With a little scratching (as the concierge pushed it) with the malignity of a little, quiet, sleek animal, the letter from Germany crept under the door the next morning, and lay there through the silence of the next hour or two, until Kreisler woke. Succeeding to his first brutal farewells to his dreams, no hopes leapt on his body, a magnificent stallion’s, uselessly refreshed. Soon he saw the letter. It lay there quiet, unimportant, rather matter of fact and sly.

Kreisler felt it an indignity to have to open it. Until his dressing was finished, it remained where it was. He might have been making some one wait. Then he took it up, and opening it, drew out between his forefinger and thumb, the cheque. This he deposited with as much contempt as possible, and a “phui” on the edge of his washhand stand. Then he turned to the letter. He read the first few lines, pumping at a cigarette, reducing it mathematically to ash. Cold fury entered his mind with a bound at the first words. They were the final words giving notice of a positive stoppage of supplies. This month’s money was sent to enable him to settle up his affairs and come to Germany at once.

He read the first three lines over and over again, going no further, although the news begun in these first lines was developed throughout the two pages of the letter. Then he put it down beside the cheque, and crushing it under his fist, said monotonously to himself, without much more feeling than the sound of the word contained: “Schwein, Schwein, Schwein!”

He got up, and pressed his hand on his forehead; it was wet: he put his hands in his pockets and these came into contact with a cinquante centime piece. He took them out again slowly, went to his box and underneath an old dressing-gown found writing paper and envelopes. Then, referring to his father’s letter for the date, he wrote the following lines:

Within half an hour this was posted. Then he went and had breakfast with more tranquillity and relish than he had known for some days. He sat up stiffly like a dilapidated but apparently in some way satisfied rooster at his cafÉ table. This life was now settled, pressure ceased. He had come to a conventional and respectable decision. His conduct the night before, for instance, had not been at all respectable. Death—like a monastery—was before him, with equivalents of a slight shaving of the head merely, a handful of vows, some desultory farewells, very restricted space, but none the worse for that; with something like the disagreeableness of a dive for one not used to deep water. But he had got into life, anyhow, by mistake; il s’Était trompÉ de porte. His life might almost have been regarded as a long and careful preparation for voluntary death. The nightmare of Death, as it haunted the imaginations of the Egyptians, had here been conjured in another way. Death was not to be overcome with embalmings and Pyramids, or fought within the souls of children. It was confronted as some other more uncompromising race (and yet also haunted by this terrible idea) might have been.

Instead of rearing smooth faces of immense stone against it, you imagine an unparalleled immobility in life, a race of statues, throwing flesh in Death’s path instead of basalt. Kreisler would have undoubtedly been a high priest among this people.

CHAPTER II

In a large fluid but nervous handwriting, the following letter lay, read, as it were: Bertha still keeping her eye on it from a distance:

He spelt his name with two T’s because Bertha had never disciplined herself to suppress final consonants.

Bertha was in her little kitchen. It was near the front door. Next to it was her studio or salon, then bedroom: along a passage at right angles the rooms rented by Clara Goenthner, her friend.

The letter had been laid on the table, by the side of which stood the large gas-stove, like a safe, its gas stars, on top, blasting away luridly at pans and saucepans with Bertha’s breakfast. While busying herself with eggs and coffee, she gazed over her arm reflectively at the letter. It was a couple of inches too far away for her to be able to read it.

The postman had come ten minutes before. It was now four days after the dance, and since she had last seen Tarr. She had “felt” he would come on that particular morning. The belief in woman’s intuition is not confined, of course, to men. “Could he have heard anything of the Kreisler incident?” she had asked herself. The possibility of this was terrifying. But perhaps it would be as well if he had. It might at any future time crop up. And what things had happened when other older things had come to light suddenly! She would tell him if he had not already heard. He should hear it from her. The great boulevard sacrifice of the other night had appeared folly, long ago. But peculiarly free from any form of spite—she did not feel unkindly towards Kreisler.

So Sorbert was expected to breakfast, on the authority of her intuition. Bread was being fried in fat. What manner of man would appear, how far renseignÉ—or if not informed, still all their other difficulties were there inevitably enough? Experience, however, suggested such breakfast as pleased him. Could fried toast and honey play a part in such troubles? Ah, yes. Troubles often reduced themselves to fried bread and honey: they could sow troubles, why not help to quell troubles? But she had had a second intuition that he knew. Not knowing how stormy their interview might be she neglected no minute precautions—and these were the touching ones—any more than the sailor would neglect to stow away even the smallest of his sails, I suppose, at the sulky approach of a simoom. The simoom, however, had left her becalmed and taken the train for Dieppe instead of coming in her direction.

CHAPTER III

Bertha went on turning the bread over in the pan, taking the butter from its paper and dropping it into its dish: rinsing and wiping a knife or two, regulating the gas. Frequent truculent exclamations spluttered out if anything went wrong. “Verdammtes Streichholz!” “Donnerwetter!” She used the oaths of Goethe. One eyebrow was raised in humorous reflective irritation. She would flatten the letter out and bend down to examine a sentence, stopping her cooking for a moment.

“SÂlot!” she exclaimed, after having read the letter, all through again, putting it down. She turned with coquettish contemptuousness to her frying-pan. “SÂlot” was, with her, a favourite epithet. Clara’s door opened, and Bertha crumpled the letter into her pocket. Clara entered sleepy-eyed and affecting ill-humour. Her fat body was a softly distributed burden, which she carried with the aplomb and indifference of habit. She had a gracefully bumpy forehead, a nice whistling mouth, soft, good and discreet orbs. Her days were passed in the library of the Place Saint Sulpice.

“Ach, lasse! lass mich doch! Get on with your cooking!” she exclaimed as Bertha began her customary sociable and playful greeting. Bertha always was conscious of her noise, of shallowness and worldliness, with this shrewd, indifferent, slow, and monosyllabic bookworm. She wanted to caper round it, inviting it to cumbrous play, like a small lively dog around a heavy one. She was much more femme as she said, but aware that Clara did not regard this as an attainment. Being femme had taken up so much of her energy and life that she could not expect to be so complete in other ways as Clara. With this other woman, who was much less “woman” than she, she always felt impelled to ultra-feminine behaviour. She was childish to the top of her bent. This was insulting to the other: it showed too clearly Bertha’s way of regarding her as not so much femme as herself. Clara felt this and would occasionally show impatience at Bertha’s skittishness: a gruff man-like impatience entering grimly but imperturbably into the man-part, but claiming at the same time its prerogatives.

Clara had had no known love affairs. She regarded Bertha, sometimes, with much curiosity. This “woman’s temperament,” so complacently displayed, soothed and tickled her.

“Clara, Soler has told me to send a picture to the Salon d’Automne.”

“Oh!” Clara was not impressed by “success.” She was preparing her own breakfast and jostled Bertha, usurping more than half the table. Bertha, delighted, retorted with trills of shrill indignation and by recapturing the positions lost by her plates. Her breakfast ready she carried it into her room, pretending to be offended with Clara.

Breakfast over she wrote to Tarr. The letter was written quite easily and directly. She was so sure in the convention of her passion that there was no scratching out or hesitation. “I feel so far away from you.” There was nothing more to be said; as it had been said often before, it came easily and promptly with the pen. All the feeling that could find expression was fluent, large and assured, like the handwriting, and went at once into these conventional forms.

“Let Englishmen thank their stars—the good stars of the Northmen and early seamen—that they have such stammering tongues and such a fierce horror of grandiloquence. They are still primitive and true in their passions, because they are afraid of them, like children. The shocks go on underneath; they trust their unconsciousness. The odious facility of the South, whether it be their, at bottom, very shrewdly regulated anger (l’art de s’engueuler) or their picture post card perfection of amorous expressiveness; such things these Island mutterers and mutes have escaped. But worst of all is the cult of the ‘Temperament,’ all the accent on that poor last syllable, whose home is that dubious middle Empire, so incorrigibly banal. The lacerating and tireless pricking and pushing of this hapless ‘temperament’ is a more harrowing spectacle than the use of dogs in Belgium or women in England.”

This passage, from an article in the English Review, Tarr had shown to Bertha with great pleasure. Bertha had a good share of impoverished and overworked temperament, but in a very genial fashion. It had not, with her, grown crooked and vicious with this constant ill-treatment. It was strenuous but friendly. It served in any case a mistress surprisingly disinterested and gentle.

On the receipt of Tarr’s letter she had felt, to begin with, very indignant and depressed at his having had the strength to go away without coming to see her. So her letter began on that complaint. He had at last, this was certain, gone away, with the first likelihood of permanence since they had known each other. Despite her long preparation for this, and her being even deliberately the cause of it, she was mortified and at the same time unhappy at the sight of her success.

The Kreisler business had been more for herself than anything, for her own private edification. She would free Sorbert by an act, in a sort of impalpable way. It was not destined as yet for publicity. The fact of the women surprising Kreisler and her on the boulevard had put everything at once out of perspective, damaged her illusion of sacrifice. Compelled at once to be practical again, find excuses, repudiate immediately what she had done before she had been able to enjoy or digest it, was like a man being snatched away from table, the last mouthful hardly swallowed. She was the person surprised before some work doing is completed—it still in a rudimentary unshowable state. For once Tarr was not only in the right, but, to her irritation, he had proofs, splendid ocular proofs, a cloud of witnesses.

To end nobly, on her own initiative, had been her idea; to make a last sacrifice to Sorbert in leaving him irrevocably, as she had sacrificed her feelings all along in allowing their engagement to drag suspiciously on, in making her position slightly uncomfortable with her friends (and these social things meant so much to her in addition). And now, instead, everything had been turned into questionable meanness and ridicule; when she had intended to behave with the maximum of swagger, she suddenly found herself relegated to a skulking and unfortunate plane.

Considerations about Fate beset her. Everything was hopelessly unreliable. The best thing to do was to do nothing. She was not her usual energetic too spiritually bustling self. She wrote her letter quite easily and as usual, but she did not (very unusually) believe in its efficacy. She even wrote it a trifle more easily than usual for that reason.

It was only a momentary rebellion against the ease with which this protest was done. Perhaps had it not been for the fascination of habit, then some more adequate words would have been written. His letter had come. Empty and futile she had done her task, answered as she must do; “As we all must do!” she would have thought, with an exclamation mark after it. She sealed up her letter and addressed it.

In the drawer where she was putting Sorbert’s latest letter away were some old ones. A letter of the year before she took out and read. With its two sentences it was more cruel and had more meaning than the one she had just received: “Put off that little Darmstadt woman. Let’s be alone.”

It was a note she had received on the eve of an expedition to a village near Paris. She had promised to take a girl down with them, to show her the place, its hotel and other possibilities—she had stayed there once or twice herself. The Darmstadt girl had not been taken. Sorbert and she had spent the night at an inn on the outskirts of the forest. They had come back in the train next day without speaking, having quarrelled somehow or other in the inn. Chagrin and regret for him struck her a series of sharp blows. She started crying again suddenly, quickly, and vehemently as though surprised by some thought.

The whole morning her work worried her, dusting and arranging. She experienced a revolt against her ceaseless orderliness, a very grave thing in such an exemplary prisoner. At four o’clock in the afternoon, as often happened, she was still dawdling about in her dressing-gown and had not yet had lunch.

The femme de mÉnage came at about eight in the morning, doing Clara’s rooms first. Bertha was in the habit of discussing politics with Madame Vannier. Sorbert too was discussed.

“Mademoiselle est triste?” this good woman said, noticing her dejection. “C’est encore Monsieur Sorbert qui vous a fait du chagrin?”

“Oui madame, c’est un SÂlot!” Bertha replied, half crying.

“Oh, il ne faut pas dire Ça, mademoiselle. Comment, il est un SÂlot?” Madame Vannier worked silently with soft quiet thud of felt slippers. She appeared to regard work as not without dignity. Bertha was playing at life. She admired and liked her as an emblem of Fortune; she respected herself as an emblem of Misfortune. Madame Vannier was given the letter to post at two.

CHAPTER IV

Bertha’s friends looked for her elsewhere, nowadays, than at her rooms. Tarr was always likely to be found there in impolite possession. She made them come as often as she could; her coquetry as regards her carefully arranged rooms needed satisfaction. She suffered in the midst of her lonely tastefulness. But Tarr had certainly made these rooms a rather deserted place. Since the dance none of her women friends had come. She had spent an hour or two with them at the restaurant.

At the dance she had kept rather apart. Dazed, after a shock, and needing self-collection, was the line sketched. Her account of things could not, of course, be blurted out anyhow. It had to grow out of circumstances. It, of course, must be given. She had not yet given it. But haste must be avoided. For its particular type, as long a time as possible must be allowed to elapse before she spoke of what had happened. It must almost seem as though she were going to say nothing; sudden, perfect, and very impressive silence on her part. To accustom their minds to her silence would make speech all the more imposing, when it came. At a cafÉ after the dance her account of the thing flowered grudgingly, drawn forth by the ambient heat of the discussion.

They were as yet at the stage of exclamations, no malveillant theory yet having been definitely formed about Kreisler.

“He came there on purpose to create a disturbance. Whatever for, I wonder!”

“I expect it was the case of FrÄulein Fogs over again.” (Kreisler had, on a former occasion, paid his court to a lady of this name, with resounding unsuccess.)

“If I’d have known what was going on, I’d have dealt with him!” said one of the men.

“Didn’t you say he told a pack of lies, RenÉe??”

FrÄulein Lipmann had been sitting, her eyes fixed on a tram drawn up near by, watching the people evacuating the central platform, and others restocking it. The discussion and exclamations of her friends did not, it would appear, interest her. It would have been, no doubt, scandalously unnatural if Kreisler had not been execrated. But anything they could say was negligible and inadequate to cope with the “Gemeine alte Sau.” The tameness of their reflections on and indignation against Kreisler when compared with the terrific corroding of this epithet (known only to her) made her sulky and impatient.

Applied to in this way directly about the lies, she turned to the others and said, as it were interposing herself regally at last in their discussion:

“Ecoutez—listen,” she began, leaning towards the greater number of them, seeming to say, “It’s really simple enough, as simple as it is disagreeable: I am going to settle the question for you. Let us then discuss it no more.” It would seem a great effort to do this, too, her lips a little white with fatigue, her eyes heavy with disgust at it all: fighting these things, she was coming to their assistance.

“Listen: we none of us know anything about that man”; this was an unfortunate beginning for Bertha, as thoughts, if not eyes, would spring in her direction no doubt, and FrÄulein Lipmann even paused as though about to qualify this: “we none of us, I think, want to know anything about him. Therefore why this idiot—the last sort of beer-drinking brute—treated us to his bestial and—and—wretched foolery?”

FrÄulein Lipmann shrugged her shoulders with blank, contemptuous indifference. “I assure you it doesn’t interest me the least little bit in the world to know why such brutes behave like that at certain times. I don’t see any mystery. It seems odd to you that Herr Kreisler should be an offensive brute?” She eyed them a moment. “To me NOT!”

“We do him too much honour by discussing him, that’s certain,” said one of them. This was in the spirit of FrÄulein Lipmann’s words, but was not accepted by her just then as she had something further to say.

“When one is attacked, one does not spend one’s time in considering why one is attacked, but in defending oneself. I am just fresh from the souillures de ce brute. If you knew the words he had addressed to me.”

Ekhart was getting very red, his eyes were shining, and he was moving rhythmically in his chair something like a steadily rising sea.

“Where does he live, FrÄulein Lipmann?” he asked.

“Nein, Ekhart. One could not allow anybody to embroil themselves with that useless brute.” The “Nein, Ekhart” had been drawled fondly at once, as though that contingency had been weighed, and could be brushed aside lightly in advance. It implied as well an “of course” for his red and dutiful face. “I myself, if I meet him anywhere, shall deal with him better than you could. This is one of the occasions for a woman?”

So Bertha’s story had come uncomfortably and difficultly to flower. She wished she had not waited so long. But it was impossible now, the matter put in the light that FrÄulein Lipmann’s intervention had caused, to delay any longer. She was, there was no doubt about it, vaguely responsible for Kreisler. It was obviously her duty to explain him. And now FrÄulein Lipmann had just put an embargo on explanations. There were to be no more explanations. In Kreisleriana her apport was very important: much more definite than the indignation or hypothesis of any of the rest. She had been nearer to him, anyway. She had waited too long, until the sea had risen too high, or rather in a direction extremely unfavourable for launching her contribution. It must be in some way, too, a defence of Kreisler. This would be a very delicate matter to handle.

Yet could she sit on there, say nothing, and let the others in the course of time drop the subject? They had not turned to her in any way for further information or as to one peculiarly susceptible of furnishing interesting data. Maintaining this silence was a solution. But it would be even bolder than her first plan. This would be a still more vigorous, more insolent development of her plan of confessing—in her way. But it rather daunted her. They might easily mistake, if they pleased, her silence for the silence of acknowledged, very eccentric, guilt. The subject was drawing perilously near the point where it would be dropped. FrÄulein Lipmann was summing up, and doing the final offices of the law over the condemned and already unspeakable Kreisler. No time was to be lost. The breaking in now involved inevitable conflict of a sort with FrÄulein Lipmann. She was going to “say a word for Kreisler” after FrÄulein Lipmann’s words. (How much better it would have been before!)

So at this point, looking up from the table, Bertha (listened to with uncomfortable unanimity and promptness) began. She was smiling with an affectedly hesitating, timid face, smiling in a flat strained way, the neighbourhood of her eyes suffused slightly with blood, her lips purring the words a little:

“RenÉe, I feel that I ought to say something—” Her smile was that made with a screwing up of the eyes and slow flowering of the lips, noticed on some people’s faces when some snobbery they cannot help has to be allowed egress from their mouth.

RenÉe Lipmann turned towards her composedly. This interruption would require argument; consciousness of the peculiar nature of Bertha’s qualifications was not displayed.

“I had not meant to say anything—about what happened to me, that is. I, as a matter of fact, have something particularly to complain of. But I had nothing to say about it. Only, since you are all discussing it, I thought you might not quite understand if I didn’t—I don’t think, RenÉe, that Herr Kreisler was quite in his right mind this evening. He doesn’t strike me as mÉchant. I don’t think he was really in any way accountable for his actions. I don’t, of course, know any more about him than you do. This evening was the first time I’ve ever exchanged more than a dozen words with him in my life.”

This was said in the sing-song of quick parentheses, eyebrows lifted, and with little gestures of the hand.

“He caught hold of me—like this.” She made a quick snatching gesture at FrÄulein Lipmann, who did not like this attempt at intimidation or velvety defiance. “He was kissing me when you came up,” turning to one or two of the others. This was said with dramatic suddenness and “determination,” as it were: the “kissing” said with a sort of deliberate sententious brutality, and luscious disparting of the lips.

“We couldn’t make out whatever was happening?” one of them began.

“When you came up I felt quite dazed. I didn’t feel that it was a man kissing me. He was mad. I’m sure he was. It was like being mauled by a brute.” She shuddered, with rather rolling eyes. “He was a brute to-night—not a man at all. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

They were all silent, answerless at this unexpected view of the case. It only differed from theirs in supposing that he was not always a brute. She had spoken quickly and drew up short. Their silence became conscious and septic. They appeared as though they had not expected her to stop speaking, and were like people surprised naked, with no time to cover themselves.

“I think he’s in great difficulties—money or something. But all I know for certain is that he was really in need of somebody?”

“But what makes you think, Bertha?” one of the girls said, hesitating.

“I let him in at RenÉe’s. He looked strange to me: didn’t you notice? I noticed him first there.”

Anastasya Vasek was still with them. She had not joined in the talk about Kreisler. She listened to it with attention, like a person newly arrived in some community, participating for the first time at one of their discussions on a local and stock subject. Kreisler would, from her expression, have seemed to be some topic peculiar to this gathering of people—they engaged in a characteristic occupation. Bertha she watched as one would watch a very eloquent chief airing his views at a clan-meeting.

“I felt he was really in need of some hand to help him. He seemed just like a child. He was ill, too. He can’t have eaten anything for some time. I am sure he hasn’t. He was walking slower and slower—that’s how it was we were so far behind. It was my fault, too—what happened. At least?”

The hungry touch was an invention of the moment. “You make him quite a romantic character. I’m afraid he has been working on your feelings, my dear girl. I didn’t see any signs of an empty stomach myself,” said FrÄulein van Bencke.

“He refreshed himself extensively at the dance, in any case. You can put your mind at rest as to his present emptiness,” RenÉe Lipmann said.

Things languished. The Lipmann had taken her stand on boredom. She was committed to the theory of the unworthiness of this discussion. The others not feeling quite safe, Bertha’s speeches raised no more comment. It was all as though she had been putting in her little bit of abuse of the common enemy. Bertha might have interrupted with a “Yes. He outraged me too!”—and this have been met with a dreary, acquiescing silence!

She was exculpating herself, then (heavily), at his expense. The air of ungenerosity this had was displeasing to her.

The certain lowering of the vitality of the party when she came on the scene with her story offended her. There should have been noise. It was not quite the lifelessness of scepticism. But there was an uncomfortable family likeness to the manner of people listening to discourses they do not believe. She persevered. She met with the same objectionable flaccid and indifferent opposition. Her intervention had killed the topic, and they seemed waiting till she had ended her war-dance on its corpse.

The red-headed member of the party had met Tarr by chance. Hearing he had not seen Bertha since the night of the ball, she had said with roguish pleasantness: “He’d better look after her better; why hadn’t he come to the ball?” Tarr did not understand.

“Bertha had had an adventure. All of them, for that matter, had had an adventure, but especially Bertha. Oh, Bertha would tell him all about it.” But, on Tarr insisting, Bertha’s story, in substance, had been told.

So with Bertha, the fact was still there. Retrospectively, her friends insisted upon passing by the two remarkably unanimous-looking forms on the boulevard in stony silence. She shouted to them and kissed Kreisler loudly. But they refused to take any notice. She sulked. They had been guilty of catching her. She kept to herself day after day. She would make a change in her life. She might go to Germany; she might go to another quartier. To go on with her life just as though nothing had happened, that was out of the question. Demonstration of some sort must follow, and change compatible with grief.

Her burly little clock struck four. Hurrying on reform-clothes, she went out to buy lunch. The dairy lay nearly next door to Lejeune’s restaurant. Crossing the road towards it, she caught sight of Kreisler’s steadily marching figure approaching. First she side-stepped and half turned. But the shop would be reached before they met, so she went on, merely quickening her pace. Her eye, covertly fixed on him, calculating distances and speeds, saw him hesitate—evidently having just caught sight of her—and then turn down a side street nearly beside the dairy she was making for. Unwise pique beset her at this.

CHAPTER V

Kreisler, on his side, had been only a few paces from his door when he caught sight of Bertha. As his changed route would necessitate a good deal of tiresome circling to bring him back practically to the spot he had started from, he right-about-faced in a minute or two, the danger past, as he thought. The result was that, as she left the shop, there was Kreisler approaching again, almost in the same place as before.

She was greeted affably, as though to say “Caught! both of us!” He was under the impression, however, that she had lain in wait for him. He was so accustomed to think of her in that character! If she had been in full flight he would have imagined that she was only decoying him. She was a woman who could not help adhering.

“How do you do? I’ve just been buying my lunch.”

“So late?”

“I thought you’d left Paris!” She had no information of this sort, but was inclined to rebuke him for not leaving Paris.

“I? Who told you that, I should like to know. I shall never leave Paris; at least?”

There was heavy enigmatic meaning in this, said lightly. It did not escape her, sensible to such nuances.

“How are our fair friends?” he asked.

“Our? Oh, FrÄulein Lipmann and—Oh, I haven’t seen them since the other night.”

“Indeed! Not since the other night??”

She made her silence swarm with significant meanings, like a glassy shoal with innumerable fish: her eyes even, stared and darted about, glassily.

It was very difficult, now she had stopped, to get away. The part she had more or less played with her friends, of his champion, had imposed itself on her. She could not leave her protÉgÉ without something further said. She was flattered, too, at his showing no signs now of desire to escape.

His more plainly brutal instincts woke readily in these vague days. Various appetites had been asserting themselves. So the fact that she was a pretty girl did its work on a rather recalcitrant subject. He felt so modest now, ideals things of the past. Surely for a quiet ordinary existence pleasant little distinctions were suitable?

Without any anxiety about it, he began to talk to Bertha with the idea of a subsequent meeting. He had wished to avoid her because she had embodied for him the evening of the dance, and appeared to him in its disquieting colours. What he sought unconsciously now was a certain quietude, enlivened by healthy appetites. He had disconnected her with his great Night.

“I was cracked the other night. I’m not often in that state,” he said. Bertha’s innuendoes had to be recognized.

“I’m glad of that,” she answered.

As to Bertha, to have been kissed and those things, under however eccentric circumstances, gave a man certain rights on your interest.

“I’m afraid I was rather rude to FrÄulein Lipmann before leaving. Did she tell you about it?”

“I think you were rude to everybody!”

“Ah, well?”

“I must be going. My lunch?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry! Have I kept you from your lunch? I wonder if you would procure me the extreme pleasure of seeing you again?”

Bertha looked at him in doubtful astonishment, taking in this sensational request.

See Kreisler again! The result as regards the Lipmann circle! But this pleaded for Kreisler. It would be carrying out her story. It would be insisting on it, and destroying that subtle advantage, now possessed by her friends, in presenting them with somewhat the same uncompromising spectacle again. In deliberately exposing herself to criticism she would be effacing, in some sense, the extreme involuntariness of the boulevard incident. He asked her simply if he might see her again. The least pretentious request. Would the refusal to do this simple thing be a concession to Lipmann and the rest? Did she want to at all? But it was in a jump of deliberate defiance or “carelessness” that she concluded:

“Yes, of course, if you wish it.”

“You never go to cafÉs? Perhaps some day?”

“Good! Very well!” she answered very quickly, in her trenchant tone, imparting all sorts of particular unnecessary meanings to this simple acceptance. She had answered as men accept a bet or the Bretons clinch a bargain in the fist.

Kreisler was still leisurely. He appeared to regard her vehemence with amusement.

“I should like then to go with you to the CafÉ de l’Observatoire to-morrow evening. I hope I shall be able to efface the rather unusual impression I must have made on you the other night!” (The tone of this remark did not ignore or condemn, however, the kisses.) “When can I meet you?”

“Will you come and fetch me at my house?”

But shivers went down her back as she said it.

She was now thoroughly committed to this new step. She was delighted, or rather excited, at each new further phase of it. Its horrors were scores off her friends. These details of meeting!—these had not been reckoned on. Of course they would have to meet. Kreisler seemed like a physician conducting a little unpleasant operation in a genial, ironical, unhurrying way.

“Well, it’s understood. We shall see each other to-morrow,” he said. And with a smile of half raillery at her rather upset expression, he left her. So much fuss about a little thing, such obstinacy in doing it! What was the terrible thing? Meeting him! His smiling was only natural. She showed without disguise in her face the hazardous quality, as she considered it, of this consent. She would wish him to feel the largeness of the motive that prompted her, and for him to participate too in the certain horror of meeting himself!

CHAPTER VI

Back in her rooms, she examined, over her lunch, with stupefaction, the things she had been doing—conversations, appointments, complementary sensations, and all the rest, as she might have sat down before some distinctly expensive, troubling purchase that she had not dreamt of making an hour before. “What a strange proceeding!”—as it might have been—“what sudden disease in my taste made me buy that!”

Had she been enveloped, in a way, by that idle Teutonically smiling manner of his? But at the bottom of her (for her) dramatic consent was the instantaneous image of FrÄulein Lipmann and Company’s disapprobation. The carrying out and so substantiating her story, that notion turned the scale. Kreisler’s easy manner (he was unmistakably “a gentleman!”) contrasted with her friend’s indignant palaver gave him the advantage. He cannot, cannot have behaved so outrageously as they pretended!

These activities as well distracted her from brooding over Sorbert’s going.

Of Kreisler she thought very little. Her women friends held the centre of the stage.

In her thoughts they stared at her supersession: Tarr to Kreisler. From bad to worse, for her friends. There was a strange continuity in her troubled friendship with these women. Always (only more so) at the same point, stretching the cord.

So this was the key to her programme; a person has made some slip in grammar, say. He makes it again deliberately, so that his first involuntary speech may appear deliberate.

She began her customary pottering about in her rooms. FrÄulein Elsa Kinderbach, one of the Dresden sisters already spoken of, interrupted her. At the knock she thought of Tarr and Kreisler simultaneously, and welded in one.

“Isn’t it hot? It’s simply broiling outside. I left the studio quite early.” FrÄulein Kinderbach sat down, giving her hat a toss and squinting up at it.

The most evident thing about these sisters was dirt, anÆmia, and a sort of soiled, insignificant handsomeness. They explained themselves, roughly, by describing in a cold-blooded lazy way their life at home.

A stepmother, prodigiously smart, well-to-do, neglecting them; sent first to one place then another (now Paris) to be out of the way. Yet the stepmother supplies them superfluously from her superfluity.—They talked about themselves with a consciously dramatic matter-of-factness, as twin parcels, usually on the way from one place to another, expensively posted here and there, without real destination. They enjoyed nothing at all; painted well (according to Juan Soler); had a sort of wild uncontrollable attachment for the Lipmann.

“Oh! Bertha, I didn’t know your dear ‘Sorbert’ was going to England.” “Dein Sorbet” was the bantering formula for Tarr. Bertha was perpetually talking about him, to them, to the charwoman, to the greengrocer opposite, to everybody she met. Tarr did not quite bask in this notoriety.

“Didn’t you? Oh, yes; he’s gone.”

“You’ve not quarrelled—with your Sorbert?”

“What’s that to do with you, my dear?” Bertha gave a brief, indecent laugh she sometimes had. “By the way, I’ve just seen Herr Kreisler. We’ve arranged to go out somewhere to-morrow.”

“Go out—Kreisler! Liebes Kind!—What on earth possessed you—!—Herr—Kreisler!”

“What’s the matter with Herr Kreisler? You were all friendly enough with him a week ago.”

Elsa looked at her with the cold-blooded scrutiny of the precocious urchin.

“But he’s a vicious brute. Besides, there are other reasons for avoiding Herr Kreisler. You know the reason of his behaviour the other night? It was it appears, because Anastasya Vasek snubbed him. He was nearly the same when the Fogs wouldn’t take an interest in him. He can’t leave women alone. He follows them about and annoys them, and then becomes—well, as you saw him the other night—when he’s shaken off. He is impossible. He is not a person who can be accepted by anybody.”

“Where did you hear all that? I don’t think that FrÄulein Vasek’s story is true. I am certain?”

“Well, he once was like that with me. He began hanging round, and—You know the story of his engagement?”

“What engagement?”

“He was engaged to a girl and she married his father instead of marrying him.”

Bertha struggled a moment, a little baffled.

“Well, what is there in that? I’ve known several cases?”

“Yes. That by itself?”

Elsa Kinderbach was quite undisturbed. Her information had been coldly given. She had argued sweepingly, as though talking to a child, and following some reasonable resolve formed during her earlier silent scrutiny.—In a few moments Bertha returned to the charge.

“Did FrÄulein Vasek give that particular explanation of Herr Kreisler’s behaviour?”

“No. We put two and two together. She did say something—yes, she did as a matter of fact say that she thought she had been the cause of Kreisler’s behaviour.”

“How funny! I can’t stand that girl; she’s so unnatural, she’s such a poseuse. Don’t you think, Elsa?—What a funny thing to say? You can depend on it that that, anyhow, is not the explanation.”

“Sorbert has a rival perhaps?”

This remark was met in staring silence. It was a mixing of elements, an unnecessary bringing in of something as unapropos, as unmanageable; that deserved only no words at all. She did not wish to concede the light tone required.

Elsa had admitted that FrÄulein Vasek was responsible for the statement, “I was the cause of Kreisler’s behaviour,” etc. That was one of those things (there being no evidence to confirm or even suggest it) which at once puts a woman on a peculiar pinnacle of bad taste, incomprehensibleness, and horridness. Bertha’s personal estimation of Kreisler received a complex fillip. This ridiculous version—coming after her version—was a rival version, believed in by her friends.

Bertha took some minutes to digest Elsa’s news. She flushed. The more she thought of this rival version of FrÄulein Vasek’s, the more reprehensible it appeared. It was a startlingly novel and uncompromising version, giving proof of a perfect immodesty. It charged hers full tilt.

This version of hers had been the great asset of existence for three days. Some one had coolly set up shop next door, to sell an article in which she, and she alone, had specialized. Here was an unexpected, gratuitous, new inventor of versions coming along. And what a version to begin with!

Bertha’s version had been a vital matter, FrÄulein Vasek’s evidently was a matter of vanity. The contempt of the workman, sweating for a living, for the amateur, possessed her.

But there was a graver aspect to the version of this poaching Venus. In discrediting Bertha’s suggested account of how things happened, it attacked indirectly her action, proceeding, ostensibly, from these notions.

Her meeting Kreisler at present depended for its reasonableness and existence even on the “hunger” theory; or, if that should fail, something equally touching and primitive. Were she forced, as Elsa readily did, to accept the snub-by-Anastasya theory, with its tale of ridiculous reprisals, further dealings with Kreisler would show in a bare and ugly light. Her past conduct also would have its primitive slur renewed.

Her defiance to Elsa had been delivered with great satisfaction. “I am meeting Herr Kreisler to-morrow!” The shine had soon been taken off that.

All Bertha’s past management of the boulevard scene had presupposed that she was working in an element destined to obscurity: malleable, therefore, to any extent. Anastasya had risen up calm, contradictory, a formidable and perplexing enemy, with her cursed version. The weak point in it was the rank immodesty of the form it took.

Her obstinacy awoke. This new turn coming from the other camp solidified two or three degrees more, in a twinkling, her partisanship of Kreisler. She had a direct interest now in their meeting. She was curious to hear what he had to say as to his alleged attempt in FrÄulein Vasek’s direction.

“Well, I’m going to RenÉe’s now, to fetch her for dinner. Are you coming?” Elsa said, getting up.

“No. I’m going to dine here to-night,” and Bertha accompanied her to the door.

CHAPTER VII

People appear with a startling suddenness sometimes out of the fog of Time and Space. Bertha did not visualize Kreisler very readily. She was surprised when she saw him below her windows the next day. He stared up at the house with an eager speculation. He considered the house and studio opposite. Behind the curtains Bertha stood with emotions of an ambushed soldier. She felt on her face the blankness of the wall of the house, its silence and unresponsiveness. He appeared almost to be looking at her face, magnified and exposed.—Then it appeared to her that it was he, the enemy getting in. She wished to stop him there, before he came any further.

In the processes of his uncertainty he was so innocuous and distant, for the moment. His first visit. There he was: so far, a stranger. Why should these little obstacles of strangeness—which gate to enter, which bell to ring—be taken away from this particular individual? He should remain “stranger” for her, where he came from. But he had burrowed his way through, was at the bell already, and would soon be at herself. She found here, in her room, was very different from she found outside, in restaurant or street. The clothing of this dÉcor was a nakedness.

She struggled for a moment up from the obstinate dream, made of artificial but tenacious sentiments, shaped by contretemps of all sorts that had been accumulating like a snowball ever since her last interview with Tarr. Still somewhat wrapt in this interview she rolled in its nightmarish, continually metamorphosed, substance through space. Where would it land her, this electric, directionless, vital affair? This invasion of Indifference and Difference had floated her, successfully, away in some direction.

The bell rang again. She could see him, almost, through the wall, standing phlegmatic and erect. They had not spoken yet. But they had been some minutes “in touch.”

Perhaps he was mad! Elsa, cold, matter-of-fact, but with warnings for her, came into her mind. However much she resisted the facts, there was very little reason for this meeting. It was a now unnecessary, exploded, and objectless impulse, sapped by Anastasya. She was going through with something from laziness and obstinacy mixed, that no longer meant anything.

Already dressed, she walked to the door as the bell rang a third time. Kreisler was serious and a little haggard; different from the day before. He had expected to be asked in. Instead, hardly saying anything, she came out on the narrow landing and closed the door behind her. Surprised, he felt for the first stair. It was eight in the evening, very dark on the staircase, and he stumbled several times. Bertha felt she could not say a single word to him. It was just as though some lawyer’s clerk had come to fetch her for a tragic disagreeable interview, and she, having been sitting fully dressed for unnecessary hours in advance, were now urging him silently and violently before her, following.

That afternoon she had received a second letter from Sorbert.

On the receipt of this letter—as on the former occasion a little—she first of all behaved as she would have done had Sorbert been there. She acted silent resignation and going about her work as usual for the benefit of the letter, as though it had been a living person. The reply to this, written an hour or so before Kreisler arrived, had been an exaggerated acquiescence. “Of course, Sorbert: far better that we should part!” But soon this letter began to worry her and threaten her mannerisms. She was just going to take up a book and read, when, as though something had called her attention, she put it down, got up, her head turned over her shoulder, and then suddenly flung herself on the sofa as though it had been rocks and she plunging on them from a high cliff. She sobbed until she had tired herself out.

So Kreisler and she walked up the street as though compelled by some very strange circumstances, only, to be in each other’s company.

He appeared depressed, and to have come also under the spell of some sort of meaningless duty. His punctuality suggested, too, fatigued and senseless waiting, careful timing. His temporary destination reached, he delivered himself up indifferently into her hands. He said something about its being hot. They said hardly anything, but walked on away from her house. They showed no pudeur about this peculiar state of mind and their manners.

Before they got to the CafÉ de l’Observatoire Kreisler was attempting to make up for his lapse into strangeness, discovering, however, in a little, that he had not been alone.

Bertha looked at the clock inside as they took up their place on the quieter terrasse. When she asked herself how long she would stop she was astonished.

“Who is that, then?” Kreisler asked, after some moments of gradually changing silence, when Anastasya began to be mentioned by Bertha. He showed no interest.

This meeting had been the only event of the day for him. He had looked forward to it a little at first. But as it approached he got fidgety, began counting the time, and from being a blessed something, it became a burden. The responsibility of this meeting even seemed too much for him. He began to ask himself what useless errand he was on now? The effort of this simple affair worked lamentably on his nerves. He would not have gone, only the appointment being made and fixed in his mind, and he having felt it in the distance all day, he knew it would irk him more if he did not go. He was compelled, in short, to go, to have done with it. The worrying obsession of not having done it intimidated him. In the empty evening he would have been at the mercy of this thing-not-done, like an itch.

Bertha, for her part, recovered. Kreisler’s complete abstraction and indifference were soothing. He seemed to know as little why he was there as she, or less, and be only waiting for her to disappear again. No slight was implied. Her vanity stirred a little. She perhaps came through this to bring FrÄulein Vasek on the boards as she had originally intended. As to there being anything compromising in this meeting, that might be disposed of. He did not look like suggesting another.—His manner on the day before would not have warranted complete calm. And Elsa’s description of his conduct with women had stuck in her mind. As the hour of meeting approached it helped her uneasiness. But now she felt refreshingly relieved. This was the man who had caused her fresh misgivings! When a dog or cow has passed a trembling child without any signs of mischief, the child sometimes is inclined to step after it and put forth a caressing hand.

By his manner and its reflection on her feelings he had created a situation not unlike that of the dance night. There they sat, she pressing a little, he civilly apathetic. It seemed for all the world as though Bertha had run after him somewhere and forced a meeting on him, to which he had grudgingly come. She was back in what would always be for him her characteristic rÔle. And so now—and again later continually—she appeared to be following him up, to the discomfort of both, for some unguessable reason.

“No, I don’t know who you mean,” he said, replying to descriptions of Anastasya. “A tall girl you say? No, I can’t bring to mind?”

He liked fingering over listlessly the thought of Anastasya, but as a stranger. This subject gave him a little more interest in Bertha, just as, for her, it had a similar effect in his favour. She was immediately convinced that FrÄulein Vasek had been guilty of the most offensive, self-complacent mistake.

Kreisler had not energy enough left to continue his pursuit of his bespangled dream.

Bertha now had achieved a simplification of the whole matter as follows:

Anastasya, a beautiful and swankily original girl, had arrived, bespangled and beposed, on the scene of her (Bertha’s) simple little life. She had discovered her kissing and being kissed by a ridiculous individual in the middle of the street. Bertha had disengaged herself rapidly, and explained that she had been doing that because he had awoken her pity by his miserable and half-starved appearance; that, even then, he had assaulted her, and she had been found in that delicate situation entirely independent of her own will. Anastasya’s lip had curled, and she had received these explanations in silence. Then, at their nervous repetition, she had said negligently: “You were no doubt being hugged by Herr Kreisler in the middle of the pavement, the motives the ordinary ones. You might have waited till—But that’s your own business. On the other hand, the reason of his eccentric appearance this evening was this. He had the incredible impudence to wish to make up to me. I sent him about his business, and he ‘manifested’ in the way you know.”

Reducing all the confused material of this affair to such essential situation, Bertha saw clearly the essence of her action.

Definite withdrawal from the circle of her friends was now essential. It was accomplished with as much style as possible. Kreisler provided the style.

Her instinct now was to wallow still more in the unbecoming situation in which she had been found, with defiance. She wanted to be seen with Kreisler. The meanness, strangeness, and certain dÉchÉance or come-down, in consorting with this sorry bird, must be heightened into poetry and thick and luscious fiction. They had driven her to this. They were driving her! Very well. She was lasse! She would satisfy them. She would satisfy Sorbert. It was what he wanted, was it not?

Kreisler, of course, was the central, irreducible element in this mental pie. He was the egg-cup that kept up the crust. She tried to interest herself in Kreisler and satisfy Tarr, her friends, the whole world, more thoroughly.

CHAPTER VIII

Destiny has more power over the superstitious. They attract constantly bright fortunes and disasters within their circle. Destiny had laid its trap in the unconscious Kreisler. It fixed it with powerful violent springs. Eight days later (dating from the Observatoire meeting), it snapped down on Bertha.

Kreisler’s windows had been incandescent with steady saffron rays, coming over the roofs of the quarter. His little shell of a room had breasted them with pretence of antique adventure. The old boundless yellow lights streamed from their abstract El Dorado. They were a Gulf Stream for our little patch of a world, making a people as quiet as the English. Men once more were invited to be the motes in the sunbeam, to play in the sleepy surf on the edge of remoteness.

Now, from within, his windows looked as suddenly harsh and familiar. Unreasonable limitation gave its specific colour to thin glass.

The clock was striking eight. Like eight metallic glittering waves dashing discordantly together in a cavern, its strokes rushed up and down in Bertha’s head. She was leaning on the mantelshelf, head sunk forward, with the action of a person about to be sick. She had struggled up from the bed a moment before—the last vigour at her disposal being spent in getting away from the bed at all costs.

“Oh schwein! schwein! Ich hass es—ich hass dich! Schwein! Scheusal! schensslicher Mensch!”

All the hatred and repulsion of her being, in a raw, indecent heat, seemed turned into this tearful sonority, gushing up like blood. An exasperated falling, deepening sing-song in the “schensslicher Mensch!” something of the disgusting sound of the brutal relishing and gobbling of food. Hatred expresses itself like the satisfaction of an appetite. The outrage was spat out of her body on to him. As she stood there she looked like some one on whom a practical joke had been played, of the primitive and physical order, such as drenching, in some amusing manner, with dirty water. She had been decoyed into swallowing something disgusting. Her attitude was reminiscent of the way people are seen to stand bent awkwardly forward, neck craned out, slowly wiping the dirt off their clothes, or spitting out the remains of their polluted drink, cursing the joker.

This had been, too, a desperate practical joke in its madness and inconsequence. But it was of the solemn and lonely order. At its consummation there had been no chorus of intelligible laughter. An uncontrolled Satyr-like figure had leapt suddenly away: Bertha, in a struggle that had been outrageous and extreme, fighting with the silence of a confederate beneath the same ban of the world. A joke too deep for laughter, parodying the phrase, alienating sorrow and tears, had been achieved. The victim had been conscious of an eeriness.

A folded blouse lay on the corner of Kreisler’s trunk. Bertha’s arms and shoulders were bare, her hair hanging in wisps and strips, generally—a Salon picture was the result. For purposes of work (he had asked her to sit for him), the blouse had been put aside. A jagged tear in her chemise over her right breast also seemed the doing of a Salon artist of facile and commercial invention.

Kreisler stood at the window. His eyes had a lazy, expressionless stare, his lips were open. Nerves, brain and the whole body were still spinning and stunned, his muscles teeming with actions not finished, sharp, when the actions finished. He was still swamped and strung with violence. His sudden immobility, as he stood there, made the riot of movement and will rise to his brain like wine from a weak body. Satisfaction had, however, stilled everything except this tingling prolongation of action.

The inanity of what had happened to her showed as her unique, intelligible feeling. Her being there at all, her eccentric conduct of the last week, what disgusting folly! Ever since she had known Tarr, her “sentiment” had been castigating her. A watchful fate appeared to be inventing morals to show her the folly of her perpetual romancing. And now this had happened. It was senseless. There was not a single atom of compensation anywhere. She was not one of those who, were there any solid compensation of sentiment and necessity (such as, in the most evident degree, was the case with Tarr), would draw back from natural conclusions. Then conclusive physical matters were a culmination of her romance, and not a separate and disloyal gratification. It never occurred to her that they could be arrived at without traversing the romance.

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.

She now had to go away as though nothing had happened. It was nothing. After all what did it matter what became of her now? Her body was of little importance—ghosts of romantic consolations here! What was the good (seeing what she knew and everything) of storming against this man? She saw herself coming there that afternoon, talking with amiable affectation of interest in his work, in him (in him!), sitting for him; a long, uninterrupted stream of amiability, talk, suddenly the wild few minutes, then the present ridiculous hush.

The moral, heavily, too heavily, driven in by her no doubt German fate, found its mark in her mind. What Tarr laughed at her for—that silly and vulgar mush, was the cause of all this. Well!

She had done up her hair; her hat was once more on her head. She went towards the door, her face really haggard, inevitable consciousness of drama too in it. Kreisler turned round, went towards the door also, unlocked it, let her pass without saying anything, and, waiting a moment, closed it indifferently again. She was let out as a workman would have been, who had been there to mend a shutter or rectify a bolt.

CHAPTER IX

Bertha made her way home in a roundabout fashion to avoid the possibility of meeting any one she knew. The streets were loftily ignorant of her affairs. Thin walls dyked in affairs and happenings. Ha ha! the importance of our actions! Is it more than the kissing of the bricks?

She came out with mixed feelings; gratefulness for the enormous indifference and ignorance flowing all round us; anger and astonishment at finding herself walking away in this matter-of-fact manner; suffering at the fact that the customary street scene would not mix with the obsession of her late experience.

No doubt Nature was secret enough. But not to tell this experience of hers to anybody also would be shutting her in with Kreisler, somehow for good. She would never be able to escape the contamination of that room of his. It was one of those things that in some form one should be able to tell. She had a growing wish to make it known at once somewhere, in some shape.

That is, at bottom, she still was inclined to continue things—dreams, fancies, explanations, sacrifices. Would nothing cure her? The first feeling that this was finally the end of those things, that there was nothing further to be said or thought, was modified. She did not definitely think of telling any one—the moral was wearing off more quickly than it should. But the thought of this simple, unsensational walking away and ending up of everything in connexion with Kreisler irked her more and more. Anger revived spasmodically. Kreisler, by doing this, had made an absolute finishing with Kreisler perhaps impossible.

There was nobody now in any sense on her side, or on whose side she could range herself. Kreisler had added himself to the worrying list of her women friends, Tarr, etc., in a disgusting, dumbfounding way, the list of people preying on her mind and pushing her to perpetual fuss, all sorts of explicative, defiant, or other actions. She had stuck Kreisler up as a “cause” against her friends. In a manner of his own, he had betrayed her and placed himself beside her friends. In any case, he had carried out in the fullest fashion their estimate of him. In being virtuous a libelled man can best attack his enemies; in being “blackguardly,” awaken a warmth of sympathy in corroborating them. Kreisler had acted satanically for her friends.

She had seen Elsa and her sister twice that week, but none of the others. Ungregariousness, keeping to herself, was explained by indisposition. Sorbert was meant by this. Her continued seeing of Kreisler was known to all now, and she could imagine their reception of that news. Now she could hardly go on talking about Kreisler. This would at once be interpreted as “something having happened.” So more scandal against her name. In examining likelihoods of the future she concluded that she would have to break still more with her friends, to make up for having to retire from her Kreisler positions. To squash and counteract their satisfaction she must accentuate her independence in their direction to insult and contempt.

The last half-hour of senseless outrage still took up all the canvas. Attempts to adjust her mind to a situation containing such an element as this was difficult. What could be done with it? It took up too much space. Everything must come back and be referred to that. She wanted to tell this somewhere. This getting closed in with Kreisler—a survival, perhaps, of her vivid fear of a little time before, when he had locked the door, and she knew that resisting him would be useless—must be at all costs avoided.

Who could she tell? Clara? Madame Vannier?

Once home, she lay down and cried for some time, but without conjuring any of her trouble.

Kreisler seemed to have suddenly brought confusion everywhere. There was nothing that would quite fit in with that ridiculous, disgusting event. He had even, in the end, driven her friends out of her mind, too. She would have said nothing had one turned up then.

Having left Kreisler so simply and undramatically worried her. Something should have been done. There would have been the natural relief. But her direct human feelings of revenge had been paralysed. She thought of going back at once to his room. She could not begin life clearly again until something had been done against him, or in some way where he was.

He had been treated by her as a cypher, as something vague to put up against her friends. All along for the last week he had been a shadowy and actually unimportant figure. He had shown no consciousness of this. Rather dazed and machine-like himself, Bertha had treated him as she had found him. Suddenly, without any direct articulateness, he had revenged himself as a machine might do, in a nightmare. At a leap he was in the rigid foreground of her life. He had absorbed all the rest in an immense clashing wink. But the moment following this “desperateness” he stood, abstracted, distant and baffling as before. It was difficult to realize he was there.

Tarr had been the real central and absorbing figure all along, of course, but purposely veiled. He had been as really all-important, though to all appearance eliminated, as Kreisler had been of no importance, though propped up in the foreground. Sorbert at last could no longer be suppressed and kept from coming forward now in her mind. But his presence, too, was perplexing. She had become so used to regarding him, though seeing him daily, as an uncertain and departing figure, that now he had really gone that did not make much difference. His proceedings, a carefully prepared anÆsthesia for himself, had had its effect on her as well, serving for both.

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.

He stood leaning on his cane, and staring in front of him.—Bertha stood quite still, as she would sometimes do when a wasp entered the room, waiting to see if it would blunder about and then fly out again. He was a dangerous animal, he had got in there, and might in the same manner go off again in a minute or two.

Now was the chance she had been fretting for to wipe out in some way what had happened;—not to seem, anyhow, to have taken it all as a matter of course.—But it was too convenient. She had never reckoned on his actually coming and putting himself at her disposition in this way. He stood there without saying anything, just as though he had been sent for and it were for her to speak.—She would have been inclined to send him back to his room, and then, perhaps, go to him.

Constantly on the point of “throwing him out,” as her energetic German idiom put it, it yet evidently would then, in the first place, be the same as before. Secondly, she was a good deal intimidated by his unexplained presence. She had a curiosity about him,—curiosity rather as to how what had happened to her could be straightened out or a little sense in some way got into it. The material of this modification was in him and only there.—She hated him thoroughly now. But this new and distinct feeling gave him at last some reality.—Her way of regarding Kreisler was that of the girl a man “has got into trouble,” and to whom she looks to get her out of it.

So she stood, anxious as to what he might have come there to do, gradually settling down into a “proud and silent indignation,” behind which her curiosity might wait and see what would transpire.

Kreisler had at length, having allowed her to stay unexplained by his side for a week or so, divined some complication. Her case might possibly be similar to his? She did not interest him any the more for this. But communication would not be, perhaps, absolutely useless.

His only possibility of action at present was to act violently, in gusts. He did not know, when he began an action, whether he would be able to go through with it.—He could not now prevail upon himself to go through the senseless form of apology or anything else. He had got there, that would have to be sufficient.

But the situation for Bertha became urgent, too. The difficulty was that there was nothing adequate to be done, that she could think of, in any way in proportion to the enormity of the occasion. Yet, to escape from the memory of Kreisler, what had happened must be wiped out, checkmated, by some action. She was still stunned and overwhelmed with the normal feminine feelings proper to the case. But yet even here there was an irregularity. Another source of infinite discomfort was that she could not even feel, as she should normally, the extent of the outrage, although it was evident enough. She had an hysterical inclination, in waves of astonishment, to accept its paradoxical and persistent appearance. This appearance Kreisler’s peculiar manner, her own present mind and the unexampled circumstances gave it. It was nothing,—a bagatelle!—Pooh! it is nothing, after all! How can it be of any importance, seeing that??—This was one of those things that seem to have got into the category of waking by mistake. It had nothing to do with life’s context. And yet it was life. She must deal with it.

She had wished to free Sorbert. That had been the beginning of all this. It was with idea of sacrifice in her mind that she had committed the first folly on the boulevard.—Well, she had succeeded. What did Kreisler mean?—At last his significance was as clear as daylight. He meant always and everywhere merely that she could never see Tarr again!

She now faced him with fresh strength, her face illuminated with happy tragic resolve.—Supposing she had given herself to a man to compass this sacrifice? As it was, everything, except the hatefulness and violence of the act, had been spared her. And in telling Sorbert that there was something, now, between them, she had been driven to something, she would be nobly lying, and turning an involuntary act into a voluntary one.

She could now, too, be tragically forbearing even with Kreisler.

“Herr Kreisler, I think I have waited long enough. Will you please leave my room?”

He stirred gently like a heavy flower in a light current of wind. But he turned towards her and said:

“I don’t know what to say to you.—Is there nothing I can do to make up to you—? I shall go and shoot myself, FrÄulein! I cannot stand the thought of what I have done!”

This was perplexing and made her angry. He appeared to possess a genius for making things complicated and more difficult.

“All I ask you is to go. That will be the best thing you can do for me.”

“FrÄulein, I can’t!—Do listen to me for a moment.—I cannot even refer to what has happened without insult in the mere direction of the words.—I am mad—mad—mad!—You have showed yourself a good friend to me. And that is the way I repay you! Were you anywhere but here and unprotected, there would be a man to answer to for this outrage. I will be that man myself!—I come to ask your permission!”

His appetite, waking afresh, was the only directing thing in Kreisler at present. With hypocritical—almost palpably mock—eloquence, he was serving that.

This talk alone would have been of little use or consequence to Bertha. But coming in conjunction with her new independent reinforcement, which alone would have been enough to shape things to a specious ending, it was in a way effective.—The new contradiction and struggle in her mind was between her natural aversion for Kreisler now and her feeling of clemency towards him in his now beautiful usefulness.

She was very dignified, wise, and clement when she answered:

“Let us leave all that, if you please.—It was my fault.—I should have known better what I was doing. You must have been mad, as you say. But if you wish to show yourself a gentleman now, the only obvious thing is to go away, as I have said, and not to molest or remind me any further of what has passed. There is nothing more to say, is there?—Go, now, please!”

Kreisler flung himself on his knees, and seized her hand, she receiving this with astonished, questioning protestation.

“FrÄulein, you are an angel! You don’t know how much good you do me! You are so good, so good! There is nothing you can ask of me too much. I have done something I can never undo. It is as though you had saved my life.—Otto Kreisler you can always count on!—The greatest service you can do me, that I humbly beg you may—is to ask some service of me, the more difficult the better!—Good-bye, FrÄulein.”

Giving her hand a last hug, he sprang up, and Bertha heard him next stormily descending the stairs, and then farther away passing rapidly down the avenue.

Bertha was distinctly affected by this demonstration. It put a last brilliant light of grateful confusion on all the emotions emanating from Kreisler. The sort of notion he had evoked in parting that they had been doing something splendid together—a life-saving, a heroism—found a hospitable ground in her spirit. Taking everything together, things had been miraculously turned round. Her late blackness of depression and perplexity now merged in steadily growing relieved exaltation.

CHAPTER XI

Tarr had not gone to England. Kreisler had not been sufficient to accomplish this. He still persisted in his self-indulgent system of easy stages. A bus ride distant, he would be able to keep away. But in any case he did not wish to go to England, nor anywhere else, for that matter. Paris was much the most suitable domicile, independently of Bertha, with his present plans.

In the neighbourhood of the Place Clichy, in an old convent, he found a room big enough for four people. There, on the day of the second of the letters, he arrived in a state of characteristic misgiving. It was the habitual indigestion of Reality. He was very fond of reality. But he was like a man very fond of what did not agree with him. It usually ended, however, by his assimilating it.

The insouciant, adventurous, those needing no preparation to live, he did not admire, but felt he should imitate.—A new room was a thing that had to be fitted into as painfully as a foot into some new and too elegant boot. The things deposited on the floor, the door finally closed on this new area to be devoted exclusively to himself, the blankest discomfort descended on him. To undo and let loose upon the room his portmanteau’s squashed and dishevelled contents—like a flock of birds, brushes, photographs and books flying to their respective places on dressing-table, mantelpiece, shelf or bibliothÈque; boxes and parcels creeping dog-like under beds and into corners, taxed his character to the breaking-point. The unwearied optimism of these inanimate objects, the way they occupied stolidly and quickly room after room, was appalling. Then they were packed up things, with the staleness of a former room about them, and the souvenir of a depressing time of tearing up, inspecting, and interring.

This preliminary discomfort was less than ever spared him here. He had cut his way to this decision (to go and live in Montmartre), through a bristling host of incertitudes. A place would have had to be particularly spacious to convince him. This large studio-room was worse than any desert. It had been built for something else, and would never be right.—A large square whitewashed box was what he wanted to pack himself into. This was an elaborate carved chest of a former age. He would no doubt pack it eventually with consoling memories of work. He started work at once, in fact. This was his sovereign cure for new rooms.

Half an hour after his taking possession, it being already time for the apÉritif, he issued forth into the new quarter. There were a few clusters of men. The Spanish men dancers were coloured earth-objects, full of basking and frisking instincts; the atmosphere of the harlot’s life went with them, and Spanish reasonableness and civility. He chose a cafÉ on the Place Clichy. The hideous ennui of large gimcrack shops and dusty public offices pervaded other groups of pink, mostly dark-haired Frenchmen drinking appetizers. They responded with their personalities on the cafÉ terraces to the emptiness of the boulevard.

He had not any friends in Montmartre. But he had not been at the cafÉ above a few minutes, when he saw a familiar face approaching. It was a model (Berthe, by name, though bringing no reminder with her of the other “Berthe” he knew) with an English painter he saw for the first time, but whom he had just heard about in connexion with this girl. Berthe knew Tarr very slightly. But she chose a table near him, with a nod, and shortly opened conversation. She meant to talk to him evidently. She asked about one or two people Tarr knew.

“Do you wish me to present you?” she said, looking towards her protector. “This is Mr. Tarr, Dick.”

So it was done.

“Why don’t you come and sit here?” That too was done, partly from inquisitiveness.

The young Englishman annoyed Tarr by pretending to be alarmed every time he was addressed. He had a wide-open, wondering eye, fixed on the world in timid serenity. It did not appear at first to understand what you said, and rolled a little alarmedly, even so only to be filled the next moment with some unexpected light of whimsical intelligence. It had understood all the time! It was only its art to surprise you, and its English affectation of unreadiness and childishness.

He was a great big child, wandering through life! The young Latin wishes to impress you with his ability to look after himself. General idiocy of demeanour, on the other hand, is the fashionable English style. This young man was six feet one, with a handsome beak in front of his face, meant for a super-Emersonian mildness. His “wide awake” was large, larger than Hobson’s. Innumerable minor Tennysons had planted it on his head, or bequeathed a desire for it to this ultimate Dick of long literary line. His family was allied to much Victorian talent. But, alas, thought Tarr, how much worse it is when the mind gets thin than when the blood loses its body, in merely aristocratic refinement. Intellectual aristocracy in the fifth generation!—but Tarr gazed at the conclusive figure in front of him, words failing. Words failed, too, for maintaining conversation with it. He soon got up, and left, his first apÉritif at Montmartre unsatisfactory.

He did not take possession of his new life with very much conviction. After dinner he went to a neighbouring music hall, precariously amused, soothed by the din. But he eventually left with a headache. The strangeness of the streets, cafÉs, and places of entertainment depressed him deeply. Had it been an absolutely novel scene, he would have found stimulus in it. But it was like a friend grown indifferent, or something perfectly familiar with the richness of habit taken out of it. Tarr was gregarious in the sense that usually he liked his room and some familiar streets with their traces of familiar men. And where more energetic spirit suggested some truer solitude to him, he would never have sought it where a vestige of inanimate friendship remained.

Here, where he had chosen to live, he appeared as though fallen in some intermediate negative existence. Unusually for him, he felt alone. To be alone was essentially a nondescript, lowered, and unreal state for him.

The following morning Tarr woke, his legs rather cramped and tired, and not thoroughly rested. But as soon as he was up, work came quite easily.

He got his paints out, and without beginning on his principal canvas, took up a new and smaller one by way of diversion. Squaring up a drawing of three naked youths sniffing the air, with rather worried Greek faces and heavy nether limbs, he stuck it on the wall with pins and drew his camp easel up alongside it. He squared up his canvas on the floor with a walking-stick, and fixed it on the easel. To get a threadlike edge a pencil had to be sharpened several times.

By the end of the afternoon he had got a witty pastiche on the way. Two colours principally had been used, mixed in piles on two palettes: a smoky, bilious saffron, and a pale transparent lead. The significance of the thing depended first on the psychology of the pulpy limbs, strained dancers’ attitudes and empty faces; secondly, the two colours and the simple yet contorted curves.

Work over, his depression again grasped him, like an immensely gloomy companion who had been idling impatiently while he worked. He promenaded this companion in “Montmartre by Night,” without improving his character. Nausea glared at him from every object met. Sex surged up and martyrized him, but he held it down rather than satisfy himself with its elementary servants.

The next day, mÊme jeu. He sat for hours in the fatiguing evening among a score of relief ships or pleasure boats, hesitating, but finally rejecting relief or pleasure. And the next day it was the same thing.

Meantime his work progressed. But to escape these persecutions he worked excessively. His eyes began to prick, and on the sixth day he woke up with a headache. He was sick and unable to work.

Tarr decided he had been mistaken in remaining in Paris. The fascination of the omnibuses bound for the Rive gauche was almost irresistible. Destiny had granted him the necessary resolution to break. He could have gone away—anywhere, even. His will had then offered him a free ticket, as it were, to any end of the earth. Or simply, and most sensibly, to London. And yet he had decided to go no farther than Montmartre, in the unwisdom of his sense of energy and freedom of that moment. Now the “free ticket” was not any more available. His Will had changed. It offered all sorts of different bus tickets, merely, which would conduct him, avec and sans correspondence, in the direction of the Quartier du Paradis.

Why not go back again, simply, in fact? The mandates of the governing elements in our nature, resolves, etc., were childish enough things. His resentment against Bertha, and resolve to quit, would always be there. There was room in life for the satisfaction of this impulse, and the equally strong one to see her again. The road back to the Quartier du Paradis would probably have been taken quite soon, only it needed in a way as much of an effort in the contrary direction to get back as it had to get away. He did not know what might await him either. She might really have given him up and changed her life. He had not the necessary experience to dismiss that possibility.

But at last one evening he did go. He went deliberately up to an omnibus “Clichy—St. Germain,” and took his seat under its roof. He was resolved to glut himself, without any atom of self-respect or traces of “resolve” remaining, in what he had been wanting to do for a week. He would go to Bertha’s rooms, even find out what had been happening in his absence. He might even, perhaps, hang about a little outside, and try to surprise her in some manner. Then he would behave en maÎtre, there would be no further question of his having given her up and renounced his rights. He would behave just as though he had never gone away or the letters been sent. He would claim her again with all the appeals he knew to her love for him. He would conduct himself without a scrap of dignity or honesty. Once the “resolution” and pride of his retiring had been broken down, it was thenceforth immaterial to what length he went. In fact, better be frankly weak and unprincipled in his actions and manner, go the whole length of his defeat and confusion. In such completeness there remains a grain of superiority and energy.

But once started in his bus, a wave of excitement and anxiety surged in him with hot gushes.—What awaited him? He fancied all sorts of strange developments.—Perhaps, after all, his journey would not satisfy his weaker movement, but confirm and establish definitely his more sensible resolves. Perhaps weaknesses would find at last the door closed against them.

He smiled at the city as they passed through it, with the glee of a boy on a holiday excursion.