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.