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.