Tarr (Oxford World's Classics)

  ‘How do you do? I’ve just been buying my lunch.’

  ‘So late?’

  ‘I thought you’d left Paris!’ She had no information of this sort, but was inclined to rebuke him for not leaving Paris.

  ‘I? Who told you that I should like to know! I shall never leave Paris; at least—.’

  There was a sudden wealth of enigmatic significance in this, said lightly—the heartbreak note—the colossal innuendo did not escape her, sensible to such nuances.

  ‘How are our fair friends?’ asked he.

  ‘Our—? Why Fräulein Liepmann I suppose you mean and—. Oh I haven’t seen them since the other night.’

  ‘Indeed! Not since the other night—?’

  She made her silence swarm with unuttered thoughts, like a glassy shoal with innumerable fish: her eyes, even, stared and darted about, glassily.

  It was very difficult, now she had stopped, to get away: the part she had adopted with her friends, of Otto’s champion, seemed to have imposed itself on her. Her protégé could not be hurried away from exactly: the fact that he did not this time hurry away from her, even, had its weight.

  His more brutal instincts had latterly remained within close call: even quite novel appetites had put in an appearance. The fact that she was a pretty girl did its work on a rather recalcitrant subject.

  Surely for a quiet ordinary existence pleasant little distractions were suitable? The time had to be filled up somehow.

  Without any anxiety about it, he began to talk to Bertha with the idea of a subsequent meeting. Like other women, she no doubt had a—she no doubt had all—had what all—. He had avoided her not to be reminded of disquieting events: but she turned, as he stood in front of her, into a bit of comfort. What he particularly needed was a certain quietude, enlivened by healthy appetites.

  ‘I was cracked the other night, quite potty!* I’m not often in that state’ he said. Bertha’s innuendoes had to receive recognition.

  ‘I’m glad to hear that’ she answered.

  To have been kissed was after all to have been kissed: Bertha threw a little fascination into her attitude—she flexed one knee, juiced her lips a little and cocked a serious eye into non-committal distances.

  ‘I’m afraid I was rather rude to Fräulein Liepmann before leaving: did she speak about it?’

  ‘I think you were rude to everybody!’

  ‘Ah well—.’

  ‘I must be going. My lunch—.’

  ‘Oh I’m so sorry, have I kept you from your lunch? I was so glad to meet you—under more normal conditions! I had some things I wished to say to you. Ahem!’ He gave the stiff little cough of his student days. ‘I wonder if you would procure me the extreme pleasure of seeing you again?’

  Bertha looked at him in astonishment, taking in this sensational request. See Kreisler again! How—when—why? The result as regards the Liepmann circle! This pleaded for Kreisler: it would be carrying out her story: this insistence upon it would destroy that subtle advantage, now possessed by her friends. Presented with rather the same compromising spectacle again they would be somewhat nonplussed! All the arguments in favour of seeing more of Kreisler marshalled themselves with rapidity. In deliberately exposing herself to criticism, she would be effacing, in some sense, the extreme involuntariness of the Boulevard incident. It was in a jump of defiance or ‘carelessness,’ her mind’s eye on those cattish troublesome friends, that she exclaimed:—

  ‘Yes, of course, if you wish it! Why not!’

  ‘You like Cafés? There’s such a good concert—.’

  ‘Good! Very well!’ she answered very quickly, in her trenchant tone, imparting all sorts of unnecessary meanings to her simple acceptance: she had answered as men accept a bet or the Bretons clinch a bargain in the fist. ‘Certainly! Fine! Cafés! Schön. Thanks a thousand times. Good-bye! Auf wiedersehen!’

  Kreisler was leisurely: he met her vehemence with sleepy amusement.

  ‘I should then like to go with you to the Café de l’Observatoire to-morrow evening!’ He stood smiling down at her ‘faraway’ frowning ox-eye. ‘When can I meet you?’

  ‘Will you come and fetch me at my house?’

  Shivers went down her back as she said it. She was now thoroughly committed. She was delighted, or rather excited. Each fresh step was a thrill. But the details had not been reckoned on: of course they would have to meet: Kreisler was like a physician conducting a little, unpleasant, operation, in an ironical, unhurrying way.

  ‘Well it’s understood: we shall see each other tomorrow’ he said. With a smile of half raillery at her rather upset expression, he left her upon his invariable stiff bow, his hat held up in the air, derisively high. So much fuss about a little thing, such obstinacy in doing it! What was it after all? Meeting him!—his smiling was only natural. She showed with too little disguise the hazardous quality, as she considered it, of this consent: she would wish him to feel the largeness of the motive that prompted her, and for him to participate too in the certain horror of meeting himself! Well well well! What a goose! A plump and pleasing goose, however! Yes! He marched away with the rather derisive smile still upon his face.

  CHAPTER 6

  BACK in her rooms, Bertha examined, over her lunch, with stupefaction, the things she had been up to—her conversations, farewell letters, appointments, and all the rest. All in a few hours! What a strange proceeding though! Was she quite responsible for her actions?

  She was prevented from brooding over Sorbert’s going. Of Kreisler she thought very little: her women friends held the centre of the stage. As she imagined their response to the new situations she was creating, she saw them staring open-mouthed at her supersession: Tarr to Kreisler: from bad to worse.

  The key to her programme was a cumulative obstinacy: a person has made some slip in grammar, say: he makes it again on purpose so that his first involuntary speech may appear deliberate.

  She resumed her customary pottering, dawdling from one domestic task to another. Fräulein Elsa von Arnim, one of the Dresden sisters, interrupted her. At the knock she thought of Tarr and Kreisler simultaneously, welded in one, and her heart beat in double-time. Elsa had a cold reception.

  ‘Isn’t it hot? It’s simply grilling out in the street. I had to go into the gardens and get under the trees. I left the studio quite early.’

  Fräulein von Arnim sat down, giving her hat a toss and squinting up at it.

  These dirty anaemic sisters had 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 as twin parcels, usually on the way from one place to another, expensively posted here and there sealed and registered, the Royal Mail, but without real destination. They enjoyed nothing at all; unless it was the society of Fräulein Liepmann. Their stepmother neglected them, she was very smart and well-off, she gave them plenty of money, and despatched them hither and thither, always out of the way.

  ‘Oh! Bertha, I didn’t know your dear “Sorbert” was going to England.’—Deiner Sorbert was the bantering formula for Tarr. Bertha was incessantly talking about him—to them, to the charwoman, to the greengrocer opposite, to everybody she met: so Tarr was for them her possession, her Tarr.

  ‘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. ‘By the way, I’ve just met Herr Kreisler. He’s going to take me to a wine-restaurant tomorrow night, isn’t it lovely!’

  ‘Wine-restaurant with—! Well! I like your taste!’

  ‘What’s the matter with Herr Kreisler? You were all friendly enough with him a week ago.’

  Elsa looked at her with a cold-blooded sc
rutiny, puffing cigarette smoke towards her as though in an attempt to reach her with its impalpable scented cloud.

  ‘But he’s a vicious brute, but above all a brute, simply. 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 Fuchs 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 a really hopeless brute who should be given as wide a berth as possible.’

  ‘Where did you hear all that! I don’t think that Fräulein Vasek’s story is true for a moment, I am certain—.’

  ‘Well, he once was like that with me. Yes think of it! Even with me. He began hanging around, 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 don’t see anything in that. You are all so unfair—that’s my complaint. His fiancée married! I’ve known several cases—.’

  ‘Yes. That by itself—.’

  Elsa was quite undisturbed. She was talking to a child. She offered it advice but it must take it or leave it. 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? But what a funny thing to say! You can depend on it that that, anyhow, is not the explanation.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Why no! Certainly not!’

  ‘Sorbert has a rival perhaps?’

  This remark was met in staring silence. It was an unnecessary intrusion of something as inapropos as unmanageable: it deserved no reply, it would get none from her. She had no intention of conceding 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 (seeing there was no evidence to confirm or even suggest it) which at once place 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 and superseding it with her cats of friends was, why, a sort of rival version. And in such exquisite taste! Such pretentiousness should discredit it in advance, it should with decent people.

  Bertha took some minutes to digest Elsa’s news: she flushed and frowned: the more she thought of this rival version of Fräulein Vasek’s the more repulsive it appeared. It was a startlingly novel view, it gave proof of a perfect immodesty. It charged hers full tilt. For three days now this story of hers had been her great asset, she had staked her little all upon it. Now 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 come along: and what a version, to start with!

  Bertha’s version had been a vital matter: Fräulein Vasek’s was a matter of vanity clearly. 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 had happened, it attacked indirectly her action, proceeding, ostensibly, from those notions. Her meeting Kreisler at present depended for its reasonableness upon the ‘hunger’ theory; or, if that should fail, something equally touching and primitive. Were she forced to accept, as Elsa readily did, the snub-by-Anastasya theory, with its tale of ridiculous reprisals, further dealings with Kreisler would show up in a bare and ugly light. Her past conduct also would have its primitive slur renewed. She saw all this immediately: her defiance had been delivered with great gusto—‘I am meeting Herr Kreisler to-morrow!’ The shine had soon been taken off that.

  The weak point in Anastasya’s calm and contradictory version was the rank immodesty of the form it took.

  Bertha’s obstinacy awoke: in a twinkling her partisanship of Kreisler was confirmed. She had a direct interest now in their meeting: she was most 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, humming an especially ‘gay’ air, with the most off-hand of expressions to leave in no doubt the true meaning of the tune.

  CHAPTER 7

  PEOPLE appear with a startling suddenness sometimes out of the fog of Time and Space: so Kreisler appeared—such an apparition! Bertha did not visualize her countryman very readily: and the next day she was surprised when she saw him below her windows. He stared up at the house with eager speculation: he examined the house and studio opposite. Behind the curtains Bertha stood with the emotions of an ambushed sharp-shooter; she felt on her face the blankness of the house wall, all her body was as unresponsive as a brick: the visitor beneath appeared almost to be looking at her face, magnified and exposed instead of at the walls of the house and its windows.

  Then it appeared to her that it was he, the enemy, getting in: she wished to stop him there, before he came any farther: he was a bandit, a house-breaker, after all a dangerous violent person.

  Yet in the processes of his uncertainty he looked so innocuous and distant, for the moment. His first visit: there he was, so far, a stranger. Why should these little obstacles of strangeness—which gate to enter, which bell to ring—be taken away from this particular individual? He should remain ‘stranger’ for her, where he came from: she did not want him any nearer to her. But he had burrowed his way through, was at the bell already, and would soon be at herself: he would be at her! He would be breaking into her: she did not wish him inside, he was well enough where he was. She found here, in her room, was very different from she found outside, in restaurant or street: the clothing of this décor was a nakedness: she revolted immobile and alarmed.

  For a moment she struggled up from the obstinate dream, made of artificial but tenacious sentiments, shaped by ‘contretemps’* of all sorts which had been accumulating like a snow-ball ever since her last interview with Tarr. Still somewhat rapt in this interview she rolled in its nightmarish, continually metamorphosed substance, through Space: where would it land her—this electric, directionless, vital affair? The ‘Indifference’ and the ‘Difference,’ they had floated her, successfully, away in some direction. Again the bell rang: then the knocker, the little copper gargoyle, began to thunder. She could see him, almost, through the wall, standing phlegmatic and erect. They had not spoken yet: but they had been some minutes ‘in touch.’

  Perhaps this visitor was after all mad? Elsa, with her warnings for her, came into her mind: however much she resisted the facts, there was very little reason for this meeting. It was now unnecessary. It had been exploded actually by Anastasya. She was going through with something that no longer meant anything at all.

  As the bell rang a third time she walked to the door. Kreisler was a little haggard, different from the day before. He had expected to be asked in: instead, hardly saying anything, she came out on the narrow landing and closed the door behind her with a bang. Surprised, he felt for the first stair with his foot: it was eight in the evening, very dark on the staircase and he stumbled several times. Bertha felt she could not say the simplest word to him. She had the impression that some lawyer’s clerk had come to fetch her for a tragic interview; and she, having been sitting fully dressed
for unnecessary hours in advance, was now urging him silently and violently before her, following.

  That afternoon she had received a second letter from Sorbert.

  ‘MY DEAR BERTHA.—Excuse me for the quatsch* I wrote the other day. Simply, I think we had better say, finally, that we will try and get used to not seeing each other, and give up our idea of marriage. Do you agree with me? As you will see, I am still here, in Paris. I am going to England this afternoon.—Yours ever,

  SORBETT.’

  On the receipt of this letter—as on the former occasion a little—she first of all behaved as she would have done had Sorbert been there: she acted silent resignation, and ‘went about her work as usual,’ for the benefit of the letter, in the absence of its author. The reply, written an hour or so before Kreisler arrived, had been an exaggerated falling in with the view expressed.—‘Of course, Sorbert: far better that we should part! far far better!’ and so forth. But soon this letter of his began to molest her. It even threatened her mannerisms. She was just going to take up a book and read, when, as though something had claimed her attention, she put it down: she got up, her head turned back over her shoulder, then suddenly flung herself down upon the sofa as though it had been rocks and she plunging down on to them from a high cliff. She sobbed until she had tired herself out.

  So Kreisler and she now walked up the street as though compelled by some very strange circumstances, only, to be in each other’s company. He appeared depressed, he too had come under the spell of some meaningless duty: his punctuality even suggested fatigued and senseless waiting, careful timing. His temporary destination reached, he delivered himself up indifferently into her hands. He remarked that it was hot: she did not answer. They said nothing but walked on away from her house: neither seemed to require any explanation for these peculiar manners.

  Before they got to the Café de l’Observatoire Kreisler attempted to make up for his lapse into strangeness: he discovered, however, that he had not been alone, and desisted.