Bertha was in her little kitchen. It was near the front door. Next to it was her studio or salon, then bedroom: along a passage at right angles the rooms rented by Clara Goenthner, her friend.
The letter had been laid on the table, by the side of which stood the large gas-stove, like a safe, its gas stars, on top, blasting away luridly at pans and saucepans with Bertha’s breakfast. While busying herself with eggs and coffee, she gazed over her arm reflectively at the letter. It was a couple of inches too far away for her to be able to read it.
The postman had come ten minutes before. It was now four days after the dance, and since she had last seen Tarr. She had “felt” he would come on that particular morning. The belief in woman’s intuition is not confined, of course, to men. “Could he have heard anything of the Kreisler incident?” she had asked herself. The possibility of this was terrifying. But perhaps it would be as well if he had. It might at any future time crop up. And what things had happened when other older things had come to light suddenly! She would tell him if he had not already heard. He should hear it from her. The great boulevard sacrifice of the other night had appeared folly, long ago. But peculiarly free from any form of spite—she did not feel unkindly towards Kreisler.
So Sorbert was expected to breakfast, on the authority of her intuition. Bread was being fried in fat. What manner of man would appear, how far renseigné—or if not informed, still all their other difficulties were there inevitably enough? Experience, however, suggested such breakfast as pleased him. Could fried toast and honey play a part in such troubles? Ah, yes. Troubles often reduced themselves to fried bread and honey: they could sow troubles, why not help to quell troubles? But she had had a second intuition that he knew. Not knowing how stormy their interview might be she neglected no minute precautions—and these were the touching ones—any more than the sailor would neglect to stow away even the smallest of his sails, I suppose, at the sulky approach of a simoom. The simoom, however, had left her becalmed and taken the train for Dieppe instead of coming in her direction.
CHAPTER III
Bertha went on turning the bread over in the pan, taking the butter from its paper and dropping it into its dish: rinsing and wiping a knife or two, regulating the gas. Frequent truculent exclamations spluttered out if anything went wrong. “Verdammtes Streichholz!” “Donnerwetter!” She used the oaths of Goethe. One eyebrow was raised in humorous reflective irritation. She would flatten the letter out and bend down to examine a sentence, stopping her cooking for a moment.
“Sâlot!” she exclaimed, after having read the letter, all through again, putting it down. She turned with coquettish contemptuousness to her frying-pan. “Sâlot” was, with her, a favourite epithet. Clara’s door opened, and Bertha crumpled the letter into her pocket. Clara entered sleepy-eyed and affecting ill-humour. Her fat body was a softly distributed burden, which she carried with the aplomb and indifference of habit. She had a gracefully bumpy forehead, a nice whistling mouth, soft, good and discreet orbs. Her days were passed in the library of the Place Saint Sulpice.
“Ach, lasse! lass mich doch! Get on with your cooking!” she exclaimed as Bertha began her customary sociable and playful greeting. Bertha always was conscious of her noise, of shallowness and worldliness, with this shrewd, indifferent, slow, and monosyllabic bookworm. She wanted to caper round it, inviting it to cumbrous play, like a small lively dog around a heavy one. She was much more femme as she said, but aware that Clara did not regard this as an attainment. Being femme had taken up so much of her energy and life that she could not expect to be so complete in other ways as Clara. With this other woman, who was much less “woman” than she, she always felt impelled to ultra-feminine behaviour. She was childish to the top of her bent. This was insulting to the other: it showed too clearly Bertha’s way of regarding her as not so much femme as herself. Clara felt this and would occasionally show impatience at Bertha’s skittishness: a gruff man-like impatience entering grimly but imperturbably into the man-part, but claiming at the same time its prerogatives.