Yet could she sit on there, say nothing, and let the others in the course of time drop the subject? They had not turned to her in any way for further information or as to one peculiarly susceptible of furnishing interesting data. Maintaining this silence was a solution. But it would be even bolder than her first plan. This would be a still more vigorous, more insolent development of her plan of confessing—in her way. But it rather daunted her. They might easily mistake, if they pleased, her silence for the silence of acknowledged, very eccentric, guilt. The subject was drawing perilously near the point where it would be dropped. Fräulein Lipmann was summing up, and doing the final offices of the law over the condemned and already unspeakable Kreisler. No time was to be lost. The breaking in now involved inevitable conflict of a sort with Fräulein Lipmann. She was going to “say a word for Kreisler” after Fräulein Lipmann’s words. (How much better it would have been before!)
So at this point, looking up from the table, Bertha (listened to with uncomfortable unanimity and promptness) began. She was smiling with an affectedly hesitating, timid face, smiling in a flat strained way, the neighbourhood of her eyes suffused slightly with blood, her lips purring the words a little:
“Renée, I feel that I ought to say something—” Her smile was that made with a screwing up of the eyes and slow flowering of the lips, noticed on some people’s faces when some snobbery they cannot help has to be allowed egress from their mouth.
Renée Lipmann turned towards her composedly. This interruption would require argument; consciousness of the peculiar nature of Bertha’s qualifications was not displayed.
“I had not meant to say anything—about what happened to me, that is. I, as a matter of fact, have something particularly to complain of. But I had nothing to say about it. Only, since you are all discussing it, I thought you might not quite understand if I didn’t—I don’t think, Renée, that Herr Kreisler was quite in his right mind this evening. He doesn’t strike me as méchant. I don’t think he was really in any way accountable for his actions. I don’t, of course, know any more about him than you do. This evening was the first time I’ve ever exchanged more than a dozen words with him in my life.”
This was said in the sing-song of quick parentheses, eyebrows lifted, and with little gestures of the hand.
“He caught hold of me—like this.” She made a quick snatching gesture at Fräulein Lipmann, who did not like this attempt at intimidation or velvety defiance. “He was kissing me when you came up,” turning to one or two of the others. This was said with dramatic suddenness and “determination,” as it were: the “kissing” said with a sort of deliberate sententious brutality, and luscious disparting of the lips.
“We couldn’t make out whatever was happening⸺” one of them began.
“When you came up I felt quite dazed. I didn’t feel that it was a man kissing me. He was mad. I’m sure he was. It was like being mauled by a brute.” She shuddered, with rather rolling eyes. “He was a brute to-night—not a man at all. He didn’t know what he was doing.”
They were all silent, answerless at this unexpected view of the case. It only differed from theirs in supposing that he was not always a brute. She had spoken quickly and drew up short. Their silence became conscious and septic. They appeared as though they had not expected her to stop speaking, and were like people surprised naked, with no time to cover themselves.