The bell rang. She stood up in one movement and stared towards the door. She looked as though she were waiting for the bell to ring two or three times to find resolution in that, one way or the other. It rang a second and third time. She did not know how much persistence would draw her to the door. But she knew that any definite show of energy would overcome her. Was it Elsa? She had lighted her lamp, and her visitor could therefore have seen that she was at home.
Bertha went to the door at length with affected alacrity, in a pretence of not having heard the bell before, and opened it sharply. Kreisler was there. The opening of the door had been like the tearing of a characterless mask off a face. Had he not been looking at her through it all the time? There did not seem room for them where they were standing. He looked to her like a great terrifying poster, cut out on the melodramatic stairway. She remained stone-still in front of him with a pinched expression, as though about to burst out crying, and something deprecating in her paralysed gesture, like a child. There was an analogy to a laugh struck dead on a child’s face at a rebuff, souring and twisting all the features.
Caricatured and enlarged to her eyes, she wanted to laugh for a moment. The surprise was complete. “What, what⸺” Her mind formed his image, rather like a man compelled to photograph a ghost. Kreisler! It was as though the world were made up of various animals, each of a different kind and physique even, and this were the animal Kreisler, whose name alone conjured up certain peculiar dangerous habits. A wild world, not of uniform men and women, but of very divergent and strangely living animals—Kreisler, Lipmann, Tarr. This man, about to speak to her again, on the same square foot of ground with her: he was not an apparition from any remote Past, but from a Past almost a Present, a half-hour old, much more startling. He had the too raw and too new colours of an image hardly digested, much less faded. When she had last seen him she had been still in the sphere of an intense agitation. His ominous and sudden appearance, so hardly out of that, seemed to swallow up the space and time in between. It was like the chilly return of a circling storm. She had imagined that it depended on her to see him or not, that he was pensive except when persistently approached. But here he was, this time, at last, following!
CHAPTER X
He took a step forward, her room evidently his destination.
“Mistvich!” Bertha said, at the same time retreating into the passage-way.—“Go!”
Got into the room, he did not seem to know what next to do. So far he had been evidently quite clear as to his purpose. He had been feeling the same necessity as her—he, to see his victim. He had not known what he wanted with her, but the obvious pretext and road for the satisfaction of this impulse was the seeking of pardon.
She had a moment before felt that she must see him again, at once, before going further with her life.—He, more vague but more energetic, had come at the end of twenty minutes. They were now together, quite tongue-tied. Once he was there, the pretext appeared unnecessary. The real reason might be found. The real reason no doubt was an intuition not to lose her absolutely, the wisdom of his appetite counselling.