CHAPTER VII
The sight of Bertha’s twistings and turnings, her undignified rigmarole, had irritated Anastasya. This was why she had brutally announced, as though to cut short all that, that Kreisler’s behaviour was due simply to the fact that he fancied himself in love with her, Anastasya. “He was not worrying about Fräulein Lunken. He was in love with me;” the statement amounted to that. There was no disdainful repudiation or self-reference in her statement; only a piece of information.
Bertha’s intuitions and simplifications had not been without basis. This “hostile version” had contained a certain amount of hostile intention.
But Anastasya had another reason for this immodest explicitness. She personally liked Kreisler. The spectacle of Bertha excusing herself, and in the process putting Kreisler in a more absurd and unsatisfactory light, annoyed her extremely.
How could Tarr consort with Bertha, she questioned? Her aristocratic woman’s sense did not appreciate the taste for a slut, a miss or a suburban queen. The apache, the coster girl, fisher-lass, all that had character, oh, yes. Her romanticism, in fact, was of the same order as Butcher’s only better.
Two days after the duel she met Tarr in the street. They agreed to meet at Lejeune’s for dinner.
The table at which she had first come across Kreisler was where they sat.
“You knew Soltyk, didn’t you?” he asked her.
“Yes. It was a terrible affair. Poor Soltyk!”
She looked at Tarr doubtfully. A certain queer astonishment in her face struck Tarr. It was the only sign of movement beneath. She spoke with a businesslike calm about his death. There was no sign of feeling or search for feeling.
She refused to regard herself as the “woman in the affair.” She knew people referred to her as that. Soltyk possessed a rather ridiculous importance, being dead; a cadaveric severity in the meaning of the image, Soltyk, for her. The fact was bigger than the person. He was like a boy in his father’s clothes.
Kreisler, on the other hand, she abominated. To have killed, he to have killed!—and to have killed some one she knew! It was a hostile act to bring death so near her. She knew it was hostile. She hoped he might never come back to Paris. She did not want to meet Kreisler.
But these feelings were not allowed to transpire. She recognized them as personal. She was so fastidious that she refrained from using them in discussing the affair when they would have given a suspect readiness and “sincerity” to her expression. She rather went to the other extreme.
“They say Soltyk was not killed in a duel,” Tarr continued. “Kreisler is to be charged with murder, or at least manslaughter.”
“Yes, I have heard that Kreisler shot him before he was ready or something⸺”
“I heard that he was shot when he was unarmed. There was no duel at all.”
“Oh, that is not the version I have heard.”
She did not seem revengeful about her friend.
“I was Kreisler’s second for half an hour,” Tarr said in a minute.
“How do you mean, for half an hour?” She was undemonstrative but polite.
“I happened to be there, and was asked to help him until somebody else could be found. I did not suspect him, I may say, of meaning to go to such lengths.”
“What was the reason of it all—do you know?”
“According to Kreisler, they had done some smacking earlier in the day⸺”
“Yes. Herr Kreisler met Soltyk and myself. I think that Soltyk then was a little in the wrong.”
“I dare say.”
Tarr’s sympathies were all with Kreisler. He had never been attracted by Poles, and as such rather than a Russian he thought of Soltyk. Deep square races he preferred. And Kreisler was a clumsy and degenerate atavism bringing a peculiarity into too elastic life.
Some of Tarr’s absurd friendliness for Bertha flowed over on to her fellow-countryman.
Had Anastasya more of a hand in the duel than he would naturally believe? Her indifference to Soltyk’s death, and her favouring Kreisler, almost pointed to something unusual. Kreisler’s ways were still mysterious!
That was all they said about the duel. As they were finishing the meal, after turning her head towards the entrance door, Anastasya remarked, with mock concern:
“There is your fiancée. She seems rather upset.”
Tarr looked towards the door. Bertha’s white face was close up against one of the narrow panes, above the lace curtain. There were four and a half feet of window on either side of the door. There were so many objects and lights in the front well of the shop that her face would not be much noticed in the corner it had chosen.
Her eyes were round, vacant, and dark, the features very white and heavy, the mouth steadily open in painful lines. As he looked the face drew gradually away, and then disappeared into the melodramatic night. It was a large trapped fly on the pane. It withdrew with a glutinous, sweet slowness. The heavy white jowl seemed pulling itself out of some fluid trap where it had been caught like a weighty body.
Tarr knew how the pasty flesh would nestle against the furs, the shoulders swing, the legs move just as much as was necessary for progress, with no movement of the hips. Everything about her in the chilly night would give an impression of warmth and system. The sleek cloth fitting the square shoulders tightly, the underclothes carefully tight as well, the breath from her nostrils the slight steam from a contented machine.
He caught Anastasya’s eye and smiled.
“Your fiancée is pretty,” she said, pretending that was the answer to the smile.
“She’s not my fiancée. But she’s a pretty girl.”
“Oh, I understood you were engaged⸺”
“No.”
“It’s no good,” he thought. But he must spare Bertha in future such discomforting sights.