All her hope centred in his laziness. She watched his weaknesses with a loving eye. He had much to say about his under-nature. She listened attentively.
“It is the most dangerous quality of all to possess,” and he would sententiously add—“only the best people possess it, in common with the obscure and humble. It is like a great caravanserai in which scores of people congregate. It is a disguise in which such a one, otherwise Pasha, circulates among unembarrassed men. He brings away stores of wisdom, with much diversion by the way.” He saw, however, the danger of these facilities. The Pasha had been given a magic mask of humbleness. But the inner nature seemed flowing equally to the mask and the unmasked magnificence. He was as yet unformed, but wished to form wholly Pasha. This under-nature’s chief use was as a precious villégiature for his energy. Bertha was the country wench the more exalted incarnation had met while on its holidays, or, wandering idle Khalife, in some concourse of his surreptitious life.
His three days’ unannounced and uncommented “leave” had made Bertha very nervous. She suffered from the incomplete, unsymmetrical appearance her life now presented. Everything spread out palpably before her, that she could arrange like a roomful of furniture, was how she liked it. Even in her present shakedown of a life, Tarr had noticed the way he was treated as material for “arrangement.” But she had never been able to indulge this idiosyncrasy much in the past. This was not the first time that she had found herself in a similar position. Hence her certain air of being at home in these casual quarters, which belied her.
The detested temporary dwelling in the last few days had been given a new coat of sombre thought. Found in accidental quarters, had she not been over-delicate in not suggesting an immediate move into something more homelike and permanent. People would leave her there for the rest of her natural life unless she were a little brutal and got herself out somehow. No shadow of un-nice feeling ever tainted her abject genuineness. Cunning efforts to retain him abounded. But she never blamed or turned on him. She had given herself long ago, at once, without ceremony. She awaited his thanks or no thanks simply.
But the itch of action was on her.
Tarr’s absences were like light. His presence was a shadow. They were both stormy. The last absence had illuminated the undiscipline of her life. During the revealing luridness, she got to work. Reconstruction was begun. She had trusted too much in Fate and obedient waiting Hymen.
So Bertha had a similar ferment to Tarr’s.
Anger with herself, dreary appetite for action, would help her over farewells. She was familiar enough with them, too, in thought. She would not stir a hand to change things. He must do that. She would only facilitate things in all directions for him. The new energy delivered attack after attack upon her hope. She saw nothing beyond Tarr but measures of utility. The “heart” had always been her most cherished ornament. That Tarr would take with him, as she would keep his ring and the books he had given her. She could not now get it back for the asking. She did not want it! She must indulge her mania for tasteful arrangement in future without this. Or rather what heart she had left would be rather like one of those salmon-coloured, corrugated gas office-stoves, compared to a hearth with a fire of pine.
Tarr had not brought his indifference there to make it play tricks, perform little feats. Nor did he wish to press it into inhuman actions. It was a humane “indifference,” essentially. So with reluctance he got up, and went over to her.