‘Why should I? I don’t see that! One paltry—one—!’
‘Tell me what you want!’
‘I want a woman. What I want is a woman, you understand, I want a woman badly, that’s all!’
‘But I am one!’
‘I agree, of sorts—very much of sorts!’
She whispered in his ear, hanging upon his neck.
‘No no!’ he answered: ‘all that may be true but—.’
‘It is.’
He sat frowning intently at the table.
‘Don’t be quarrelsome Tarr!’
For a moment she considered him then she pushed her glass away, lay back and remarked with rapid truculence.
‘It’s all right when you’re talking about art but at present you are engaged in the preliminaries to love with a woman.’
‘So you say.’
‘This is something that can die! Ha! Ha! we’re in life my Tarr: we represent absolutely nothing thank God!’
‘I realize I’m in life, but I don’t like being reminded of it in that way. It makes me feel as though I were in a “mauvais lieu.” ’*
‘My confession has been unavailing I observe.’
‘To cut a long story short, you disgust me!’
‘Give me a kiss you efficient chimpanzee.’
Tarr scowled at her but did not alter the half embrace in which they sat.
‘You won’t give me a kiss? Silly old in efficient chimpanzee!’
She sat back in her chair, and head down, looked through her eyelashes at him with arch menace.
‘Garçon! garçon!’ she called.
‘Mademoiselle?’ the waiter said, approaching slowly, with dignified scepticism.
‘This gentleman, waiter, wants to be a lion with fleas on his back—at least so he says! At the same time he wants a woman if we are to believe him. I don’t know if he expects the woman to catch his fleas or not, I haven’t asked him: but he’s a funny looking bird isn’t he?’
The waiter withdrew with hauteur.
‘What’s the meaning of your latest tack you great he-man of a german art-tart?’
‘What am I?’
‘I called you german pastry on the large side, with the icing laid on with a shovel.’
‘Oh, tart is it—?’
‘Quite well made, well puffed out, with a great line of talk—.’
‘And what, good God, shall we call the cow-faced specimen you spend the greater part of your days with—?’
‘She, too, is german pastry, more homely than you though—.’
‘Homely’s* the word!’
‘But not quite so fly-blown and not above all, at least, pretentious—yes pre-ten—.’
‘I see, and takes you more seriously than other people would be likely to: that’s what all your “quatsch” about “woman” means. I guess you know that?’
She had recovered from the effect of the drinks. Sitting up stiffly she examined him as he spoke.
‘I know you are a famous whore who becomes rather acid in her cups!—when you showed me your legs this evening I suppose I was meant—.’
‘Assez! Assez!!’ She struck the table with her fist and flashed her eyes picturesquely over him.
‘Let’s get to business.’ He put his hat on and leant towards her. ‘It’s getting late. Twenty-five francs, I’m afraid, is all I can manage, you’ve cleaned me out with the meal.’
‘Twenty-five francs for what? with you—it would be robbery! Twenty-five francs to be your audience while you drivel about art? Keep your money and buy Bertha an—efficient chimpanzee—she will need it poor bitch if she marries you!’
Her mouth uncurled, a thin red line, her eyes glaring and her hands in her overcoat pockets she walked out of the door of the Café.
Tarr ordered another drink.
‘It’s like a moral tale told on behalf of Bertha’ he pondered. That was the temper of Paradise!
Much sobered, he sat in a grim sulk at the thought of the good time he had lost. For half an hour he plotted his revenge and satisfaction together. With a certain buffoonish lightness he went back to his studio with smug, thick secretive pleasure settling down upon his body’s exquisite reproaches and burning retaliations.
CHAPTER 3
TARR went slowly up the stairs feeling for his key. He arrived at the door without having found it. The door was ajar: at first this seemed quite natural to him and he continued the search for the key. Then suddenly he dropped that occupation, pushed the door open and entered his studio. The moonlight came heavily through the windows: in a part of the room where it did not strike he became aware of an apparition of solid white. It was solid white flowed round by a dark cloud: it crossed into the moonlight and faced him, its hands placed like a modest statue’s: the hair reached below the waist, and flowed to the right from the head. This tall nudity began laughing with a harsh sound like stone laughing.
‘Close that door!’ it shouted, ‘there’s a draught. You took a long time to consider my words. I’ve been waiting chilled to the bone my dear. Forgive me, Tarr, my words belied me, the acidulated demimondaine* was a trick. It occupied your mind—you didn’t notice me take your key!’
Tarr’s vanity was soothed: the key, which could only have been taken in the Café, justified the harsh dialogue.
She stood before him now with her arms up, hands joined behind her head: this impulse to be naked and unashamed had the cultural hygienic touch so familiar to him: the dark ash of the hair was the same colour as Bertha’s only it was darker and coarser, Bertha’s being fine. Anastasya’s white face, therefore, had the appearance almost of a mask.
‘Will you engage me as your model sir? Je fais de la réclame pour les Grecs!’*
‘You are very ionian—hardly greek.* But I don’t require a model thank you, I never use nude models for my pictures.’
‘Well I must dress again, I suppose.’ She turned towards a chair where her clothes were piled. But Tarr shouted ‘I accept, I accept!’ a simultaneous revolt of all his tantalized senses shouted its veto upon further acts of that sort. He seized her from behind and heaving her up from the ground, kissing her in the mass, as it were, carried his mighty, luminous burden through the door at the back of the studio leading to his bedroom.
‘Tarr be my love! we’ll be the doviest couple on the erdball honey!’ Next morning, the sunlight having taken the place of the moonlight, but striking on the opposite side of the house, they lay in muscular masses side by side, smoking and drinking coffee.
‘You’ll never hear the horrid word marriage from me—I want to rescue you from your Bertha habits. We’re very well together, aren’t we? I’m not doing Bertha a bad turn, either.’
‘How do you make that out?’
‘Why when that sort of cattle mix themselves with the likes of us, it’s at their peril! They suffer for their effrontery.’
Anastasya rolled up against him with the movement of a seal.
‘Thank you Tarr for being so nice to me just now. It was perfect.’
Tarr drove the smoke away from his face and wiped his eye.
‘You are my efficient chimpanzee then for keeps?’
‘No I’m the new animal; we haven’t thought up a name for him yet—the thing that will succeed the Superman.’*
CHAPTER 4
TARR crawled towards Bertha that day upon the back of a St. Germain omnibus: as he crawled his mind lazily wandered in the new scene to whose first landmarks he had now grown accustomed. He also turned back into the old with a fresh eye. He really had never meant to leave Bertha at all, he saw: he had not meant to leave her altogether. He had just been playing. A long debt had accumulated, it had been deliberately increased by him because he knew he would not repudiate it.
To-day he must break the news to Bertha that he could no longer regard himself as responsible. The debt was not to be repudiated but he must tell her that he only had himself to pay with, and that his person had been seized and was held by somebody else.
He passed through her iron gateway with a final stealth, although making his shoes sound loudly upon the gravel. It was like entering a vault. The trees looked like weeds, the meaning or taste of everything, of course, had died: the concierge looked like a new one. He had bought a flower for his button-hole: he kept smelling it as he approached the house.
During the last week or more he had got in the habit of writing his letters at Bertha’s, to fill up the time. Occasionally he would do a drawing of her (a thing he had never done formerly) to vary the monotony. This time there would be no letter-writing: this visit would be more like the old ones.
‘Come in Sorbett’ she said, as she opened the door. The formality of the terms upon which they at present met must not be overlooked: prerogatives of past times were proudly rejected. The same depressed atmosphere as the day before, and the days preceding that, penetrated his consciousness. She appeared stale, in some way she was deteriorated and shabby, her worth in the market as in his eyes had dwindled, she was extremely pitiable. Her ‘reserve’ (a natural result of the new equivocal circumstances) removed her to a distance, as it seemed; it also shut her up inside herself, in an unhealthy dreary and faded atmosphere, she who was naturally so over-expansive. She was shut up with a mass of reserves and secrets, new and old. One was a corpse, as Kreisler was one of her secrets. Mournfully reproachful, she mounted guard over her store of bric-à-brac that had gone out of fashion and was getting musty in a neglected shop: such was her manner, such were her sensations.
Greeted with long mournful glances, he felt she had thought out what she should say; this interview meant a great deal to her. The abject little room seemed to be thrust forward to awaken his memories and ask for pity. An intense atmosphere of teutonic suicide permeated everything: he could not move an eyelid or a muscle without wounding or slighting something: it was like being in a dark kitchen at night, where you know at every step you will put your foot upon a beetle—there was indeed a still closer analogy to this in the disgust he felt for these too naked and familiar things upon which he was treading. He scowled at Beethoven, who scowled back at him like a reflection in a mirror: it was the fate of both of them to haunt this room. The Mona Lisa was there and the breton sabots* and jars. She might have a change of scenery sometimes!—he had the feeling that these tiresome things had been deliberately left in the same place to reproduce a former mood in him. His photograph was prominent on her writing-table: she seemed to say (with a sort of sickly idiocy) ‘You see, he is faithful to me!’
She preceded him to her sitting-room: as he looked at her back he thought of her as taking a set number of paces, then turning round abruptly, confronting him. From a typical and similar enervation of the will to that which was at the bottom of his troubles, he could hardly stop himself from putting his arm round her waist while they stood for a moment close to each other: he did not wish to do this in response to any renewed desire, but merely because it was the one thing he must not do. To throw himself into the abyss of perplexity he had just escaped from was an almost irresistible temptation: the dykes set up were perpetually threatened by his neurasthenia in this fashion. He kept his hands in his pockets.
When they had reached the room, she turned round, as he had half imagined, and caught hold of his hands.
‘Sorbert! Sorbert!’
The words were said separately, each emphatic, each significant. The second was a repetition only of the first. She seemed calling him by his name to conjure back his self again. Her face was a strained and energetic mask.
‘What is it Bertha?’
‘I don’t know!’
She dropped his hands, drooped her head to the right, and turned away.
She sat down. He sat down opposite her, his hat still on his head.
‘Anything new?’ he asked.
‘Anything new? Yes!’ She gazed fierily at him, with an insistent meaning.
He concluded this was just the usual, with nothing more behind it than what was always there.
‘Well. I have something new as well!’
‘Have you Sorbett?’
‘To begin with how have my visits struck you lately? How did you explain them?’
‘Oh, I did not: why bother about an explanation? Why do you ask?’
‘I thought I might as well clear that up.’
‘Well?’
‘My explanation to myself was this: I did not want to leave you brusquely and I thought a blurred interlude of this sort would do no harm to either of us. Our loves could die in each other’s arms so to speak—a comfort to both.’
She stared with incredulous fixity at the floor: her spirit seemed arched over like a swan, and to be gazing down hypnotically.
‘That was what I said to myself. The real reason was simply that being very fond of you, I could not make up my mind to give you up. I claim that my visits were not frivolous.’
‘Well?’
‘I would have married you, if you had considered that advisable.’
‘Yes? And—?’
‘The rest I find it rather difficult to say.’
‘What is difficult?’
‘Well, I still like you very much. Yesterday I met a woman, we got on well, I have just left her. I love her too. I can’t help that. What must I do?’
Bertha turned a slightly stormier white.
‘Who is she?’
‘You know her. She is Anastasya Vasek.’
The news struck through something else, and, inside, her ego shrank to an almost wizened being. It seemed glad of the protection the cocoon, the ‘something,’ afforded her.
‘You did not—find out what my news was.’
‘I did not. Is there anything particular—?’
‘Yes. I am enceinte.’*
He thought about this in a clumsy and incredulous way. What a woman, there was no end to her—a Roland for his Oliver:* now she was going to have a baby! With what regularity she countered him. Perhaps Anastasya was getting one too? Bertha’s news rose up in opposition to the night he had just spent. Hopes of swagger sex in the future were dashed a little. He was crestfallen at once. He looked up with a gleam of hope.
‘Whose child is it?’
‘Kreisler’s.’
No, no good! There you are! he thought.
Tarr got up and stepped over to her with a bright relieved look in his face.
‘Poor Mensch!’ he said. ‘That’s a bad business. But don’t go on about it or worry yourself: we can get married and it can always pass as mine: if we do it quickly enough.’
She looked up at him obliquely and sharply, with suspicion grown a habit. When she saw the pleasant, assured expression, she saw that at last things had turned. Sorbert was denying reality! He was ending with miracles—against himself. Her instinct had always told her that generosity would not be lost.
She could have told him at this juncture the actual circumstances under which the child had come. But the idea having occurred to her she had the presence of mind to refrain. She knew that by that her case would be so terribly weakened (whatever the satisfaction to her) that Tarr might immediately take back what he had said.
CHAPTER 5
WHEN he got outside Bertha’s house, Bertha waving to him from the window with tears in her eyes, he came in for the counter-attack. One after the other the protesting masses of good sense rolled up. He picked his way out of the avenue with a reasoning gesticulation of the body; a chicken-like motion of sensible fastidious defence in front of vulgar violence. At the gate he exploded in harsh laughter, looking bravely and raillingly out into the world through his glasses; then he tramped slowly off in his short jacket, his buttocks moving methodically just beneath its rim.
‘Ha ha! Ha ha! Kreisleriana’* he shouted without his voice.
The indignant plebs of his glorious organism rioted around his mind.
‘Ah-ha! Ah-ha! dirty practical joker, dirty intellect, where are you leading us now?’ They were vociferous. ‘You have kept us fooling in this neighb
ourhood so long and now you are pledging us to your fancy fool for ever. Ah-ha! Ah-ha!’
A faction clamoured ‘Anastasya!’ Certain sense-sections attacked him in vulnerable spots with Anastasya’s voluptuous banner unfurled and fragrant. He buffeted his way along, as though spray were dashing in his face, watchful behind his glasses. He met his thoughts with a contemptuous stiff veteran smile: this capricious and dangerous master had an offensive stylistic coolness, similar to Wellington breakfasting at Salamanca while Marmont hurried exultingly into traps:* they were of the same metal, enemies of demagogues and haters of the mob.
Those thoughts that bellowed ‘Anastasya!’ however, held him up. He answered them.
‘Anastasya! Anastasya! You shall have her, what do you take me for? you will still have your Anastasya all right, I am not selling myself or you, a man such as I am does not dispose of himself in such a matter as this. I am going to marry Bertha Lunken: well and what of it, shall I be any the less my own master for that? If I want to sleep with Anastasya I shall do so. “Why marry Bertha Lunken and shoulder all that contagious mess?” Because it is only the points or movements in life that matter, and one of those points is in question; namely, to keep faith with another person: then I show my world by choosing the “premier venu” to be my body-servant and body-companion my contempt for it and for my body, too. Are you satisfied?’
Anastasya he sacrificed with a comparatively light heart. He came back to his earlier conclusions: such successful people as Anastasya and himself were by themselves: it was as impossible to combine or wed them as to compound the genius of two great artists. If you mixed together into one whole Gainsborough and Goya* he argued, you would get nothing. A subtle lyrical wail would gain nothing from living with a rough and powerful talent, or vice versa: success is always personal. More than ever he was steadily convinced that above a certain level co-operation, group-genius was a slavish pretence and in fact absurd. Mob-talent or popular art was a good thing, it was a big, diffuse, vehement giant; but he was quite sure the only songs of the popular muse that were exciting were composed by great individuals, submerged in an unfavourable time.
Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Page 37