“She has an innocent face, like a Madonna. But she is a prostitute. I have the proofs of it!”
“In what way has she tricked me?”
“In the way that women always trick men!”
With resentment partly and with hard picturesque levity Kreisler met Tarr’s discourse.
This solitary drinker, particularly shabby, who could be “dismissed” so easily, whom Bertha with accents of sincerity, “hated, hated!” was so different to the sort of man that Tarr expected might attract her, that he began to wonder. A certain satisfaction accompanied these observations.
For that week he saw Kreisler nearly every day. A partie à trois then began. Bertha (whom Tarr saw constantly too) did not actually refuse admittance to Kreisler (although he usually had first to knock a good many times), yet she prayed him repeatedly not to come any more. Standing always in a drooping and desperate condition before him, she did her best to avert a new outburst on his part. She sought to mollify him as much as was consistent with the most absolute refusal. Tarr, unaware of how things actually stood, seconded his successor.
Kreisler, on his side, was rendered obstinate by her often tearful refusal to have anything more whatever to do with him. He had come to regard Tarr as part of Bertha, a sort of masculine extension of her. At the café he would look out for him, and drink deeply in his presence.
“I will have her. I will have her!” he once shouted towards the end of the evening, springing up and calling loudly for the garçon. It was all Tarr could do to prevent him from going, with assurances of intercession.
His suspicions of Tarr at last awoke once more. What was the meaning of this Englishman always there? What was he there for? If it had not been for him, several times he would have rushed off and had his way. But he was always there between them. And in secret, too, probably, and away from him—Kreisler—he was working on Bertha’s feelings, and preventing her from seeing him. Tarr was anyhow the obstacle. And yet there he was, talking and palavering, and offering to act as an intermediary, and preventing him from acting. He alone was the obstacle, and yet he talked as though he were nothing to do with it, or at the most a casually interested third party. That is how Kreisler felt on his way home after having drunk a good deal. But so long as Tarr paid for drinks he staved him off his prey.