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_!