LITMIR.BIZ

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      She suddenly got up without speaking. Rather spectrally, she went over to the writing-table for her handkerchief. She had not moved an inch or a muscle until quite herself again, dropping steadily down all the scale of feeling to normal. With matter-of-factness she got up, easily and quietly, making Sorbert a little dizzy.

      Her face had all the drama wrung out of it. It was hard, clear, and garishly white, like her body.

      If he were to have a chance of talking he must clear the air of electricity completely. Else at his first few words storm might return.

      Once lunch had swept through the room, things would be better. He would send the strawberries ahead to prepare his way. It was like fattening a lamb for the slaughter. This idea pleased him. Now that he had accepted the existence of a possible higher plane of feeling as between Bertha and himself, he was anxious to avoid display. So he ran the risk of outdoing his former callousness. Tarr was saturated with morbid English shyness, that cannot tolerate passion and its nakedness. This shyness, as he contended, in its need to show its heart, discovers subtleties and refinements of expression, opposites and between shades, unknown to less gauche and delicate people. But if he were hustled out of his shell the anger that co-existed with his modesty was the most spontaneous thing he possessed. Bertha had always left him alone.

      He got up, obsequiously reproducing in his own movements and expression her new normality.

      “Well, how about lunch? I’ll come and help you with it.”

      “There’s nothing to do. I’ll get it.”

      Bertha had wiped her eyes with the attentiveness a man bestows on his chin after a shave, in little brusque hard strokes. She did not look at Tarr. She arranged her hair in the mirror, then went to the kitchen. For her to be so perfectly natural offended him.

      The intensity of her past feeling carried her on for about five minutes into ordinary life. Her seriousness was tactful for so long. Then her nature began to give way. It broke up again into fits and starts of self-consciousness. The mind was called in, did its work clumsily as usual. She became her usual self. Sitting on the stool by the window, in the act of eating, Tarr there in front of her, it was more than ever impossible to be natural. She resented the immediate introduction of lunch in this way. The resentment increased her artificiality.

      To counterbalance the acceptance of food, she had to throw more pathos into her face. With haggard resignation she was going on again; doing what was asked of her, partaking of this lunch. She did so with unnecessary conscientiousness. Her strange wave of dignity had let her in for this? Almost she must make up for that dignity! Life was confusing her again; it was useless to struggle.

      “Aren’t these strawberries good? These little hard ones are better than the bigger strawberries. Have some more cream?”

      “Thank you.” She should have said no. But being greedy in this matter she accepted it, with heavy air of some subtle advantage gained.

      “How did the riding lesson go off?” She went to a riding school in the mornings.

      “Oh, quite well, thank you. How did your lesson go off?” This referred to his exchange of languages with a Russian girl.

      “Admirably, thank you.”

      The Russian girl was a useful feint for her.

      “What is the time?” The time? What cheek! He was almost startled.

      He took his heavy watch out and presented its face to her ironically.

      “Are you in a hurry?” he asked.

      “No, I just wondered what the time was. I live so vaguely.”

      “You are sure you are not in a hurry?”

      “Oh, no!”

      “I have a confession to make, my dear Bertha.” He had not put his watch back in his pocket. She had asked for the watch; he would use it. “I came here just now to test a funny mood—a quite new mood. My visit is a sort of trial trip of this mood. It was connected with you. I wanted to find out what it meant, and how it would be affected by your presence.”

      Bertha looked up with mocking sulky face, a shade of hopeful curiosity.

      “It was a feeling of complete indifference as regards yourself!”

      He said this solemnly, with the pomp with which a weighty piece of news might be delivered by a solicitor in conversation with his client.

      “Oh, is that all?” The new barbaric effort was met by Bertha scornfully.

      “No, that is not all.”

      Catching at the professional figure his manner had conjured up, he ran his further remarks into that mould. The presence of his watch in his hand had brought some image of the family physician or gouty attorney. It all centred round the watch, and her interest in the time of day.

      “I have found that this was only another fraud on my too credulous sensibility.” He smiled with professional courtesy. “At sight of you, my mood evaporated. But what I want to talk about is what is left. It would be well to bring our accounts up to date. I’m afraid the reckoning is enormously against me. You have been a criminally indulgent partner⸺”

      He had now got the image down to the more precise form of two partners, perhaps comfortable wine merchants, going through their books.

      “My dear boy, I know that. You needn’t trouble to go any further. But why are you going into these calculations, and sums of profit and loss?”

      “Because my sentimental finances, if I may use that term, are in a bad state.”

      “Then they only match your worldly ones.”

      “In my worldly ones I have no partner,” he reminded her.

      She cast her eyes about in swoops, full of self-possessed wildness.

      “I exonerate you, Sorbet,” she said, “you needn’t go into details. What is yours and what is mine. My God! What does it matter? Not much!”

      “I know you to be generous⸺”

      “Leave that then! Leave these calculations! All that means so little to me! I feel at the end of my strength—au bout de force!” She always heaved this out with much energy. “If you’ve made up your mind to go—do so, Sorbet. I release you! You owe me nothing. It was all my fault. But spare me a reckoning. I can’t stand any more⸺”

      “No, I insist on being responsible. We can’t leave things upside down—our books in an endless muddle, our desks open, and just walk away for ever—and perhaps set up shop somewhere else?”

      “I do not feel in any mood to ‘set up shop somewhere else,’ I can assure you!”

      The unbusinesslike element in the situation she had allowed to develop for obvious reasons. She now resisted his dishonest attempt to set this right, and benefit first, as he had done, by disorder, and lastly by order.

      “We can’t, in any case, improve matters by talking. I—I, you needn’t fear for me, Sorbet. I can look after myself, only don’t let us wrangle,” with appealing gesture and saintlily smiling face, “let us part friends. Let us be worthy of each other.”

      Bertha always opposed to Tarr’s images her Teutonic lyricism, usually repeating the same phrases several times.

      This was degenerating into their routine of wrangle. Always confronted by this imperturbable, deaf and blind “generosity,” the day would end in the usual senseless “draw.” His words still remained unsaid.

      “Bertha, listen. Let us, just for fun, throw all this overboard. I mean the cargo of inflated soul-stuff that makes us go statelily, no doubt, but—Haven’t we quarrelled enough, and said these things often enough? Our quarrels have been our undoing.

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