CHAPTER VII
The sight of Bertha’s twistings and turnings, her undignified rigmarole, had irritated Anastasya. This was why she had brutally announced, as though to cut short all that, that Kreisler’s behaviour was due simply to the fact that he fancied himself in love with her, Anastasya. “He was not worrying about Fräulein Lunken. He was in love with me;” the statement amounted to that. There was no disdainful repudiation or self-reference in her statement; only a piece of information.
Bertha’s intuitions and simplifications had not been without basis. This “hostile version” had contained a certain amount of hostile intention.
But Anastasya had another reason for this immodest explicitness. She personally liked Kreisler. The spectacle of Bertha excusing herself, and in the process putting Kreisler in a more absurd and unsatisfactory light, annoyed her extremely.
How could Tarr consort with Bertha, she questioned? Her aristocratic woman’s sense did not appreciate the taste for a slut, a miss or a suburban queen. The apache, the coster girl, fisher-lass, all that had character, oh, yes. Her romanticism, in fact, was of the same order as Butcher’s only better.
Two days after the duel she met Tarr in the street. They agreed to meet at Lejeune’s for dinner.
The table at which she had first come across Kreisler was where they sat.
“You knew Soltyk, didn’t you?” he asked her.
“Yes. It was a terrible affair. Poor Soltyk!”
She looked at Tarr doubtfully. A certain queer astonishment in her face struck Tarr. It was the only sign of movement beneath. She spoke with a businesslike calm about his death. There was no sign of feeling or search for feeling.