Tarr had not gone to England. Kreisler had not been sufficient to
accomplish this. He still persisted in his self-indulgent system of
easy stages. A bus ride distant, he would be able to keep away. But in
any case he did not wish to go to England, nor anywhere else, for that
matter. Paris was much the most suitable domicile, independently of
Bertha, with his present plans.
In the neighbourhood of the Place Clichy, in an old convent, he found a
room big enough for four people. There, on the day of the second of the
letters, he arrived in a state of characteristic misgiving. It was the
habitual indigestion of Reality. He was very fond of reality. But he was
like a man very fond of what did not agree with him. It usually ended,
however, by his assimilating it.
The insouciant, adventurous, those needing no preparation to live, he
did not admire, but felt he should imitate.—A new room was a thing that
had to be fitted into as painfully as a foot into some new and too
elegant boot. The things deposited on the floor, the door finally closed
on this new area to be devoted exclusively to himself, the blankest
discomfort descended on him. To undo and let loose upon the room his
portmanteau’s squashed and dishevelled contents—like a flock of birds,
brushes, photographs and books flying to their respective places on
dressing-table, mantelpiece, shelf or bibliothèque; boxes and parcels
creeping dog-like under beds and into corners, taxed his character to the
breaking-point. The unwearied optimism of these inanimate objects, the
way they occupied stolidly and quickly room after room, was appalling.
Then they were _packed up_ things, with the staleness of a former
room about them, and the souvenir of a depressing time of tearing up,
inspecting, and interring.
This preliminary discomfort was less than ever spared him here. He had
cut his way to this decision (to go and live in Montmartre), through a
bristling host of incertitudes. A place would have had to be particularly
spacious to convince him. This large studio-room was worse than any
desert. It had been built for something else, and would never be right.—A
large square whitewashed box was what he wanted to pack himself into.
This was an elaborate carved chest of a former age. He would no doubt
pack it eventually with consoling memories of work. He started work at
once, in fact. This was his sovereign cure for new rooms.
Half an hour after his taking possession, it being already time for
the _apéritif_, he issued forth into the new quarter. There were a few
clusters of men. The Spanish men dancers were coloured earth-objects,
full of basking and frisking instincts; the atmosphere of the harlot’s
life went with them, and Spanish reasonableness and civility. He chose a
café on the Place Clichy. The hideous ennui of large gimcrack shops and
dusty public offices pervaded other groups of pink, mostly dark-haired
Frenchmen drinking appetizers. They responded with their personalities on
the café terraces to the emptiness of the boulevard.
He had not any friends in Montmartre. But he had not been at the café
above a few minutes, when he saw a familiar face approaching. It was a
model (Berthe, by name, though bringing no reminder with her of the other
“Berthe” he knew) with an English painter he saw for the first time,
but whom he had just heard about in connexion with this girl. Berthe
knew Tarr very slightly. But she chose a table near him, with a nod, and
shortly opened conversation. She meant to talk to him evidently. She
asked about one or two people Tarr knew.
“Do you wish me to present you?” she said, looking towards her protector.
“This is Mr. Tarr, Dick.”
So it was done.
“Why don’t you come and sit here?” That too was done, partly from
inquisitiveness.
The young Englishman annoyed Tarr by pretending to be alarmed every
time he was addressed. He had a wide-open, wondering eye, fixed on the
world in timid serenity. It did not appear at first to understand what
you said, and rolled a little alarmedly, even so only to be filled the
next moment with some unexpected light of whimsical intelligence. It had
understood all the time! It was only its art to surprise you, and its
English affectation of unreadiness and childishness.
He was a great big child, wandering through life! The young Latin wishes
to impress you with his ability to look after himself. General idiocy
of demeanour, on the other hand, is the fashionable English style. This
young man was six feet one, with a handsome beak in front of his face,
meant for a super-Emersonian mildness. His “wide awake” was large, larger
than Hobson’s. Innumerable minor Tennysons had planted it on his head, or
bequeathed a desire for it to this ultimate Dick of long literary line.
His family was allied to much Victorian talent. But, alas, thought Tarr,
how much worse it is when the mind gets thin than when the blood loses
its body, in merely aristocratic refinement. Intellectual aristocracy in
the fifth generation!—but Tarr gazed at the conclusive figure in front
of him, words failing. Words failed, too, for maintaining conversation
with it. He soon got up, and left, his first _apéritif_ at Montmartre
unsatisfactory.
He did not take possession of his new life with very much conviction.
After dinner he went to a neighbouring music hall, precariously amused,
soothed by the din. But he eventually left with a headache. The
strangeness of the streets, cafés, and places of entertainment depressed
him deeply. Had it been an absolutely novel scene, he would have found
stimulus in it. But it was like a friend grown indifferent, or something
perfectly familiar with the richness of habit taken out of it. Tarr was
gregarious in the sense that usually he liked his room and some familiar
streets with their traces of familiar men. And where more energetic
spirit suggested some truer solitude to him, he would never have sought
it where a vestige of inanimate friendship remained.
Here, where he had chosen to live, he appeared as though fallen in some
intermediate negative existence. Unusually for him, he felt alone. _To be
alone_ was essentially a nondescript, lowered, and unreal state for him.
The following morning Tarr woke, his legs rather cramped and tired, and
not thoroughly rested. But as soon as he was up, work came quite easily.
He got his paints out, and without beginning on his principal canvas,
took up a new and smaller one by way of diversion. Squaring up a drawing
of three naked youths sniffing the air, with rather worried Greek faces
and heavy nether limbs, he stuck it on the wall with pins and drew his
camp easel up alongside it. He squared up his canvas on the floor with
a walking-stick, and fixed it on the easel. To get a threadlike edge a
pencil had to be sharpened several times.
By the end of the afternoon he had got a witty pastiche on the way. Two
colours principally had been used, mixed in piles on two palettes: a
smoky, bilious saffron, and a pale transparent lead. The significance of
the thing depended first on the psychology of the pulpy limbs, strained
dancers’ attitudes and empty faces; secondly, the two colours and the
simple yet contorted curves.
Work over, his depression again grasped him, like an immensely gloomy
companion who had been idling impatiently while he worked. He promenaded
this companion in “Montmartre by Night,” without improving his character.
Nausea glared at him from every object met. Sex surged up and martyrized
him, but he held it down rather than satisfy himself with its elementary
servants.
The next day, _même jeu_. He sat for hours in the fatiguing evening
among a score of relief ships or pleasure boats, hesitating, but finally
rejecting relief or pleasure. And the next day it was the same thing.
Meantime his work progressed. But to escape these persecutions he worked
excessively. His eyes began to prick, and on the sixth day he woke up
with a headache. He was sick and unable to work.
Tarr decided he had been mistaken in remaining in Paris. The fascination
of the omnibuses bound for the _Rive gauche_ was almost irresistible.
Destiny had granted him the necessary resolution to break. He could have
gone away—anywhere, even. His will had then offered him a free ticket,
as it were, to any end of the earth. Or simply, and most sensibly, to
London. And yet he had decided to go no farther than Montmartre, in the
unwisdom of his sense of energy and freedom of that moment. Now the “free
ticket” was not any more available. His Will had changed. It offered all
sorts of different bus tickets, merely, which would conduct him, _avec_
and _sans_ correspondence, in the direction of the _Quartier du Paradis_.
Why not go back again, simply, in fact? The mandates of the governing
elements in our nature, resolves, etc., were childish enough things. His
resentment against Bertha, and resolve to quit, would always be there.
There was room in life for the satisfaction of this impulse, and the
equally strong one to see her again. The road back to the _Quartier du
Paradis_ would probably have been taken quite soon, only it needed in
a way as much of an effort in the contrary direction to get back as it
had to get away. He did not know what might await him either. She might
really have given him up and changed her life. He had not the necessary
experience to dismiss that possibility.
But at last one evening he did go. He went deliberately up to an omnibus
“Clichy—St. Germain,” and took his seat under its roof. He was resolved
to glut himself, without any atom of self-respect or traces of “resolve”
remaining, in what he had been wanting to do for a week. He would go to
Bertha’s rooms, even find out what had been happening in his absence. He
might even, perhaps, hang about a little outside, and try to surprise
her in some manner. Then he would behave _en maître_, there would be no
further question of his having given her up and renounced his rights. He
would behave just as though he had never gone away or the letters been
sent. He would claim her again with all the appeals he knew to her love
for him. He would conduct himself without a scrap of dignity or honesty.
Once the “resolution” and pride of his retiring had been broken down, it
was thenceforth immaterial to what length he went. In fact, better be
frankly weak and unprincipled in his actions and manner, go the whole
length of his defeat and confusion. In such completeness there remains a
grain of superiority and energy.
But once started in his bus, a wave of excitement and anxiety surged in
him with hot gushes.—What awaited him? He fancied all sorts of strange
developments.—Perhaps, after all, his journey would not satisfy his
weaker movement, but confirm and establish definitely his more sensible
resolves. Perhaps weaknesses would find at last the door closed against
them.
He smiled at the city as they passed through it, with the glee of a boy
on a holiday excursion.
PART V
A MEGRIM OF HUMOUR
CHAPTER I
Some days later, in the evening, Tarr was to be found in a strange
place. Decidedly his hosts could not have explained how he got there. He
displayed no consciousness of the anomaly.
He had introduced himself—now for the second time—into Fräulein Lipmann’s
æsthetic saloon, after dining with her and her following at Flobert’s
Restaurant. As inexplicable as Kreisler’s former visits, these ones
that Tarr began to make were not so perfectly unwelcome. There was a
glimmering of meaning in them for Bertha’s women friends. He had just
walked in two nights before, as though he were an old and established
visitor there, shaken hands and sat down. He then listened to their
music, drank their coffee and went away apparently satisfied. Did he
consider that his so close connexion with Bertha entitled him to this? It
was at all events a prerogative he had never before availed himself of,
except on one or two occasions at first, in her company.
The women’s explanation of this eccentric sudden frequentation was that
Tarr was in despair. His separation from Bertha (or her conduct with
Kreisler) had hit him hard. He wished for consolation or mediation.
Neither of these guesses was right. It was really something absurder
than that that had brought him there.
Only a week or ten days away from his love affair with Bertha, Tarr was
now coming back to the old haunts and precincts of his infatuation. He
was living it all over again in memory, the central and all the accessory
figures still in exactly the same place. Suddenly, everything to do with
“those days,” as he thought of a week or two before (or what had ended
officially then) had become very pleasing. Bertha’s women friends were
delightful landmarks. Tarr could not understand how it was he had not
taken an interest in them before. They had so much of the German savour
of that life lived with Bertha about them!
But not only with them, but with _Bertha herself_ he was likewise
carrying on this mysterious retrospective life. He was so delighted,
as a fact, to be free of Bertha that he poetized herself and all her
belongings.
On this particular second visit to Fräulein Lipmann’s he met Anastasya
Vasek. She, at least, was nothing to do with his souvenirs. Yet, not
realizing her as an absolute new-comer at once, he accepted her as
another proof of how delightful these people in truth were.
He had been a very silent guest so far. They were curious to hear what
this enigma should eventually say, when it decided to speak.
“How is Bertha?” they had asked him.
“She has got a cold,” he had answered. It was a fact that she had caught
a summer cold several days before.—“How strange!” they thought.—“So he
sees her still!”
“She hasn’t been to Flobert’s lately,” Renée Lipmann said. “I’ve been so
busy, or I’d have gone round to see her. She’s not in bed, is she?”
“Oh, no, she’s just got a slight cold. She’s very well otherwise,” Tarr
answered.
Bertha disappears. Tarr turns up tranquilly in her place. Was he a
substitute? What could all this mean? Their first flutter over, their
traditional hostility for him reawakened. He had always been an arrogant,
eccentric, and unpleasant person: “Homme égoïste! Homme sensuel!” in Van
Bencke’s famous words.
On seeing him talking with new liveliness, not displayed with them, to
Anastasya, suspicions began to germinate. Even such shrewd intuition, a
development from the reality, as this: “_Perhaps getting to like Germans,
and losing his first, he had come here to find another._” Comfortable
in his liberty, he was still enjoying, by proxy or otherwise, the
satisfaction of slavery.
The arrogance implied by his infatuation for the commonplace was taboo.
He must be more humble, he felt, and take an interest in his equals.
He had been “Homme égoïste” so far, but “Homme sensuel” was an
exaggeration. His concupiscence had been undeveloped. His Bertha, if she
had not been a joke, would not have satisfied him. She did not succeed
in waking his senses, although she had attracted them. There was no more
reality in their sex relations than in their other relations.
He now had a closer explanation of his attachment to stupidity than he
had been able to give Lowndes. It was that his artist’s asceticism could
not support anything more serious than such an elementary rival, and,
when sex was in the ascendant, it turned his eyes away from the highest
beauty and dulled the extremities of his senses, so that he had nothing
but rudimentary inclinations left.
But in the interests of his animalism he was turning to betray the artist
in him. For he had been saying to himself lately that a more suitable
lady-companion _must_ be found; one, that is, he need not be ashamed of.
He felt that the time had arrived for Life to come in for some of the
benefits of Consciousness.
Anastasya’s beauty, bangles, and good sense were the very thing.
Despite himself, Sorbert was dragged out of his luxury of reminiscence
without knowing it, and began discriminating between the Bertha
enjoyment felt through the pungent German medium of her friends, and this
novel sensation. Yet this sensation was an intruder. It was as though a
man having wandered sentimentally along an abandoned route, a tactless
and gushing acquaintance had been discovered in unlikely possession.
Tarr asked her from what part of Germany she came.
“My parents are Russian. I was born in Berlin and brought up in America.
We live in Dresden,” she answered.
This accounted for her jarring on his maudlin German reveries.
“Lots of Russian families have settled latterly in Germany, haven’t
they?” he asked.
“Russians are still rather savage. The more bourgeois a place or thing is
the more it attracts them. German watering places, musical centres and so
on, they like about as well as anything. They often settle there.”
“Do you regard yourself as a Russian—or a German?”
“Oh, a Russian. I⸺”
“I’m glad of that,” said Tarr, quite forgetting where he was, and
forgetting the nature of his occupation.
“Don’t you like Germans then?”
“Well, now you remind me of it, I do:—Very much, in fact,” He shook
himself with self-reproach and gazed round benignantly and comfortably
at his hosts. “Else I shouldn’t be here! They’re such a nice, modest,
assimilative race, with an admirable sense of duty. They are born
servants; excellent mercenary troops, I understand. They should always be
used as such.”
“I see you know them _à fond_.” She laughed in the direction of the
Lipmann.
He made a deprecating gesture.
“Not much. But they are an accessible and friendly people.”
“You are English?”
“Yes.”
He treated his hosts with a warm benignity which sought, perhaps, to
make up for past affronts. It appeared only to gratify partially. He was
treating them like part and parcel of Bertha. They were not ready to
accept this valuation, that of chattels of her world.
The two Kinderbachs came over and made an affectionate demonstration
around and upon Anastasya. She got up, scattering them abruptly and went
over to the piano.
“What a big brute!” Tarr thought. “She would be just as good as Bertha
to kiss. And you get a respectable human being into the bargain!” He was
not intimately convinced that she would be as satisfactory. Let us see
how it would be; he considered. This larger machine of repressed, moping
senses did attract. To take it to pieces, bit by bit, and penetrate to
its intimacy, might give a similar pleasure to undressing Bertha!
Possessed of such an intense life as Anastasya, women always appeared
on the verge of a dark spasm of unconsciousness. With their organism of
fierce mechanical reactions, their self-possession was rather bluff. So
much more accomplished socially than men, yet they were not the social
creatures, but men. Surrender to a woman was a sort of suicide for an
artist. Nature, who never forgives an artist, would never allow _her_ to
forgive. With any “superior” woman he had ever met, this feeling of being
with a parvenu never left him. Anastasya was not an exception.
On leaving, Tarr no longer felt that he would come back to enjoy a
diffused form of Bertha there. The prolongations of his Bertha period had
passed a climax.
On leaving Renée Lipmann’s, nevertheless, Tarr went to the Café de
l’Aigle, some distance away, but with an object. To make his present
frequentation quite complete, it only needed Kreisler. Otto was there,
very much on his present visiting list. He visited him regularly at the
Café de l’Aigle, where he was constantly to be found.
* * * * *
This is how Tarr had got to know him.
CHAPTER II
Tarr had arrived at Bertha’s place about seven in the evening on his
first return from Montmartre. He hung about for a little. In ten minutes’
time he had his reward. She came out, followed by Kreisler. Bertha did
not see him at first. He followed on the other side of the street, some
fifteen yards behind. He did this with sleepy gratification. All was well.
Relations with her were now, it must be clear, substantially at an end.
A kind of good sensation of alternating jealousy and regret made him
wander along with obedient gratitude. Should she turn round and see him,
how uncomfortable she would be! How naturally alike in their mechanical
marching gait she and the German were! He was a distinct third party.
Being a stranger, with very different appearance, thrilled him agreeably.
By a little manœuvre of short cuts he would get in front of them. This he
did.
Bertha saw him as he debouched from his turning. She stopped dead, and
appeared to astonished Kreisler to be about to take to her heels. It was
flattering in a way that his mere presence should produce this effect. He
went up to her. Her palm a sentimental instrument of weak, aching, heavy
tissues, she gave him her hand, face fixed on him in a mask of regret and
reproach. Fascinated by the intensity of this, he had been staring at her
a little too long, perhaps with some of the reflection of her expression.
He turned towards Kreisler. He found a, to him, conventionally German
indifferent countenance.
“Herr Kreisler,” Bertha said with laconic energy, as though she were
uttering some fatal name. Her “Herr Kreisler” said hollowly, “It’s done!”
It also had an inflexion of “What shall I do?”
A sick energy saturated her face, the lips were indecently compressed,
the eyes wide, dull, with red rims.
Tarr bowed to Kreisler as Bertha said his name. Kreisler raised his
hat. Then, with a curious feeling of already thrusting himself on
these people, he began to walk along beside Bertha. She moved like an
unconvinced party to a bargain, who consents to walk up and down a
little, preliminary to a final consideration of the affair. “Yes, but
walking won’t help matters,” she might have been saying. Kreisler’s
indifference was absolute. There was an element of the child’s privilege
in Tarr’s making himself of the party (“Sorbet, tu es _si jeane_”).
There was the claim for indulgence of a spirit not entirely serious!
The childishness of this turning up as though nothing had happened,
with such wilful resolve not to recognize the seriousness of things,
Bertha’s drama, the significance of the awful words, “Herr Kreisler!”
and so on, was present to him. Bertha must know the meaning of his rapid
resurrection—she knew him too well not to know that. So they walked on,
without conversation. Then Tarr inquired if she were “quite well.”
“Yes, Sorbert, quite well,” she replied, with soft tragic banter.
As though by design, he always found just the words or tone that would
give an opening for this sentimental irony of hers.
But the least hint that he had come to reinstate himself must not remain.
It must be clearly understood that _Kreisler_ was the principal figure
now. He, Tarr, was only a privileged friend.
With unflattering rapidity somebody else had been found. Her pretension
to heroic attachment was compromised. Should not he put in for the
vacated berth?
He had an air of welcoming Kreisler. “Make yourself at home; don’t mind
me,” his manner said. As to showing him over the premises he was taking
possession of—he had made the inspection, himself, no doubt!
“We have a mutual friend, Lowndes,” Tarr said to Kreisler, pleasantly. “A
week or two ago he was going to introduce me to you, but it was fated⸺”
“Ah, yes, Lowndes,” said Kreisler, “I know him.”
“Has he left Paris, do you know?”
“I think not. I thought I saw him yesterday, there, in the Boulevard du
Paradis.” Kreisler nodded over his shoulder, indicating precisely the
spot on which they had met. His gesture implied that Lowndes might still
be found thereabout.
Bertha shrank in “subtle” pantomime from their affability. From the
glances she pawed her German friend with, he must deserve nothing but
horrified avoidance. Sorbert’s astute and mischievous way of saddling
her with Kreisler, accepting their being together as the most natural
thing in life, roused her combativity. Tarr honoured him, clearly out
of politeness to her. Very well: all she could do for the moment was to
be noticeably distant with Kreisler. She must display towards him the
disgust and reprobation that Tarr should feel, and which he refused, in
order to vex her.
* * * * *
Kreisler during the last few days had persisted and persisted. He
had displayed some cleverness in his choice of means. As a result of
overtures and manœuvres, Bertha had now consented to see him. Her
demoralization was complete. She could not stand up any longer against
the result, personified by Kreisler, of her idiotic actions. At present
she transferred her self-hatred from herself to Kreisler.
Tarr’s former relations with Bertha were known to him. He resented the
Englishman’s air of proprietorship, the sort of pleasant “handing-over”
that was going on. It had for object, he thought, to cheapen his little
success.
* * * * *
“I don’t think, Herr Kreisler, I’ll come to dinner after all.” She stood
still and rolled her eyes wildly in several directions, and stuck one of
her hands stiffly out from her side.
“Very well, Fräulein,” he replied evenly.—The dismissal annoyed him. His
eyes took in Tarr compendiously in passing. Was this a resuscitation of
old love at his expense? Tarr had perhaps come to claim his property.
This was not the way that is usually done.
“Adieu, Herr Kreisler,” sounded like his dismissal. A “let me see you
again; understand that here things end!” was written baldly in her very
bald eyes. With irony he bid good day to Tarr.
“I hope we shall meet again”: Tarr shook him warmly by the hand.
“It is likely,” Kreisler replied at once.
As yet Kreisler was undisturbed. He intended not to relinquish his
acquaintance with Bertha Lunken. If the Englishman’s amiability were
a polite way of reclaiming property left ownerless and therefore
susceptible of new rights being deployed as regards it, then in time
these _later_ rights would be vindicated. Kreisler’s first impression of
Tarr was not flattering. But no doubt they would meet again, as he had
said.
CHAPTER III
Bertha held out her hand brutally, in a sort of spasm of will: said, in
the voice of “finality,”
“Good-bye, Sorbet: good-bye!”
He did not take it. She left it there a moment, saying again, “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye, if you like,” he said at length. “But I see no reason why
we should part in this manner. If Kreisler wouldn’t mind”—he looked
after him—“we might go for a little walk. Or will you come and have an
_apéritif_?”
“No, Sorbert, I’d rather not.—Let us say good-bye at once; will you?”
“My dear girl, don’t be so silly!” He took her arm and dragged her
towards a café, the first on the boulevard they were approaching.
She hung back, prolonging the personal contact, yet pretending to be
resisting it _with wonder_.
“I can’t, Sorbert. Je ne _peux_ pas!” purring her lips out and rolling
her eyes. She went to the café in the end. For some time conversation
hung back.
“How is Fräulein Lipmann getting on?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her.”
“Ah!”
Tarr felt he had five pieces to play. He had played one. The other four
he toyed with in a lazy way.
“Van Bencke?”
“I have not seen her.”
That left three.
“How is Isolde?”
“I don’t know.”
“Seen the Kinderbachs?”
“One of them.”
“How is Clara?”
“Clara? She is quite well, I think.”
The solder for the pieces of this dialogue was a dreary grey matter that
Bertha supplied. Their talk was an unnecessary column on the top of which
she perched herself with glassy quietude.
She turned to him abruptly as though he had been hiding behind her, and
tickling her neck with a piece of feather-grass.
“Why did you leave me, Sorbert?—_Why_ did you leave me?”
He filled his pipe, and then said, feeling like a bad actor:
“I went away at that particular moment, as you know, because I had heard
that Herr Kreisler⸺”
“Don’t speak to me about Kreisler—don’t mention his name, I _beg_ you.—I
hate that man.—Ugh!”
Genuine vehemence made Tarr have a look at her. Of course she would say
that. She was using too much genuineness, though, not to be rather flush
of it for the moment.
“But I don’t see⸺”
“Don’t; don’t!” She sat up suddenly in her chair and shook her finger
in his face. “If you mention Kreisler again, Sorbert, I shall _hate you
too_! I especially _pray_ you not to mention him.”
She collapsed, mouth drawn down at corners.
“As you like.” In insisting he would appear to be demanding an
explanation. Any hint of exceptional claims on her confidence must be
avoided.
“_Why_ did you leave me?—You don’t know.—I have been mad ever since. One
is as helpless as can be—When you are here once more, I feel how weak I
am without you. It has not been fair. I have felt just as though I had
got out of a sick-bed. I am not BLAMING you.”
They went to Flobert’s from the café. It was after nine o’clock, and the
place was empty. She bought a wing of chicken; at a dairy some salad and
eggs; two rolls at the baker’s, to make a cold supper at home. It was
more than she would need for herself. Sorbert did not offer to share the
expense. At the gate leading to her house he left her.
Immediately afterwards, walking towards the terminus of the Montmartre
omnibus, he realized that he was well in the path that led away, as he
had not done while still with her. He was glad and sorry, doing homage to
her and the future together. She had a fascination as a moribund Bertha.
The immobile short sunset of their friendship should be enjoyed. A rich
throwing up and congesting of souvenirs on this threshold were all the
better for the weak and silly sun. Oh what a delightful, imperturbable
clockwork orb!
The next day he again made his way across Paris from Montmartre at a
rather earlier hour. He invited himself to tea with her. They talked as
though posing for their late personalities.
He took up deliberately one or two controversial points. In a spirit of
superfluous courtesy he went back to the subject of several of their old
typical disputes, and argued against himself.
All their difficulties seemed swept away in a relaxed humid atmosphere,
most painful and disagreeable to her. He agreed entirely with her, now
agreeing no longer meant anything! But the key was elsewhere. Enjoyment
of and acquiescence in everything Berthaesque and Teutonic was where it
was to be found. Just as now he went to see Bertha’s very German friends,
and said “How delightful” to himself, so he appeared to be resolved to
come back for a week or two and to admire everything formerly he had
found most irritating in Bertha herself. Before retiring definitely, like
a man who hears that the rind of the fruit he has just been eating is
good, and comes back to his plate to devour the part he had discarded,
Tarr returned to have a last tankard of German beer.
Or still nearer the figure, his claim in the unexceptionable part of
her now lapsed, he had returned demanding to be allowed to live _just a
little while longer_ on the absurd and disagreeable section.
Bertha suffered, on her side, more than all the rest of the time she had
spent with him put together. To tell the whole Kreisler story might lead
to a fight. It was too late now. She could not, she felt, in honour,
seek to re-entangle Tarr, nor could she disown Kreisler. She had been
found with Kreisler: she had no means of keeping him away for good. An
attempt at suppressing him might produce any result. Should she have been
able, or desired to resume her relations with Tarr, Kreisler would not
have left him uninformed of things that had happened, shown in the most
uncongenial light. If left alone, and not driven away like a dog, he
might gradually quiet down and disappear. Sorbert would be gone, too, by
that time!
Their grand, never-to-be-forgotten friendship was ending in shabby
shallows. Tarr had the best rôle, and did not deserve it. Kreisler was
the implacable remote creditor of the situation.
CHAPTER IV
Tarr left Bertha punctually at seven. She looked very ill. He resolved
not to go there any more. He felt upset. Lejeune’s, when he got there,
was full of Americans. It was like having dinner among a lot of canny
children. Kreisler was not there. He went on a hunt for him afterwards,
and ran him to earth at the Café de l’Aigle.
Kreisler was not cordial. He emitted sounds of surprise, shuffled
his feet and blinked. But Tarr sat down in front of him on his own
initiative. Then Kreisler, calling the _garçon_, offered him a drink.
Afterwards he settled down to contemplate Bertha’s Englishman, and await
developments. He was always rather softer with people with whom he could
converse in his own harsh tongue.
The causes at the root of Tarr’s present thrusting of himself upon
Kreisler were the same as his later visits at the Lipmann’s. A sort of
bath of Germans was his prescription for himself, a voluptuous immersion.
To heighten the effect, he was being German himself: being Bertha as well.
But he was more German than the Germans. Many aspects of his conduct were
so un-German that Kreisler did not recognize the portrait or hail him as
a fellow. Successive lovers of a certain woman fraternizing; husbands
hobnobbing with their wives’ lovers or husbands of their unmarried days
is a commonplace of German or Scandinavian society.
Kreisler had not returned to Bertha’s. He was too lazy to plan
conscientiously. But he concluded that she had better be given scope
for anything the return of Tarr might suggest. He, Otto Kreisler, might
be supposed no longer to exist. His mind was working up again for some
truculent action. Tarr was no obstacle. He would just walk through Tarr
like a ghost when he saw fit to “advance” again.
“You met Lowndes in Rome, didn’t you?” Tarr asked him.
Kreisler nodded.
“Have you seen Fräulein Lunken to-day?”
“No.” As Tarr was coming to the point Kreisler condescended to speak: “I
shall see her to-morrow morning.”
A space for protest or comment seemed to be left after this sentence, in
Kreisler’s still very “speaking” expression.
Tarr smiled at the tone of this piece of information. Kreisler at once
grinned, mockingly, in return.
“You can get out of your head any idea that I have turned up to interfere
with your proceedings,” Tarr then said. “Affairs lie entirely between
Fräulein Lunken and yourself.”
Kreisler met this assurance truculently.
“You could not interfere with my proceedings. I do what I want to do in
this life!”
“How splendid. _Wunderbar!_ I admire you!”
“Your admiration is not asked for!”
“It leaps up involuntarily! Prosit! But I did not mean, Herr Kreisler,
that my desire to interfere, had such desire existed, would have been
tolerated. Oh, no! I meant that no such desire existing, we had no cause
for quarrel. Prosit!”
Tarr again raised his glass expectantly and coaxingly, peering steadily
at the German. He said, “Prosit” as he would have said, “Peep-oh!”
“Pros’t!” Kreisler answered with alarming suddenness, and an alarming
diabolical smile. “Prosit!” with finality. He put his glass down. “That
is all right. I have no _desire_,” he wiped and struck up his moustaches,
“to _quarrel_ with anybody. I wish to be left alone. That is all.”
“To be left alone to enjoy your friendship with Bertha—that is your
meaning? Am I not right? I see.”
“That is my business. I wish to be left _alone_.”
“Of course it’s your business, my dear chap. Have another drink!” He
called the _garçon_. Kreisler agreed to another drink.
Why was this Englishman sitting there and talking to him? It was in
the German style and yet it wasn’t. Was Kreisler to be shifted, was he
meant to go? Had the task of doing this been put on Bertha’s shoulders?
Had Tarr come there to ask him, or in the hope that he would volunteer a
promise, never to see Bertha again?
On the other hand, was he being approached by Tarr in the capacity of an
old friend of Bertha’s, or in her interests or at her instigation?
With frowning impatience he bent forward quickly once or twice, asking
Tarr to repeat some remark. Tarr’s German was not good.
Several glasses of beer, and Kreisler became engagingly expansive.
“Have you ever been to England?” Tarr asked him.
“England?—No—I should like to go there! I like Englishmen! I feel I
should get on better with them than with these French. I hate the French!
They are all actors.”
“You should go to London.”
“Ah, to London. Yes, I should go to London! It must be a wonderful town!
I have often meant to go there. Is it expensive?”
“The journey?”
“Well, life there. Dearer than it is here, I have been told.” Kreisler
forgot his circumstances for the moment. The Englishman seemed to have
hit on a means of escape for him. He had never thought of England! A
hazy notion of its untold wealth made it easier for him to put aside
momentarily the fact of his tottering finances.
Perhaps this Englishman had been sent him by the _Schicksal_. He had
always got on well with Englishmen!
The peculiar notion then crossed his mind that Tarr perhaps wanted _to
get him out of Paris_, and had come to make him some offer of hospitality
in England. In a bargaining spirit he began to run England down. He must
not appear too anxious to go there.
“They say, though, things have changed. England’s not what it was,” he
said.
“No. But it has changed for the better.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Quite true. The last time I was there it had improved so much that I
thought of stopping. Merry England is _foutu_! There won’t be a regular
Pub. in the whole country in fifty years. Art will flourish! There’s not
a _real_ gipsy left in the country. The sham art-ones are dwindling!”
“Are the _Zigeuner_ disappearing?”
“Je vous crois! Rather!”
“The only Englishmen I know are very _sympathisch_.”
They pottered about on the subject of England for some time. Kreisler was
very tickled with the idea of England.
“English women—what are they like?” Kreisler then asked with a grin.
Their relations made this subject delightfully delicate and yet, Kreisler
thought, very natural. This Englishman was evidently a description of
pander, and no doubt he would be as inclined to be hospitable with his
countrywomen in the abstract as with his late fiancée in material detail.
“A friend of mine who had been there told me they were very ‘pretty’”—he
pronounced the English word with mincing slowness and mischievous
interrogation marks in his distorted face.
“Your friend did not exaggerate. They are like languid nectarines! You
would enjoy yourself there.”
“But I can’t speak English—only a little. ‘I spik Ingleesh a leetle,’” he
attempted with pleasure.
“Very good! You’d get on splendidly!”
Kreisler brushed his moustaches up, sticking his lips out in a hard
gluttonous way. Tarr watched him with sympathetic curiosity.
“But—my friend told me—they’re not—very easy? They are great flirts. So
far—and then _bouf_! You are sent flying!”
“You would not find anything to compare with the facilities of your own
country. But you would not wish for that?”
“No?—But, tell me, then, they are cold?—They are of a calculating nature?”
“They are practical, I suppose, up to a certain point. But you must go
and see.”
Kreisler ruminated.
“What do you find particularly attractive about Bertha?” Tarr asked in
a discursive way. “I ask you as a German. I have often wondered what a
German would think of her.”
Kreisler looked at him with resentful uncertainty for a moment.
“You want to know what I think of the Lunken?—She’s a sly prostitute,
that’s what she is!” he announced loudly and challengingly.
“Ah!”
When he had given Tarr time for any possible demonstration, he thawed
into his sociable self. He then added:
“She’s not a bad girl! But she tricked you, my friend! She never cared
_that_”—he snapped his fingers inexpertly—“for you! She told me so!”
“Really? That’s interesting.—But I expect you’re only telling lies. All
Germans do!”
“All Germans _lie_?”
“‘_Deutsches Volk_—the folk that deceives!’ is your philosopher
Nietzsche’s account of the origin of the word Deutsch.”
Kreisler sulked a moment till he had recovered.
“No. We don’t lie! Why should we? We’re not _afraid of the truth_, so why
should we?”
“Perhaps, as a tribe, you lied to begin with, but have now given it up?”
“What?”
“That may be the explanation of Nietzsche’s etymology. Although he
seemed very stimulated at the idea of your national certificate of
untruthfulness. He felt that, as a true patriot, he should react against
your blue eyes, beer, and childish frankness.”
“_Quatsch!_ Nietzsche was always paradoxal. He would say anything to
amuse himself. You English are the greatest liars and hypocrites on this
earth!”
“‘See the Continental Press’! You should not swallow that rubbish. I
only dispute your statement because I know it is not first-hand. What I
mean about the Germans was that, like the Jews, they are extremely proud
of success in deceit. No enthusiasm of that sort exists in England.
Hypocrisy is usually a selfish stupidity, rather than the result of
cunning.”
“The English are _stupid_ hypocrites then! We agree. Prosit!”
“The Germans are uncouth but zealous liars! Prosit!”
He offered Kreisler a cigarette. A pause occurred to allow the acuter
national susceptibilities to cool.
“You haven’t yet given me your opinion of Bertha. You permitted yourself
a truculent flourish that evaded the question.”
“I wish to evade the question.—I told you that she has tricked you. She
is very _malin_! She is tricking me now; or she is trying to. She will
not succeed with _me_! ‘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 a ferocious and ironical manner.
“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. I
have the 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 to the sort of man that Tarr expected might attract her, that
he began to wonder. A certain satisfaction accompanied these observations.
For that week he saw Kreisler nearly every day. A _partie à trois_ then
began. 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. He 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 _garçon_.
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? If it had not been
for him, several times he would have rushed off and had his 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 anyhow the obstacle. And yet there he
was, talking and palavering, and offering to act as an intermediary,
and 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 V
Tarr soon regretted this last anti-climax stage of his adventure. He
would have left Kreisler alone in future, 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 imbibing 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.—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.
* * * * *
Yet a protest had to be made. He had rather neglected the coincidence of
his arrival 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. Up to a point he encouraged Bertha
to see his boon companion and relax her sudden exclusiveness. He
hesitated to carry out thoroughly his part of go-between and reconciler.
At length he began to make inquiries. After all, to have to hold back
his successor to the favours of a lady, from going and seizing those
rights (presumably temporarily denied him), was a strange situation.
At any moment now it seemed likely that Kreisler would turn on him.
This would simplify matters. Better leave lovers to fight out their own
quarrels and not take up the ungrateful rôle of interferer and voluntary
policeman. All his retrospective pleasure was being spoilt. But he was
committed to remain there for the present. To get over his sensation
of dupe, he was more sociable with Kreisler than he felt. The German
interpreted this as an hypocrisy. His contempt and suspicion of the
peculiar revenant grew.
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 Lipmann’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: _ganz verucht!_—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, is 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 only am to blame.”
“I wonder what is the real explanation of Kreisler?” Sorbert said, pulled
up by what she had said. “Have you known him 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.”
Kreisler certainly was a “new link”—too much. The chief cause of
separation had become an element of insidious _rapprochement_.
He left her silently apprehensive, staring at him mournfully.
So that night, after his second visit to Fräulein Lipmann’s, he did not
seek out Kreisler at his usual head-quarters with his first enthusiasm.
CHAPTER VI
Already before a considerable pile of saucers, representing his evening’s
menu of drink, Kreisler sat quite still, his eyes very bright, smiling to
himself. Tarr did not at once ask him “what Kreisler meant.” “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. It was a sort of silent invitation to “come inside.”
Then they sat without speaking, an unpleasant atmosphere of police-court
romance for Tarr.
Tarr still kept his retrospective luxury before him, as it maintained the
Kreisler side of the business in a desired perspective. Anastasya, whom
he had seen that evening, 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 existing on a sort of
three-legged affair. This inclusion of the fourth party would make things
solid and less precarious again.
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 wish to enter into a new attachment with Anastasya? That could be
decided later. He would make the first steps, retain her if possible,
and out of this, charming expedient pleasant things might come. He was
compelled to requisition her for the moment. She might be regarded as
a travelling companion. Thrown together inevitably on a stage-coach
journey, anything might happen. Delight, adventure, and amusement was
always achieved: as his itch to see his humorous concubine is turned
into a “retrospective luxury,” visits to the Lipmann circle, mysterious
relationship with Kreisler. This, in its turn, suddenly turning rather
prickly and perplexing, he now, through the medium of a beautiful woman,
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 with gusto to his
work in her direction.
There would be no harm in anticipating a little. She might at once be
brought on to 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 Lipmann’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 a charming girl, isn’t she?” Tarr could
not quite make out Kreisler’s reception of these innocent remarks.
“Is she?” Kreisler looked at him almost with astonishment.
There is a point in life beyond which we must hold people responsible for
accidents and their unconsciousness. 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 and officious figure
suddenly appearing between him and his prey of the Rue Martine. The habit
of civilized restraint had kept Kreisler baffled and passive for a week.
Annoyance at Bertha’s access of self-will had been converted into angry
interest in his new self-elected boon companion. He had been preparing
lately, though, to borrow money from him. Anastasya brought on the scene
was another kettle of fish.
What did this Tarr’s proceedings say? They said: “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!”
* * * * *
A question that presented itself to Kreisler was whether Tarr had heard
the whole story of his assault on his late fiancée? The possibility of
his knowing this increased his contempt for Tarr.
Kreisler was disarmed for the moment by the remembrance of Anastasya.
By the person he had regarded as peculiarly accessible becoming
paradoxically out of his reach, the most distant and inaccessible—such as
Anastasya—seemed to be drawn a little nearer.
“Is Fräulein Vasek working in a studio?” he asked.
“She’s at Serrano’s, I think,” Tarr told him.
“So you go to Fräulein Lipmann’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 and rivalled in this
too? With 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 nice!” His manner began to suggest that Tarr had put her
forward as a substitute for Bertha!
For the rest of the evening Kreisler insisted upon talking about
Anastasya. How was she dressed? Had she mentioned him? etc. Tarr felt
inclined to say, “But you don’t understand! She is for _me_. _Bertha_ is
your young lady now!” Only in reflecting on this possible remark, he was
confronted with the obvious reply, “But _is_ Bertha my young lady?”
CHAPTER VII
Tarr had Anastasya in solitary promenade two days after this. 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 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 on the Latin terrace were each one a
microscopic hero, but better turned out than the big doubtful heroes of
1840.
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
carousels grinding out their antediluvian lullabies.
This place represented the richness of four wasted years. Four incredibly
gushing, thick years; what had happened to this delightful muck? 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 stuff 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, trying 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 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 faith. The streets around these gardens, in
which he had lodged alternately, were so many confluents and tributaries
of memory, charging it on all sides with defunct puissant tides. The
places, he 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. 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 like a patent food.
* * * * *
“Elle dit le mot, Anastase, né pour d’éternels parchemins.” He could
not, however, get interested. Was it the obstinate Eighteenth Century
animal vision? 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_ with that. Sex-loyalty to his most
habitual lips interfered.
He had the protective instinct that people with a sense of their own
power have for those not equals with whom they have been associated. 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.
He experienced a slight hostility to Anastasya like a part of Bertha left
in himself protesting and jealous. It was chiefly vanity at the thought
of this superior woman’s contempt could she see his latest female effort.
“I suppose she knows all about Bertha,” he thought. Kreisler-like, he
looked towards the Lipmann women. “Homme sensuel! Homme égoïste!”
She seemed rather shy with him.
“How do you like Paris?” he asked her.
“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 can see
all the machinery working. It makes you a natural sceptic. But here I am.
I find it difficult to live in London.”
“I should have thought everything was so perfected here that the
machinery did not obtrude⸺”
“I don’t feel that. I think that a place like this exists for the rest of
the world. It 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 don’t get much really 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. I prefer the _artist_ to be
free, and the crowd not to be ‘artists.’ What does all English and German
gush or sentiment, about the wonderful, the artistic French nation,
etc., amount to? They gush because they find thirty-five million little
Bésnards, little Botrels, little Bouchers, or little Bougereaus 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 nouveau-art, reform-dressed, bestatued State. Practically every
individual Frenchman of course has the filthiest taste imaginable. You
are more astonished when you come across a sound, lonely, and severe
artist in France than elsewhere. His vitality is hypnotically beset by
an ocean of artistry. His best instinct is to become rather aggressively
harsh and simple. The reason that a great artist like Rodin or the
Cubists to-day arouse more fury in France than in England, for instance,
is not because the French are _more interested in Art_! They are less
interested in art, if anything. It is because they are all ‘artistic’ and
all artists in the sense that a cheap illustrator or Mr. Brangwyn, R.A.,
or Mr. Waterhouse, R.A., are. They are _scandalized_ at good art; the
English are inquisitive about and tickled by it, like gaping children.
Their social instincts are not so developed and logical.”
“But what difference does the attitude of the crowd make to the artist?”
“Well, we were talking about Paris, which is the creation of the crowd.
The man thinking in these gardens to-day, the man thinking on the quays
of Amsterdam three centuries ago, think much the same thoughts. Thought
is like climate and chemistry. It even has its physical type. But the
individual’s _projection of himself_ he must entrust to his _milieu_. I
maintain that the artist’s work is nowhere so unsafe as in the hands of
an ‘artistic’ vulgarly alive public. The other question is his relation
to the receptive world, and his bread and cheese. Paris is, to begin
with, no good for bread and cheese, except as a market to which American
and Russian millionaire dealers come. Its intelligence is of great use.
But no friendship is a substitute for the blood-tie; and intelligence
is no substitute for the response that can only come from the narrower
recognition of your kind. This applies to the best _type_ of art rather
than work of very personal genius. Country is left behind by that.
Intelligence also.”
“Don’t you think that work of very personal genius often _has_ a country?
It may break through accidents of birth to perfect conditions somewhere;
not necessarily contemporary ones or those of the country it happens in?”
“I suppose you could find a country or a time for almost _anything_. But
I am sure that the _best_ has in reality _no_ Time and no Country. That
is why it accepts without fuss any country or time for what they are
worth; thence the seeming contradiction, that it is always _actual_. It
is alive, and nationality is a portion of actuality.”
“But _is_ the best work always ‘actual’ and up to date?”
“It always has that appearance. It’s manners are perfect.”
“I am not so sure that manners cannot be overdone. A personal code is as
good as the current code.”
“The point seems to me to be, in that connexion, that manners are not
very important. You use them as you use coins.”
“The most effectual men have always been those whose notions were
diametrically opposed to those of their time,” she said carefully.
“I don’t think that is so; except in so far as all effectual men are
always the enemies of every time. With that fundamental divergence, they
give a weight of impartiality to the supreme thesis and need of their
age. Any opinion of their fellows that they adopt they support with the
uncanny authority of a plea from a hostile camp. _All activity_ on the
part of a good mind has the stimulus of a paradox. To produce is the
sacrifice of genius.”
They seemed to have an exotic grace to him as they promenaded their
sinuous healthy intellects in this eighteenth-century landscape. There
was no other pair of people who could talk like that on those terraces.
They were both of them barbarians, head and shoulders taller than the
polished stock around. And they were highly strung and graceful. They
were out of place.
“Your philosophy reminds me of Jean-Jacques,” she said.
“Does it? How do you arrive at that conclusion?”
“Well, your hostility to a tidy rabble, and preference for a rough
and uncultivated bed to build on brings to mind ‘wild nature’ and the
doctrine of the natural man. You want a human landscape similar to
Jean-Jacques’ rocks and water falls.”
“I see what you mean. But I also notice that the temper of my theories
is the exact opposite of Jean-Jacques’.—He raved over and poetized his
wild nature and naturalness generally and put it forward as an ideal. My
point of view is that it is a question of expediency only. I do not for a
moment sentimentalize crudeness. I maintain that that crude and unformed
_bed_, or backing, is absolutely essential to maximum fineness; just as
crudity in an individual’s composition is necessary for him to be able
to create. There is no more absolute value in stupidity and formlessness
than there is in dung. But they are just as necessary. The conditions of
creation and of life disgust me. The birth of a work of art is as dirty
as that of a baby. But I consider that my most irremediable follies have
come from fastidiousness; not the other thing. If you are going to work
or perform, you must make up your mind to have dirty hands most part of
the time. Similarly, you must praise chaos and filth. _It is put there
for you._ Incense is, I believe, camels’ dung. When you praise, you do
so with dung. When you see men fighting, robbing each other, behaving
meanly or breaking out into violent vulgarities, you must conventionally
clap your hands. If you have not the stomach to do that, you cannot be a
creative artist. If people stopped behaving in that way, you could not be
a creative artist.”
“So you would discourage virtue, self-sacrifice, and graceful behaviour?”
“No, praise them very much. Also praise deceit, lechery, and panic.
Whatever a man does, praise him. In that way you will be acting as the
artist does; If you are not an artist, you will not act in that way. An
artist should be as impartial as God.”
“Is God impartial?”
“We disintegrate. His dream is no doubt ignorant of our classifications.”
“Rousseau again⸺?”
“If you really want to saddle me with that Swiss, I will help you. My
enthusiasm for art has made me fond of chaos. It is the artist’s fate
almost always to be exiled among the slaves. _The artist who takes his
job seriously gets his sensibility blunted._ He is less squeamish than
other people and less discriminating.”
“He becomes in fact less of an artist?”
“An artist is a cold card, with a hide like a rhinoceros.”
“You are poetizing him! But if that is so, wouldn’t it be better to be
something else?”
“No, I think it’s about the best thing to be.”
“With his women companions, sweethearts, he is also apt to be
undiscriminating.”
“He is notorious for that!”
“I think that is a pity. Then that is because I am a woman, and am
conscious of not being a slave.”
“But then such women as you are condemned also to find themselves
surrounded by slaves!”
“Your frequentation of the abject has not caused you to forget one banal
art!”
“You tempt me to abandon art. Art is the refuge of the shy.”
“Are you shy?”
“Yes.”
“You need not be.”
Her revolving hips and thudding skirts carried her forward with the
orchestral majesty of a simple ship. He suddenly became conscious of the
monotonous racket.
At that moment the drums beat to close the gardens. They had dinner in a
Bouillon near the Seine. They parted about ten o’clock.
CHAPTER VIII
For the first time since his “return” Tarr found no Kreisler at the café.
“I wonder what that animal’s up to,” he thought. The _garçon_ told him
that Kreisler had not been there at all that evening. Tarr reconsidered
his responsibilities. He could not return to Montmartre without just
informing himself of Kreisler’s whereabouts and state of mind. The
“obstacle” had been eluded. It must be transported rapidly “in the way”
again, wherever and in whatever direction the sluggish stream was flowing.
Bertha’s he did not intend to go to if he could help it. A couple of
hours at tea-time was what he had instituted as his day’s “amount” of
her company. _Kreisler’s_ room would be better. This he did. There was a
light in Kreisler’s room. The window had been pointed out to him. This
perhaps was sufficient, Tarr felt. He might now go home, having located
him. Still, since he was there he would go up and make sure. He lighted
his way up the staircase with matches. Arrived at the top floor he was
uncertain at which door to knock. He chose one with a light beneath it
and knocked.
In a moment some one called out “Who is it?” Recognizing the voice Tarr
answered, and the door opened slowly. Kreisler was standing there in his
shirt-sleeves, glasses on, and a brush in his hand.
“Ah, come in,” he said.
Tarr sat down, and Kreisler went on brushing his hair. When he had
finished he put the brush down quickly, turned round, and pointing to
the floor said, in a voice suggesting that that was the first of several
questions:
“Why have you come _here_?”
Tarr at once saw that he had gone a step too far, and either shown bad
calculation or chanced on his rival at an unfortunate time. It was felt,
no doubt, that—acting more or less as “keeper,” or check, at any rate—he
had come to look after his charge, and hear why Kreisler had absented
himself from the café.
“Why have you come, here?” Kreisler asked again, in an even tone,
pointing again with his forefinger to the centre of the floor.
“Only to see you, of course. I thought perhaps you weren’t well.”
“Ah, so! I want you, my dear English friend, now that you are here, to
explain yourself a little. Why do you honour me with so much of your
company?”
“Is my company disagreeable to you?”
“I wish to know, sir, why I have so much of it!” The Deutscher-student
was coming to the top. His voice had risen and the wind of his breath
appeared to be making his moustaches whistle.
“I, of course, have reasons, besides the charm of your society, for
seeking you out.”
Tarr was sitting stretched on one of Kreisler’s two chairs looking up
frowningly. He was annoyed at having let himself in for this interview.
Kreisler stood in front of him without any expression in particular,
his voice rather less guttural than usual. Tarr felt ill at ease at this
sudden breath of storm and kept still with difficulty.
“You have reasons? You have reasons! Heavens! Outside! Quick! Out!”
There was no doubt this time that it was in earnest. He was intended
rapidly to depart. Kreisler was pointing to the door. His cold grin was
slightly on his face again, and an appearance of his hair having receded
on his forehead and his ears gone close against his head warned Tarr
definitely where he was. He got up. The absurdity in the situation he had
got himself into chiefly worried him. He stood a moment in a discouraged
way, as though trying to remember something. His desire for a row had
vanished with the arrival of it. It had come at such an angle that it was
difficult to say anything, and he had a superstition of the vanity about
the marks left by hands, or rather his hands.
“Will you tell me what on earth’s the matter with you to-night?” he asked.
“Yes! I don’t want to be followed about by an underhand swine like you
any longer! By what devil’s impudence did you come here to-night? For a
week I’ve had you in the café. What did you want with me? If you wanted
your girl back, why hadn’t you the courage to say so? I saw you with
another lady to-night. I’m not going to have you hovering and slavering
around me. Be careful I don’t come and pull your nose when I see you with
that other lady! You’re welcome, besides, to your girl⸺”
“I recommend you to hold your mouth! Don’t talk about _my girl_. I’ve had
enough of it. Where her sense was when she alighted on a specimen like
you—” Tarr’s German hesitated and suddenly struck, as though for the rest
of the night. He had stepped forward with a suggestion of readiness for
drama:
“Heraus, schwein!” shouted Kreisler, in a sort of incredulous drawling
crescendo, shooting his hand towards the door and urging his body like
the cox of a boat. Like a sheep-dog he appeared to be collecting Tarr
together and urging him out.
Tarr stood staring doubtfully at him.
“What⸺”
“Heraus! Out! Quicker! Quicker!! Quick!”
His last word, “Schnell!” dropped like a plummet to the deepest tone his
throat was capable of. It was short and so absolutely final that the
grace given, even after it had been uttered, for this hateful visitor
to remove himself, was a source of astonishment to Tarr. For a man to
be ordered out of a room that does not belong to him always puts him at
a disadvantage. Should he insist, forcibly and successfully, to remain,
it can only be for a limited time. He will have to go sooner or later,
and make his exit, unless he establish himself there and make it his
home henceforth; a change of lodging most people are not, on the spur of
the moment, prepared to decide on. The room, somehow, too, seems on its
owner’s side, and to be vomiting forth the intruder. The civilized man’s
instinct of ownership makes it impossible for any but the most indelicate
to resist a feeling of hesitation before the idea of resistance in
another man’s shell! All Tarr’s attitude to this man had been made up of
a sort of comic hypocrisy. Neither comedy nor hypocrisy were usable for
the moment.
Had Tarr foreseen this possible termination of his rôle of “obstacle?”
And ought he, he would ask himself, to have gone on with this half-farce
if he were not prepared to meet the ultimate consequences? Kreisler was
quite unworthy to stand there, with perfect reason, and to be telling him
to “get out.” It was absurd to exalt Kreisler in that way! But Tarr had
probably counted on being equal to any emergency, and baffling or turning
Kreisler’s violence in some genial manner.
He stood for a few seconds in a tumultuous hesitation, when he saw
Kreisler run across the room, bend forward and dive his arm down behind
his box. He watched with uncomfortable curiosity this new move, as
one might watch a surgeon’s haste at the crisis of an operation,
searching for some necessary implement, mislaid for the moment. He felt
schoolboy-like, left waiting there at Kreisler’s disposition. It was as
a reaction against this unpleasant feeling that he stepped towards the
door. The wish not to “obey” or to seem to turn tail either had alone
kept him where he was. He had just found the door when Kreisler, with a
bound, was back from his box, flourishing an old dog-whip in his hand.
“Ah, you go? Look at this!” He cracked the whip once or twice. “This is
what I keep for hounds like you!” Crack! He cracked it again in rather
an inexperienced way with a certain difficulty. He frowned and stopped
in his discourse, as though it had been some invention he were showing
off, that would not quite work at the proper moment, necessitating
concentration.
“If you wish to see me again, you can always find me here. You won’t get
off so easily next time!” He cracked the whip smartly and then slammed
the door.
Tarr could imagine him throwing it down in a corner of the room, and then
going on with his undressing.
When Kreisler had jumped to the doorway Tarr had stepped out with a
half-defensive, half-threatening gesture and then gone on with strained
slowness, lighting a match at the head of the stairs. He felt like a
discomfited pub-loafer as he raised the match to an imaginary clay pipe
rising in his mind. There was the ostentatious coolness of the music-hall
comedian.
The thing that had chiefly struck him in Kreisler under this new aspect
was a kind of nimbleness, a pettiness in his behaviour and movements,
where perhaps he had expected more stiffness and heroics; the clown-like
gibing form his anger took, a frigid disagreeable slyness and irony, a
juvenile quickness and coldness.
Tarr was extremely dissatisfied with the part he had played in this
scene. First of all he felt he had withdrawn too quickly at the
appearance of the whip, although he had in fact got under way before it
had appeared. Then, he argued, he should have stopped at the appearance
of this instrument of disgrace. To stop and fight with Kreisler, what
objection was there to that, he asked himself? A taking Kreisler too
seriously? But what _less_ serious than fighting? He had saved himself
an unpleasantness, something ridiculous, merely to find himself outside
Kreisler’s door, a feeling of primitive dissatisfaction in him. Had he
definitely been guilty of a lack of pluck or pride, it would have been
better.
There was something mean and improper in all this that he could not
reason away or mistake. He had undoubtedly insulted this man by his
attitude, _s’en était fiche de lui_; and when the other turned, whip in
hand, he had walked away. What really should he have done? He should,
no doubt, he thought, having humorously instituted himself Kreisler’s
keeper, have humorously struggled with him, when the idiot became
obstreperous. At that point his humour had stopped. Then his humour had
limitations?
Once and for all and certainly: he had no right to treat a man as he
had treated Kreisler and yet claim, when he turned and resented this
treatment, immunity from action on the score of Kreisler’s idiocy.
In allowing the physical struggle any importance he allowed Kreisler
an importance, too, that made his former treatment of him unreal and
unjustified. In Kreisler’s eyes he was a _blagueur_, without resistance
at a pinch, who walks away when turned on. This opinion was of no
importance, since he had not a shadow of respect for Kreisler. Again he
turned on himself. If he was so weak-minded as to care what trash like
Kreisler thought or felt! He wandered in the direction of the Café de
l’Aigle, gripped in this ratiocination.
His unreadiness, his dislike for action, his fear of ridicule, he treated
severely in turn. He thought of everything he could against himself.
And he laughed at himself. But it was no good. At last he gave way to
the urgency of his vanity and determined not to leave the matter where
it was. At once plans for retrieving this discomfort came crowding on
him. He would go to the café as usual on the following evening, sit down
smilingly at Kreisler’s table as though nothing had happened. In short,
he would altogether endorse the opinion that Kreisler had formed of him.
And yet why this meanness, even assumed, Tarr asked himself, even while
arranging realistically his to-morrow evening’s purification? Always in a
contemptuous spirit, some belittlement or unsavoury rôle was suggesting
itself. His contempt for everybody degraded him.
Still, for a final occasion and since he was going this time to accept
any consequences, he would follow his idea. He would be, to Kreisler’s
mind for a little, the strange “slaverer and hoverer” who had been kicked
out on the previous night. He would even have to “pile it on thick” to be
accepted at all, exaggerate in the direction of Kreisler’s unflattering
notion of him. Then he would gradually aggravate Kreisler, and with the
same bonhomie attack him with resolution. He laughed as he came to this
point, as a sensible old man might laugh at himself on arriving at a
similar decision.
Soothed by the prospect of this rectification of the evening’s blunder,
Tarr once more turned to reflect on it, and saw more clearly than ever
the parallel morals of his Bertha affair and his Kreisler affair.
His sardonic dream of life got him, as a sort of Quixotic dreamer of
inverse illusions, blows from the swift arms of windmills and attacks
from indignant and perplexed mankind. He, instead of having conceived
the world as more chivalrous and marvellous than it was, had conceived
it as emptied of all dignity, sense, and generousness. The drovers and
publicans were angry at not being mistaken for legendary chivalry or
châtelaines. The very windmills resented not being taken for giants! The
curse of humour was in him, anchoring him at one end of the see-saw
whose movement and contradiction was life.
Reminded of Bertha, he did not, however, hold her responsible. But his
protectorate would be wound up. Acquaintance with Anastasya would be left
where it was, despite the threatened aggression against his nose.
PART VI
HOLOCAUSTS
CHAPTER I
Tarr’s character at this time performed repeatedly the following
manœuvre: his best energies would, once a farce was started, gradually
take over the business from the play department and continue it as a
serious line of its own. It was as though it had not the go to initiate
anything of its own accord. It was content to exploit the clown’s
discoveries.
The bellicose visit to Kreisler now projected was launched to a slow
blast of Humour, ready, when the time came, to turn into a storm. His
contempt for the German would not allow him to enter into anything
seriously against him. Kreisler was a joke. Jokes, it had to be admitted
(and in that they became more effective than ever), were able to make you
sweat.
That Kreisler could be anywhere but at the Café de l’Aigle on the
following evening never entered Tarr’s head. As he was on an unpleasant
errand, he took it for granted that Fate would on this occasion put
everything punctually at his disposal. Had it been an errand of pleasure,
he would have instinctively supposed the reverse.
At ten, and at half-past, his rival had not yet arrived. Tarr set out to
make rapidly a tour of the other cafés. But Kreisler might be turning
over a new leaf. He might be going to bed, as on the previous evening.
He must not be again sought, though, on his own territory. The moral
disadvantage of this position, on a man’s few feet of most intimate floor
space, Tarr had clearly realized.
The Café Souchet, the most frequented café of the Quarter, entered merely
in a spirit of German thoroughness, was, however, the one. More alert,
and brushed up a little, Tarr thought, Kreisler was sitting with another
man, with a bearded, naïf, and rather pleasant face, over his coffee. No
pile of saucers this time attended him.
The stranger was a complication. Perhaps the night’s affair should be
put off until the conditions were more favourable. But Tarr’s vanity
was impatient. His wait in the original café had made him nervous and
hardly capable of acting with circumspection. On the other hand, it
might come at once. This was an opposite complication. Kreisler might
open hostilities on the spot. This would rob him of the subtle benefits
to be derived from his gradual strategy. This must be risked. He was
not very calm. He crudely went up to Kreisler’s table and sat down. The
feeling of the lack of aplomb in this action, and his disappointment at
the presence of the other man, chased the necessary good humour out of
his face. He had carefully preserved this expression for some time, even
walking lazily and quietly as if he were carrying a jug of milk. Now it
vanished in a moment. Despite himself, he sat down opposite Kreisler as
solemn as a judge, pale, his eyes fixed on the object of his activity
with something like a scowl.
But, his first absorption in his own sensations lifted and eased a
little, he recognized that something very unusual was in the air.
Kreisler and his friend were not speaking or doing anything visibly. They
were just sitting still, two self-possessed malefactors. Nevertheless,
Tarr’s arrival to all appearance disturbed and even startled them,
as if they had been completely wrapped up in some engrossing game or
conspiracy.
Kreisler had his eyes trained across the room. The other man, too, was
turned slightly in that direction, although his eyes followed the tapping
of his boot against the ironwork of the table, and he only looked up
occasionally.
Kreisler turned round, stared at Tarr without at once taking in who it
was; then, as though saying to himself, “It’s only Bertha’s Englishman,”
he took up his former wilful and patient attitude, his eyes fixed.
Tarr had grinned a little as Kreisler turned his way, rescued from his
solemnity. There was just a perceptible twist in the German’s neck and
shade of expression that would have said “Ah, there you are? Well, be
quiet, we’re having some fun. Just you wait!”
But Tarr was so busy with his own feelings that he didn’t understand this
message. He wondered if he had been seen by Kreisler in the distance, and
if this reception had been concerted between him and his friend. If so,
why?
Sitting, as he was, with his back to the room, he stared at his
neighbour. His late boon companion distinctly was waiting, with absurd
patience, for something. The poise of his head, the set of his yellow
Prussian jaw, were truculent, although otherwise he was peaceful and
attentive. His collar looked _new_ rather than clean. His necktie was one
not familiar to Tarr. Boots shone impassibly under the table.
Tarr screwed his chair sideways, and faced the room. It was full of
people—very athletically dressed American men, all the varieties of the
provincial in American women, powdering their noses and ogling Turks, or
sitting, the younger ones, with blameless interest and fine complexions.
And there were _plenty_ of Turks, Mexicans, Russians and other “types”
for the American ladies! In the wide passage-way into the further rooms
sat the orchestra, playing the “Moonlight Sonata,” Dvorak and the
“Machiche.”
In the middle of the room, at Tarr’s back, he now saw a group of eight
or ten young men whom he had seen occasionally in the Café Berne.
They looked rather German, but smoother and more vivacious. Poles or
Austrians, then? Two or three of them appeared to be amusing themselves
at his expense. Had they noticed the little drama that he was conducting
at his table? Were they friends of Kreisler’s, too?—He was incapable of
working anything out. He flushed and felt far more like beginning on
them than on his complicated idiot of a neighbour, who had become a cold
task. This genuine feeling illuminated for him the tired frigidity of his
present employment.
He had moved his chair a little to the right, towards the group at his
back, and more in front of Kreisler, so that he could look into his face.
On turning back now, and comparing the directions of the various pairs of
eyes engaged, he at length concluded that he was without the sphere of
interest; _just_ without it.
At this moment Kreisler sprang up. His head was thrust forward, his hands
were in rear, partly clenched and partly facilitating his passage between
the tables by hemming in his coat tails. The smooth round cloth at the
top of his back, his smooth head above that with no back to it, struck
Tarr in the way a momentary smell of sweat would. Germans had no backs to
them, or were like polished pebbles behind. Tarr mechanically moved his
hand upwards from his lap to the edge of the table on the way to ward off
a blow. He was dazed by all the details of this meeting, and the peculiar
miscarriage of his plan.
But Kreisler brushed past him with the swift deftness of a person
absorbed with some strong movement of the will. The next moment Tarr saw
the party of young men he had been observing in a sort of noisy blur of
commotion. Kreisler was in among them, working on something in their
midst. There were two blows—smack—smack; an interval between them. He
could not see who had received them.
Tarr then heard Kreisler shout in German:
“For the _second_ time to-day! Is your courage so slow that I must do it
a _third_ time?”
Conversation had stopped in the café and everybody was standing. The
companions of the man smacked, too, had risen in their seats. They
were expostulating in three languages. Several were mixed up with the
_garçons_, who had rushed up to do their usual police work on such
occasions. Over Kreisler’s shoulder, his eyes carbonized to a black
sweetness, his cheeks a sweet sallow-white, with a red mark where
Kreisler’s hand had been, Tarr saw the man his German friend had singled
out. He had sprung towards the aggressor, but by that time Kreisler had
been seized from behind and was being hustled towards the door. The blow
seemed to hurt his vanity so much that he was standing half-conscious
till the pain abated. He seemed to wish to brush the blow off, but
was too vain to raise his hands to his cheek. It was left there like
a scorching compress. His friends, Kreisler wrenched away from them,
were left standing in a group, in attitudes more or less of violent
expostulation and excitement.
Kreisler receded in the midst of a band of waiters towards the door. He
was resisting and protesting, but not too much to retard his quick exit.
The _garçons_ had the self-conscious unconcern of civilian braves.
The young man attacked and his friends were explaining what had happened,
next, to the manager of the café. A _garçon_ brought in a card on a
plate. There was a new outburst of protest and contempt from the others.
The plate was presented to the individual chiefly concerned, who brushed
it away, as though he had been refusing a dish that a waiter was, for
some reason, pressing upon him. Then suddenly he took up the card, tore
it in half, and again waived away the persistent platter. The _garçon_
looked at the manager of the café and then returned to the door.
* * * * *
So this was what Kreisler and the little bearded man had been so busy
about! Kreisler had laid his plans for the evening as well! Tarr’s scheme
was destined not to be realized; unless he followed Kreisler at once,
and got up a second row, a more good-natured one, just outside the café?
Should he go out now and punch Kreisler’s head, fight about a little bit,
and then depart, his business done, and leave Kreisler to go on with his
other row? For he felt that Kreisler intended making an evening of it.
His companion had not taken part in the fracas, but had followed on his
heels in his ejection, protesting with a vehemence that was intended to
hypnotize.
Just at the moment when he had felt that he was going to be one of the
principal parties to a violent scene, Tarr had witnessed, not himself
at all, but another man snatched up into his rôle. He felt relieved.
As he watched the man Kreisler had struck, he seemed to be watching
himself. And yet he felt rather on the side of Kreisler. With a mortified
chuckle he prepared to pay for his drink and be off, leaving Kreisler
for ever to his very complicated, mysterious and turbulent existence.
He noticed just then that Kreisler’s friend had come back again, and
was talking to the man who had been struck. He could hear that they
were speaking Russian or Polish. With great collectedness, Kreisler’s
emissary, evidently, was meeting their noisy expostulations. He could not
at least, like a card, be torn in half! On the other hand, in his person
he embodied the respectability of a visiting card. He was dressed with
perfect “correctness” suitable to such occasions and such missions as his
appeared to be. By his gestures (one of which was the taking an imaginary
card between his thumb and forefinger and tearing it) Tarr could follow a
little what he was saying.
“That, sir,” he seemed to assert, “is not the way to treat a gentleman.
That, too, is an insult no gentleman will support.” He pointed towards
the door. “Herr Kreisler, as you know, cannot enter the café; he is
waiting there for your reply. He has been turned out like a drunken
workman.”
The Russian was as grave as he was collected, and stood in front of the
other principal in this affair, who had sat down again now, with the
evident determination to get a different reply. The talking went on for
some time. Then he turned towards Tarr, and, seeing him watching the
discussion, came towards him, raising his hat. He said in French:
“You know Herr Kreisler, I believe. Will you consent to act for him with
me, in an affair that unfortunately⸺? If you would step over here, I will
put you ‘au courant.’”
“I’m afraid I cannot act for Herr Kreisler, as I am leaving Paris early
to-morrow morning,” Tarr replied.
But the Russian displayed the same persistence with him as he had
observed him already capable of with the other people.
At last Tarr said, “I don’t mind acting temporarily for a few minutes,
now, until you can find somebody else. But you must understand that I
cannot delay my journey—you must find a substitute at once.”
The Russian explained with businesslike gusto and precision, having drawn
him towards the door (seemingly to cut off a possible retreat of the
enemy), that it was a grave affair. Kreisler’s honour was compromised.
His friend Otto Kreisler had been provoked in an extraordinary fashion.
Stories had been put about concerning him, affecting seriously the
sentiments of a girl he knew regarding him; put about with that object by
another gentleman, also acquainted with this girl. The Russian luxuriated
emphatically on this point. Tarr suggested that they should settle the
matter at once, as he had not very much time. He was puzzled. Surely the
girl mentioned must be Bertha? If so, had Bertha been telling more fibs?
Was the Kreisler mystery after all to her discredit? Perhaps he was now
in the presence of _another_ rival, existing, unknown to him, even during
his friendship with her.
In this heroic, very solemnly official atmosphere of ladies’ “honour”
and the “honour” of gentlemen, that the little Russian was creating,
Tarr unwillingly remained for some time. Noisy bursts of protest from
other members of the opposing party met the Russian’s points. “It was
all nonsense;” they shouted; “there could be no question of honour here.
Kreisler was a quarrelsome German. He was drunk.” Tarr liked his own
farces. But to be drawn into the service of one of Kreisler’s was a
humiliation. Kreisler, without taking any notice of him, had turned the
tables.
The discussion was interminable. They were now speaking French. The
entire café appeared to be participating. Several times the principal on
the other side attempted to go, evidently very cross at the noisy scene.
Then Anastasya’s name was mentioned. Tarr found new interest in the scene.
“You and Herr Kreisler,” the Russian was saying patiently and distinctly,
“exchanged blows, I understand, this afternoon, before this lady. This
was as a result of my friend Herr Kreisler demanding certain explanations
from you which you refused to give. These explanations had reference to
certain stories you are supposed to have circulated as regards him.”
“Circulated—as regards—that chimpanzee you are conducting about?
“If you please! By being abusive you cannot escape. You are accused by my
friend of having at his expense⸺”
“Expense? Does he want money?”
“If you please! You cannot buy off Herr Kreisler; but he might be willing
for you to pay a substitute if you find it—inconvenient⸺?”
“I find you, bearded idiot!⸺”
“We can settle all that afterwards. You understand me? I shall be quite
ready! But at present it is the affair between you and Herr Kreisler⸺”
In brief, it was the hapless Soltyk that Kreisler had eventually got hold
of, and had just now publicly smacked, having some hours before smacked
him privately.
CHAPTER II
Kreisler’s afternoon encounter with Anastasya and Soltyk had resembled
Tarr’s meeting with him and Bertha. Kreisler had seen Anastasya and
his new café friend one day from his window. His reference to possible
nose-pulling was accounted for by this. The next day he had felt rather
like seeing Anastasya again somewhere. With this object, he had patrolled
the neighbourhood. About four o’clock, having just bought some cigarettes
at the “Berne,” he was standing outside considering a walk in the
Luxemburg, when Fräulein Vasek appeared in this unshunnable circus of
the Quartier du Paradis. Soltyk was with her. He went over at once. With
urbane timidity, as though they had been alone, he offered his hand. She
looked at Soltyk, smiling. But she showed no particular signs of wanting
to escape. They began strolling along the Boulevard, Soltyk showing every
sign of impatience. She then stopped.
“Mr. Soltyk and I were just going to have the ‘five o’clock’ somewhere,”
she said.
Soltyk looked pointedly down the Boulevard, as though that had been an
improper piece of information to communicate to Kreisler.
“If you consent to my accompanying you, Fräulein, it would give me the
greatest pleasure to remain in your company a little longer.”
She laughed. “Where were we going, Louis? Didn’t you say there was a
place near here?”
“There is one over there. But I’m afraid, Fräulein Vasek, I must leave
you.—I have⸺”
“Oh, must you? I’m sorry.”
Soltyk was astonished and mortified. He did not go, looking at her
doubtfully. At this point Kreisler had addressed him.
“I said nothing, sir, when a moment ago, you failed to return my salute.
I understand you were going to have tea with Fräulein Vasek. Now you
deprive her suddenly of the pleasure of your company. So there is no
further doubt on a certain point. Will you tell me at once and clearly
what objection you have to me?”
“I don’t wish to discuss things of that sort before this lady.”
“Will you then name a place where they may be discussed? I will then take
my leave?”
“I see no necessity to discuss anything with you.”
“Ah, you see none. I do. And perhaps it is as well that Fräulein Vasek
should hear. Will you explain to me, sir, how it is that you have been
putting stories about having reference to me, and to my discredit,
calculated to prejudice people against me? Since this lady no doubt has
heard some of your lies, it would be of advantage that you take them back
at once, or else explain yourself.”
Before Kreisler had finished, Soltyk said to Anastasya, “I had better go
at once, to save you this—” Then he turned to Kreisler,
“I should have thought you would have had sufficient decency left⸺”
“Decency, liar? Decency, _lying swine_? Decency—? What do you mean?” said
Kreisler, loudly, in crescendo.
Then he crossed quickly over in front of Anastasya and smacked Soltyk
first smartly on one cheek and then on the other.
“There is liar branded on both your cheeks! And if you should not wish to
have coward added to your other epithets, you or your friends will find
me at the following address before the day is out.” Kreisler produced a
card and handed it to Soltyk.
Soltyk stared at him, paralysed for the moment at this outrage, his eyes
burning with the sweet intensity Tarr noticed that evening, taking in the
incredible fact. He got the fact at last. He lifted his cane and brought
it down on Kreisler’s shoulders. Kreisler snatched it from him, broke it
in three and flung it in his face, one of the splinters making a little
gash in his under lip.
Anastasya had turned round and begun walking away, leaving them alone.
Kreisler also waited no longer, but marched rapidly off in the other
direction.
Soltyk caught Anastasya up, and apologized for what had occurred, dabbing
his lip with a handkerchief.
Kreisler after this felt himself fairly launched on a satisfactory little
affair. Many an old talent would come in useful. He acted for the rest
of the day with a gusto of professional interest. For an hour or two he
stayed at home. No one came, however, to call him to account. Leaving
word that he would soon be back, he left in search of a man to act for
him. He remembered a Russian he had had some talk with at the Studio, and
whom he had once visited. He was celebrated for having had a duel and
blinded his opponent. His instinct now led him to this individual, who
has already been seen in action. His qualifications for a second were
quite unique.
Kreisler found him just finishing work. He had soon explained what he
required of him. With great gravity he set forth his attachment for a
“beautiful girl,” the discreditable behaviour of the Russian in seeking
to prejudice her against him. In fact, he gave an entirely false picture
of the whole situation. His honour _must_ now be satisfied. He would
accept nothing less than reparation by arms. Such was Kreisler, but he
was _himself_ very cynically. He had explained this to Volker after
the following manner: “I am a hundred different things; I am as many
people as the different types of people I have lived amongst. I am a
‘Boulevardier’ (he believed that on occasion he answered fully to that
description), I am a ‘Rapin’; I am also a ‘Korps-student.’”
In his account of how things stood he had, besides, led the Russian to
understand that there was more in it all than it was necessary to say,
and, in fact, than he _could_ say. Whatever attitude Soltyk might take
up, this gentleman too knew, he hinted, that they had come to the point
in their respective relations towards this “beautiful girl” at which one
of them must disappear. In addition, he, Kreisler, had been grossly
insulted in the very presence of the “beautiful girl” that afternoon.
The Russian’s compatriot had used his cane. These latter were facts that
would be confirmed later, for the physical facts at least could not be
got round by Soltyk.
The Russian, Bitzenko by name, a solemnly excitable bourgeois of
Petrograd, recognized a situation after his own heart. Excitement was
a food he seldom got in such quantities, and pretending to listen to
Kreisler a little abstractedly and uncertainly to start with, he was
really from the first very much his man.
So Kreisler and his newly found henchman, silently and intently engaged
on their evening’s business, have been accounted for. Soltyk had been
discovered some quarter of an hour before Tarr’s appearance, and stared
out of countenance for the whole of the time by Kreisler.
CHAPTER III
The indignation and flurry subsided; but the child of this eruption
remained. The Polish party found the legacy of the uproar as cold as its
cause had been hot. Bitzenko inspired respect as he scratched his beard,
which smelt of Turkish tobacco, and wrinkled up imperturbably small grey
eyes.
Then, the excitement over, the red mark on Soltyk’s cheek became merely a
fact. One or two of his friends found themselves examining it obliquely,
as a relic, with curiosity.
He had had his face smacked earlier in the day, as well. How much longer
was his face going to go on being smacked? Here was this Russian still
there. There _was_ the chance of an affair. A duel—a duel, for a change,
in our civilized life; _c’était une idée_.
Who was the girl the Russian kept mentioning? Was she that girl he had
been telling them about who had a man-servant? Kreisler was a Frei-Herr?
The Russian had referred to him as “my friend the Frei-Herr.”
“Herr Kreisler does not wish to take further measures to ensure himself
some form of satisfaction,” the Russian said monotonously.
“There is always the police for drunken blackguards,” Soltyk answered.
“If you please! That is not the way! It is not usually so difficult to
obtain satisfaction from a gentleman.”
“But then I am not a gentleman in the sense that your friend Kreisler is.”
“Perhaps not, but a blow on the face⸺”
The little Russian said “blow on the face” in a soft inviting way, as
though it were a titbit with powers of fascination of its own.
“But it is most improper to ask me to stand here wrangling with you,” he
next said.
“You please yourself.”
“I am merely serving my friend Herr Kreisler. Will you oblige me by
indicating a friend of yours with whom I can discuss this matter?”
The waiter who had brought in the card again approached their table.
This time he presented Soltyk with a note, written on the café paper and
folded in four.
Tarr had been watching what was going on with as much interest as his
ruffled personal dignity would allow him to take. He did not believe in a
duel. But he wondered what would happen, for he was certain that Kreisler
would not let this man alone until something had happened. What would he
have done, he asked himself, in Soltyk’s place? He would have naturally
refused to consider the idea of a duel as a possibility. If you had to
fight a duel with any man who liked to hit you on the head—Kreisler,
moreover, was not a man with whom a duel need be fought. He was in a
weak position in that way, in spite of the additional blacking on his
boots. Tarr himself, of course, could have taken refuge in the fact
that Englishmen do not duel. But what would have been the next step,
this settled, had he been in Soltyk’s shoes? Kreisler was waiting at the
door of the café. If his enemy got up and went out, at the door he would
once more have his face smacked. His knowledge of Kreisler convinced him
that that face would be smacked all over the _quartier_, at all hours of
the day, for many days to come. Kreisler, unless physically overwhelmed,
would smack it in public and in private until further notice. He would
probably spit in it, after having smacked it, occasionally. So Kreisler
must be henceforth fought by his victim wherever met. Would this state
of things justify the use of a revolver? No. Kreisler should be maimed.
It all should be prepared with great thoroughness; exactly the weight of
stick, etc. The French laws would allow quite a bad wound. But Tarr felt
that the sympathetic young Prussian-Pole would soon have Bitzenko on his
hands as well. Bitzenko was very alarming.
Kreisler, although evicted from the café, had been allowed by the waiters
to take up his position on a distant portion of the terrace. There he
sat with his legs crossed and his eye fixed on the door with a Scottish
solemnity. He was an object of considerable admiration to the _garçons_.
His coolness and persistence appeared to them amusing and typical. His
solemnity aroused their wonder and respect. He meant business. He was
behaving correctly.
Soltyk opened the note at once.
On it was written in German:
“_To the cad Soltyk_
“If you make any more trouble about appointing seconds, and
delay the gentlemen who have consented to act for me, I shall
wait for you at the door and try some further means of rousing
you to honourable action.”
A little man sitting next to Soltyk with an eloquent, sleek lawyer’s face
took the letter as though it had been a public document and read it. He
bent towards his friend and said:
“What is really the matter with this gentleman?”
Soltyk shrugged his shoulders.
“He’s a brute, and he is a little crazy as well. He wants to pick a
quarrel with me, I don’t know why.”
“He means trouble. Doesn’t he want to be taken seriously, only? Let
his shaggy friend here have a chat with a friend of yours. He may be a
nuisance—”
“What rot! Why should one, Stephen? If he comes for me at the door, let
him! I wish that little man there would go away. He has annoyed us quite
enough.”
“Louis, will you give me permission to speak to him on your behalf?”
“If that will give you any satisfaction.”
Stephen (Staretsky) got up and put himself at Bitzenko’s disposition. The
whole party became tumultuous at this.
“What the devil are you up to, Stephen? Let them alone.”
“You’re not going⸺?”
“Tell them to go to hell!”
“Stephen, come back, you silly fool!”
Stephen Staretsky smiled at this with a sort of worldly indulgence. “You
don’t understand. This is the best thing to do,” he seemed to say.
“Do you want this to last the whole evening?” he asked the man nearest
him.
He followed Bitzenko out, and Tarr followed Bitzenko.
CHAPTER IV
They went over to a small, gaudy, quiet café opposite, Kreisler watching
them, but still with his eye on the door near at hand.
Tarr was amused now at his position of dummy. He enjoyed crossing the
road under Kreisler’s eye, in his service. The evening’s twists were very
comic.
Imaginative people are easy to convince of the naturalness of anything;
and the Russian was the prophet of the necessity of this affair. Stephen
was not convinced; but he soon made up his mind that Bitzenko was either
Kreisler’s accomplice in some scheme or at least had made up his mind
that there could only be one ending to the matter.
He went back to the café and, sitting down beside Soltyk again, said:
“I’m afraid I was mistaken, Louis. Your German means to fight you or else
he has some little game. If you’re sure there’s nothing in it, you must
tell him and his little Russian to go to the devil.”
While Stephen Staretsky had been away one of Soltyk’s friends told them
about Bitzenko.
“Don’t you know him, Louis? Maiewski used to know him. He lives in one
of those big studios, Rue Ulm, near the Invalides. Il a du pognon, il
parait.”
Soltyk began patting his cheek gently. But his vanity ached steadily
inside.
“What is his name?” asked another.
“Bitzenko. He once had a duel and blinded a man.”
Soltyk looked up and stopped patting his cheek.
“How? Blinded him?” somebody asked.
“Yes, blinded him.”
The blows began to take effect, the atmosphere becoming somehow congenial
to them. When Stephen Staretsky delivered his message Soltyk was losing
his self-control. The opportunity of killing this obnoxious figure
offered him so obstinately by Bitzenko—whom he disliked even more—began
to recommend itself to him. This _commis voyageur_ sent to press the
attractions of destruction had won his point.
Soltyk had been silent. He had been twisting up the corners of a
newspaper on the table before him, and appeared struck lazy, into a kind
of sullen sleepiness and detachment resembling despair.
“Ask him,” he said suddenly to Staretsky, “what he wants.”
“What do you mean?”
Soltyk answered irritably, “Why, what they want: what sort of a duel
he wants and when.” “Duel” was said as though it were a common object.
“Settle it quickly and let’s get all this nonsense over, since you have
begun negotiations.”
Stephen Staretsky stared at him.
“You don’t mean—? I have not been negotiating. I simply⸺”
The others once more clamoured, after a moment of astonishment.
“You don’t mean to say, Louis, you’re going⸺?”
“What nonsense, what utter nonsense! What can you be thinking of?”
“If Bitzenko comes in again, pay no attention to him! What possesses you,
Louis! Whatever possesses you, Louis!”
Soltyk looked angrily at his friends without replying.
“Staretsky, arrange that, do you mind?” he said when the exclamations
stopped. “But for Heaven’s sake get it finished quickly. This is becoming
boring.”
Staretsky said, leaning on the back of Soltyk’s chair, with authority:
“Don’t be absurd, Louis: don’t be absurd. You must refuse to listen to
him. All that rot about libelling and the ‘beautiful girl’: my God, man,
you’re not going to take that seriously?”
“Of course not. But I shall fight the German clown. I want to. This is
becoming ridiculous.”
Soltyk had made up his mind. He would never have armed himself and shot
Kreisler in the street. That would have been too ridiculous. It would
have had the touch of passion and intimacy of a _crime passionel_. It
would only have been dignified for an inhabitant of Nevada.
He did not regard this as a duel, but a brawl, ordered by the rules
of “affairs of honour.” If a drunken man or an _apache_ attacked you
the best thing to do would be to fight. If he offered to “fight you
fair”—putting it in that way—then _that_ would be the best thing, too,
no doubt.
But Bitzenko really had brought him to this. Kreisler alone could never
have hoped to compass anything approaching a duel with him.
Stephen Staretsky overwhelmed him with expostulation—even reproaches.
His voice rose and fell in a microscopic stream of close-packed sound.
His face became shiny and the veins appeared in it. He begged Soltyk to
think of his friends! He gathered his arguments up in the tips of his
fingers in little nervous bunches and held them under his friend’s nose,
as though asking him to smell them. And then, with a spasm of the body, a
vibrating twang on some deep chord in his throat, he dashed his gathered
fingers towards the floor.
In face of this attack it was impossible, even had he wished to do so,
for Soltyk to reconsider his decision. The others, too, sat for the most
part watching him.
Bitzenko appeared again. Soltyk became pale at the sight of this sinister
figure, so bourgeois, prepossessing, and bearded, with its legend of
blindings and blood and uncanny tenacity as a second.
He turned to a good-looking, sleek, sallow companion at his elbow.
“Khudin, will you act for me, as Stephen won’t?”
Stephen Staretsky rose. A superfine sweat moistened his skin. His
extraordinary volubility was tucked away somewhere in him in a flash, in
a satisfied and polished acrobatic, and he faced the Russian. Khudin rose
at the same time. Bitzenko had won.
Tarr was astonished at the rapid tragic trend of these farcical
negotiations.
“How angry that man must be to do that,” he thought. But he had not been
smacked the evening before; yet he remembered he had been passably angry.
CHAPTER V
Otto Kreisler, when he had entered the Café Souchet, had been anxious.
His eyes had picked out Soltyk in a delicate flurry. He had been afraid
that he might escape him. Soltyk looked so securely bedded in life,
and he wanted to wrench him out. He was not at all bad-tempered at the
moment. He would have extracted him quite “painlessly” if required. But
bleeding and from the roots, he must come out! (Br-r-rr. The Bersaker
rage!)
He was quite quiet and well-behaved; above all things, _well-behaved_!
The mood he had happened on for this particular phase of his action was
a virulent snobbery. He was a painful and blushing snob! He had, at
his last public appearance, taken the rôle of a tramp-comedian. He had
invited every description of slight and indignity. The world seemed to
wish to perpetuate this part for him. But he would not play! He refused!
A hundred times, he refused!
He remembered with eagerness that he was a German gentleman, with a
_university education_; who had never worked; _a member of an honourable
family_! He remembered each detail socially to his advantage, realizing
methodically things he had from childhood accepted and never thought of
examining. But he had gone a step further. He had arbitrarily revived the
title of Frei-Herr that, it was rumoured in his family, his ancestors had
borne. With Bitzenko he had referred to himself as the Frei-Herr Otto
Kreisler. Had the occasion allowed, he would have been very courteous and
gentle with Soltyk, merely to prove what a gentleman he was! But, alas,
nothing but brutality (against the grain—the noble grain—as this went!)
would achieve his end.
And the end was still paramount. His snobbery was the outcome of this
end, of his end. It was, in this obsession of disused and disappearing
life, the wild assertion of vitality, the clamour for recognition that
life and the beloved self were still there, that brought out the reeking
and brand-new snob. He was almost dead (he had promised his father his
body for next month, and must be punctual), but people already had begun
treading on him and striking matches on his boots. As to fighting with a
man who was practically dead, to all intents and purposes, one mass of
worms—a worm, in short—that was not to be expected of anybody.
So he became a violent snob.
It was Soltyk’s rude behaviour on the day before in the presence of
Anastasya that had set him raving on this subject. The Russian Pole was
up against a raving snob whose social dignity he had wounded.
Bitzenko and Kreisler came out to get Louis Soltyk like two madmen,
full of solemn method and with miraculous solidarity. Their schemes and
energies flew direct from mind to mind, without the need for words.
Bitzenko with his own hand had brushed the back of Kreisler’s coat; on
tiptoe doing this he looked particularly childlike. They were together
there in Kreisler’s room before they started like two little boys
dressing up in preparation for some mischief.
Kreisler had fixed his eyes on Soltyk from his table with alert
offensiveness. The prosperous appearance of the Poles annoyed him deeply.
Their watches were all there, silk handkerchiefs slipped up their
sleeves; they looked sleek and new. A gentle flame of social security and
ease danced in their eyes and gestures. He was out in the dark, they were
in a lighted room! He wished their fathers’ affairs might deteriorate and
their fortunes fall to pieces; that their watches could be stolen, and
their restaurant-tick attacked by insidious reports! And as he watched
them he felt more and more an outcast, shabbier and shabbier. He saw
himself the little official in a German provincial town that his father’s
letter foreshadowed.
One or two of them pointed him out to Soltyk, and it was a wounding laugh
of the latter’s that brought him to his feet.
As he was slapping his enemy he woke up out of his nightmare. He was like
a sleeper having the first inkling of his solitude when he is woken by
the climax of his dream, still surrounded by tenacious influences. But
had any one struck him then, the blow would have had as little effect as
a blow aimed at a waking man by a phantom of his sleep. The noise around
him was a receding accompaniment.