Was this to be explained as the boulevard incident had been explained by her? Was she to proceed with her explanations and her part? But this time it would be to herself that the explanations would have to be made. That was a different audience; a dim feeling found its way into her, with a sort of sickening malice. She had a glimpse too of Kreisler’s Bertha—the woman that you couldn’t shake off, who, for some unimaginable reason, was always hanging on to you. She even had the strength to admit, distantly, the logic of this act—what had happened to her—still more disgusting and hateful than its illogic. The only thing that might have been found to mitigate, in some sense, the dreary, sudden madness of it, was that she felt practically nothing at all for Kreisler. It was like some violent accident of the high road, the brutality of a tramp. And—as that too would—it partook of the unreality of nightmare.
A few minutes before he had been tranquilly working away at a drawing, she sitting in some pose she had taken up with quick ostentatious intelligence. Startled at his request to draw her shoulders she had immediately condemned this feeling. She had come to sit for him; the mere idea that there was any danger was so repulsive that she immediately consented. He was an artist, too, of course. While he was working they had not talked. Then he had put down his paper and chalk, stretched, and said:
“Your arms are like bananas!” A shiver of warning had penetrated her at this. But still he was an artist: it was natural—even inevitable—that he should compare her arms to bananas.
“Oh! I hope you’ve made a good drawing. May I see?” She intended to emphasize the reason of this exposure.
He had got up, and before she knew what he was doing caught hold of her above the elbow, chafing her arm, saying:
“You have pins and needles, Fräulein?” The “Fräulein” used here had some disquieting sound. She drew herself away, now serious and on the defence.
“No, thank you. Now I will put my blouse on, if you have finished.”
They had looked at each other uncertainly for a moment, he with a flushed rather silly fixed smile. She was afraid, somehow, to move away.
“Let me rub your arm.” Then with the fury of a man waking up to some insult, he had seized her. Her tardy words, furious struggling and all her contradictory emotions disappeared in the whirlpool towards which they had, with a strange deliberateness and yet aimlessness, been steering.
He was standing there at the window now as though wishing to pretend that he had done nothing; she “had been dreaming things” merely. The long silence and monotony of the posing had prepared her for the strangeness now. It had been the other extreme out of which she had been flung and into which, at present, she was again flung. She saw side by side and unconnected the silent figure drawing her and the other one full of blindness and violence. Then there were two other figures, one getting up from the chair, yawning, and the present lazy one at the window—four in all, that she could not bring together somehow, each in a complete compartment of time of its own. It would be impossible to make the present idle figure at the window interest itself in these others. A loathsome, senseless event, of no meaning, naturally, to that figure there. It had quietly, indifferently, talked: it had drawn: it had suddenly flung itself upon her and taken her, and now it was standing idly there. It could do all these things. It appeared to her in a series of precipitate states. It resembled in this a switchback, rising slowly, in a steady insouciant way to the top of an incline, and then plunging suddenly down the other. Or a mastiff’s head turning indolently for some seconds and then snapping at a fly, detached again the next moment. Her fury and animal hostility did not last more than a few minutes. She had come there, got what she did not expect, and now must go away again. There was positively nothing more to be said to Kreisler. She had spasmodic returns of raging. They did not pass her dourly active mind. There never had been anything to say to him. He was a mad beast.