Bertha’s intuitions and simplifications had not been without basis. This “hostile version” had contained a certain amount of hostile intention.
But Anastasya had another reason for this immodest explicitness. She personally liked Kreisler. The spectacle of Bertha excusing herself, and in the process[284] putting Kreisler in a more absurd and unsatisfactory light, annoyed her extremely.
How could Tarr consort with Bertha, she questioned? Her aristocratic woman’s sense did not appreciate the taste for a slut, a miss or a suburban queen. The apache, the coster girl, fisher-lass, all that had character, oh, yes. Her romanticism, in fact, was of the same order as Butcher’s only better.
Two days after the duel she met Tarr in the street. They agreed to meet at Lejeune’s for dinner.
The table at which she had first come across Kreisler was where they sat.
“You knew Soltyk, didn’t you?” he asked her.
“Yes. It was a terrible affair. Poor Soltyk!”
She looked at Tarr doubtfully. A certain queer astonishment in her face struck Tarr. It was the only sign of movement beneath. She spoke with a businesslike calm about his death. There was no sign of feeling or search for feeling.
She refused to regard herself as the “woman in the affair.” She knew people referred to her as that. Soltyk possessed a rather ridiculous importance, being dead; a cadaveric severity in the meaning of the image, Soltyk, for her. The fact was bigger than the person. He was like a boy in his father’s clothes.
Kreisler, on the other hand, she abominated. To have killed, he to have killed!—and to have killed some one she knew! It was a hostile act to bring death so near her. She knew it was hostile. She hoped he might never come back to Paris. She did not want to meet Kreisler.
But these feelings were not allowed to transpire. She recognized them as personal. She was so fastidious that she refrained from using them in discussing the affair when they would have given a suspect readiness and “sincerity” to her expression. She rather went to the other extreme.
“They say Soltyk was not killed in a duel,” Tarr continued. “Kreisler is to be charged with murder, or at least manslaughter.”
[285]
“Yes, I have heard that Kreisler shot him before he was ready or something?”
“I heard that he was shot when he was unarmed. There was no duel at all.”
“Oh, that is not the version I have heard.”
She did not seem revengeful about her friend.
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