Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (20 page)

This account, to be brought up to date, would have in any case to be modified on account of Vokt. No woman had come conspicuously to disturb him since Vokt’s arrival. But between this state enjoyed by him in association with Ernst—the least intense flowering of male friendship possible, a distant and soothing companionship—and more serious states occurring, with Kreisler, invariably with woman, there was no possible foothold for him. Friendship usually dates from unformed years: but Love still remains in full swing long after Kreisler’s age at that time, a sort of spurious and intense friendship. Kreisler had however regarded both as extinct. Still the intensities of “Love” it would have surprised him least of the two to see reappearing.

An uncomfortable thing happened now: he realized all the possibilities of this chance acquaintanceship, plainly and cinematographically and was seized with panic. He must make a good impression. From that moment he ran the risk of doing the reverse, so unaccustomed was he to act with calculation. There he was like an individual who had gone nonchalantly into the presence of a prince but who—just in the middle of the audience, when he should have been getting over his first embarrassment—is overcome with a tardy confusion, the imagination in some way giving a jump. This is the phenomenon of the imagination, repressed and as it were slighted, revenging itself.

Casting desperately about for means of handling the situation, he remembered she had spoken of getting a dog
to guide her
. What had she meant? However, he grasped at the dog: he could regain possession of himself in romantic stimulus of this figure. He would be her dog! Lie at her feet! He would fill with a merely animal warmth and vivacity the void that
must
exist in her spirit. His imagination, flattered, came
in as ally: this, too, exempted him from the necessity of being victorious. All he asked was to be her dog! Only wished to impress her as a dog! Even if she did not feel much sympathy for him now, no matter: humbly he would follow her up, put himself at her disposition, not ask too much. It was a rôle difficult to refuse him.

The sense of security ensured him by the abjectness of this resolution caused him to regain his self-possession. Only it imposed the condition, naturally, of remaining a dog. Every time he felt his retiring humbleness giving place to another sensation, he experienced qualms afresh.

‘Do you intend studying here Fräulein?’ he asked, with a new deference in his tone—hardly a canine whine, but the deep servient bass of the faithful St. Bernard. She seemed to have noticed this something that was novel already, and Kreisler on all fours evidently astonished her.

‘A year or two ago I escaped from a bourgeois household in an original manner. Shall I tell you about that Otto?’

Confidence for confidence, he had told Anastasya that he was Otto.

‘Please!’ he said, with reverent eagerness.

‘Well, the bourgeois household was that of my father and mother, I got out of it in this way. I made myself such a nuisance to my family that they had to get rid of me.’ Otto flung himself back in his chair with dramatic incredulity. ‘It was quite simple. I began scribbling and scratching all over the place—on blotting-pads, the margins of newspapers, upon my father’s correspondence, the wallpaper. I inundated my home with troublesome images—it was like vermin; my multitude of little figures swarmed everywhere! They simply
had
to get rid of me. I said nothing—I pretended that I was possessed! That’s the way to treat them—when you have to deal with the bourgeois.’

Kreisler looked at her dully, smiling solemnly and rolling his head up and down, with something in fact of the misplaced and unaccountable pathos and protest of dogs (although still with a slavish wagging of the tail) at some pleasantry of the master. Her expansiveness, as it happened, did embarrass him very much at this point: he was divided between his inclination to respond to it and mature their acquaintance out of hand, where everything appeared so promising, and his determination to be merely a dog. Her familiarity, if adopted in turn
by him, might not be the right thing; yet, as it was, he must appear to be holding back, he must seem ‘reserved’ in his mere humility. He was a very perplexed dog for some time.

Smiling up at her with appealing pathos at intervals, he remained dumb: she wondered if he had indigestion or what. He undertook several desperate dog-like sorties: but she saw he was clearly in difficulties. As her lunch was finished, she called the waitress. Her bill was made out, Kreisler scowling at her all the while. Her attitude, suggesting ‘Yes, you
are
funny, you know you are, I’d better go, then you’ll be better’ was responded to by him with the same offended dignity as the drunken man displays when his unsteadiness is remarked. Sulkily he repudiated the suggestion that there was anything amiss: then he grew angry with her. His nervousness was all her doing. All was lost: he was very near some violence. But when she stood up he was so impressed that he sat gaping after her. He remained cramped in his place until she had left the restaurant.

He moved in his chair stiffly; his limbs ached as though he had been sitting for his portrait. The analogy struck him: sitting for his portrait—that was what had been happening very likely. These people dining near him as though they had suddenly appeared out of the ground—it was embarrassing to find himself alone with them: he had not noticed that they were there all round him, overhearing and looking on. Anastasya—Otto!—it was as though he had been talking to himself and had just become aware of the fact: a tide of magnetism had flowed away, leaving him bare and stranded.

Recovering his self-possession, Kreisler at once put a stop to this empty mental racket. Only a few minutes had passed since Anastasya’s departure: seizing hat and stick he hurried to the desk. Once outside he gave his glasses a new angle, started up and down the boulevard in all directions. The tall figure he was pursuing was not there: he started off, partly at a run, in the likeliest direction. At the Berne corner, where several new vistas opened, there she was some distance down the Boulevard Vitelotte: she stood beneath the trees festooning the side-walk, attending the passage of an oncoming tram to cross. Having seen so much, should he not go back? There was nothing else to be done: to catch her up and force himself on her could have only one result, he thought. He might, perhaps, follow a little way: that already he was doing at a sluggish march-step.

For some hundred yards they advanced, she a good distance ahead on the opposite pavement. Walking for a moment with his eyes on the ground, when he looked up he caught her head pivoting slowly round. She had seen him no doubt. He realized what was happening then. ‘Here I am following Anastasya as though we were strangers: so I am putting the final touch to what I began in the restaurant: by following her in the street as though we had never spoken I am making a stranger of a person who has just been talking to me in a most friendly manner.’ He pulled up and frowned. Either he must catch her up at once or vanish. He headed up a side street and circled round to his starting-point brooding for a few moments on the sleepy pavement encompassing the Berne.

A
NASTASYA
towered bleakly in Kreisler’s mind henceforth as an obstacle in his path, a sort of embodiment of optimism, totally unsought, but since she had been put there she must be dealt with. By all rights and according to the rules of the national temperament he should have committed suicide some weeks earlier: now so much a machine with the momentum of all this old blood and iron
*
that was Otto Kreisler he must go on: but lo he had been held up by an obstruction.

Probably his nature would have sought to fill up the wide shallow gap left by Ernst and earlier ties either by another Ernst or more likely a variety of matter: it would have been a temporary stopping only. Now a gold crown, regal person, had fallen upon the hollow.

His little dog simile was veritably carried out in his scourings of the neighbourhood, in hope of crossing his lost mistress. But these ‘courses’ gave no result: benignant apparition, his roughness had scared it away, and off the earth, for ever. He entered, even infested, all painting schools of the Quarter: rapidly he would give chase to distant equivocal figures in gardens and streets. Each rendered up its little quota of malignant hope, then presented him with a face of monotonous strangeness.

It was Saturday when Kreisler was found preparing to take his valise to the Mont-de-Piété. On the preceding evening he had paid one of his unaccountable calls on Fräulein Liepmann, the first for some time. He had a good reason for once. Her salon was the only
place of comparatively public assembly in the Quarter he had not visited. Entering with his usual slight air of mystification he bent to kiss Fräulein Liepmann’s hand in a vaguely significant fashion. He prolonged his ceremonious kiss to emphasize the significance of this particular call.

The blank indifference attending these calls on both sides was thus relieved: a vague curiosity was woken on one side, a little playful satisfaction on the other. Even this might have ripened into a sort of understanding. He did not follow up his advantage: after a half-hour of musing upon the margin of a stream of conversation, and then music, suddenly he recognized something, a flotsam bobbing past. It had bobbed past before several times: but gradually he became aware of it. A dance at the Bonnington Club,
*
which was to take place the following evening, it was that that finally attracted his attention. Why was this familiar?—Anastasya!—She had spoken of it: that was all he could remember.

Would Anastasya be present at the dance at the Bonnington Club—had she said she would be present? That he could not remember. At once, and as though he had come there to do so, he commenced fishing delicately in this same stream of tepid chatter for an invitation to the function. Fräulein Liepmann, the fish he particularly angled for, was backward: they did not seem to want him very much at the dance. Nevertheless, after the exertion of many powers seldom put forth in that salon, he secured the form, not the spirit, of an invitation.

Kreisler saw, in his alarmed fancy, Anastasya becoming fused in this female group-soul: the energy and resource of the devil in person would be required to extricate her. She must be beaten back from this slough for the moment he needed.

Was it too late to intercept her? He felt he might accomplish it. The eyes of these ladies, so far dull with indifference, would open: he would stand forth as a being with a novel mysterious function where they were concerned. Vokt’s absence from the Liepmann reunions was due to that traitor’s not wishing to meet him: they must have observed that. Now the enigmatical and silent doggedness of his visits would seem explained. Would he not appear like some unwieldy deliberate parasite got on to their indivisible body? The invitation extracted, he made haste to go: if he stayed much longer, it might be overlaid with all sorts of offensive and effacing matter, and be hardly fit for use.
A defiant and jeering look upon his departing face, he withdrew with an ‘until to-morrow.’

It was at this point that the
smokkin
came into prominence.

I
MPOSSIBLE
my poor old son! Five francs. Not a cent more! That’s the outside!’

Suzanne stood at attention before him in the hall of the Mont-de-Piété: if before she had been inexorable she was now doubly so beneath the eyes of the authentic officials. The sight of these salaried usurers of the State combined with her half-official status of go-between and interpreter, urged her to an ape-like self-importance. With flushed and angry face, raised eyebrows, shocked at any further questioning of the verdict, she repeated:

‘Five francs; it’s the most.’

‘No that’s no good, give me the portmanteau’ he exclaimed.

She gave it him in silence, eyebrows still raised, eyes fixed, staring with intelligent disapproval right in front of her. She did not look at her eminent compatriots behind the large counter: but her sagacious stare, lost in space, was meant to meet and fraternize with probable similar stares of theirs, lost in the same intelligent electrical void.

Her face fixed in distended, rubicund, discontentedly resigned mask, she walked on beside him, the turkey-like backward-forward motion of the fat neck marking her ruffled state. Kreisler sat down on a bench of the Boulevard Vitelotte, she beside him.

‘Dis! Otto! couldn’t you have borrowed the rest?’ she said at last.

Kreisler was tired. He got up.

‘No of course I couldn’t. I hate people who lend money as I hate pawnbrokers.’

Suzanne listened, with protesting grin. Her head nodded energetically.

‘Eh bien! si tout le monde pensait comme toi—!’
*

He pushed his moustache up and frowned pathetically.

‘Où est Monsieur Vokt?’ she asked.

‘Vokt? I don’t know. He has no money.’

‘Comment! Il n’a pas d’argent? C’est pas vrai! Tu ne le vois pus?’
*

‘Good-bye.’ Kreisler left Suzanne seated, staring after him.

The portmanteau dragged forward at his side, he strode past a distant figure. Suzanne saw him turn round and examine the stranger’s face. Then she lost sight of them round a corner of the Boulevard.

‘Quel type!’ she exclaimed to herself, nearly as the concierge had done.

In a little room situated behind the Rue de la Gaiété,
*
Suzanne pulled open one of two drawers in her washstand, which contained a little bread, coffee, potatoes, and a piece of cold cod. She spread out a sheet of the
Petit Parisien
*
beside the basin. Having peeled the potatoes and put them on the gas, she took off those outdoor things that just enabled her to impart a turkey-like movement to her person. Then, dumpy, in a salmon-check petticoat, her calves bowed backwards and her stomach thrust out, she stood moodily at the window. In the Midi
*
at present, a substantial traveller in pharmaceutical goods, who had enjoyed her earliest transports in the days when she worked at Arras,
*
sent her a few francs at irregular intervals.