Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (18 page)

‘It’s not a question unhappily of how we should like our faces to be:
it is how they are
. But I do not consider the actual position of my eyes to be any more “beautiful” than any other position they might have assumed. The almond eye was long held in contempt by the hatchet eye—.’

Kreisler peered up at him, and laughed. ‘You’re a modest fellow. You’re not as ugly as you think! Na! I like to find—.’

‘But you haven’t told us, Otto, what you call
beautiful
.’

‘I call this young lady here’—and he turned gallantly to a blushing cocotte
*
at his side—‘
beautiful
, very beautiful.’ He kissed her amid gesticulation and applause.

‘That’s just what I supposed’ his opponent said with appreciation.

With Soltyk he could not get on at all. Louis Soltyk was a young Russian Pole, who occasionally sat amongst the Germans at the Berne; and of him Vokt saw more than of anybody: in fact it was he who had superseded Kreisler in the position of influence as regards Vokt’s purse. But Soltyk did not borrow a hundred marks: his system
was far more up to date. Ernst had experienced an unpleasant shock in coming into contact with Kreisler’s clumsy and slovenly money habits again.

Physically Soltyk even bore, distantly and with polish, a resemblance to Kreisler. It was as though he had been compelled to imitate Kreisler all his life, but the material at his disposal being of an unsuitable texture, something rather different had resulted. His handsome face and elegance belied the suggestion. Still Kreisler and he disliked each other for obscure physiological reasons perhaps: in some ways Soltyk was his efficient and more accomplished counterpart.

‘Also wo steckt er eigentlich, unser wahrhaftlicher echter Germane? Ist wohl nicht hier gewesen?’
*
Soltyk would ask.

‘He’s in good company somewhere!’—Vokt revealed Kreisler as a lady’s man. This satisfied the hilarious purposes of Soltyk: the Russian Pole now made it his business to keep an eye on Vokt’s pocket while Kreisler was about; he had not been long in noting the signs of the professional borrower, the most contemptible and slatternly member of the crook family.

Louis Soltyk dealt in paintings and art-objects. In the first days of Kreisler’s arrival Ernst asked his new friend if he could not dispose of a painting by Kreisler.

‘What. Does he
paint
?’

‘Why yes.’

‘What’s it like? I should like to see that! I should like to see the sort of paintings your friend Kreisler does!’

‘Well, come round some day—.’

But Soltyk took Vokt by the lapel of the coat.

‘Non! Sois pas bête! Here’ he pulled out a handful of money and chose a dollar piece. ‘Here—give him this. You buy a
picture
—if it’s a picture you want to buy—you buy a picture by Picasso, or—or—. Kreisler has nothing but
Kreisler
to offer. C’est peu!’

Ernst introduced Kreisler next to another sort of Paris compatriot: this time it was a large female contingent. He took him round to Fräulein Liepmann’s on her evening at home, when these ladies played the piano and met.

Kreisler felt that he was a victim of strategy: he puffed and swore outside, he complained of their music, the coffee, their way of dressing.

The Liepmann circle could have stood as a model for Tarr’s bourgeois-bohemians, stood for a group. For chief characteristic this particular bourgeois-bohemian circle had in the first plan the inseparability of its members. Should a man, joining them, wish to flirt with one particularly, he must flirt with all—flatter all, take all to the theatre, carry the umbrellas and the paint boxes, of all. Eventually, should he come to that, it is doubtful if a proposition of marriage could be made otherwise than before the assembled band. And marriage alone could wrench the woman chosen away from the clinging bunch, if it did succeed in doing that.

Kreisler, despite his snorting, went again with Vokt: the feminine spell had taken effect. This gregarious female personality had shown such frank invitation to Vokt upon his arrival in Paris that, had any separate woman exhibited half as hospitable a front, he would have been very alarmed. As it was, it had at first just fulfilled certain bourgeois requirements of his lonely german soul.

Kreisler went a few weeks running to the Liepmann soirée: never finding Vokt there, he left off going as well. He felt he had been tricked and slighted. The ladies divined what had happened: Fräulein Liepmann, the leader, put a spiteful little mark down to each of their names.

K
REISLER
pocketed Ernst’s hundred-mark note and made no further attempts upon the formerly hospitable income of his friend, for he was a proud sponger: but debts began accumulating. Thereupon he made a disquieting discovery: he found he had suddenly grown timid with his creditors. The concierge literally frightened him: he conciliated the garçon at the Café, to whom he owed money: he even paid several debts that it was quite unnecessary to pay, in a moment of panic and discouragement. On one occasion this novel open-handedness caused him to spend a very disagreeable week until the next allowance arrived. This rapid deterioration of his will extended to his relations with his Café acquaintances: at the Berne he had lost his nerve in some way; on some evenings he would clown obsequiously, and depressed and slack the next, perhaps, resenting his companions’ encores, would grow boorish.

The next thing was that he gradually developed the habit of sitting alone: more often than not he would enter the Café and proceed to a table at the opposite side of the room to that at which his german acquaintances were sitting.

Ridicule is focussed at about ten yards: the spectator is then without the sphere of average animal magnetism. For once it does not matter: but if persisted in it results without fail in a malicious growth of criticism at the expense of the solitary. This process is perfectly automatic: those who keep to themselves awaken mirth as a cartwheel running along the road by itself would. With regard to the ‘lonely’ man people have the sensation that he is going about with some eccentric companion, namely himself. Why did he choose this deaf and dumb companion? What do they find to say to each other? He is ludicrous as two men would be, who, perpetually in each other’s company, were never seen to exchange a word—who dined together, went to theatre or Café in each other’s company, without ever looking at each other or speaking.

So Kreisler became a lonely figure. It was a strange feeling: he must be quiet and not attract attention: in some way he was marked as though he had committed a theft. Perhaps it was merely the worry of perpetual ‘tick’
*
beginning to tell. For the moment he would just put himself aside, and see what happened, he seemed to have decided. He was afraid of himself too: always up till then immersed in that self, now for the first time he stood partly outside it. This slight divorce made him less sure in his touch in everything. A little less careful of his appearance, he went sluggishly about, smoking, reading the paper a great deal, working at the art school fairly often, playing billiards with an austrian cook whom he had picked up in a Café and who disappeared owing him seven francs.

The inertia and phlegm, outward sign of depressing everyday Kreisler, had found someone, when he had found Vokt, for whom they were a charm and something to be envied. Kreisler’s imagination woke shortly after Vokt’s. It was as though the peasant, always regarding his life as the dullest affair, should be suddenly transformed by participating in some townsman’s romantic notions of the romance of rural man. Kreisler’s moody wastefulness and futility had found a raison d’être and meaning, almost.

Vokt had been a compendious phenomenon in his life, although his cheery gold had attracted him to the more complete discovery.
Vokt had ousted women, too, from Kreisler’s daily needs: he had become a superstition for his tall friend.

On the other hand it was Kreisler’s deadness, his absolute lack of any reason to be confident and yet perfect aplomb, that mastered his companion.

Ernst Vokt had remained for three desultory and dreamy years becalmed on this empty sea. Kreisler basked around him, never having to lift his waves and clash them together as formerly he had been forced sometimes to do. There had been no appeals to life, all that was asked of him was to be his own static essence, the deader the better: Vokt had been the guarantor of his peace. And now the defection of Vokt was the omen of the sinking ship, the disappearance of the rat.

The terms of this desertion, however, resembled in their indistinctness and taciturnity the terms of their companionship. Otto and Ernst had never arrived at terms of friendship. It had been only an epic acquaintanceship, and Kreisler had taken him about as a parasite that he pretended not to notice. There was no question, therefore, of a reproach at desertion. Ernst merely hopped off on to somebody else. At this Kreisler was more exasperated than at the defection of a friend, who could be fixed down and from whom at last an explanation must come. An unfair advantage had been taken of his hospitable nature: no man had a right to accompany you in that distant and paradoxical fashion, get all he could, make himself ideally useful, unless it were for life.

Soltyk’s success he observed with an affectation of distant mockery. Vokt’s loves were all husks, of illogical completeness. Off with the old and on with the new it was with him. Soltyk’s turn would come.

A man appeared one day in the Berne who had known Kreisler in Munich. The story of Kreisler’s marrying his fiancée to his father thereupon became known: other complications were alleged in which Otto’s paternity played a part. The dot
*
of the bride was another obscure matter.

These backgrounds were revealed at a time when he had already become an aloof figure at the Café. He looked the sort of man, the party agreed, who would splice his sweetheart with his papa, or reinforce his papa’s affairs with a dot he did not wish to pay for at last with his own person. The Berne was also informed that Kreisler had to keep seventeen children in Munich alone; that he only had to look at a woman for her to become pregnant. It was when the head of the column, the eldest
of the seventeen, emerged into boyhood requiring instruction that Kreisler left for Rome. Since then a small society had been founded in Bavaria to care for Kreisler’s offspring throughout Germany.

The picture of Otto as universal papa was the last straw, this misdirected and disordered animal capacity made him into a vast Magog of Carnival,
*
an antediluvian puppet of fecundity for his compatriots. When he appeared that night everybody turned towards his historic figure with cries of welcome. But he took a seat in the passage-way leading to the Bureau de Tabac. As their laughter struck him through his paper, he was unstrung enough to respond with visible annoyance. He frowned and puckered up his spectacled eyes, and two flushed lines descended from his brows to his jaw. On their way out one or two of his compatriots greeted him.

‘Sacré Otto vas!
*
Why so unsociable? You cut us. You are unkind!’

‘Hush! He has much to think about. You don’t understand what the cares of a—.’

‘Come, old Otto, a drink! No? Why not? No! All right.’

He shook them off with a mixture of affected anger and authentic spitting oaths of vexed disgust. He avoided their eyes, and spat blaspheming at his beer. For some days he gave the Berne a wide berth.

Kreisler then recovered.

At first nothing much happened. He had just gone back again into the midst of his machinery like a bone slipped into its place, with a soft click. He became rather more firm with his creditors: he changed his rooms (moving to the Boulevard Kreutzberg), passed an occasional evening with the Germans at the Berne and started a portrait of Suzanne, who had been sitting at the Academy.
*

‘How is Herr Vokt? Is he out of Paris?’ Fräulein Liepmann asked him when they met. ‘Come round and see us.’

People’s actual or possible proceedings formed in very hard and fast mould in Kreisler’s mind, seen not with the flexible breadth of the realistic intelligence but through conventions of his suspicious irony. This solicitude as to Vokt he contrasted with their probable indifference as regards his impoverished shabby and impolite self.

But he went round, his reception being insipid. He had shown no signs of animation or interest in them: both he and the ladies were
rather doubtful as to why he came at all: no pleasure resulted on either side from these visits, yet they doggedly continued. A distinct and steady fall in the temperature could be observed: he sneered, as though the aimlessness of his visits were an insult that had at last been taken up. They would have been for ever discontinued except for a sudden necessity to reopen that channel of bourgeois intercourse.

O
N
the first morning of his letter being overdue, a convenient manner of counting, Otto rose late from a maze of shallow and sluggishly protracted dreams, and was soon dressed, wanting to get out of his room. As the clock struck one he slammed his door and descended the stairs alertly. The concierge, upon the threshold of her ‘loge,’ peered up at him.

‘Good morning Madame Leclerc, it’s a fine day’ said Kreisler, in his heavy french, his direct and chilly gaze incongruously brightened with a vivid smile.

‘Monsieur has got up late this morning’ replied the concierge, with very faint amiability.

‘Yes, I have lost all sense of time. J’ai perdu le temps! Ha! Ha!’ He grinned mysteriously. The watch had gone the way of the dress clothes some days already.

‘J’ai perdu’ he gulped with mirth ‘mon temps!’
*

She followed him slowly along the passage, become extremely grave.

‘Qu’est-ce qu’il raconte? Il perd son temps? En effet!’ She chucked her head up and cocked her eye. ‘Quel original! quel genre!’
*
With a look of perplexed distrust she watched him down the street. His german good humour and sudden expansiveness was always a portentous thing to Madame Leclerc. Kreisler, still beneath the eye of the concierge, with his rhythmic martial tread approached the restaurant. A few steps from the threshold he slowed down, dragging his long german boots, which acted as brakes.