Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (19 page)

The Restaurant Vallet, like many of its neighbours, had been originally a clean tranquil little creamery, consisting of a small shop a few feet either way. Then one after another its customers had lost their reserve: they had asked, in addition to their daily glass of milk,
for côtes de pré salé
*
and similar massive nourishment, which the decent little business at first supplied with timid protest. But perpetual scenes of unbridled voracity, semesters of compliance with the most brutal appetites of man, gradually brought about a change in its character; it became frankly a place where the most full-blooded palate might be satisfied. As trade grew the small business had burrowed backwards into the ramshackle house: bursting through walls and partitions, flinging down doors, it discovered many dingy rooms in the interior that it hurriedly packed with serried cohorts of eaters. It had driven out terrified families, had hemmed the apoplectic concierge in her ‘loge,’ it had broken out on to the court at the back in shed-like structures: and in the musty bowels of the house it had established a broiling luridly lighted roaring den, inhabited by a fierce band of slatternly savages. The chef’s wife sat at a desk immediately fronting the entrance door: when a diner had finished, adding up the bill himself upon a printed slip of paper, he paid at the desk on his way out.

In the first room a tunnel-like and ill-lit recess furnished with a long table formed a cul-de-sac to the left: into this Kreisler passed. At the right-hand side the passage led to the inner rooms.

Kreisler’s military morning suit,
*
slashed with thick seams, carefully cut hair, short behind, a little florid and bunched on the top, his german high-crowned bowler hat and plain cane, were in distinguished contrast with the Charivari of the art-fashion and uniform of The Brush
*
in those about him, chiefly students from the neighbouring art schools.

He took up the bill-of-fare, stencilled in violet ink, and addressed himself to the task of interpreting its characters. Someone took the seat in front of him. He looked up, put down the card. A young woman was now sitting there, and she seemed waiting, as though Kreisler might be expected, after a few moments’ intermission, to take up the menu again and go on reading it.

‘Have you done with? May I—?’

At the sound of her voice he moved a little forward, and in handing it to her, spoke in german.

‘Ich danke sehr’ she said, smiling with a german nod of racial recognition.

He ordered his soup. Usually this meal passed in impassible inspection of his neighbours when he was not reading the newspaper.
Staring at and through the figure in front of him, he spent several minutes. He seemed making up his mind.

‘Monsieur est distrait aujourd’hui’ Jeanne said, who was waiting to take his order.

Contrary to custom, he sought for some appetizing dish to change the routine. There were certain tracts of menu he never explored: his eye always guided him at once to the familiar place where the ‘plat du jour’ was to be found, and the alternations of eggs in snow or chocolate custard following the plat du jour. He now plunged his eye down the long line of unfamiliar dishes.

On Jeanne he fixed his eye with indecision too, as she stood politely smiling. (‘My vis-à-vis is pretty!’ he thought.)

‘Lobster salad, mayonnaise and a pommes à l’huile Jeanne’ he called out.

The beauties of menu to which he had just awoken led him to survey his neighbour. She must be connected with lobster salad something told him, yet how did not seem obvious at first. He was surprised that such a very presentable girl should be sitting there. Unusually attractive people wander dangerously about in life just like ordinary folk it is true. It was in the nature of good luck that an exceptional specimen of his race should arrive there in front of him: good luck in the abstract, of course, for it could have no especial significance for him. But this man could never leave good luck alone: all his past proved it up to the hilt.

He had already been examined by the attractive newcomer. Throwing a heavy far-away look into her eyes she let them wander over him. Afterwards she cast them down into her soup. As a pickpocket, after brisk work in a crowd, hurries home to examine his spoil, so she then assessed collectedly what her dreamy eyes had noted. Perhaps in her cloudy soup she beheld something of the storm and shock
*
that inhabited her neighbour, for her face assumed a rather grave expression.

Without interior preparation Kreisler found himself addressing her, a little abashed when he suddenly heard his voice and with an eerie sensation when it was answered.

‘From your hesitation in choosing your lunch, gnädiges Fräulein, I suppose you have not been long in Paris?’

‘No, I only arrived a week ago and can’t speak much French yet.’ She settled her elbows on the table for a moment.

‘Allow me to give you some idea of what the menu of this restaurant is like.’ This was like a lesson: he started ponderously. ‘At the head of each list you will find simple dishes; elemental dishes, I might call them; this is the rough material from which the others are evolved. Each list is like a dervish performance:
*
as it progresses it gets wilder and more confused: in the last dish you can be sure that the potatoes will taste like parsnips, and that the pork will have become a schnitzel of veal.’

‘
So!
’ laughed the young woman, with good german guttural. ‘I’m glad to say I have ordered dishes that head the list.’

Kreisler let fall a further heavy hint.

‘Garlic is an enemy usually ambushed in gigot: that is its only quite certain haunt!’

‘Good. I will avoid gigot.’ His facetiousness met with her indulgence, she drawled a little in sympathy. Between language and feeding Kreisler sought to gain the young lady’s confidence, adhering conventionally to the primitive order of creation.

She wore a heavy black burnous,
*
very voluminous and severe; a large ornamental bag was on the chair at her side, which one expected to contain herbs and trinkets, paraphernalia of the witch, rather than powder lip-stick and mere beauty secrets. Her hat was immense and sinuous; generally her appearance implied an egotistic code of advanced order, full of insolent strategies. Beside her other women in the restaurant appeared dragged down and drained of vitality by their clothes, thought Kreisler, although she wore so much more than they did. Her large square-shouldered and powerful body swam in the fluidities of hers like a duck.

When she laughed, this commotion was transmitted to her body as though sharp sonorous blows had been struck upon her mouth. Her lips were long hard bubbles risen in the blond heavy pool of her face, ready to break, pitifully and gaily: grown forward with ape-like intensity, they refused no emotion noisy egress if it got so far. Her eyes were large stubborn and reflective, brown coming out of blondness: her head was an elegant bone-white egg in a tobacco-coloured nest. Personality was given off by her with alarming intensity; it was an ostentation similar to diamonds and frocks mailed with sequins; Kreisler felt himself caught in the midst of a cascade, a hot cascade.

Recognizing herself, it would seem, to be some sort of travelling circus, equipped with tricks and wonders, beauty shows and
monstrosities, quite used to being looked at, she possessed the geniality of public characters and gossiped easily with Kreisler as though he were a strange loafer nothing more, without any consciousness of condescension.

Just when most out of his depth, it was scarcely the moment for Kreisler to encounter all this: with the mellowness of sunset it melted and boomed in this small alcove infernally.

By the fact of sex this figure seems to offer Otto a traditional substantiality: he clutches at it eagerly as at something familiar and unmetamorphosed—and somewhat unmetamorphosable—by Fate. In the first flush of familiarity he revolves with certain skill in this new ‘champs de manœuvres,’ executing one or two of his stock displays. He seems to make some headway.

‘My name is Anastasya’ his neighbour informs him irrelevantly, as if she had stupidly forgotten, before, this little detail.

Whew! his poor ragged eyelashes flutter, a cloud of astonishment passes grotesquely over his face; like the clown of the piece, he looks as though he were about to rub his head, click his tongue and give his nearest man-neighbour an enthusiastic kick. ‘Anastasya!’ It will be ‘Tasy’ soon!

Outwardly he becomes more solemn than ever, like an unworthy merchant who finds himself in the presence of a phenomenal dupe, and would in some way conceal his exhilaration. But he calls her carefully, at regular intervals, ‘Anastasya.’

‘I suppose you’ve come here to work?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to work any more than is absolutely necessary. I am overworked as it is, by living merely.’ He could well believe it; she must do some overtime! But
Life
had been mentioned; all was in the authentic german note, he felt more and more at home. ‘If it were not for my excellent constitution—.’

This was evidently the moment to touch on some of the more ponderous of life’s burdens. Her expression was perfectly even and non-committal.

‘Ah, yes’ he sighed heavily, one side of the menu rising gustily and relapsing. ‘Life gives one work enough.’

She looked at him and reflected ‘What work does “cet oiseau-là” perform?’

‘Have you many friends here, Anastasya?’

‘None.’

She laughed with ostentatious satisfaction at his funniness.

‘I came here as a matter of fact to be alone. I want to see
only
fresh people: that is being alone, isn’t it? People become too real. After a time we give them our illusions, then they are too real. But I have had all the gusto and illusion I had lent all round steadily handed back to me where I come from: the result is that I am amazingly rich—I am
lousily
rich!’ She opened her eyes wide; Kreisler pricked up his ears and wondered if this were to be taken in another sense: he cast down his eyes respectfully. ‘Lousily rich: I have the sort of feeling that I have enough to go all round. But perhaps I haven’t!’

Kreisler lingered over her first observation:—‘wanted to be alone.’ The indirect compliment conveyed (and he felt, when it was said, that he was somewhere near the frontier, surely, of a german confidence) was rather mitigated by what followed: the ‘having enough to go all round,’ that was very universal and included him too easily in its sweep. That was a pity—but it was something to go on with to be included.

‘Do you want to go all round?’ he asked, with heavy plagiarism of her accent, and best
de profundis
*
mask of suety insistence, almost clammy with its intensity.

‘I don’t want to be mean.’

His pulses gave a heavy hop: his eyes struggled with hers; he was easily thrown. But she had the regulation feminine foible of charity, he reassured himself, by her answer.

The one great optimism of Otto Kreisler was a belief in the efficacity of women. You did not deliberately go there—at least he usually did not—unless you were in straits, no: but there they were all the time—vast dumping-ground for sorrow and affliction—a world-dimensioned Pawn-shop, in which you could deposit not your dress suit or garments, but yourself, temporarily, in exchange for the gold of the human heart and any other gold that happened to be knocking about. Their hope consisted, no doubt, in the reasonable uncertainty as to whether you would ever be able to take yourself out again. Kreisler had got in and out again almost as many times as his ‘smokkin’
*
in another sphere.

Womenkind were Kreisler’s Theatre, they were for him art and expression: the tragedies played there purged you periodically of the too violent accumulations of desperate life. There life’s burden of laughter as well might be exploded. Woman was a confirmed
Schauspielerin, a play-actress it was his conviction, and to this he often gave trenchant utterance: but coming there for illusion he was willingly moved. Much might be remarked of a common nature between this honest german man and the drunken navvy on saturday night, coming home bellicosely towards his wife, blows raining gladly at the mere sight of her. Thus practically all the excitement and exertion he violently needs may be obtained, without any of the sinister chances a more real encounter must present. The Missis is his little bit of unreality, his ration of play. He can declaim, be outrageous to the top of his bent and can be maudlin too—all conducted almost as he pleases, with none of the shocks of the real and too tragic world.

In this manner ‘woman’ was the aesthetic element in Kreisler’s life. Love, too, always meant
unhappy
love for him, with its misunderstandings and wistful separations. From these encounters he emerged solemnly and all the better for them however exacting in detail. He approached a love affair as the Korps-student
*
engages in a student’s duel—no vital part exposed, but where something spiritually of about the importance of a nose might be lost—at least stoically certain that blood would be drawn.

A casual observer of the progress of Otto Kreisler’s life might have said that the chief events, the crises, consisted of his love-affairs—such as that unfortunate one with his present step-mother. But, in the light of a careful analysis, this would have been an inversion of the truth. When the events of his life became too unwieldy or overwhelming, he converted them into love; as he might otherwise have done, had he possessed a specialized talent, into some art or other. He was a sculptor—a german sculptor of a mock-realistic and degenerate school—in the strange sweethearting of the ‘free-life.’

The two or three women he had left in this way about the world—although perhaps those symbolic statues had grown rather characterless in Time’s weather and perhaps lumpish—were monuments of his perplexities. After weeks of growing estrangement, he would sever all relations suddenly one day—usually on some indigestible epigram, that worried the poor girl for the rest of her days. Being no adept in the science of his heart, there remained a good deal of mystery for him about the appearance of ‘Woman’ in his life. What was she doing there, what did she want with him? She was always connected he felt with its important periods; superstitiously he would tell himself that his existence was in some way implicated with ‘das Weib.’
*
She was, in
any case, for him, a stormy petrel.
*
He would be killed by a woman, he sometimes thought. This superstition had flourished with him before he had yet found for it much raison d’être. A rather serious duel having been decided upon in his early student days, this reflection ‘I am quite safe; it is not thus that I shall die,’ had given him uncanny coolness. His opponent nearly got himself killed, because he, for his part, had no hard and fast theory about the sort of death in store for him. But Kreisler now felt that he might find release in some other manner.