Tarr (Oxford World's Classics)

by Wyndham Lewis

  He put his finger to the side of his nose.

  ‘ “When you go to take a woman you should be careful not to forget your whip!” That Nietzsche said too!’*

  ‘Are you going to give her a beating?’ Tarr asked.

  Kreisler laughed in ferocious ironical fashion.

  ‘You consider that you are being fooled in some way by Fräulein Lunken?’

  ‘She would if she could. She is nothing but deceit. She is a snake. Pfui!’

  ‘You consider her a very cunning and double-faced woman?’

  Kreisler nodded sulkily.

  ‘With the soul of a prostitute?’

  ‘She has an innocent face, like a Madonna. But she is a prostitute.’ He paused: then he shouted ‘I have proofs of it!’

  ‘In what way has she tricked me?’

  ‘In the way that women always trick men!’

  With resentment partly, and with hard picturesque levity, Kreisler met Tarr’s discourse.

  This solitary drinker, particularly shabby, who could be ‘dismissed’ so easily, whom Bertha with accents of sincerity ‘hated, hated!’ was so different from the sort of man that Tarr expected might attract her, that he began to wonder. A certain satisfaction resulted from these observations.

  For that week he saw Kreisler nearly every day: a regulation ‘triangle’ was then set up. Bertha (whom Tarr saw constantly too) did not actually refuse admittance to Kreisler (although he usually had first to knock a good many times), yet she prayed him repeatedly not to come any more. Standing always in a drooping and desperate condition before him, she did her best to avert a new outburst on his part. She sought to mollify him as much as was consistent with the most absolute refusal. Tarr, unaware of how things actually stood, seconded his successor.

  Kreisler, on his side, was rendered obstinate by her often tearful refusal to have anything more whatever to do with him. On one occasion he attempted to repeat his initial performance. They were fighting on the floor when Tarr entered. With curses, panting and dishevelled, Kreisler desisted and retired to the kitchen. Tarr placed himself upon the settee. Bertha remained where she was, rolling over upon her face. Shortly Tarr heard Kreisler leave the house.

  ‘I’m sorry to have barged in’ he said.

  As Bertha did not speak, he withdrew, quietly closing the two doors after him—he had still retained his latchkey.

  Kreisler had come to regard Tarr as part of Bertha, a sort of masculine extension of her: at the Café he would look out for him, and drink deeply in his presence.

  ‘I will have her. I will have her!’ he once shouted towards the end of the evening, springing up and calling loudly for the waiter. It was all Tarr could do to prevent him from going, with assurances of intercession.

  His suspicions of Tarr at last awoke once more. What was the meaning of this Englishman always there—what was he there for after all? If it had not been for him, several times he would have rushed off and had his way with this disaffected mistress, the eagle’s way. But he was always there between them: and in secret, too, probably, and away from him—Kreisler—he was working on Bertha’s feelings, and preventing her from seeing him. Tarr was the obstacle! Yet there he was, arguing and palavering, offering to act as an intermediary, and meantime preventing him from acting. He alone was the obstacle, and yet he talked as though he were nothing to do with it, or at the most a casually interested third party:—that is how Kreisler felt on his way home after having drunk a good deal. But so long as Tarr paid for drinks he staved him off his prey.

  CHAPTER 5

  TARR soon regretted this last anti-climax stage of his adventure: he would have left Kreisler alone, but he felt that by frequenting him he could save Bertha from something disagreeable. With disquiet and misgiving every night now he sat in front of his prussian friend; he watched him gradually swallowing enough spirits to work him up to his pitch of characteristic madness.

  ‘After all let us hear really what it all means, your Kreisler stunt, and Kreisler?’ he said to her four or five days after his reappearance. ‘Do you know that I act as a dam, or rather a dyke, to his outrageous flood of liquorous spirits every night? Only my insignificant form is between you and destruction, or you and a very unpleasant Kreisler, at any rate. I’m afraid he may do you some mischief one of these fine days. Have you seen him when he’s drunk?—What, after all, does Kreisler mean? Satisfy my curiosity.’

  Bertha shuddered and looked at him with dramatically wide-open eyes, as though there were no answer.

  ‘It’s nothing Sorbert, nothing’ she said, as though Kreisler were the bubonic plague* and she were making light of it.

  ‘Why aren’t you kinder to him? He really has something to complain of.’

  He had neglected the coincidence of his own reappearance and Bertha’s refusal to see Kreisler. He must avoid finding himself manœuvred into appearing the cause: a tranquil and sentimental revenant* was the rôle he had chosen. He encouraged Bertha to see his boon companion and relax her sudden exclusiveness: but he hesitated to carry out thoroughly his part of go-between and reconciler. At length he began to make enquiries. After all, to have to hold back his successor to the favours of a lady, from going and seizing those rights (temporarily denied him presumably), was an uncomfortable situation. At any moment now it seemed likely that Kreisler would turn upon him.

  Better leave lovers to fight out their own quarrels! All his retrospective pleasure was being spoilt. Bertha was tempted to explain, in as dramatic a manner as possible, the situation to Tarr: but she hesitated always because she thought it would lead to a fight. She was often, as it was, anxious for Tarr.

  ‘Sorbert, I think I’ll go to Germany at once’ she said to him, on the afternoon of his second visit to Renée Liepmann’s.

  ‘Why, because you’re afraid of Kreisler?’

  ‘No but I think it’s better.’

  ‘But why, all of a sudden?’

  ‘My sister will be home from Berlin, in a day or two—.’

  ‘And you’d leave me here to “mind” the dog.’

  ‘No. Don’t see Kreisler any more, Sorbert. Dog is the word indeed! He is mad: he is worse than mad. Promise me, Sorbert’—she took his hand—‘not to go to the Café any more!’

  ‘Do you want him at your door at twelve to-night?—I feel I may be playing the part of—gooseberry* do you call it—.’

  ‘Don’t Sorbert. If you only knew!—He was here this morning, hammering for nearly half an hour. But all I ask you is to go to the Café no more. There is no need for you to be mixed up in all this: I alone am to blame.’

  ‘Have you known Otto long—before you knew me for instance?’

  ‘No only a week or two—since you went away.’

  ‘I must ask Kreisler. But he seems to have very primitive notions about himself.’

  ‘Don’t bother any more with that man Sorbert. You don’t do any good. Don’t go to the Café to-night!’

  ‘Why to-night?’

  ‘Any night.’

  The chief cause of separation had become an element of insidious rapprochement.* He left her silently apprehensive face at the front door, staring after him mournfully.

  So that night, after his second visit to Fräulein Liepmann’s, he did not seek out Kreisler at his usual headquarters with his first enthusiasm.

  CHAPTER 6

  ALREADY before a considerable pile of saucers, representing a considerable bill up-to-date for the accommodating Tarr, Kreisler sat quite still, his eyes very bright, smiling to himself. Tarr did not at once ask him ‘what Kreisler meant’ as he had intended; ‘Kreisler’ looked as though it meant something a little different on that particular evening. He acknowledged Tarr’s arrival slightly, seeming to include him in his reverie. Then they sat without speaking, this meeting redolent of the unpleasant atmosphere of police-court romance.*

  Tarr still kept his retrospective luxury before him, as it maintained the Kreisler side of the transaction in a desired perspective. Anastasya, whom
he had just left, had come as a diversion. He got back, with her, into the sphere of ‘real’ things again, not fanciful retrospective ones. This would be a reply to Kreisler (an Anastasya for your Otto) and restore the balance: at present they were perched upon a sort of three-legged affair. The fourth party would make things solid and less precarious.

  To maintain his rôle of intermediary and go on momentarily keeping his eye on Kreisler’s threatening figure, he must himself be definitely engaged in a new direction, beyond the suspicion of hankerings after his old love. Did he, however, wish to enter into a new attachment with Anastasya? That could be decided later: he would take the first steps, retain her if possible, and out of this charming expedient pleasant things might arise. For the moment he was compelled to requisition her. She might be regarded as a casual travelling companion: thrown together on a casanovaesque stage-coach journey,* anything might happen. Delight, adventure and amusement were always achieved: his itch to see his humorous concubine is turned into a ‘retrospective luxury,’ visits to the Liepmann circle, mysterious relationship with Kreisler: this, in its turn, suddenly turning rather prickly and perplexing, he now, through the agency of a beautiful fourth party, turns it back again into fun; not serious enough for Beauty—destined, therefore, rather for her subtle, rough, satiric sister.

  Once Anastasya had been relegated to her place rather of expediency, he could think of her with more freedom: he looked forward to his work in her direction. There would be no harm at all in anticipating a little: she might at once be brought upon the boards, as though the affair were already settled and ripe for publicity.

  ‘Do you know a girl called Anastasya Vasek? She is to be found at your german friend’s, Fräulein Liepmann’s.’

  ‘Yes I know her’ said Kreisler, looking up with unwavering blankness. His introspective smile vanished. ‘What then?’ was implied in his look. What a fellow this Englishman was, to be sure! What was he after now? Anastasya was a much more delicate point with him than Bertha.

  ‘I’ve just got to know her. She’s an attractive girl, don’t you agree?’ Kreisler’s reception of these innocent remarks he could not make out at all.

  ‘Is she?’ Kreisler looked at him almost with astonishment.

  There is a point beyond which we must hold people responsible for accidents: innocence then loses its meaning. Beyond this point Tarr had transgressed. Whether Tarr knew anything or not, the essential reality was that Tarr was beginning to get at him with Anastasya, just having been for a week a problematic figure suddenly appearing between him and his prey of the rue Martine. The habit of civilized restraint had done something to keep Kreisler baffled and passive for a week. His new self-elected boon companion also was an open-handed person: he had been preparing lately to borrow money from him. Anastasya brought on the scene was another kettle of fish. What did this new stunt signify? ‘Bertha Lunken will have nothing more to do with you. You mustn’t annoy her any more. In the meantime, I am getting on very well with Anastasya Vasek!’ Was that the idea?

  Kreisler ruminated the question as to whether Tarr had heard the whole story of his assault upon his late fiancée: the possibility of his knowing increased his contempt for this shifty gentleman.

  Kreisler was disarmed for the moment by the remembrance of Anastasya.

  ‘Is Fräulein Vasek working in a studio?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s at Serrano’s, I think’ Tarr answered.

  ‘So you go to Fräulein Liepmann’s?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Kreisler reflected a little.

  ‘I should like to see her again.’

  Tarr began to scent another mysterious muddle. Would he never be free of Herr Kreisler? Perhaps he was going to be followed there as well. In deliberate meditation Kreisler appeared to be coming round to Tarr’s opinion: for his part too, Fräulein Vasek was a nice young lady. ‘Yes, she is attractive, as you say!’—his manner began to suggest that Tarr had put her forward as a substitute for Bertha.

  For the rest of the evening Kreisler would talk of nothing but Anastasya. How was she dressed? Had she mentioned him? and so forth. Tarr felt inclined to say ‘But you don’t understand! She is for me. Bertha is your young woman now!’ Only in reflecting on this possible remark, he was confronted with the obvious reply ‘But is Bertha my young woman? I have been denied my male rights since you put in an appearance! It’s up to you to find me a substitute.’

  CHAPTER 7

  TARR had Anastasya in solitary promenade two days after this conversation. He had worked the first stage consummately: he swam with ease beside his big hysterical black swan, seeming to guide her with a golden halter. They were swimming at the moment with august undulations of thought across the Luxembourg Gardens on this sunny and tasteful evening, about four o’clock. The Latins and Scandinavians who strolled upon the Latin terrace were each of them a microscopic hero, but better turned out than the dubious too spacious and slapdash heroes of 1840’s Vie de Bohème and revolutionary storm and stress.*

  The inviolate, constantly sprinkled and shining lawns by the Lycée Henri Trois* were thickly fringed with a sort of seaside humanity, who sat facing them and their coolness as though it had been the sea. Leaving these upland expanses to the sedentary swarms of mammas and papas, Tarr and Anastasya crossed over beneath the trees past the children’s carousals grinding out their antediluvian lullabies.

  This place represented the richness of three wasted years, three incredibly gushing, thick years—what had happened to this delightful muck? He had just turned seventeen when he had arrived there, and had wandered in this children’s outdoor nursery almost a child himself. All this profusion had accomplished for him was to dye the avenues of a Park with personal colour for the rest of his existence. No one, he was quite convinced, had squandered so much of the imaginative stuff of life in the neighbourhood of these terraces, ponds, and lawns. So this was more nearly his Park* than it was anybody else’s: he should never walk through it without bitter and soothing recognition from it. Well, that was what the ‘man of action’ accomplished. In four idle years he had been, when most inactive, experimenting with the man of action’s job. He had captured a Park!—well! he had spent himself into the earth, the trees had his sap in them.

  He remembered a day when he had brought a newly purchased book to the bench there, his mind tearing at it in advance, almost writing it in its energy. He had been full of such unusual abounding faith: the streets around these gardens, in which he had lodged alternately, were so many confluents and tributaries of memory, charging in upon it on all sides with defunct puissant tides. The places, he then reflected, where childhood has been spent, or where, later, dreams of energy have been flung away, year after year, are obviously the healthiest spots for a person where such places exist: but perhaps, although he possessed the Luxembourg Gardens so completely, they were completely possessed by thousands of other people! So many men had begun their childhood of ambition in this neighbourhood. His hopes, too, no doubt, had grown there more softly because of the depth and richness of the bed. A sentimental miasma made artificially in Paris a similar good atmosphere where the mind could healthily exist as was found by artists in brilliant, complete and solid times. Paris was the most human city we had.

  ‘Elle dit le mot, Anastase, né pour d’éternels parchemins.’* He could not, however, get interested: was it the obstinate Eighteenth-Century animal vision? Those Eighteenth-Century hams—the rosy cheeks and cupid mouths and gigantic bottoms, those shapes once they got into your head, perhaps got in the way and obstructed? When you plunge into these beings, must they be all quivering with unconsciousness, like life with a cat or a serpent?—But her sex would throw clouds over her eyes: she was a woman—it was no good. Again he must confess Anastasya could only offer him something too serious: he could not play and joke so well with that.

  Then to his Bertha he was after a fashion true;* the protective instinct that people with a sense of their own power have for those not equal
s with whom they have been associated existed with him: he would have given to Bertha the authority of his own spirit, to prime her with himself that she might meet on equal terms and vanquish any rival. A slight hostility to Anastasya made itself felt, like a part of Bertha left in himself protesting and jealous.

  ‘I suppose she knows all about Bertha’ he thought. (‘Homme sensuel! Homme égoïste!’ he remembered.) She seemed rather shy with him.

  ‘How do you like Paris?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet. Do you like it?’ She had a flatness in speaking english because of her education in the United States.

  ‘I don’t like to be quite so near the centre of the world, you feel the machinery at work. Then it’s too exciting and prevents you from working. But here I am. It’s certainly difficult to live in London after Paris.’

  ‘I should have thought everything was so perfected here that the machinery did not obtrude—’ she objected.

  ‘Perhaps that is so; but I think that Paris works that the other countries may live and create: that is the rôle France has chosen. The french spirit seems to me rather spare and impoverished at present.’

  ‘You regard it as a mother-drudge?’

  ‘More of a drudge than a mother—we really get very little from France except tidiness.’

  ‘I expect you are ungrateful.’

  ‘Perhaps so. But I cannot get over a dislike for latin facilities. Suarès finds a northern rhetoric of ideas in Ibsen,* for instance, exactly similar to the word-rhetoric of the South: but in latin countries you have a democracy of vitality, the best things of the earth are in everybody’s mouth and nerves. The artist has to go and find them in the crowd. You can’t have “freedom” both ways and I prefer the artist to be free, and the crowd not to be “artists”—I don’t know if you understand what I mean? What does all our emotional talk about the wonderful artist-nation, etc., amount to?—we exclaim and point because we find thirty-five million petits-maîtres,* each individually possessing very little taste, really, living together and prettifying their towns and themselves. Imagine England an immense garden city, on Letchworth lines (that is the name of a model Fabian township near London),* or Germany (it almost has become that) a huge reform-dressed,* bestatued State. Every individual Frenchman has the trashiest taste possible: you are more astonished when you come across a severe artist in France than elsewhere: for his vitality is hypnotically beset by an ocean of cheap Salon artistry: his best instinct is to become rather aggressively harsh and simple. The reason that a great artist arouses more fury in France than in England is not because the French are more interested in Art—they are less interested: it is because they are all “artistic” and all artists—little ones. In their case it is professional jealousy.’