Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (14 page)

Now he was joining battle again with the most chivalrous sentiments: the reserves had been called up, his nature was mobilized. As his will gathered force and volume (in its determination to ‘throw’ her once and for all) he unhypocritically keyed up its attitude. While he had been holding her just now he had been at a considerable disadvantage because of his listless emotion. But with emotion equal to hers, he could accomplish anything. Leaving her would be child’s play, absolutely child’s play. He projected the manufacture of a more adequate sentiment.

Any indirectness was out of the question: a ‘letting down softly,’ kissing and leaving in an hour or two, as though things had not changed—that must not be dreamt of, now. The genuine section of her (of which he had a troubled glimpse): that mattered, nothing
else—he must appeal obstinately to that. Their coming together had been prosecuted on his side with a stupid levity: that he would retrieve in their parting. Everything that was most opposite to his previous lazy conduct must now be undertaken by him. Especially he frowned upon Humour, that inveterate enemy of anglo-saxon mankind.

The first skirmish of his comic Armageddon
*
had opened with the advance of his mysterious and vaunted ‘indifference.’ That had dwindled away at the first onset. A new and more potent principle had taken its place. This was in Bertha’s eyes, a
difference
in Tarr.

‘Something has happened; he is
different
’ she said to herself. ‘He has met somebody else’ had then been her rapid provisional conclusion.

Suddenly she got up without speaking, rather spectrally; she went over to the writing-table for her handkerchief. Not an inch or a muscle would she move until quite herself again—dropping steadily down all the scale of feeling to normal—that had been the idea. With notable matter-of-factness she got up, easily and quietly, making Sorbert a little dizzy. Her face had all the drama wrung out of it: it was hard, clear and garishly white, like her body.

If he were to have a chance of talking he must clear the air of electricity completely: else at his first few words the storm might return. Once lunch had swept through the room, things would be better. So he would send the strawberries ahead to prepare his way. It was like fattening a lamb for the slaughter. This idea pleased him: now that he had recognized the existence of a possible higher plane of feeling as between Bertha and himself, he was anxious to avoid display. According to his present dispositions it was true that he ran the risk of outdoing his former callousness. Saturated with morbid english shyness, that cannot tolerate passion and its nakedness, it was a choice of brutalities, merely, in fact. This shyness, he contended, in its need to show its heart, will discover subtleties and refinements of expression, unknown to less gauche and hence less delicate nations. But if he happened to be hustled out of his shell the anger that coexisted with his modesty was the most spontaneous thing he possessed.

He got up, obsequiously reproducing in his own movements and expression her matter-of-factness.

‘Well how about lunch? I’ll come and help you with it.’

‘There’s nothing to do. I’ll get it.’

Bertha had wiped her eyes with the attentiveness a man bestows on his chin after a shave, in little brusque hard strokes. She did not look at Tarr. Arranging her hair in the mirror, she went out to the kitchen.

The intensity of her recent orgasm carried her on for about five minutes into ordinary life: for so long her seriousness was tactful. Then her nature began to give way: again it broke up into fits and starts of self-consciousness. The mind was called in, did its work clumsily as usual: she became her ordinary self.

Sitting upon the stool by the window, in the act of eating, Tarr there in front of her, it was more than ever impossible to be natural. She resented the immediate introduction of lunch in this way, and that increased her artificiality. For to counterbalance the acceptance of food, she had to throw more pathos into her face. With haggard resignation she was going on again; doing what was asked of her, partaking of this lunch. She did so with unnecessary conscientiousness. Her strange wave of dignity had let her in for this?—almost she must make up for that dignity! Life was confusing her again; it was useless to struggle.

‘Aren’t these strawberries good? Very sweet. These little hard ones are better than the bigger strawberries. Have some more cream?’

‘Thank you.’ She should have said no. But being greedy in this matter she accepted it, with a heavy air of some subtle advantage gained.

‘How did the riding lesson go off?’ She went to a riding school in the mornings.

‘Oh quite well, thank you. How did
your
lesson go off?’ (This referred to his exchange of languages with a russian girl.)

‘Admirably, thank you.’

The russian girl was a useful weapon for her.

‘What is the time?’ The time? What cheek! He was almost startled. He took his heavy watch out and presented its big bold dial to her ironically.

‘Are you in a hurry?’ he asked.

‘No, I just wondered what the time was. I live so vaguely.’

‘You are sure you are not in a hurry?’

‘Oh no!’

‘I have a confession to make, my dear Bertha.’ He had not put his watch back in his pocket. She had asked for the watch; he would
use it. ‘I came here just now to test a funny mood—a quite
new
mood as a matter of fact. My visit is a sort of trial trip of this new mood. The mood was connected with you. I wanted to find out what it meant, and how it would be affected by your presence. That was the test.’

Bertha looked up with mocking sulky face, a shade of hopeful curiosity.

‘Shall I tell what the mood was?’

‘That’s as you like.’

‘
It was a feeling of complete indifference as regards yourself!
’

He said this solemnly, with the pomp with which a weighty piece of news might be invested by a solicitor in conversation with his client.

‘Oh, is
that
all? That is disappointing.’ The little barbaric effort was met by Bertha scornfully.

‘No that is not all.’

Catching at the professional figure his manner had conjured up, he ran his further remarks into that mould. The presence of his watch in his hand had brought with it some image of the family physician or gouty attorney. It all centred round the watch, as it were, and her interest in the time of day.

‘I have found that this was only another fraud on my too credulous sensibility.’ He smiled with professional courtesy. ‘At sight of you, my mood evaporated. But what I want to talk about is what is left. I am of opinion that our accounts should be brought up to date. I’m afraid the reckoning is enormously against me: you have been a criminally indulgent partner—.’

He had now got the image down to the more precise form of two partners, perhaps comfortable wine-merchants, going through their books or something of that sort.

‘My
dear
Sorbert I am aware of that. You needn’t trouble to go any further. But why are you entering into these calculations, and sums of profit and loss?’

‘Because my sentimental finances, if I may employ that term, are in a bad state.’

‘Then they only match your worldly ones.’

‘In my worldly ones I have no partner’ he reminded her.

She cast her eyes about in wide-eyed swoops, full of self-possessed wildness.

‘I exonerate you Sorbert’ she said, ‘you needn’t go into details. What is
yours
and what is
mine
—my God! what does it matter? Not much!’

‘I know you to be generous—.’

‘Leave that then, leave these calculations! All that means
so little
to me! I feel at the end of my strength—à bout de force!’ she always heaved this french phrase out with much energy. ‘If you’ve made up your mind to go—do so Sorbert—I release you! You owe me nothing—it was all my fault. But spare me a reckoning! I can’t stand any more—.’

‘No, I insist on my responsibility. It would break my heart to leave things upside down like that—all our books in a ghastly muddle, our desks open, and just walk away for ever—perhaps to set up shop somewhere else, who knows? What a prospect! I can’t bear it!’

‘I do not feel in any mood to “set up shop somewhere else” I can assure you!’

The unbusinesslike element in the situation had been allowed by her to develop for obvious reasons. She now resisted her Sorbert’s dishonest attempt to set this right, and to benefit, first (as he had done) by disorder, and lastly to benefit by order.

‘We can’t in any case improve matters by talking. I—I, you needn’t fear for me Sorbert, I can look after myself. Only don’t let us wrangle’ with appealing gesture and saintishly smiling face. ‘Let us part friends. Let us be worthy of each other!’

Bertha always opposed to Tarr’s treacherous images her teutonic lyricism, usually repeating the same phrases several times.

This was degenerating into their routine of wrangle. Always confronted by this imperturbable, deaf and blind, ‘generosity,’ the day would end in the usual senseless draw. His compelling statement still remained unuttered.

‘Bertha, listen. Let us, just for fun, throw all this overboard, I mean the cargo of inflated stuff that makes us go statelily, no doubt, but—. Haven’t we quarrelled enough, and said these things to each other till we’re both sick of them? Our quarrels have been our undoing. Look. A long chain of little quarrels has fastened us down: we should neither of us be here if it hadn’t been for them.’

Bertha gazed at Tarr half wonderingly. Something out of the ordinary was on foot, it was plain.

Tarr proceeded.

‘I have accepted from you a queer sentimental dialect of life—please don’t interrupt me, I have something I want particularly to say—I should have insisted on your expressing yourself in a more
metropolitan speech.
*
Let us drop it. There is no need to converse in the drivelling idiom we for the most part use. I don’t think we should lead a very pleasant married life—naturally. In the second place, you are not a girl who wants an intrigue, but to marry. I have been playing at fiancé with a certain unprincipled pleasure in the novelty, but I experience a genuine horror as the fatal consequences begin to take shape. I have been playing with you!’

He said this eagerly, as though it were a point in his argument—as it was. He paused, for effect apparently.

‘You for your part Bertha don’t do yourself justice when you are acting. I am in the same position. This I feel acutely, no I do in fact. My ill-humour occasionally takes your direction—yours, for its part, heading in mine when I criticize
your
acting. We don’t act well together and that’s a fact; though I’m sure we should be smooth enough allies off the boards of love. Your heart, Bertha, is in the right place; ah, ça! what a heart!’

‘You are too kind!’

‘But—but; I will go a great deal farther than that: at the risk of appearing paradoxical I will affirm that the heart in question is so much part of your intelligence too—!’

‘Thanks! Thanks!’

‘—despite your fatuity in the matter of personal expression. But I must not allow myself to be enticed into these by-paths. I wish to make a clean breast of my motives. I had always till I met you regarded marriage as a thing beyond all argument
not
for me, I was unusually isolated from that idea; anyway, I had never even reflected what marriage was at all. It was you who introduced me to marriage! In consequence it is you who are responsible for all our troubles. The approach of this disgusting thing, so unexpectedly friendly at nearer sight, caused revulsion of feeling beyond my control, resulting in sudden fiançailles. Like a woman luxuriously fingering some merchant’s goods, too dear for her, or not wanted enough for the big price, I philandered with the idea of marriage. Then I was caught. But I find I really don’t want the stuff at all. I’m sorry.’

This simplification put things in a new callous light that was all. Tarr felt that she too must, naturally, be enjoying his points: he forgot to direct his exposition in such a way as to hurt her least. This trivial and tortured landscape had a beauty for him he was able and eager to explain, where for her there was nothing but a harrowing reality.

But the lunch had had the same effect upon him that it was intended to have upon his victim—not enough to overthrow his resolution, but enough to relax its form.

As to Bertha, this behaviour seemed, in the main, ‘Sorbert all over.’ There was nothing new. There was the ‘difference’: but she recognized that ‘differences’ had often been noticed by her, and it was really the familiar process; he was attempting to convince himself, heartlessly, at her expense. Whether he would ever manage to do so was problematic: there was no sign of his being likely to do so more to-day than any other day. So she listened; sententiously released him from time to time.

Just as she had seemed strange to him in some way when he came in (seen through his ‘indifference’) so he had appeared a little odd to her: this for a moment had wiped off the dullness of habit. This husband she so obstinately wanted had been recognized: she had seized him round the shoulders and clung athletically to him, as though he had been her child that some senseless force were about to snatch.

As to his superstition about marriage the subject of his recent remarks—was it not merely the restlessness of youth, propaganda of Liberty, that a year or so would see in Limbo? For was he not a ‘marrying man’? She was sure of it! She had tried not to frighten him, and to keep ‘marriage’ in the background: but she was quite certain that he was intended to marry: he needed a wife.

Thus Tarr’s disquisition had no effect except for one thing; when he spoke of a pleasure he derived from the idea of marriage upon closer acquaintance, she wearily pricked up her ears. The conviction that Tarr was a domesticated animal was confirmed from his own lips: the only result of his sortie was to stimulate her always vigilant hope and irony, both, just a little. (He had intended to prepare the couch for her despair!)

His last words, affirming marriage to be a game not worth the candle, brought a faint and ‘weary’ smile to her face: once more she was obviously ‘à bout de force.’