of this meeting even seemed too much for him. He began to ask himself what useless errand he was on now? The effort of this simple affair worked lamentably on his nerves. He would not have gone, only the appointment being made and fixed in his mind, and he having felt it in the distance all day, he knew it would irk him more if he did not go. He was compelled, in short, to go, to have done with it. The worrying obsession of not having done it intimidated him. In the empty evening he would have been at the mercy of this thing-not-done, like an itch.
Bertha, for her part, recovered. Kreisler’s complete abstraction and indifference were soothing. He seemed to know as little why he was there as she, or less, and be only waiting for her to disappear again. No slight was implied. Her vanity stirred a little. She perhaps came through this to bring Fräulein Vasek on the boards as she had originally intended. As to there being anything compromising in this meeting, that might be disposed of. He did not look like suggesting another.—His manner on the day before would not have warranted complete calm. And Elsa’s description of his conduct with women had stuck in her mind. As the hour of meeting approached it helped her uneasiness. But now she felt refreshingly relieved. This was the man who had caused her fresh misgivings! When a dog or cow has passed a trembling child without any signs of mischief, the child sometimes is inclined to step after it and put forth a caressing hand.
By his manner and its reflection on her feelings he had created a situation not unlike that of the dance night. There they sat, she pressing a little, he civilly apathetic. It seemed for all the world as though Bertha had run after him somewhere and forced a meeting on him, to which he had grudgingly come. She was back in what would always be for him her characteristic rôle. And so now—and again later continually—she appeared to be following him up, to the discomfort of both, for some unguessable reason.
“No, I don’t know who you mean,” he said, replying to descriptions of Anastasya. “A tall girl you say? No, I can’t bring to mind⸺”
He liked fingering over listlessly the thought of Anastasya, but as a stranger. This subject gave him a little more interest in Bertha, just as, for her, it had a similar effect in his favour. She was immediately convinced that Fräulein Vasek had been guilty of the most offensive, self-complacent mistake.
Kreisler had not energy enough left to continue his pursuit of his bespangled dream.
Bertha now had achieved a simplification of the whole matter as follows:
Anastasya, a beautiful and swankily original girl, had arrived, bespangled and beposed, on the scene of her (Bertha’s) simple little life. She had discovered her kissing and being kissed by a ridiculous individual in the middle of the street. Bertha had disengaged herself rapidly, and explained that she had been doing that because he had awoken her pity by his miserable and half-starved appearance; that, even then, he had assaulted her, and she had been found in that delicate situation entirely independent of her own will. Anastasya’s lip had curled, and she had received these explanations in silence. Then, at their nervous repetition, she had said negligently: “You were no doubt being hugged by Herr Kreisler in the middle of the pavement, the motives the ordinary ones. You might have waited till—But that’s your own business. On the other hand, the reason of his eccentric appearance this evening was this. He had the incredible impudence to wish to make up to me. I sent him about his business, and he ‘manifested’ in the way you know.”
Reducing all the confused material of this affair to such essential situation, Bertha saw clearly the essence of her action.
Definite withdrawal from the circle of her friends was now essential. It was accomplished with as much style as possible. Kreisler provided the style.
Her instinct now was to wallow still more in the unbecoming situation in which she had been found, with defiance. She wanted to be seen with Kreisler. The meanness, strangeness, and certain déchéance or come-down, in consorting with this sorry bird, must be heightened into poetry and thick and luscious fiction. They had driven her to this. They were driving her! Very well. She was lasse! She would satisfy them. She would satisfy Sorbert. It was what he wanted, was it not?
Kreisler, of course, was the central, irreducible element in this mental pie. He was the egg-cup that kept up the crust. She tried to interest herself in Kreisler and satisfy Tarr, her friends, the whole world, more thoroughly.