“I think he’s in great difficulties—money or something. But all I know for certain is that he was really in need of somebody⸺”
“But what makes you think, Bertha⸺” one of the girls said, hesitating.
“I let him in at Renée’s. He looked strange to me: didn’t you notice? I noticed him first there.”
Anastasya Vasek was still with them. She had not joined in the talk about Kreisler. She listened to it with attention, like a person newly arrived in some community, participating for the first time at one of their discussions on a local and stock subject. Kreisler would, from her expression, have seemed to be some topic peculiar to this gathering of people—they engaged in a characteristic occupation. Bertha she watched as one would watch a very eloquent chief airing his views at a clan-meeting.
“I felt he was really in need of some hand to help him. He seemed just like a child. He was ill, too. He can’t have eaten anything for some time. I am sure he hasn’t. He was walking slower and slower—that’s how it was we were so far behind. It was my fault, too—what happened. At least⸺”
The hungry touch was an invention of the moment. “You make him quite a romantic character. I’m afraid he has been working on your feelings, my dear girl. I didn’t see any signs of an empty stomach myself,” said Fräulein van Bencke.
“He refreshed himself extensively at the dance, in any case. You can put your mind at rest as to his present emptiness,” Renée Lipmann said.
Things languished. The Lipmann had taken her stand on boredom. She was committed to the theory of the unworthiness of this discussion. The others not feeling quite safe, Bertha’s speeches raised no more comment. It was all as though she had been putting in her little bit of abuse of the common enemy. Bertha might have interrupted with a “Yes. He outraged me too!”—and this have been met with a dreary, acquiescing silence!
She was exculpating herself, then (heavily), at his expense. The air of ungenerosity this had was displeasing to her.
The certain lowering of the vitality of the party when she came on the scene with her story offended her. There should have been noise. It was not quite the lifelessness of scepticism. But there was an uncomfortable family likeness to the manner of people listening to discourses they do not believe. She persevered. She met with the same objectionable flaccid and indifferent opposition. Her intervention had killed the topic, and they seemed waiting till she had ended her war-dance on its corpse.