face made him sick. To overcome this he stepped forward again to strike
the dummy once more, and then it moved suddenly. As he raised his hand
his glasses almost slipped off, and at that point he was seized by the
_garçons_. Hurried out on to the pavement, he could still see, at the
bottom of a huge placid mirror just inside the café, the wriggling backs
of the band of Poles. Drawing out his card-case, he had handed the waiter
a visiting-card. The waiter at first refused it. He turned his head aside
vaguely, as a dog does when doubtful about some morsel offered him; then
he took it. Kreisler saw in the mirror the tearing up of his card. Fury
once more—not so much because it was a new slight as that he feared his
only hope, Soltyk, might escape him.
The worry of this hour or so in which Bitzenko was negotiating told on
him so much that when at last his emissary announced that an arrangement
had been come to in the sense he wished, he questioned him incredulously.
He felt hardly any satisfaction, reaction setting in immediately.
Bitzenko went back to Kreisler’s door with him and, promising to return
within half an hour, left him. Tarr having, as he had stipulated, left
when the talking was over, Bitzenko first went in search of a friend to
serve as second. The man he decided on was already in bed, and at once,
half asleep, without preparation of any sort, consented to do what was
asked of him.
“Will you be a second in a duel to-morrow morning at half-past six?”
“Yes.”
“At half-past six?”
“Yes.” And after a minute or two, “Is it you?”
“No, a German friend of mine.”
“All right.”
“You will have to get up at five.”
Bitzenko’s friend was a tall, powerfully built young Russian painter,
who, with his great bow-legs, would take up some straggling and
extravagantly twisted pose of the body and remain immobile for minutes
together, with an air of ridiculous detachment. This combination of a
tortured, restless attitude, and at the same time statuesque tendency,
suggested something like a contemplative acrobat or contortionist. A
mouth of almost anguished attention and little calm indifferent eyes,
produced similar results in the face.
Bitzenko’s next move was to go to his rooms, put a gently ticking little
clock, with an enormous alarum on the top, under his arm, and then walk
round once more to Otto Kreisler’s. He informed his friend of these last
arrangements made in his interests. He suggested that it would be better
for him to sleep there that night, to save time in the morning. In short,
he attached himself to Kreisler’s person. Until it were deposited in
the large cemetery near by, or else departed from the Gare du Nord in a
deal box for burial in Germany, it should not leave him. In the event of
victory, and he being no longer responsible for it, it should disappear
as best it could. The possible subsequent conflict with the police
was not without charm for Bitzenko. He regarded the police force, its
functions and existence, as a pretext for adventure.
The light was blown out. Bitzenko curled himself up on the floor. He
insisted on this. Kreisler must be fresh in the morning and do him
justice. The Russian could hear the bed shaking for some time. Kreisler
was trembling violently. A sort of exultation at the thought of his
success caused this nervous attack. He had been quite passive since he
had heard that all was well.
At about half-past four in the morning Kreisler was dreaming of Volker
and a pact he had made with him in his sleep never to divulge some
secret, which there was never any possibility of his doing in any case,
as he had completely forgotten what it was. He was almost annihilated by
a terrific explosion. With his eyes suddenly wide open, he saw the little
clock quivering in the mantelpiece beneath its large alarum. When it had
stopped Kreisler could hardly believe his ears, as though this sound had
been going to accompany life, for that day at least, as a destructive and
terrifying feature. Then he saw the Russian, already on his feet. His
white and hairy little body had apparently risen energetically out of the
scratch bedclothes simultaneously with the “going off” of his clock, as
though it were a mechanism set for the same hour.
They both dressed without a word. Kreisler wrote a short letter to his
father, entrusting it to his second.
Kreisler’s last few francs were to be spent on a taxi to take them to the
place arranged on, outside the fortifications.
They found the other second sound asleep. Bitzenko more or less dressed
him. They set out in their taxi to the rendezvous by way of the Bois.
The chilly and unusual air of the early morning, the empty streets and
shuttered houses, destroyed all feeling of reality of what was happening
for Kreisler. Had the duel been a thing to fear it would have had an
opposite effect. His errand did not appear as an inflexible reality,
either, following upon events that there was no taking back. It was
a whim, a caprice, they were pursuing, as though, for instance, they
had woken up in the early morning and decided to go fishing. They were
carrying it out with a dogged persistency, with which our whims are often
served.
He kept his thought away from Soltyk. He seemed a very long way off; it
would be fatiguing for the mind to go in search of him.
When the scientist’s nature, with immense _fugue_, has induced a man
to marry some handsome young lady—this feat accomplished, Nature leaves
him practically alone, only coming back to give him a prod from time
to time—assured that, like a little trickling stream, his life will
go steadily on in the bed gauged for it by this upheaval. Nature, in
Kreisler’s case, had done its work of another description. But she had
left the Russian with him to see that all was carried out according to
her wishes. Kreisler’s German nature that craved discipline, a course
marked out, had got more even than it asked for. It had been presented
with a mimic Fate.
But Bitzenko evidently took his pleasure morosely. The calm and
assurance of the evening before had given place to a brooding humour.
He was only restored to a silent and intense animation on hearing his
“Browning” speak. He produced this somewhere in the Bois, and insisted
on his principal having a little practice as they had plenty of time to
spare. This was a very imprudent step. It might draw attention to their
movements. Kreisler proved an excellent shot. Then the Russian himself,
with impassible face, emptied a couple of chambers into a tree-trunk. He
put his “Browning” back into his pocket hastily after this, as though
startled at his own self-indulgence.
A piece of waste land, on the edge of a wood, well hidden on all sides,
had been chosen for the duel.
The enemy was not on the ground. Kreisler’s passivity still subsisted. So
far he had felt that Accident had been dealt a shrewd blow and brought to
its knees. He was in good hands. Until this was all over he had nothing
to worry about.
Fresh compartment. The duel became for him, as he stood on the damp
grass, conventional. It was a duel like another. He was seeking
reparation by arms. He had been libelled and outraged. “A beautiful
woman” was at the bottom of it. Life had no value for him! _Tant pis_
for the other man who had been foolhardy enough to cross his path.
His coat-collar turned up, he looked sternly towards the road, his
moustaches blowing a little in the wind. He asked Bitzenko for a
cigarette. That gentleman did not smoke, but the other Russian produced
a khaki cigarette with a long mouthpiece. He struck a light. As Kreisler
lit his cigarette at it, his hand resting against the other’s, a strange
feeling shot through him at the contact of this flesh. He moistened his
lips and spat out a piece of the mouthpiece he had bitten through.
The hour arranged came round and there was still no sign of anybody. The
possibility of a hitch in the proceedings dawned on Kreisler. Personal
animosity for Soltyk revived. That idea of obstinacy in a caprice,
instead of merely carrying out something prearranged and unavoidable,
despite his passivity, had proved really the wakefulness of his will.
He looked towards his companions, alone there on the ground of the
encounter. They were an unsatisfactory pair, after all. They did not look
a winning team. He reproached himself for having hit just on this Russian
for assistance.
Bitzenko, on the other hand, was deep in thought. He was rehearsing his
part of second. The duel in which he had blinded his adversary was a
figment of his boyish brain, confided with tears in his voice one evening
to a friend. His only genuine claim to activity was that, in a perfect
disguise, he had assisted the peasants of his estate to set fire to his
little Manor House during the revolution of 1906 for the fun of the thing
and in an access of revolutionary sentiment. Afterwards he had assisted
the police with information in the investigation of the affair, also
anonymously. All this he kept to himself. He referred to his past in
Russia in a way that conjured up more luridness than the flames of his
little château (which did not burn at all well) warranted.
Bitzenko was quite in his element climatically; whereas Kreisler felt his
hands getting so cold that he thought they might fail him in the duel.
But a car was heard beyond the trees on the Paris road. This sound in the
listless blur of nature was masterful in its significance. It struck
steadily and at once into brutish apathy. It so plainly knew what it
wanted. It had perhaps outstripped men in that. Men in their soft bodies
still contained the apathy of the fields. Their mind had burst out of
them and taken these crawling pulps up on its rigid back.
It was Staretsky’s car. With its load of hats it drew up. The four
members of the other party came on to the field, the fourth a young
Polish doctor. They walked quickly. Bitzenko went to meet them. Staretsky
protested energetically that the duel must not proceed.
“It must—not—go—on! Should anything happen—you must allow me to say,
should anything happen—the blood of whoever falls will be at your door!”
But he felt all the same that the prospect of having a little pond of
blood at his door was an alluring one for Bitzenko.
“Has not your principal seen that in accepting this duel, M. Soltyk had
proved his respect for Herr Kreisler’s claim? The attitude your principal
attributed to him is _not_ his attitude⸺”
Bitzenko stiffened.
“Is there anything in Herr Kreisler that would justify M. Soltyk in
considering that he was condescending⸺?”
The little Russian kept up his cunning and baffling wrangle. Soltyk’s
eyes steadily avoided Kreisler’s person. He hoped this ridiculous figure
might make some move enabling them to abandon the duel. But the idea of
a favour coming from such a quarter was repellent. His stomach had been
out of order the day before—he wondered if it would surge up, disgrace
him. He might be sick at any moment. He saw himself on tiptoe, in an
ignominious spasm, the proceedings held up, friends and enemies watching.
He kept his eyes off Kreisler as a man on board ship keeps his eyes off a
dish of banana fritters or a poached egg.
Kreisler, from twenty yards off, stared through his glasses at the group
of people he had assembled, as though he had been examining the enemy
through binoculars. Obediently, erect and still, he appeared rather
amazed at what was occurring. Soltyk, in rear of the others, struggled
with his bile. He slipped into his mouth a sedative tablet, oxide of
bromium and heroin. This made him feel more sick. For a few moments he
stood still in horror, expecting to vomit at every moment. The blood
rushed to his head and covered the back of his neck with a warm liquid
sheet.
Kreisler’s look of surprise deepened. He had seen Soltyk slipping
something into his mouth, and was puzzled and annoyed, like a child. What
was he up to? Poison was the only guess he could give. What on earth⸺?
Having taken part in many _mensurs_ he knew that for this very serious
duel his emotions were hardly adequate. His nervous system was as
quiescent as a corpse’s. He became offended with his phlegm. All this
instinctive resistance to the idea of Death, the indignity of being
nothing, was rendered empty by his premature insensitiveness. He tried to
visualize and feel. In a few minutes he might be dead! That had so little
effect that he almost laughed.
Then he reflected that that man over there might in a few minutes be
wiped out. He would become a disintegrating mess, uglier than any vitriol
or syphilis could make him. All that organism he, Kreisler, would be
turning into dung, as though by magic. He, Kreisler, is insulted. The
sensations and energies of that man deny him equality of existence. He,
Kreisler, lifts his hand, presses a little bar of steel, and the other
is swept away into the earth. Heaven knows where the insulting spirit
goes to. But the _physical disfigurement_ at least is complete. He
went through it laboriously. But it fell flat as well. He was too near
the event to benefit by his fancy. Possibilities were weakened by the
nearness of Certainty.
His momentary resentment with Bitzenko survived, and he next became
annoyed at being treated like an object, as he felt it. He was not
deliberately conscious of much. But, try as he would to elude the
disgraces and besmirchings of death, people refused to treat him as
anything but a sack of potatoes.
There four or five men had been arguing about him for the last five
minutes, and they had not once looked his way. But clearly Bitzenko was
defending _his_ duel.
Why should Bitzenko go on disposing of him in this fashion? He took
everything for granted; he never so much as appealed to him, even once.
Had Bitzenko been commissioned to hustle him out of existence?
But Soltyk. There was that fellow again slipping something into his
mouth! A cruel and fierce sensation of mixed real and romantic origin
rose hotly round his heart. He _loved_ that man! But because he loved him
he wished to plunge a sword into him, to plunge it in and out and up and
down! Why had pistols been chosen?
He would let him off for two pins! He would let him off if⸺Yes! He began
pretending to himself that the duel might after all not take place. That
was the only way he could get anything out of it.
He laughed; then shouted out in German:
“Give me one!”
They all looked round. Soltyk did not turn, but the side of his face
became crimson.
Kreisler felt a surge of active passion at the sight of the blood in his
face.
“Give me one,” Kreisler shouted again, putting out the palm of his hand,
and laughing in a thick, insulting, hearty way. He was now a _Knabe_. He
was young and cheeky. His last words had been said with quick cleverness.
The heavy coquetting was double-edged.
“What do you mean?” Bitzenko called back.
“I want a jujube. Ask Herr Soltyk!”
They all turned towards the other principal to the duel, standing some
yards on the other side of them.
Head thrown back and eyes burning, Soltyk gazed at Kreisler. It was
genuine, but not very strong. If killing could be embodied in the organ
that _sees_—a new function of expression—a perfect weapon would exist.
Only the intensest expression being effective, such spiritual blasting
powers would be a solution of the arbitrary decisions of force. Words,
glances, music are at present as indirect as hands and cannons. Such
music might be written, however, that no fool, hearing it, could survive.
Whether it throttled him in a spasm of disgust or of shame is immaterial.
Soltyk’s battery was too conventional to pierce the layers of putrifying
tragedy, Kreisler’s bulwark. It played to the limit of its power. His
cheeks were a dull red: his upper lip was stretched tightly over the
gums. The white line of teeth made his face look as though he were
laughing. He stamped his foot on the ground with the impetuous grace of a
Russian dancer, and started walking hurriedly up and down. He glared at
his seconds as well, but although sick with impatience made no protest.
A peal of drawling laughter came from Kreisler:
“Sorry! Sorry! My mistake,” he shouted.
Bitzenko came over and asked Kreisler if he still, for his part, was
of the same mind, that the duel should go on. The principal stared
impenetrably at the second.
“If such an arrangement can be come to as should—er⸺” he began slowly. He
was going to play with Bitzenko too, against whom his humour had shifted.
A look of deepest dismay appeared in the Russian’s face.
“I don’t understand. You mean⸺?”
“I mean, that if the enemy and you can find a basis for understanding⸺”
and Kreisler went on staring at Bitzenko with his look of false surprise.
“You seem very anxious for me to fight, Herr Bitzenko,” he then said
furiously. With a laugh at Bitzenko’s miserable face and evident pleasure
at his quick-change temperamental, facial agility, he left him, walking
towards the other assistants.
Addressing Staretsky, his face radiating affability, stepping with
caution, as though to avoid puddles, he said:
“I am willing to forgo the duel at once on one condition. If Herr Soltyk
will give me a kiss, I will forgo the duel!”
He smiled archly and expectantly at Staretsky.
“I don’t know what you mean!”
“Why, a kiss. You know what a kiss is, my dear sir.”
“I shall consider you out of your mind, if⸺”
“That is my condition.”
Soltyk had come up behind Staretsky.
“What is your _condition_?” he asked loudly.
Kreisler stepped forward so quickly that he was beside him before Soltyk
could move. With one hand coaxingly extended towards his arm, he was
saying something, too softly for the others to hear.
He had immobilized everybody by his rapid action. Surprise had shot their
heads all one way. They stood, watching and listening, screwed into
astonishment as though by deft fingers.
His soft words, too, must have carried sleep. Their insults and their
honey clogged up his enemy. A hand had been going up to strike. But at
the words it stopped dead. So much new matter for anger had been poured
into the ear that it wiped out all the earlier impulse. Action must be
again begun right down from the root.
Kreisler thrust his mouth forward amorously, his body in the attitude of
the eighteenth-century gallant, as though Soltyk had been a woman.
The will broke out frantically from the midst of bandages and a bulk of
suddenly accruing fury. Soltyk tore at _himself_ first, writhing upright,
a statue’s bronze softening, suddenly, with blood. He became white and
red by turns. His blood, one heavy mass, hurtled about in him, up and
down, like a sturgeon in a narrow tank.
All the pilules he had taken seemed acting sedatively against the
wildness of his muscles. The bromium fought the blood.
His hands were electrified. Will was at last dashed all over him, an
Arctic douche. The hands flew at Kreisler’s throat. His nails made six
holes in the flesh and cut into the tendons beneath. Kreisler was hurled
about. He was pumped backwards and forwards. His hands grabbed a mass
of hair; as a man slipping on a precipice gets hold of a plant. Then
they gripped along the coat-sleeves, connecting him with the engine he
had just overcharged with fuel. A sallow white, he became puffed and
exhausted.
“Acha—acha—” a noise, the beginning of a word, came from his mouth.
He sank on his knees. A notion of endless violence filled him.
“Tchun—tchun—tchun—tchun—tchun—tchun!” He fell on his back, and the
convulsive arms came with him. The strangling sensation at his neck
intensified.
Meanwhile a breath of absurd violence had smitten everywhere.
Staretsky had said:
“That _crapule_ is beneath contempt! Pouah!—I refuse to act. Whatever
induced us⸺”
Bitzenko had begun a discourse. Staretsky turned on him, shrieking,
“Foute-moi la paix, imbécile!”
At this Bitzenko rapped him smartly on the cheek. Staretsky, who spent
his mornings sparring with a negro pugilist, gave him a blow between the
eyes, which laid him out insensible.
Bitzenko’s friend, interfering when he saw this, seized Staretsky round
the waist, and threw him down, falling with him.
The doctor and the other second, Wenceslas Khudin, went to separate
Soltyk and Kreisler, scuffling and exhorting. The field was filled with
cries, smacks, and harsh movements.
* * * * *
This Slav chaos gradually cleared up.
Soltyk was pulled off; Staretsky and the young Russian were separated.
Bitzenko once more was on his feet. Then they were all dusting their
trousers, arranging their collars, picking up their hats.
Kreisler stood stretching his neck to right and left alternately. His
collar was torn open; blood trickled down his chest. He had felt weak and
unable to help himself against Soltyk.
Actual fighting appeared a contingency outside the calculations or
functioning of his spirit. Brutal by rote and in the imagination, if
action came too quickly before he could inject it with his dream, his
forces were disconnected. This physical _mêlée_ had been a disturbing
interlude. He was extremely offended at it. His eyes rested steadily and
angrily on Soltyk. This attempt on his part to escape into physical and
secondary things he must be made to pay for! He staggered a little, with
the dignity of the drunken man.
His glasses were still on his nose. They had weathered the storm, tightly
riding his face, because of Soltyk’s partiality for his neck.
Staretsky took Soltyk by the arm.
“Come along, Louis. Surely you don’t want any more of it? Let’s get out
of this. I refuse to act as second. You can’t fight without seconds!”
Soltyk was panting, his mouth opening and shutting. He first turned this
way, then that. His action was that of a man avoiding some importunity.
“C’est bien, c’est bien!” he gasped in French. “Je sais. Laisse-moi.”
All his internal disorganization was steadily claiming his attention.
“Mais dépêche-toi donc! Filons. Nous avons plus rien à faire ici.”
Staretsky slipped his arm through his. Half supporting him, he began
urging him along towards the car. Soltyk, stumbling and coughing, allowed
himself to be guided.
Khudin and the doctor had been talking together, as the only two men on
the field in full possession of their voices and breath. When they saw
their friends moving off, they followed.
Bitzenko, recuperating rapidly, started after them.
* * * * *
Kreisler saw all this at first with indifference. He had taken his
handkerchief out and was dabbing his neck. Then suddenly, with a rather
plaintive but resolute gait, he ran after his second, his eye fixed on
the retreating Poles.
“Hi! A moment! Your Browning. Give me your Browning!” he said hoarsely.
His voice had been driven back into the safer depths of his body. It was
a new and unconvincing one.
Bitzenko did not appear to understand.
Kreisler plucked the revolver out of his pocket with the deftness of an
animal. There was a report. He was firing in the air.
Staretsky had faced quickly round, dragging Soltyk. Kreisler was covering
them with the Browning.
“Halt!” he shouted. “Stop there! Not so quickly! I will shoot you like a
dog if you will not fight!”
Still holding them up, he ordered Bitzenko to take over to them one of
the revolvers provided for the duel.
“That will be murder! If you assist in this, sir, you will be
participating in a murder! Stop this⸺”
Staretsky was jabbering at Bitzenko, his arm through his friend’s. Soltyk
stood wiping his face with his hand, his eyes on the ground. His breath
came heavily, and he kept shifting his feet.
Bitzenko’s tall young Russian stood in a twisted attitude, a gargoyle
Apollo. His mask of peasant tragedy had broken into a slight smile.
“Move and I fire! Move and I fire!” Kreisler kept shouting, moving up
towards them, with stealthy grogginess. He kept shaking the revolver and
pointing at them with the other hand, to keep them alive to the reality
of the menace.
“Don’t touch the pistols, Louis!” said Staretsky, as Bitzenko came over
with his leather dispatch-case. He let go of Soltyk’s arm and folded his
own.
“Don’t touch them, Louis. They daren’t shoot!”
Louis appeared apathetic both as to the pistols and the good advice.
“Leave him both,” Kreisler called, his revolver still trained on
Staretsky and Soltyk.
Bitzenko put them both down, a foot away from Soltyk, and walked
hurriedly out of the zone of fire.
“Will you take up one of those pistols, or both?” Kreisler said.
“Kindly point that revolver somewhere else, and allow us to go!”
Staretsky said loudly.
“I’m not speaking to you, pig-face! It’s _you_ I’m addressing. Take up
that pistol!”
He was now five or six yards from them.
“Herr Soltyk is unarmed! The pistols you want him to take only have one
charge. Yours has twelve. In any case it would be murder!”
Kreisler walked up to them. He was very white, much quieter, and acted
with effort. He stooped down to take up one of the pistols. Staretsky
aimed a blow at his head. It caught him just in front of the ear, on the
right cheek-bone. He staggered sideways, tripped, and fell. The moment he
felt the blow he pulled the trigger of the Browning, which still pointed
towards his principal adversary. Soltyk threw his arms up: Kreisler was
struggling towards his feet: he fell face forwards on top of him.
Kreisler thought this was a new attack. He seized Soltyk’s body round the
middle, rolling over on top of it. It was quite limp. He then thought
the other man had fainted; ruptured himself⸺? He drew back quickly.
Two hands grasped him and flung him down on his stomach. This time his
glasses went. Scrambling after them, he remembered his Browning, which
he had dropped. He shot his hands out to left and right—forgetting his
glasses—to recover the Browning. He felt that a blow was a long time in
coming.
“He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s dead!”
Staretsky’s voice, announcing that in French, he heard at the same time
as Bitzenko’s saying:
“What are you looking for? Come quickly!”
“Where is the Browning?” he asked. At that moment his hand struck his
glasses. He put them on and got to his feet.
At Bitzenko’s words he had a feeling of a new order of things having set
in, that he remembered having experienced once or twice before in life.
They came in a fresh surprising tone. It was as though they were the
first words he had heard that day. They seemed to imply a sudden removal,
a journey, novel conditions.
“Come along, I’ve got the Browning. There’s no time to lose.” It was
all over; he must embrace practical affairs. The Russian’s voice was
businesslike. Something had finished for him, too. Kreisler saw the
others standing in a peaceful group; the doctor was getting up from
beside Soltyk.
Staretsky rushed over to Kreisler, and shook his fist in his face and
tried to speak. But his mouth was twisted down at the corners, and he
could hardly see. The palms of his hands pressed into each of his eyes,
the next moment he was sobbing, walking back to his friends.
Bitzenko’s bolt was shot. Kreisler had been unsatisfactory. All had
ended in a silly accident, which might have awkward consequences for his
second. It was hardly a real corpse at all.
But something was sent to console him. The police had got wind of the
duel. Bitzenko, his compatriot and Kreisler were walking down the field,
intending to get into the road at the farther end, and walk to the
nearest station. The taxi had been sent away, Kreisler having no more
money, and Bitzenko’s feeling in the matter being that should Kreisler
fall, a corpse can always find some sentimental soul to look after it.
And there was always the Morgue, dramatic and satisfactory.
They were already half-way along the field when a car passed them on the
other side of the hedge at full tilt.
The Russian was once more in his element. His face cleared. He looked ten
years younger. In the occupants of the car he had recognized members of
the police force!
Calling “Run!” to Kreisler he took to his heels, followed by his young
fellow-second, whose neck shot in and out, and whose great bow-legs could
almost be heard twanging as he ran. They reached a hedge, ran along the
farther side of it. Bitzenko was bent double as though to escape a rain
of bullets. Eventually he was seen careering across an open space quite
near the river, which lay a couple of hundred yards beyond the lower end
of the field. There he lay ambushed for a moment, behind a shrub. Then he
darted forward again, and eventually disappeared along the high road in
a cloud of dust. His athletic young friend made straight for the railway
station, which he reached without incident and returned at once to Paris.
Kreisler conformed to Bitzenko’s programme of flight. He scrambled
through the hedge, crossed the road and escaped almost unnoticed.
The truth was that the Russian had attracted the attention of the police
to such an extent by his striking flight, that without a moment’s
hesitation they had bolted helter-skelter after him. They contented
themselves with a parting shout or two at Kreisler. Duelling was a very
venial offence; capture in these cases was not a matter of the least
moment. But they were so impressed by the Russian’s businesslike way of
disappearing that they imagined this must have been a curiously immoral
sort of duel. That he was the principal they did not doubt for a moment.
So they went after him in full cry, rousing two or three villagers
in their passage, who followed at their heels, pouring with frantic
hullabaloo in the direction of Paris. Bitzenko, however, with great
resourcefulness, easily outwitted them. He crossed the Seine near St.
Cloud, and got back to Paris in time to read the afternoon newspaper
account of the duel and flight with infantile solemnity and calm.
CHAPTER VI
Five days after this, in the morning, Otto Kreisler mounted the steps of
the police-station of a small town near the German frontier. He was going
to give himself up.
Bitzenko had pictured his principal, in the event of his succeeding
against Soltyk, seeking rapidly by train the German frontier, disguised
in some extraordinary manner. Had the case been suggested to him of a man
in this position without sufficient money in his pocket to buy a ticket,
he would then have imagined a melodramatic figure hurrying through
France, dodging and dogged by the police, defying a thousand perils.
Whether Kreisler were still under the spell of the Russian or not, this
was the course, more or less, he took. He could be trusted not to go near
Paris. That city dominated all his maledictions.
The police disturbing the last act of his sanguinary farce was a similar
contretemps to Soltyk’s fingers in his throat. At the last moment
everything had begun to go wrong. He had not prepared for it, because,
as though from cunning, the world had shown no tendency up till then to
interfere.
Soltyk had died when his back was turned, so to speak. He got the
contrary of comfort out of the thought that he could claim to have
done the deed. The police had rushed in and broken things off short,
swept everything away, ended the banquet in a brutal raid. A deep sore,
a shocked and dislocated feeling remained in Kreisler’s mind. He had
been hurried so much! He had never needed leisure, breathing space, so
much. The disaster of Soltyk’s death was raw on him! Had he been given
time—only a little time—he might have put that to rights. (This sinister
regret could only imply a possible mutilation of the corpse.)
A dead man has no feeling. He can be treated as an object and hustled
away. But a living man needs time!—time!
Does not a _living man_ need so much _time_ to develop his movements, to
lord it with his thoughtful body, to unroll his will? _Time_ is what he
needs!
As a tramp being hustled away from a café protests, at each jerk the
waiter gives him, that he is a human being, probably a _free_ human
being—yes, probably _free_; so Kreisler complained to his fate that he
was a living man, that he required _time_—that above all it was _time_ he
needed—to settle his affairs and withdraw from life. But his fate was a
harsh Prussian gendarme. He whined and blustered to no effect.
He was superstitious as well in the usual way about this decease. In his
spiritless and brooding tramp he questioned if it were not he that had
died and not Soltyk, and if it were not his ghost that was now wandering
off nowhere in particular.
One franc and a great many coppers remained to him. As he jumped from
field to road and road to field again, in his flight, they rose and fell
in a little leaden wave in his pocket, breaking dully on his thigh. This
little wave rose and fell many times, till he began to wait for it, and
its monotonous grace. It was like a sigh. It heaved and clashed down in a
foiled way.
He spent the money that evening on a meal in a village. The night was dry
and was passed in an empty barge. Next day, at four in the afternoon,
he arrived at Meaux. Here he exchanged his entire wardrobe for a very
shabby workman’s outfit, gaining seven francs and fifty centimes on the
exchange. He caught the early train for Rheims, travelling thirty-five
kilometres of his journey at a sou a kilometre, got a meal near the
station, and took another ticket to Verdun. Believing himself nearer the
frontier than he actually was, he set out on foot. At the next large
town, Pontlieux, he had too hearty a meal. He had exhausted his stock of
money long before the frontier was reached. For two days he had eaten
hardly anything; and tramped on in a dogged and careless spirit.
The _nearness_ of the German frontier began to rise like a wall in front
of him. This question had to be answered: Did he want to cross it after
all?
His answer was to mount the steps of the local _gendarmerie_.
His Prussian severity of countenance, now that he was dressed in every
point like a vagabond, without hat and his hair disordered, five days’
beard on his chin—this sternness of the German warrior gave him the
appearance of a scowling ruffian. The _agent_ on duty, who barred his
passage brutally before the door of the inner office, scowling too,
classed him as a depraved cut-throat vagabond, and considered his
voluntary entrance into the police-station as an act not only highly
suspicious and unaccountable in itself, but of the last insolence.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il te faut?”
“Foir le Commissaire,” returned Kreisler.
“Tu ne peux pas le voir. Il n’y est pas.”
A few more laconic sentences followed, the _agent_ reiterating sulkily
that the magistrate was not there. But he was eyeing Kreisler doubtfully
and turning something over in his mind.
The day before, two Germans had been arrested in the neighbourhood as
spies, and were now locked up in this building until further evidence
should be collected on the affair. It is extremely imprudent for a German
to loiter on the frontier on entering France. It is much wiser for him to
push on at once—neither looking to right nor left—pretending especially
not to notice hills, unnatural military-looking protuberances, ramparts,
etc.—to hurry on as rapidly as possible to the interior. But the two
men in question were carpenters by profession, and both carried huge
foot-rules in their pockets. The local authorities on this discovery were
in a state of the deepest consternation. They shut them up, with their
implements, in the most inaccessible depths of the local police-station.
And it was in the doorway of this building—all the intermittant
inhabitants of which were in a state of hysterical speculation, that
Kreisler had presented himself.
The _agent_, who had recognized a German by his accent and manner, at
last turned and disappeared through the door, telling him to wait. He
reappeared with several superiors. All of them crowded in the doorway and
surveyed Kreisler blankly. One asked in a voice of triumphant suspicion:
“And what are you doing there, my good fellow?”
“I had tuel, and killed the man; I have walked for more days⸺”
“Yes, we know all about that!”
“So you had a duel, eh?” asked another, and they all laughed with nervous
suddenness at the picture of this vagabond defending his honour at twenty
paces.
“Well, is that all you have to say?”
“I would eat.”
“Yes! your two friends inside also have big appetites. But come to the
point. Have you anything to tell us about your compatriots inside there?”
Since his throttling by Soltyk, Kreisler had changed. He knew he was
beaten. There was nothing to do but to die. His body ran to the German
frontier as a chicken’s does down a yard, headless, from the block.
Kreisler did not understand the official. He muttered that he was hungry.
He could hardly stand. Leaning his shoulder against the wall, he stood
with his eyes on the ground. He was making himself at home! “What a
nerve!”
“Va t’en! If you don’t want to tell us anything, clear out. Be quick
about it! A pretty lot of trouble you cursed Germans are giving us.
You’ll none of you speak when it comes to the point. You all stand
staring like boobies. But that won’t pay here. Of you go!”
They all turned back into the office, and slammed the door. The _agent_
stood before it again, looking truculently at Kreisler. He said:
“Passez votre chemin! Don’t stand gaping there!”
Then, giving him a shake, he hustled him to the top of the steps. A
parting shove sent him staggering down into the road.
Kreisler walked on for a little. Eventually, in a quiet square, near the
entrance to the town, he fell on a bench, drew his legs up and went to
sleep.
At ten o’clock, the town lethargically retiring, all its legs moving
slowly, like a spent insect, heavily boarding itself in, an _agent_
came gradually along the square. Kreisler’s visit to the police-station
was not known to this one. He stopped opposite the sleeping Kreisler,
surveying him with lawful indignation.
“En voilà un joli gigolo!” He swayed energetically up to him.
“Eh! le copain! Tu voudrais coucher à la belle étoile?”
He shook him.
“Oh, là! Tu ne peux pas dormir ici! _Houp!_ Dépêches-toi. Mets-toi
debout!”
Kreisler responded only by a tired movement as though to bury his skull
in the bench. A more violent jerk rolled him on the ground.
He woke up and protested in German, with a sort of dull asperity. He got
on to his feet.
At the sound of the familiar gutturals of the neighbouring Empire,
the _agent_ became differently angry. Kreisler stood there, muttering
partly in German and partly in French; he was very tired. He was
telling bitterly of his attempt to get into the police-station, and of
his inhospitable reception. The _agent_ understood several words of
German—notably “ja” and “lager beer” and “essen.” The consequence was
that he always thought he understood more than was really said in that
language. However much might be actually intended on any given occasion
by the words of that profound and teeming tongue, it could never equal in
scope, intensity, and meaning what he heard.
So he was convinced that Kreisler was threatening an invasion, and
scoffed loudly in reply. He understood Kreisler to assert that the town
in which they stood would soon belong to Germany, and that he would then
sleep, not on a bench, but in the best bed their dirty little hole of
a village could offer. He approached him threateningly. And eventually
the functionary distinctly heard himself apostrophized as a “sneaking
‘flic’,” a “dirty peeler.” At that he laid his hand on Kreisler’s
collar, and threw him in the direction of the police-station. He had
miscalculated the distance. Kreisler, weak for want of food, fell at his
feet; but, getting up, scuffled a short time. Then, it occurring to him
that here was an unhoped for way of getting a dinner, and being lodged
after all in the _bureau de police_, he suddenly became passive and
complaisant.
Arrived at the police-station—with several revolts against the brutal
handling to which he was subjected—he was met at the door by the same
inhospitable man. Exasperated beyond measure at this unwelcome guest
turning up again, the man sent his comrade into the office to report,
while he held Kreisler. He held him as a restive horse is held, and
jerked him several times against the wall, as if he had been showing
signs of resistance.
Two men, one that he had formerly seen, came and looked at him. No effort
was made to discover if he were really at fault or not. By this time they
were quite convinced that he was a desperate character, and if not a spy,
then anyway a murderer, although they were inclined to regard him as a
criminal mystery. At all events they no longer could question his right
to a night’s lodging.
Kreisler was led to a cell, given some bread and water at his urgent
request, and left alone.
On the following morning he was taken up before the _commissaire de
police_. When Kreisler was brought in, this gentleman had just finished
cross-examining for the fifteenth time the two German carpenters who were
retained as spies. They were not let alone for an instant. They would be
dragged out of their cells three times in the course of an afternoon, as
often as a new and brilliant idea should strike one of the numerous staff
of the police-station. They would be confronted with their foot-rules,
and watched in breathless silence; or be keenly cross-questioned,
confused and contradicted as to the exact hour at which they had lunched
the day before their arrest. The _commissaire_ was perspiring all over
with the intensity of his last effort to detect something. Kreisler was
led in, and prevented from finishing any sentence or of becoming in any
way intelligible during a quarter of an hour by the furious interruptions
of the enraged officer. At last he succeeded in asserting that he was
quite unacquainted with the two carpenters; moreover, that all he needed
was food; that he had decided to give himself up and await the decision
of the Paris authorities as regards the deed. If they were not going to
take any action, he would return to Paris—at least, as soon as he had
received a certain letter; and he gave his address. The _commissaire_
considered him with exhausted animosity and he was sent back to his cell.
He slept the greater part of the day, but the next he spent nervous and
awake. In the afternoon a full confirmation of his story reached the
authorities. It was likely that the following morning he would be sent
to Paris. It meant, then, that he was going to be tried as a kind of
murderer. He could not allege complete accident. The thought of Paris,
the vociferous courts, the ennuis of a criminal case about this affair,
so thoroughly ended and boringly out of date, disturbed him extremely.
Then the Russian—he would have to see him again. Kreisler felt that he
was being terribly worried once more. Sorrow for himself bowed him down.
This journey to Paris resembled his crossing of the German frontier.
He had felt that it was impossible to see his father. That represented
an effort he would do anything to avoid. Resentment against his parent
had vanished. It was this that made a meeting so difficult. It was a
stranger, with an ill will that had survived his own, awaiting him.
Noise, piercing noise, effort, awaited him revengefully. He knew exactly
what his father would do and say. If there had been a single item that
he could not forecast!—But there was not the least item. Paris was the
same. The energy and obstinacy of the rest of the world, the world that
would question him and drag him about, these frightened him as something
mad. Bitzenko appealed most to this new-born timidity. Bitzenko was like
some favourite dish a man has one day eaten too much of, and will never
be able again to enjoy, or even support.
On the other hand, he became quite used to his cell. His mind was sick,
and this room had a clinical severity. It had all the economical elements
of a place in which a human operation might be performed. He became fond
of it as patients get an appetite for the leanness of convalescent life.
He lay on his bed. He turned over the shell of many empty and depressing
hours he had lived. He took particular pleasure in these listless concave
shapes. His “good times” were avoided. Days spent with his present
stepmother, before his father knew her, gave him a particularly numbing
and nondescript feeling.
He sat up, listening to the noises from the neighbouring rooms and
corridors. It began to sound to him like one steady preparation for his
removal. Steps bustled about getting this ready and getting that ready.
The police-station had cost him some trouble to enter. But they had been
attracted to each other from the start. Something in the form of an
illicit attachment now existed between them. Buildings are female. There
is no such thing as a male building. This practical and pretentious small
modern edifice was having its romance. Otto Kreisler was its romance.
It was now warning him. It echoed sharply and insistently the feet of its
policemen.
After his evening meal he took up his bed in his arms and placed it on
the opposite side of the cell, under the window. He sat there for some
time as though resting after this effort. The muttering of two children
on a doorstep in the street below came to him on the evening light with
melodramatic stops and emptiness. It bore with it an image, like an old
picture, bituminous and with a graceful, queer formality. It fixed itself
before him like a mirage. He watched it muttering.
He began slowly drawing off his boots. He took out the laces, and tied
them together for greater strength. Then he tore several strips off his
shirt, and made a short cord of them. He went through these actions
deliberately and deftly, as though it were a routine and daily happening.
He measured the drop from the bar of the ventilator, calculating the
necessary length of cord, like a boy preparing the accessories of some
game. It was only a game, too. He realized what these proceedings meant,
but shunned the idea that it was serious. Just as an unmoral man with a
disinclination to write a necessary letter takes up the pen, resolving to
begin it merely and writes more and more until it is, in fact, completed,
so Kreisler proceeded with his task.
Standing on his bed, he attached the cord to the ventilator. He tested
its strength by holding it some inches from the top, and then, his
shoulders hunched, swaying his whole weight languidly on it for a moment.
Adjusting the noose, he smoothed his hair back after he had slipped it
over his head. He made as though to kick the bed away, playfully, then
stood still, staring in front of him. The last moment must be one of
realization. He was not a coward. His caution was due to his mistrust of
some streaks of him, the sex streak the powerfullest.
A sort of heavy confusion burst up as he withdrew the restraint. It
reminded him of Soltyk’s hands on this throat. The same throttling
feeling returned. The blood bulged in his head. He felt dizzy; it was the
Soltyk struggle over again. But, as with Soltyk, he did not resist. He
gently worked the bed outwards from under him, giving it a last steady
shove. He hung, gradually choking, the last thing he was conscious of,
his tongue.
The discovery of his body caused a deep-felt indignation among the staff
at the police-station. They remembered the persistence with which this
unprincipled and equivocal vagrant (as which they still regarded him)
had attempted to get into the building. And it was clear to their minds
that his sole purpose had been to hang himself on their premises. He had
mystified them from the first. Now their vague suspicions were bitterly
confirmed, and had taken an unpardonable form. Each man felt that this
corpse had personally insulted and made a fool of him. They thrust it
savagely into the earth, with vexed and disgusted faces.
Herr Kreisler paid without comment what was claimed by the landlord in
Paris for his son’s room; and writing to the authorities at the frontier
town about the burial, paid exactly the sum demanded by this town for
disposing of the body.
CHAPTER VII
The sight of Bertha’s twistings and turnings, her undignified rigmarole,
had irritated Anastasya. This was why she had brutally announced, as
though to cut short all that, that Kreisler’s behaviour was due simply to
the fact that he fancied himself in love with her, Anastasya. “He was not
worrying about Fräulein Lunken. He was in love with _me_;” the statement
amounted to that. There was no disdainful repudiation or self-reference
in her statement; only a piece of information.
Bertha’s intuitions and simplifications had not been without basis. This
“hostile version” had contained a certain amount of hostile intention.
But Anastasya had another reason for this immodest explicitness. She
personally liked Kreisler. The spectacle of Bertha excusing herself, and
in the process putting Kreisler in a more absurd and unsatisfactory
light, annoyed her extremely.
How could Tarr consort with Bertha, she questioned? Her aristocratic
woman’s sense did not appreciate the taste for a slut, a miss or a
suburban queen. The apache, the coster girl, fisher-lass, all that had
_character_, oh, yes. Her romanticism, in fact, was of the same order as
Butcher’s only better.
* * * * *
Two days after the duel she met Tarr in the street. They agreed to meet
at Lejeune’s for dinner.
The table at which she had first come across Kreisler was where they sat.
“You knew Soltyk, didn’t you?” he asked her.
“Yes. It was a terrible affair. Poor Soltyk!”
She looked at Tarr doubtfully. A certain queer astonishment in her face
struck Tarr. It was the only sign of movement beneath. She spoke with a
businesslike calm about his death. There was no sign of feeling or search
for feeling.
She refused to regard herself as the “woman in the affair.” She knew
people referred to her as that. Soltyk possessed a rather ridiculous
importance, being dead; a cadaveric severity in the meaning of the image,
Soltyk, for her. The fact was bigger than the person. He was like a boy
in his father’s clothes.
Kreisler, on the other hand, she abominated. To have killed, _he_ to
have killed!—and to have killed some one she knew! It was a hostile act
to bring death so near her. She knew it was hostile. She hoped he might
never come back to Paris. She did not want to meet Kreisler.
But these feelings were not allowed to transpire. She recognized them as
personal. She was so fastidious that she refrained from using them in
discussing the affair when they would have given a suspect readiness and
“sincerity” to her expression. She rather went to the other extreme.
“They say Soltyk was not killed in a duel,” Tarr continued. “Kreisler is
to be charged with murder, or at least manslaughter.”
“Yes, I have heard that Kreisler shot him before he was ready or
something⸺”
“I heard that he was shot when he was unarmed. There was no duel at all.”
“Oh, that is not the version I have heard.”
She did not seem revengeful about her friend.
“I was Kreisler’s second for half an hour,” Tarr said in a minute.
“How do you mean, for half an hour?” She was undemonstrative but polite.
“I happened to be there, and was asked to help him until somebody else
could be found. I did not suspect him, I may say, of meaning to go to
such lengths.”
“What was the reason of it all—do you know?”
“According to Kreisler, they had done some smacking earlier in the day⸺”
“Yes. Herr Kreisler met Soltyk and myself. I think that Soltyk then was a
little in the wrong.”
“I dare say.”
Tarr’s sympathies were all with Kreisler. He had never been attracted
by Poles, and as such rather than a Russian he thought of Soltyk. Deep
square races he preferred. And Kreisler was a clumsy and degenerate
atavism bringing a peculiarity into too elastic life.
Some of Tarr’s absurd friendliness for Bertha flowed over on to her
fellow-countryman.
Had Anastasya more of a hand in the duel than he would naturally believe?
Her indifference to Soltyk’s death, and her favouring Kreisler, almost
pointed to something unusual. Kreisler’s ways were still mysterious!
That was all they said about the duel. As they were finishing the meal,
after turning her head towards the entrance door, Anastasya remarked,
with mock concern:
“There is your fiancée. She seems rather upset.”
Tarr looked towards the door. Bertha’s white face was close up against
one of the narrow panes, above the lace curtain. There were four and
a half feet of window on either side of the door. There were so many
objects and lights in the front well of the shop that her face would not
be much noticed in the corner it had chosen.
Her eyes were round, vacant, and dark, the features very white and heavy,
the mouth steadily open in painful lines. As he looked the face drew
gradually away, and then disappeared into the melodramatic night. It was
a large trapped fly on the pane. It withdrew with a glutinous, sweet
slowness. The heavy white jowl seemed pulling itself out of some fluid
trap where it had been caught like a weighty body.
Tarr knew how the pasty flesh would nestle against the furs, the
shoulders swing, the legs move just as much as was necessary for
progress, with no movement of the hips. Everything about her in the
chilly night would give an impression of warmth and system. The sleek
cloth fitting the square shoulders tightly, the underclothes carefully
tight as well, the breath from her nostrils the slight steam from a
contented machine.
He caught Anastasya’s eye and smiled.
“Your fiancée is pretty,” she said, pretending that was the answer to the
smile.
“She’s not my fiancée. But she’s a pretty girl.”
“Oh, I understood you were engaged⸺”
“No.”
* * * * *
“It’s no good,” he thought. But he must spare Bertha in future such
discomforting sights.
PART VII
SWAGGER SEX
CHAPTER I
Bertha was still being taken in carefully prepared doses of an hour a
day: from half-past four to a quarter to six. Any one else would have
found this much of Bertha insupportable under any conditions. But Tarr’s
eccentric soul had been used to such far greater doses that this was the
minimum he considered necessary for a cure.
Tarr came to her every day with the regularity of an old gentleman at a
German “Bad” taking his spring water at the regulation hour. But the cure
was finishing. There were signs of a new robustness, (hateful to her)
equivalent to a springy walk and a contented and sunny eye, that heralded
departure. His daily visits, with their brutal regularity, did her as
much harm as they did him good.
The news of Soltyk’s death, then Kreisler’s, affected the readily
melodramatic side of her nature peculiarly. Death had made himself _de
la partie_. Kreisler had left her alone for a few days. This is what
had occupied him. The sensational news, without actually pushing her to
imitation, made her own case, and her own tragic sensations, more real.
They had received, in an indirect and cousin-thrice-removed sort of way,
the authority of Death. Death—real living Death—was somewhere on the
scene. His presence was announced, was felt. He had struck down somebody
among them.
In the meantime this disposed of Kreisler for ever. Tarr as well appeared
to feel that they were left in _tête-à-tête_. A sort of chaperon had been
lost in Kreisler. His official post as protector or passive “obstacle”
had been a definite status. If he stayed on, it would have to be as
something else. On the day on which the news of Kreisler’s end arrived,
he talked of leaving for England. Her more drawn face, longer silences,
sharp glances, once more embarrassed him.
He did not go to England at once. In the week or two succeeding his
meeting with Anastasya in the restaurant he saw her frequently. So a
chaperon was found. Bertha was officially presented to her successor.
When she learnt that Anastasya had been chosen, her energy reformed. She
braced herself for a substantial struggle.
The apparition at the window of the restaurant was her first revived
activity.
CHAPTER II
On August the tenth Tarr had an appointment with Anastasya at his studio
in Montmartre. They had arranged to dine in Montmartre. It was their
seventh meeting. He had just done his daily cure. He hurried back and
found her lounging against the door, reading the newspaper.
“Ah, there you are! You’re late, Mr. Tarr.”
“Am I? I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long?”
“Not very. Fräulein Lunken⸺”
“She—I couldn’t get away.”
“No, it _is_ difficult to get away, apparently.”
He let her in. He was annoyed at the backwardness of his senses. His mind
stepped in, determined to do their business for them. He put his arm
round her waist, and planting his lips fully on hers, began kissing her.
He slipped his hands sideways beneath her coat, and pressed an athletic,
sinuous hulk against him. The various bulging and retreating contact of
her body brought monotonous German reminders.
It was the first time he had kissed her. She showed no bashfulness or
disinclination, but no return. Was she in the unfortunate position of an
unawakened mass; and had she so rationalized her intimate possessions
that there was no precocious fancy left until mature animal ardour
was set up? He felt as though he were embracing a tiger, who was not
unsympathetic, but rather surprised. Perhaps he had been too sudden. He
ran his hand upwards along her body. All was statuesquely genuine. She
took his hand away.
“We haven’t come to that yet,” she said.
“Haven’t we!”
“I didn’t think we had.”
Smiling at each other, they separated.
“Let me take your coat off. You’ll be hot in here.”
Her coat was all in florid redundancies of heavy cloth, like a Tintoretto
dress. Underneath she was wearing a very plain dark blouse and skirt,
like a working girl, which exaggerated the breadth and straightness of
her shoulders. Not to sentimentalize it, she had open-work stockings on
underneath, such as the genuine girl would have worn on her night out, at
one and eleven-three the pair.
“You look very well,” Tarr said.
“I put these on for you.”
Tarr had, while he was kissing her, found his senses again. They had
flared up in such a way that the reason had been offended, and resisted.
Hence some little conflict. _They_ were not going to have the credit⸺!
He became shy. He was ashamed of his sudden interest, which had been so
long in coming, and instinctively hid it. He was committed to the rôle of
a reasonable man.
“I am very flattered at your thinking of me in that way. I am afraid I do
not deserve⸺”
“I want you to _deserve_, though. You are absurd about women. You are
like a schoolboy!”
“Oh, you’ve noticed that?”
“It doesn’t require much⸺”
She lay staring at him in a serious way. Squashed up as she was lying, a
very respectable bulk of hip filled the space between the two arms of the
chair, not enough to completely satisfy a Dago, but too’ much to please a
dandy of the west. He compared this opulence with Bertha’s and admitted
that it outdid his fiancée’s. He did this childish measuring in the
belief that he was not observed.
“You are extremely recalcitrant to intelligence, aren’t you?” she said.
“In women, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose I am. My tastes are simple.”
“I don’t know anything about your tastes, of course. I’m guessing.”
“You can take it that you are right.”
He began to feel extremely attracted to this intelligent head. He had
been living for the last week or so in the steady conviction that he
should never get the right sensual angle with this girl. It was a queer
feeling, after all, to see his sensuality speaking sense. He would marry
her.
“Well,” she said, with pleasant American accent in speaking English, “I
feel you see some disability in sensible women that does not exist. It
doesn’t irritate you too much to hear a woman talking about it?”
“Of course not—_you_. You are so handsome. I shouldn’t like it if you
were less so. Such good looks” (he rolled his eyes appreciatively) “get
us out of arty coldness. You are all right. The worst of looks like
yours is that sense has about the same effect as nonsense. Sense is a
delightful anomaly just as rot would be! You don’t require words or
philosophy. But they give one a pleasant tickling all the same.”
“I am glad you are learning. However, don’t praise me like that. It makes
me a little shy. I know how you feel about women. You feel that good
sense gets in the way.”
“It interferes with the senses, you mean? I don’t think I feel that
altogether⸺”
“You feel I’m not a woman, don’t you? Not properly a woman, like your
Bertha. There’s no mistake about her!”
“One requires something unconscious, perhaps. I’ve never met any woman
who interested me but was ten times more stupid than I. I want _to be
alone_ in those things. I like it to be subterranean as well.”
“Well, I have a cave! I’ve got all that, too. I _promise_ you.”
Her _promise_ was slow and lisping. Tarr once more had to deal with
himself.
“I—am—_a woman_; not a man. That is the fact.” (“Fact” was long and
American.) “You don’t realize that—I assure you I am!” She looked at him
with a soft, steady smile, that drew his gaze and will into her, rather
than imposed itself on him.
“I know.” He felt that there was not much to say.
“No, you know far less than you think. See here; I set out thinking of
you in this way—‘Nothing but a female booby will please that man!’ I
wanted to please you, but I couldn’t do it on those lines. I’m going to
make an effort along my own lines. You are like a youngster who hasn’t
got used to the taste of liquor; you don’t like it. You haven’t grown up
yet. I want to make you drunk and see what happens!”
She had her legs crossed. Extremely white flesh showed above the black
Lisle silk, amidst linen as expensive as the outer cloth was plain. This
clever alternating of the humble and gorgeous! Would the body be plain?
The provocation was merely a further argument. It said, “Young man, what
is there you find in your Bertha that cannot be provided along with
superior sense?” His Mohammedan eye did not refuse the conventional
bait. His butcher’s sensibility pressed his fancy into professional
details. What with her words and her acts he was in a state of strong
confusion.
She jumped up and put on her coat, like a ponderous curtain showering
down to her heels. Peep-shows were ended!
“Come, let’s have some dinner. I’m hungry. We can discuss this problem
better after a beefsteak!” A Porterhouse would have fitted, Tarr thought.
He followed obediently and silently. He was glad that Anastasya had taken
things into her hands. The positions that these fundamental matters
got him into! Should he allow himself to be overhauled and reformed by
this abnormal beauty? He was not altogether enjoying himself. He felt a
ridiculous amateur. He was a butcher in his spare moments. This immensely
intellectual ox, covered with prizes and pedigrees, overwhelmed him. You
required not a butcher, but an artist, for that! He was not an artist in
anything but oil-paint. Oil-paint and meat were singularly alike. They
had reciprocal potentialities. But he was afraid of being definitely
distracted.
The earlier coldness all appeared cunning; his own former coldness was
the cunning of destiny.
He felt immensely pleased with himself as he walked down the Boulevard
Clichy with this perfect article rolling and sweeping beside him. No
bourgeoise this time! He could be proud of this anywhere! Absolute
perfection! Highest quality obtainable. “The face that launched a
thousand ships.” A thousand ships crowded in her gait. There was nothing
highfalutin about her, Burne-Jonesque, Grail-lady, or Irish-romantic.
Perfect meat, perfect sense, accent of Minnesota, music of the Steppes!
And all that was included under the one inadequate but pleasantly
familiar heading, _German_. He became more and more impressed with what
was _German_ about her.
He took her to a large, expensive, and quiet restaurant. They began with
oysters. He had never eaten oysters before. Prudence had prevented him.
She laughed very much at this.
“You are a savage, Tarr!” The use of his surname was a tremendous caress.
“You are afraid of typhoid, and your palate is as conservative as an
ox’s. Give me a kiss!”
She put her lips out; he kissed them with solemnity and concentration,
adjusting his glasses afterwards.
They discussed eating for some time. He discovered he knew nothing about
it.
“Why, man, you never think!”
Tarr considered. “No, I’m not very observant in many things. But I have a
defence. All that part of me is rudimentary. But that is as it should be.”
“How—as it should be?”
“I don’t disperse myself. I specialize on necessities.”
“Don’t you call food⸺?”
“Not in the way you’ve been considering it. Listen. Life is art’s rival
and vice versa.”
“I don’t see the opposition.”
“No, because you mix them up. You are the archenemy of any picture.”
“I? Nonsense! But art comes out of life, in any case. What is art?”
“My dear girl—life with all the nonsense taken out of it. Will that do?”
“Yes. But what is art—especially?” She insisted with her hands on a
plastic answer. “Are we in life, now? _What is art?_”
“_Life_ is anything that could live and die. _Art_ is peculiar; it is
anything that lives and that yet you cannot imagine as dying.”
“Why cannot art die? If you smash up a statue, it is as dead as a dead
man.”
“No, it is not. That is the difference. It is the God, or soul, we say,
of the man. It always has existed, if it is a true statue.”
“But cannot you say of some life that it could not die?”
“No, because in that case it is the _real_ coming through. _Death_ is the
one attribute that is peculiar to _life_. It is the something that it is
impossible to imagine in connexion with art. Reality is entirely founded
on this fact, that of _Death_. All _action_ revolves round that, and has
it for motif. The purest thought is totally ignorant of death. Death
means the perpetual extinction of impertinent sparks. But it is the key
of life.”
“But what is _art_? You are talking about it as though I knew what it
was!”
“What is life, do you know? Well, I know what art is in the same way.”
“Yes, but I ask you as a favour to define it for me. A picture is art, a
living person is life. We sitting here are _life_; if we were talking on
a stage we should be _art_. How would you define art?”
“Well, let’s take your example. But a picture, and also the actors on a
stage, are pure life. Art is merely what the picture and the stage-scene
represent, and what we now, and any living person as such, only, do
_not_. That is why you can say that the true statue can be smashed, and
yet not die.”
“Still, what _is_ it? What _is_ art?”
“It is ourselves disentangled from death and accident.”
“How do you know?”
“I feel that is so, because I notice that that is the essential point
to grasp. _Death_ is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is
identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an
individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person.”
Both their faces lost some of their colour, hers her white, his his
yellow. They flung themselves upon each other like waves. The fuller
stream came from him.
“You say that the actors on the stage are pure life, yet they represent
something that _we_ do not. But ‘all the world’s a stage,’ isn’t it? So
how do we not also stand for that something?”
“Yes, life does generally stand for that something too; but it only
emerges and is visible in art.”
“_Still_ I don’t know what art is!”
“You ought to by this time. However, we can go further. Consider the
content of what we call art. A statue is art, as you said; you are life.
There is bad art and bad life. We will only consider the good. A statue,
then, is a dead thing; a lump of wood or stone. Its hues and masses are
its soul. Anything living, quick and changing, is bad art, always; naked
men and women are the worst art of all, because there are fewer semi-dead
things about them. The shell of the tortoise, the plumage of a bird,
makes these animals approach nearer to art. Soft, quivering and quick
flesh is as far from art as an object can be.”
“Art is merely _the dead_, then?”
“No, but _deadness_ is the first condition of art. A hippopotamus’s
armoured hide, a turtle’s shell, feathers or machinery on the one hand;
_that_ opposed to naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life,
along with infinite elasticity and consciousness of movement, on the
other.
“Deadness, then,” Tarr went on, “in the limited sense in which we use
that word is the first condition of art. The second is absence of _soul_,
in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are
its soul. No restless, quick, flame-like ego is imagined for the _inside_
of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; _to have no
inside_, nothing you cannot _see_. Instead, then, of being something
impelled like a machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives
soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.”
Tarr was developing, from her point of view, too much shop. She
encouraged him, however, immediately.
“Why should human beings be chiefly represented in art?”
“Because what we call art depends on human beings for its advertisement.
As men’s ideas about themselves change, art should change too.”
They had waded through a good deal of food while this conversation
had been proceeding. She now stretched herself, clasping her hands in
her lap. She smiled at Tarr as though to invite him to smile too, at
her beautiful, heavy, hysterical anatomy. She had been driving hard
inscrutable Art deeper and deeper into herself. She now drew it out and
showed it to Tarr.
“Art is paleozoic matter, dolomite, oil-paint, and mathematics; also
something else. Having established that, we will stick a little flag up
and come back another day. I want to hear now about _life_. But do you
believe in anything?”
Tarr was staring, suspended, with a smile cut in half, therefore defunct,
at the wall. He turned his head slowly, with his mutilated smile, his
glasses slanting in an agreeably vulpine way.
“Believe in anything? I only believe in one thing, pleasure of taste.
In that way you get back though, with me, to mathematics and paleozoic
times, and the coloured powders of the earth.”
Anastasya ordered a _gâteau reine de Samothrace_.
“Reine de Samothrace! Reine de Samothrace!” Tarr muttered. “Donnez-moi
une omelette au rhum.”
Tarr looked at her for some time in a steady, depressed way. What a treat
for his eyes not to be jibing! She held all the imagery of a perfect
world. There was no pathos anywhere in her form. Kindness—_bestial
kindness_—would be an out-of-work in this neighbourhood. The upper part
of her head was massive and intelligent. The middle of her body was
massive and exciting. There was no animalism out of place in the shape
of a weight of jaw. The weight was in the head and hips. But was not
this a complete thing by itself? How did he stand as regards it? He had
always been sceptical about perfection. Did she and he need each other?
His steadfast ideas of the flower surrounded by dung were challenged.
She might be a monotonous abstraction, and, if accepted, impoverish his
life. She was the summit, and the summit was narrow. Or in any case was
not ugliness and foolishness the richest soil? Irritants were useful
though not beautiful. He reached back doubtfully towards his bourgeoise.
But he was revolted as he touched that mess, with this clean and solid
object beneath his eyes. He was not convinced, though, that he was on the
right road. He preferred a cabin to a palace, and thought that a villa
was better for him than either, but did not want to order his life so
rigidly as that.
“What did you make of Kreisler’s proceedings?” she asked him.
“In what way do you mean?”
“Well, first—do you think he and Bertha—got on very well?”
“Do you mean was Bertha his mistress? I should think not. But I’m not
sure. That isn’t very interesting, is it?”
“Kreisler is interesting, not Bertha, of course.”
“You’re very hard on Bertha.”
She put her tongue out at him and wrinkled up her nose.
A queen, standing on her throne, was obtruding her “unruly member.”
“What were Kreisler’s relations with you, by the way?” he asked blankly.
Her extreme freedom with himself suggested possible explanations of her
manner in discussing Soltyk’s death at the time.
“My relations with Kreisler consisted in a half-hour’s conversation with
him in a restaurant, and that was all. I spoke to him several times after
that, but only for a few minutes. He was very excited the last time we
met. I have a theory that his duel and general behaviour was due to
unrequited passion for me. Your Bertha, on the other hand, has a theory
that it was due to unrequited passion for _her_. I wondered if you had
any information that might support her case or mine.”
“No. I know nothing about it. I hold, myself, a quite different theory.”
“What is that? That he was in love with _you_?”
“My theory has not the charming simplicity of your theory or Bertha’s. I
don’t believe that he was in love with anybody. I believe, though, that
it was a sex-tumult of sorts⸺”
“What is that?”
“You want to hear my theory? This is it. I believe that all the fuss he
made was an attempt to get out of Art back into life again, like a fish
flopping about who had got into the wrong tank. It would be more exact
to say, _back into sex_. He was trying to get back into sex again out of
a little puddle of Art where he felt he was gradually expiring. What I
mean is this. He was an art student without any talent, and was leading
a dull, slovenly existence like thousands of others in the same case.
He was very hard up. Things were grim that way too. The sex-instinct of
the average man, then, had become perverted into a silly false channel.
Or it might be better to say that his elementary art-instinct had been
rooted out of sex and one or two other things, where it was both useful
and ornamental, and naturally flourished, and had been exalted into
a department by itself, where it bungled and wrecked everything. It
is a measure the need of which hits the eye in these days to keep the
art-instinct of the run of men in its place. These art-spirits should
be kept firmly embedded in _sex_, in _fighting_, and in _affairs_.
The nearest the general run of men can get to Art is _Action_. Real,
bustling, bloody action is what they want! Sex is _their_ form of art:
the battle of existence in enterprise, Commerce, is _their_ picture.
The moment they _think_ or _dream_ you get an immense weight of cheap
stagnating passion that becomes a menace to the health of the world. A
“cultured” nation is as great a menace as a “free” one. The answer to the
men who object to this as high-handed is plain enough. You must answer:
No man’s claim is _individual;_ the claim of an exceptional being is that
of an important type or original—is an inclusive claim. The eccentric
Many do not matter. They are the individuals. And anyway Goddam economy
in any shape or form! Long live Waste! Curse the principle of Humanity!
Mute inglorious Miltons are not mute for God-in-Heaven. They have the
Silence. Bless Waste, Heaven bless Waste! Hoch Waste!”
“I’ll drink to that!” said Anastasya, raising her glass. “Here’s to
Waste! Hoch!” Tarr drank this toast with gusto.
“Here’s to Waste!” he said loudly. “Waste yourselves, pour yourselves
out, let there be no High-Men except such as happen! Economy is sedition.
Drink your blood if you have no wine! But _waste_; fling out into the
streets; never count your yarn. Accept fools, compromise yourselves
with the poor in spirit, fling the rich ones behind you; live like the
lions in the forests with fleas on your back. Down with the _Efficient_
Chimpanzee!”
Anastasya’s eyes were bloodshot with the gulp she had taken to honour
Waste. Tarr patted her on the back.
“There are no lions in the forests!” she hiccuped, patting her chest.
“You’re pulling my leg.”
They got to their coffee more or less decorously. But Tarr had grown
extremely loquacious and expansive in every way. He began slapping her
thighs to emphasise his points, as Diderot was in the habit of doing
with the Princesse de Clèves. After that he began kissing her, when
he had made a particularly successful remark, to celebrate it. Their
second bottle of wine had put many things to flight. He lay back in his
chair in prolonged bursts of laughter. She, in German fashion, clapped
her hand over his mouth, and he seized it with his teeth and made pale
shell-shapes in its brown fat.
In a café opposite the restaurant, where they next went, they had further
drinks.
They caressed each other’s hands now as a matter of course! Indifferent
to the supercilious and bitter natives, they became lost in lengthy
kisses, their arms round each other’s necks. In a little cave of
intoxicated affection, a conversation took place.
“Have you had dealings with many⸺?”
“What’s that you say, dear?” she asked with eager, sleepy seriousness.
The “dear” reminded him of accostings in the streets.
“Have you been the mistress of many men?”
“No, of course not. Only one. He was a Russian.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“What did you say?”
“How much did he bag?”
“Bag?”
“What did the Russian represent?”
“Nothing at all, Tarr. That’s why I took him. I wanted the experience.
But now I want you! You are my first _person_!” Distant reminiscences of
Bertha, grateful to him at present.
Kisses succeeded.
“I don’t want _you_!” Tarr said.
“Oh! Tell me what you want?”
“_I want a woman!_”
“But I am a woman, stupid!”
“I want a _slave_.”
She whispered in his ear, hanging on his neck.
“No! You may be a woman, but you’re not a slave.”
“Don’t be so quarrelsome. Forget those silly words of yours—slave, woman.
It’s all right when you’re talking about art, but you’re hugging a woman
at present. This is something that can die! Ha ha! We’re in life, my
Tarr. _We represent absolutely nothing_—thank God!”
“I realize I’m in life, darling. But I don’t like being reminded of it in
that way. It makes me feel as though I were in a _mauvais lieu_.”
“Give me a kiss, you _efficient chimpanzee!_”
Tarr scowled at her, but did not alter the half-embrace in which they sat.
“You won’t give me a kiss? Silly old _in_efficient chimpanzee!”
She sat back in her chair, and head down looked through her eyelashes at
him with demure menace.
“_Garçon! garçon!_” she called.
“Mademoiselle?” the _garçon_ said, approaching slowly, with dignified
scepticism.
“This gentleman, _garçon_, wants to be a lion with fleas on his back—at
least so he says! At the same time he wants a slave. I don’t know if he
expects the slave to catch his fleas or not. I haven’t asked him. But
he’s a funny-looking bird, isn’t he?”
The _garçon_ withdrew with hauteur.
“What’s the meaning of your latest tack, you little German art-tart?”
“What am I?”
“I called you German æsthetic pastry. I think that describes you.”
“Oh, _tart_, is it?”
“Anything you like. Very well made, puffed out. With _one_ solitary
Russian, _bien entendu_!”
“And what, good God, shall we call the cow-faced specimen you spend the
greater part of your days with⸺”
“She, too, is German pastry, more homely than you though⸺”
“Homely’s the word!”
“But not quite so fly-blown. Less variegated creams and German
pretentiousness⸺”
“I see! And takes you more seriously than other people would be likely
to! That’s what all your ‘quatch’ about ‘woman’ and ‘slave’ means. You
know that!”
She had recovered from the effects of the drinks completely and was
sitting up and talking briskly, looking at him with the same serious,
rather flattened face she had had during their argument on Art and Death.
“I know you are a famous whore, who becomes rather acid in your
cups!—when you showed me your legs this evening, I suppose I was meant⸺”
“Assez! Assez!!” She struck the table with her fist.
“Let’s get to business.” He put his hat on and leant towards her. “It’s
getting late. Twenty-five francs, I’m afraid, is all I can manage.”
“Twenty-five francs for what? With you—it would be robbery! Twenty-five
francs to be your audience while you drivel about art? Keep your money
and buy Bertha an—_efficient chimpanzee_! She will need it if she marries
you!”
Her mouth drawn tight and her hands in her coat pockets, she walked out
of the door of the café.
Tarr ordered another drink.
“It’s like a moral tale told on behalf of Bertha,” he thought. That was
the temper of Paradise! The morality, in pointing to Bertha, did her no
good, but caused her to receive the _trop-plein_ of his discontent.
He sat in a grim sulk at the thought of the good time he had lost. This
scene had succeeded in touching the necessary spring. His vanity helping,
for half an hour he plotted his revenge and satisfaction together.
Anastasya had violently flung off the illusion of indifference in which
she had hitherto appeared to him. The drinks of the evening were a
culture in which his disappointment grew luxuriantly, but with a certain
buffoonish lightness. He went back to his studio in half an hour’s time
with smug, thick, secretive pleasure settling down on his body’s ungainly
complaints.
CHAPTER III
He went slowly up the stairs feeling for his key. He arrived at the door
without having found it. The door was ajar. At first this seemed natural
to him, and he continued the search for the key. Then he suddenly dropped
that occupation, pushed the door open and went into his studio. The
moonlight came heavily through the windows. In a part of the room where
it did not strike he became aware of an apparition of solid white. It was
solid white flowed round by Naples yellow. It crossed into the moonlight
and faced him, its hands placed like a modest statue’s. The hair reached
below the waist, and flowed to the right from the head. This tall nudity
began laughing with a harsh sound like stone laughing.
“Close the door!” it shouted, “there’s a draught. You took a long time
to consider my words. I’ve been waiting. Forgive me, Tarr. My words were
acidulated whores, but my heart”—she put her hand on the skin roughly
above that organ—“my heart was completely full of sugar! The acidulated
_demi-mondaine_ was a trick. It occupied your mind. You didn’t notice me
take your key!”
His vanity was soothed. The key in her possession, which could only have
been taken in the café, seemed to justify the harsh dialogue.
She stood before him now with her arms up, hands joined behind her head.
This impulse to take her clothes off had the cultural hygienic touch
so familiar to him. The Naples yellow of the hair was the same colour
as Bertha’s, only it was coarser and thicker, Bertha’s being fine.
Anastasya’s dark face, therefore, had the appearance almost of a mask.
“Will you engage me as your model? Je fais de la réclame pour les Grecs.”
“You are very Ionian—hardly Greek. But I don’t require a model. I never
use nude models.”
“Well, I must dress again, I suppose.” She turned towards a chair
where her clothes were piled. But Tarr had learnt the laws of cultural
emancipation.
He shouted, “I accept, I accept!” He lifted her up in his arms, kissing
her in the mass, as it were, and carried her through the door at the back
of the studio leading to his bedroom.
* * * * *
“Tarr, be my love. I don’t want to give you up.”
This was said next morning, the sunlight having taken the place of the
moonlight, but striking on the opposite side of the house.
“You won’t hear marriage talked about by me. I want to rescue you from
your Bertha habits. Allow yourself to be rescued! We’re very well
together, aren’t we? I’m not doing Bertha a bad turn, either, really. I
admit my motive is quite selfish. What do you say?”
“I am your slave!”
Anastasya rolled up against him with the movement of a seal.
“Thank you, Tarr. That’s better than _having a slave_, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I think everything is in order.”
“Then you’re my efficient chimpanzee?”
“No, I’m the new animal; we haven’t found a name for it yet. It will
succeed the Superman. Back to the Earth!”
“Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kiss me!”
CHAPTER IV
Tarr crawled towards Bertha that day on the back of a Place St. Michel
bus. He did not like his job.
The secret of his visits to Bertha and interminable liaison was that he
really never had meant to leave her at all, he reflected. He had not
meant to leave her altogether. He was just playing. Or rather, a long
debt of disgraceful behaviour was accumulating, that he knew would have
to be met. It was deliberately increased by him, because he knew he would
not repudiate it. But it would have been absurd not to try to escape.
To-day he must break the fact to Bertha that he could no longer regard
himself as responsible. He was faced with the necessity, for the first
time, of seriously bargaining. The debt was not to be repudiated, but he
must tell her that he only had himself to pay with, and that he had been
seized by somebody else.
He passed through her iron gateway with a final stealth, although making
his boots sound loudly on the gravel. It was like entering a vault, the
trees looked like weeds; the meaning or taste of everything, of course,
had died. The concierge looked like a new one.
He had bought a flower for his buttonhole. He kept smelling it as he
approached the house.
During the last week or so he had got into the habit of writing his
letters at Bertha’s, to fill up the time. Occasionally he would do a
drawing of her (a thing he had never done formerly) to vary the monotony.
This time there would be no letter-writing. This visit would be more like
the old ones.
“Come in, Sorbert,” she said, on opening the door. It was emphasizing
the fact of the formality of the terms on which they at present met. Any
prerogative of past and more familiar times was proudly rejected.
There was the same depressed atmosphere as the day before, and the days
preceding that. She appeared stale, somehow deteriorated and shabby,
her worth decreased, and extremely pitiable. Her “reserve” (a natural
result of the new equivocal circumstances) removed her to a distance, as
it seemed; it also shut her up in herself, in an unhealthy, dreary, and
faded atmosphere.
She was shut up with a mass of reserves and secrets, new and old. She
seemed sitting on them in rather dismal hen-like fashion, waiting to
be asked to come out of herself and reveal something. It was a corpse
among other things that she was sitting on, as Kreisler was one of her
secrets. Mournfully reproachful, she kept guard over her secrets, a store
of bric-à-brac that had gone out of fashion and were getting musty in a
neglected shop.
Their meetings sometimes were made painful by activity on Bertha’s part.
An attempt at penetration to an intimacy once possessed can be more
indecent than the same action on the part of a stranger.
This time he was greeted with long mournful glances. He felt she had
thought of what she should say. This interview meant a great deal to her.
His friendship meant more to her now than ever. The abject little room
seemed to be thrust forward to awaken his memories and ask for pity. An
intense atmosphere of Teutonic suicide permeated everything. He could
not move an eyelid or a muscle without wounding or slighting something.
It was like being in a dark kitchen at night, where you know at every
step you will put your foot on a beetle. It had a still closer analogy to
this in the disgust he felt for these too naked and familiar things he
was treading on. He scowled at Beethoven, who scowled back at him like
a reflection in a mirror. It was the fate of both of them to haunt this
room. The _Mona Lisa_ was there, and the Breton sabots and jars. She
might have a change of scenery sometimes! He felt unreasonably that she
must have left things in the same place to reproduce a former mood in
him. His photograph was prominent on her writing-table; she seemed to say
(with a sort of sickly idiocy), “You see, _he_ is faithful to me!”
She preceded him to her sitting-room. As he looked at her back he thought
of her as taking a set number of paces, then turning round abruptly,
confronting him. From a typical and similar enervation of the will to
that which was at the bottom of his troubles, he could hardly stop
himself from putting his arm round her waist while they stood for a
moment close to each other. He did not wish to do this as a response to
any resuscitating desire. It was only because it was the one thing he
must not do. To throw himself into the abyss of perplexity he had just
escaped from tempted him. The dykes and simulations of conduct were
perpetually threatened by his neurasthenia in this way. He kept his hands
in his pockets, however.
When they had reached the room, she turned round, as he had half
imagined, and caught hold of his hands.
“Sorbert, Sorbert!”
The words were said separately, each emphatic in significance. The second
was a repetition only of the first. She seemed calling him by his name
to conjure back his self again. Her face was a strained and anxious mask.
“What is it, Bertha?”
“I don’t know!”
She dropped his hands, drooped her head to the right and turned away.
She sat down; he sat down opposite her.
“Anything new?” he asked.
“Anything new? Yes!” She gazed at him with an insistent meaning.
He concluded this was just over-emphasis, with nothing behind it; or,
rather, everything.
“Well, I have something new as well!”
“Have you, Sorbert?”
“First of all, how have my visits struck you lately? What explanation
have you found for them?”
“Oh, none. Why find an explanation? Why do you ask?”
“I thought I would explain.”
“Well?”
“My explanation to myself was that I did not want to leave you brusquely,
and I thought a blurred interlude of this sort would do no harm to either
of us. Our loves could die in each other’s arms.”
She stared with incredulous fixity at the floor, her spirit seeming to be
arched like a swan and to be gazing down hypnotically.
“The real reason was simply that, being very fond of you, I could
not make up my mind to give you up. I claim that my visits were not
frivolous.”
“Well?”
“I would have married you, if you had considered that advisable.”
“Yes? And⸺?”
“I find it very difficult to say the rest.”
“What is difficult?”
“Well, I still like you very much. Yesterday I met a woman. I love her
too. I can’t help that. What must I do?”
Bertha turned a slightly stormier white.
“Who is she?”
“You know her. She is Anastasya Vasek.”
The news struck through something else, and, inside, her ego shrank to an
almost wizened being. It seemed glad of the protection the cocoon, the
something, afforded her.
“You did not—find out what my news was.”
“I didn’t. Have you anything⸺?”
“Yes. I am enceinte.”
* * * * *
He thought about this in a clumsy, incredulous way. It _was_ a Roland
for his Oliver! She was going to have a baby! With what regularity he
was countered! This event rose up in opposition to the night he had just
spent, his new promises and hopes of swagger sex in the future. He was
beaten.
“Whose child is it?”
“Kreisler’s.”
* * * * *
“There you are!” he thought.
He got up and stepped over to her with a bright relieved look in his face.
“Poor little girl! That’s a bad business. But don’t worry about it.
We can get married and it can always pass as mine—if we do it quickly
enough.”
She looked up at him obliquely and sharply, with suspicion grown a
habit. When she saw the pleasant, assured expression, she saw that at
last things had turned. Sorbert was denying reality! He was ending
with miracles, against himself. Her instinct had always told her that
generosity would not be wasted!
She did not tell him of the actual circumstances under which the child
had come. That would have weakened her happiness and her case.
CHAPTER V
When he got outside Bertha’s house, Bertha waving to him from the window
with tears in her eyes, he came in for the counter-attack.
One after the other the protesting masses of good sense rolled up.
He picked his way out of the avenue with a reasoning gesticulation of
the body; a chicken-like motion of sensible fastidious defence in front
of buffonic violence. At the gate he exploded in harsh laughter, looking
bravely and railingly out into the world through his glasses. Then he
walked slowly away in his short jacket, his buttocks moving methodically
just beneath its rim.
“Ha ha! Ha ha! Kreisleriana!” he shouted without his voice.
The indignant plebs of his glorious organism rioted around his mind.
“Ha ha! Ha ha! _Sacré farceur_, where are you leading us?” They were
vociferous. “You have kept us fooling in this neighbourhood so long, and
now you are pledging us to your idiotic fancy for ever. Ha ha! Ha ha!”
“Be reasonable! What are you doing, master of our destiny? We shall all
be lost!”
A faction clamoured, “Anastasya!” Certain sense-sections attacked him in
vulnerable spots with Anastasya’s voluptuous banner unfurled and fragrant.
He buffeted his way along, as though spray were dashing in his face,
watchful behind his glasses. He met his thoughts with a contemptuous
stiff veteran smile. This capricious and dangerous master had an
offensive stylistic coolness, similar to Wellington breakfasting at
Salamanca while Marmont hurried exultingly into traps; although he
resembled his great countryman in no other way.
Those thoughts that bellowed, “Anastasya!” however, worried him. He
answered them.
“Anastasya! Anastasya!! I know all about that! What do you take me for?
You will still have your Anastasya. I am not selling myself or you. A man
such as I does not dispose of himself in a case like this. I am going
to marry Bertha Lunken. Well? Shall I be any the less my own master for
that reason? If I want to sleep with Anastasya, I shall do so. Why marry
Bertha Lunken, and shoulder all that semi-contagious muck? Because it is
only the points or movements in life that matter, and one of those points
indicates that course, namely, to keep faith with another person: and
secretly to show my contempt for the world by choosing the _premier venu_
to be my body-servant and body-companion; my contempt for my body too.”
He sought to overcome his reasons by appeals to their corporate vanity.
He had experienced rather a wrench as regards Anastasya. The swanky sex
with which he had ornamented his future could not be dismissed so easily.
He was astonished that it could be dismissed at all, and asked himself
the reason. He sacrificed Anastasya with a comparatively light heart. It
was chiefly his vanity that gave trouble.
He came back to his earlier conclusions. Such successful people as
Anastasya and himself were by themselves. It was as impossible to
combine or _wed_ them as to compound the genius of two great artists.
If you mixed together into one whole Gainsborough and Goya you would
get _nothing_, for they would be mutually destructive. Beyond a certain
point of perfection individual instinct was its own law. A subtle lyrical
wail would gain nothing from living with a rough and powerful talent, or
vice versa. Success is always personal. Co-operation, group-genius was,
he was convinced, a slavish pretence and absurdity. Only when the group
was so big that it became a person again, as with a nation, did you get
mob-talent or popular art. This big, diffuse, vehement giant was the next
best thing to the great artist; Patchin Tcherana coming just below.
He saw this quite clearly. He and Anastasya were a superfluity, and
destructive conflict. It was like a mother being given a child to bear
the same size already as herself. Anastasya was in every way too big;
she was too big physically. But did not sex change the whole question,
when it was a _woman_? He did not agree to this. Woman and the sexual
sphere seemed to him to be an average from which _everything_ came:
from it everything rose, or attempted to rise. There was no mysterious
opposition extending up into Heaven, and dividing Heavenly Beings into
Gods and Goddesses. There was only one God, and he was a man. A woman was
a lower form of life. Everything was female to begin with. A jellyish
diffuseness spread itself and gaped on the beds and in the _bas-fonds_
of everything. Above a certain level of life sex disappeared, just as
in highly organized sensualism sex vanishes. And, on the other hand,
_everything_ beneath that line was female. Bard, Simpson, Mackenzie,
Townsend, Annandale—he enumerated acquaintances evidently below the
absolute line, and who displayed a lack of energy, permanently mesmeric
state, and almost purely emotional reactions. He knew that everything on
the superior side of that line was not purged of jellyish attributes;
also that Anastasya’s flaccid and fundamental charms were formidable,
although the line had been crossed by her. One thing was impressive,
however. The loss of Anastasya did not worry him, except magnified
through the legal acquisition of Bertha. What did he _want_? Well, he
did not want Anastasya _as much as he should_. He was incorrigible, he
concluded. He regarded the Anastasya evening as a sort of personal defeat
even. The call of duty was nevertheless very strong. He _ought_ to love
Anastasya; and his present intentions as regards his despicable fiancée
were a disgraceful betrayal, etc. etc. The mutterings of reason continued.
* * * * *
That evening he met Anastasya. The moment he saw her he realized the
abysses of indignity and poorness he was flinging himself into with
Bertha Lunken. A sudden humbleness entered him and put him out of conceit
with his judgment, formed away from bright objects like Anastasya. The
selfishness that caused his sentimentality when alone with Bertha was
dissipated or not used in presence of more or less successful objects and
people. None of his ego was required by his new woman. She possessed
plenty of her own. This, he realized later, was the cause of his lack of
attachment. He needed an empty vessel to flood with his vitality, and
not an equal and foreign vitality to exist side by side with coldly. He
had taken into sex the _procédés_ and selfish arrangements of life in
general. He had humanized sex too much. He frequently admitted this, but
with his defence lost sight of the flagrancy of the permanent fact.
He felt in Anastasya for the first time now an element of protection and
safety. She was a touchwood and harbour from his perplexed interior life.
She had a sort of ovation from him. All his obstinacy in favour of his
fiancée had vanished. With Anastasya’s appearance an entirely different
world was revealed that demanded completely new arguments.
They went to the same restaurant as the night before. He talked quietly,
until they had drunk too much, and Bertha was not mentioned.
“And what of Bertha?” she asked finally.
“Never mind about Bertha.”
“Is she extinct?”
“No. She threatens an entirely new sort of eruption.”
“Oh. In what way new⸺?”
“It doesn’t matter. It won’t come our way.”
“Are you going there to-morrow?”
“I suppose I must. But I shall not make many more visits of⸺”
“What’s that?”
“I shall give up going, I say.” He shifted restlessly in his chair.
* * * * *
After breakfast next morning they parted, Tarr going back to work.
Butcher, whom he had not seen for some days, came in. He agreed to go
down into town and have lunch with him. Tarr put on a clean shirt.
Talking to Butcher while he was changing, he stood behind his bedroom
door. Men of ambitious physique, like himself, he had always noticed,
were inclined to puff themselves out or let their arms hang in a
position favourable to their muscles while changing before another man.
To avoid this embarrassment or absurdity, he made a point of never
exhibiting himself unclothed.
His conversation with Butcher did not fall on matters in hand. As with
Anastasya, he was unusually reticent. He had turned over a new leaf. He
became rather alarmed at this himself when he realized it. After lunch he
left Butcher and went to the Mairie of the Quartier du Paradis and made
inquiries about civil marriages. He did it like a sleep-walker.
He was particularly amiable with Bertha that day, and told her of his
activities at the Mairie and made an appointment with her there for the
next day.
Daily, then, he proceeded with his marriage arrangements in the
afternoons, saw Bertha regularly, but without modifying the changed
“correctness” of his attitude. The evenings he spent with Anastasya.
By the time the marriage preliminaries had been gone through, and Bertha
and he could finally be united, his relations with Anastasya had become
as close as formerly his friendship with Bertha had been. With the
exception of the time from three in the afternoon to seven in the evening
that he took off every day to see his fiancée, he was with her.
* * * * *
On September 29. three weeks after Bertha had told him that she was
pregnant, he married her—in the time between three in the afternoon and
seven in the evening set aside for her. Anastasya knew nothing about
these things. Neither Bertha nor she were seeing their German women
friends for the moment.
After the marriage at the Mairie Bertha and Tarr walked back to the
Luxembourg Gardens and sat down. She had not during the three intervening
weeks mentioned Anastasya. It was no time for generosity; she had done
too much of that. Fräulein Vasek was the last person for whom she felt
inclined to revive chivalry. She let Tarr marry her out of pity, and
never referred to his confidence about his other love.
They sat for some time without speaking, as though they had quarrelled.
She said, then:
“I am afraid, Sorbert, I have been selfish⸺”
“You—selfish? How’s that? Don’t talk nonsense.” He had turned at once to
her with a hurried fondness genuinely assumed.
She looked at him with her wistful, democratic face, full of effort and
sentiment.
“You are very unhappy, Sorbert⸺”
He laughed convincingly.
“No, I’m all right. Don’t worry about me. I’m a little meditative. That
is only natural on such a solemn occasion. I was thinking, Bertha, we
must set up house somewhere, and announce our marriage. We must do this
for appearance’ sake. You will soon be incapacitated⸺”
“Oh, I shan’t be just yet.”
“In any case, we have gone through this form because⸺We must make this
move efficacious. What are your ideas as to an establishment? Let us
take a flat together somewhere round here. The Rue Servandoni is a nice
street. Do you know it?”
“No.” She put her head on one side and puckered up her forehead.
“Near the Luxembourg Museum.”
They discussed a possible domicile.
* * * * *
He got up.
“It’s rather chilly. Let’s get back.”
They walked for some time without speaking. So much unsaid had to be
got rid of, without necessarily being said. Bertha did not know at all
where she was. Their “establishment,” as discussed by Tarr, appeared very
unreal, and also, what there was of it, disagreeable. She wondered what
he was going to do with her.
“You remember what I said to you some weeks ago—about Anastasya Vasek. I
am afraid there has been no change in that. You do not mind that?”
“No, Sorbert. You are perfectly free.”
“I am afraid I shall seem unkind. This is not a nice marriage for you.
Perhaps I was wrong to suggest it?”
“How, wrong? I have not been complaining.”
They arrived at the iron gate.
“Well, I’d better not come up now. I will come along to-morrow—at the
usual time.”
“Good-bye, Sorbert. _A demain!_”
“_A demain!_”
CHAPTER VI
Anastasya and he were dining that night in Montmartre as usual. His piece
of news hovered over their conversation like a bird hesitating as to the
right spot at which to establish its nest.
“I saw Bertha to-day,” he said, forcing the opening at last.
“You still see her then.”
“Yes. I married her this afternoon.”
“You _what_? What do you mean?”
“What I say, my dear. I married her.”
“You mean you⸺?” She put an imaginary ring on her finger.
“Yes. I married her at the Mairie.”
Anastasya looked blankly into him, as though he contained cheerless
stretches where no living thing could grow.
“You mean to say you’ve done that!”
“Yes; I have.”
“Why?”
Tarr stopped a moment.
“Well, the alleged reason was that she is enceinte.”
“But—whose is the child?”
“Kreisler’s, she says.”
The statement, she saw, was genuine. He was telling her what he had been
doing. They both immediately retired into themselves, she to distance
and stow away their former dialogue and consider the meaning of this
new fact; he to wait, his hand near his mouth holding a pipe, until she
should have collected herself. But he began speaking first:
“Things are exactly the same as before. I was bound to do that. I had
allowed her to consider herself engaged a year ago, and had to keep
to that. I have merely gone back a year into the past and fulfilled a
pledge, and now return to you. All is in perfect order.”
“All is _not_ in perfect order. It is Kreisler’s child to begin with, you
say⸺”
“Yes, but it would be very mean to use that fact to justify one in
escaping from an obligation.”
“That is sentimentality.”
“Sentimentality! Sentimentality! Cannot _we_, you and I, afford to give
Bertha _that_? Sentimentality! What an absurd word that is with its
fierce use in our poor modern hands! What does it mean? Has life become
such an affair of economic calculation that men are too timid to allow
themselves any complicated pleasures? Where there is abundance you can
afford waste. Sentimentality is a cry on a level with the Simple Life!
The ideal of perfect success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of
individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of Man and Perfectibility.
Sentimentality is a _privilege_. It is a luxury that the crowd does not
feel itself equal to, once it begins to think about it. Besides, it is
different in different hands.”
“That may be true as regards sentimentality in general. But in this case
you have been guilty of a popular softness⸺”
“No. Listen. I will explain something to you You said a moment ago that
it was _Kreisler’s_ child. Well, that is my security! That _enables_ me
to commit this folly, without too great danger. It is an earnest of the
altruistic origin of the action not being forgotten!”
“But _that_—to return to _your_ words—is surely a very mean calculation?”
“Therefore it takes the softness out of the generous action it is allied
to⸺”
“No. It takes its _raison d’être_ away altogether. It leaves it merely a
stupid and unnecessary fact. It cancels the generosity, but leaves the
fact—your marriage.”
“But the _fact itself_ is altered by that!”
“In what way? You are now married to Bertha⸺”
“Yes, but what does that mean? I married Bertha this afternoon, and here
I am punctually and as usual with you this evening⸺”
“But the fact of your having married Bertha this afternoon will prevent
your making any one else your wife in the future. Supposing I had a child
by _you_—not by Kreisler—it would be impossible to legitimatize him.
The thing is of no importance in itself. But you have given Kreisler’s
child what you should have kept for your own! What’s the good of giving
your sex over into the hands of a swanky expert, as you describe it, if
you continue to act on your own initiative? I throw up my job. _Garçon,
l’addition!_”
But a move to the café opposite satisfied her as a demonstration. Tarr
was sure of her, and remained passive. She extorted a promise from him:
to conduct no more obscure diplomacies in the future.
* * * * *
Bertha and Tarr took a flat in the Boulevard Port Royal, not far from
the Jardin des Plantes. They gave a party to which Fräulein Lipmann and
a good many other people came. He maintained the rule of four to seven,
roughly, for Bertha, with the utmost punctiliousness. Anastasya and
Bertha did not meet.
Bertha’s child came, and absorbed her energies for upwards of a year.
It bore some resemblance to Tarr. Tarr’s afternoon visits became less
frequent. He lived now publicly with his illicit and splendid bride.
Two years after the birth of the child, Bertha divorced Tarr. She then
married an eye-doctor, and lived with a brooding severity in his company
and that of her only child.
Tarr and Anastasya did not marry. They had no children. Tarr, however,
had three children by a lady of the name of Rose Fawcett, who consoled
him eventually for the splendours of his “perfect woman.” But yet beyond
the dim though solid figure of Rose Fawcett, another rises. This one
represents the swing-back of the pendulum once more to the swagger side.
The cheerless and stodgy absurdity of Rose Fawcett required the painted,
fine and inquiring face of Prism Dirkes.
THE END
EPILOGUE
The artists of this country make the following plain and pressing appeal
to their fellow-citizens. I have heard them in the places where they meet.
(1) That in these tragic days when the forces of the nation, of
intellect, of character, are being tested, they should grant more
freedom to the artists and thinkers to develop their visions and ideas.
That they should make an effort of sympathy. That the maudlin and the
self-defensive Grin should be dropped.
(2) That the Englishman should become ashamed of his Grin as he is at
present ashamed of solemnity. That he should cease to be ashamed of his
“feelings”: then he would automatically become less proud of his Grin.
(3) That he should remember that seriousness and unsentimentality are
quite compatible. Whereas a Grin usually accompanies loose emotionality.
(4) That in “facing the facts of existence” as he is at present compelled
to do, he should allow artists to economize time in not having to
circumvent and get round those facts, but to use them simply and directly.
(5) That he should restrain his vanity, and not always imagine that his
leg is being pulled. A symbolism is of the nature of all human effort.
There is no necessity to be literal to be in earnest. Humour, even, may
be a symbol. The recognizing of a few simple facts of that sort would
help much.
* * * * *
In these onslaughts on Humour I am not suggesting that anybody should
laugh less over his beer or wine or forgo the consolation of the
ridiculous. There are circumstances when it is a blessing. But the
_worship of the ridiculous_ is the thing that should be forgone. The
worship (or craze, we call it) of Charlie Chaplin is a mad substitution
of a chaotic tickling for all the other more organically important
ticklings of life.
Nor do I mean here that you or I, if we are above suspicion in the matter
of those other fundamentals, should not allow ourselves the little scurvy
totem of Charlie on the mantlepiece. It is not a grinning face we object
to but a face that is mean when it is serious and that takes to its grin
as a duck takes to water. We must stop grinning. You will say that I do
not practise what I preach. I do: for if you look closely at my grin you
will perceive that it is a very logical and deliberate grimace.
P. WYNDHAM LEWIS
1915
PRINTED AT THE COMPLETE PRESS, WEST NORWOOD, LONDON
Transcriber’s Note
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. By comparison with a
later version of the book, the following changes to the text were made:
Page 33, changed “cold” to “hot” (hot if you are cold)
Page 43, “à” added (Vous êtes à mon goût)
Page 145, changed “Schensal” to “Scheusal” twice, and again on page 180.