Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (21 page)

This rueful spot, struck in image of this elementary dross of humanity, was Kreisler’s occasional haunt. Cell of the unwieldy tragic brain of the city, alongside a million other similar cells, representing the overwhelming uniform force of brooding in that brain, it attracted him like a desert or ocean.

He would listen solemnly like a great judge to Suzanne’s perpetual complaints, sitting upon the edge of her bed, hat on head. She was so humble, with such pretensions: her imagination was arrogant and constantly querulous. The form her recriminations took was always that of lies; needless dismal falsehoods. She could not grumble without inventing and she never ceased to grumble. This, then, was one of Kreisler’s dwellings. He lived at large: some of his rooms, such as this, the Café Berne and Juan Soler’s School of Art, he shared with others. On very troubled days his body, like the finger of a weather-glass, would move erratically. When found in Suzanne’s room it might be taken as an indication of an unsettled state. A tendency to remain at home, on the contrary, denoted mostly a state of equilibrium.

T
HE
portmanteau fell under the bed; his body crushed into the red balloon of down. Kreisler never sat upon his bed except when about
to get into it: for another man it would have replaced the absent armchair, but in those moments of depression in which he resorted to it he always immediately sank into a still deeper melancholy, except of course at night, when he seldom failed to sleep. Head between hands emerging from the blood-red billow, he now stared at the floor. Four hours! Five hours! He must raise that paltry sum. He could not attend the party if he did not raise that paltry sum. That paltry sum! He frowned in his hands. But how could, the devil take it, the necessary be come by—in the time, in the time?

‘Small as it is, I shan’t get it’ he thought and began repeating this stupidly and stuck at the word ‘shan’t.’ Brain and mouth in a sluggish tangle, he stuttered thickly in his mind. He sprang up a blustering dishevelled mass, but the slovenly hopeless quality of the bed clung to him. This was a frivolous demonstration. He wandered to the window in a sulky apathy, his nose flattened against the pane, conscious of his compressed putty-grey mask, he let his gaze stream out into space. Ah, the Mensch, the Mensch! What was that, the Mensch?
*

The sudden quiet and idleness of his personality was an awakening after the little nightmare of Suzanne. But it was not a refreshing one at all.

That portmanteau was a disillusion: it had always received certain consideration, as being, next the dress suit, the most dependable article among those beneath his sway—to come to his aid if their common existence were threatened. With disgust he had cast it beneath the bed, and now observing its strap, he reflected that he and all his goods were rubbish for the gutters.

He sauntered from the window to the bed and back. Whenever he liked, in a sense, he could open the door and go out; but still,
until
then (and
when
would he like?) he was a poor prisoner. Outside the Mensch took some strength and importance from others: but truly, in here, he could be said to touch bottom and to realize what the Kreisler-self was, with four walls round it.

The thought of once more going over to the window and gazing down upon the street beneath made him draw back his chair: he sat midway in the room, looking steadily out at the depressing fleece of the stationary clouds, dusty city clouds a little yellow in the joints.

Comrades at the painting school, nodding acquaintances, even waiters and waitresses, were once more run through: but between
them this unworthy crowd did not muster, even from the most optimistic angle, a solitary franc.

Perhaps Anastasya had left Paris? At regular intervals he thought of that: this solution had only made his activity during the last few days more pointless and mechanical, it converted it into the pursuit of a shadow.

A quarter of an hour had passed: through a series of difficult clockwork-like actions, he had got once more to Vallet’s to have lunch. With disgust he took what had been latterly his usual seat, at the table in the recess; it was the one place, he was sure, in which Anastasya would never be discovered again, wherever else she might be encountered.

Lunch passed in a dull munching. Got to the coffee, he caught sight of Lowndes.

‘Hi! Master Lowndes!’ he called out—always assuming great bluffness and brutality, as he called it, with english people. ‘How do you do sir!’

The moment his eye had fallen upon Master Lowndes, the probable national opulence of this acquaintance had occurred to him as a tantalizing fact. All the wealth of the Indies festered in the pockets of this Englishman. No gross decision could be come to in that moment. Lowndes was called to be kept there a little bit, while he turned things over in his mind and settled the moment and mode of the
Angriff
. Their acquaintance, such as it was, throve on national antithesis. There was not much in that: but you never knew. He had never tapped an Englishman. Ah! A good start!

Lowndes had finished his own lunch, and was just going off. At the sight of the German he grinned: he had almost forgotten his idea in coming to the Restaurant, that of seeing just this acquaintance. Swaying from side to side on his two superlatively elastic calves, he sat down opposite the good Otto, who leered back, blinking.

Lowndes spoke german fairly well, so they used that, after a little flourish of english.

‘Well, what have you been doing? Working?’

‘No’ replied Kreisler truthfully. Then he added: ‘I’m giving up painting and becoming a business man. My father has offered me a position!’

Lowndes smiled correctly, not suspecting that this statement had any sentimental weight beyond what it purported to tell.

‘Have you seen Douglas?’ This was a friend, through whom they had known each other in Italy.

Why should this fellow lend him thirty francs? Why should he not? Kreisler’s new type of touchiness began to operate. The grin he was looking at would not be there were this person conscious of Otto’s designs. Why should it? But oh that offensive prosperity of the English, the smugness of their middleclassishness, the wonderbearing
Schweinerei
of their shopkeepingness!
Pfui!

Kreisler pictured the change that would come over this face when he popped the question. Anger and humiliation at the imagined expression overcame him. The man was an enemy: had they been in a quiet place he would have knocked him on the head and taken his money.

The complacent health and humoristic phlegm with which this kind grinned and perambulated through life charged Kreisler with the contempt natural to his more stiff education. He saw behind Lowndes the long line of all the Englishmen he had ever known. ‘Useless swine!’ he thought. ‘So cheerful over his average middlingness and mean as a peasant I bet!’

‘Oh I was asked for my opinion on a certain matter this morning: someone asked what I thought of german women—!!’

‘What reply did you make Mr. Lowndes?’

‘I didn’t know what to say. I was really stumped. I suggested that my friend should come along and get your opinion.’

‘My opinion as an
expert
—do I understand you? My fees as an expert are fairly considerable. I charge thirty francs a consultation!’

‘I’m sure he’d have paid that’ Lowndes laughed with innocence. Kreisler surveyed him unsympathetically.

‘What, then, is your opinion of our excellent females?’ he asked.

‘Oh I have no opinion. I admire your ladies, especially the pure Prussians—.’

Kreisler was thinking—If I borrow it there must be some time mentioned for paying back—next week say, next week. Where? More likely to lend if he knew where. He must have my address.

‘Come and see me—some time.’ Kreisler blinked. ‘Eighty-eight Boulevard Kreutzberg, fourth floor. It’s beside the Restaurant, just here. You see? Up there.’

‘I will. I looked you up at your old address a month or so ago. Where was that? They said they didn’t know where you’d gone.’

Kreisler stared at him very fixedly. The old address reminded him of several little debts. On that account he had not told the concierge where he was going. The concierge would complain of her old tenant. Even Lowndes might have been shown derelict tradesmen’s bills. Not much encouragement for his proposed victim! Na!

Lowndes was writing on a piece of paper.

‘There’s my address, Rue des Quatre Années.’

Kreisler inspected it fussily and said over—‘cinq, rue des Quatre Années. Lowndes—.’ He hesitated and then repeated the name.

‘R. W.—Robert Wooton. Here, I’ll write it down for you.’

‘Are you in a hurry? Come and have a drink at the Berne’ suggested Kreisler. He made up his bill hurriedly.

On the way Lowndes continued a discourse.

‘A novelist I knew told me he changed the names of the characters in a book several times in the course of writing it. It freshens them up, according to him; he said that the majority of people were killed by their names.’

‘Killed, yes.’ Kreisler nodded.

‘I think a name is a man’s soul.’

‘Which? I don’t understand you.’

Kreisler forged ahead, rhythmically and sullenly.

‘If we had numbers, for instance, instead of names, who would take the number thirteen?’

‘I’ said Kreisler.

‘Would you?’

Every minute Kreisler delayed popping the question increased the difficulty because his energy was giving out. Everything depended upon the first shot. It was hit or miss. Your voice had to be so modulated—but he yawned nervously. They were now sitting on the terrace at the Berne. An immense personal neurasthenia had grown up round this simple habit. Borrowing was no longer what it had been! Why Herrgott could he not
take
! Why petition? He knew that if Lowndes refused he would break out, there would be a scene—he nearly did so as it was.—With disgust and fatigue he lay back in his chair, paying no attention to what Master Bob Wooton was saying. His mind was made up: he would not proceed with his designs on this dirty pocket. He became rough and monosyllabic. He wished to purify himself in rudeness, and wash out the traces of his earlier civility.

Lowndes had been looking at a newspaper. He put it down and said he must go back to ‘work’: his ‘morning’ had of course been interrupted by Tarr.

Kreisler as he looked doggedly up still saw the expression on the Englishman’s face that he had prefigured as he had prepared to pop the question.
Pfui!
he with difficulty curbed the desire to spit in it. The nearness they had been to this demand must have affected, he thought, even his thickhided
Tor
of a companion. He
had
asked and been refused to all intents and purposes. He got up, left Lowndes standing there, and went into the lavatory of the Café. There he spat and spat and spat. Afterwards he had a hand-wash, and brushed his prickly scalp with vigour. That was good, that was good.

He returned to the Café table: there was no sign of the Englishman. He had gone off bad luck to him! As well for him! Now he could finish his drink in peace, deciding what the next move should be.

Various pursuits suggested themselves. Might he not go and offer himself as model at some big private studios near the Observatoire?
*
A week’s money might be advanced him. He would dress as a woman and waylay somebody or other on the lonely Boulevards in the early hours: it was often done. He would crouch down and have a big hat. He might steal some money anyway. Vokt was the last: he came just after murder. He would go to Ernst Vokt—Ernst with his little obstinate resolve in the obscurity of his mind no longer to be Kreisler’s acquaintance. The perfectly exasperating thing that this obstinacy was in that weak character, something that was out of place to the
n
th degree! In people of weak character—what an offence! They have no right to resoluteness, does not tenacity make them look more weak and mean than the strong can bear? The submissive Vokt had broken away, somewhere he was posing as a stranger. This proceeding was indecent—
pfui!
And again
pfui!

The massive wrinkled brow of this ‘thinking’ Mensch exhibited the big-dog pathos of his heavily-thinking german kind, as he sat and experienced this classic disgust, of a spirit against another with whom he has mingled, but which other suddenly covers and decks itself, wishing to regain its strangeness. It was as a protest against this strangeness that he uttered his customary
pfui!
A strange being suddenly baring itself provokes our
pfuis!
and the opposite operation has the same effect. Then the imagination wakes and the eye sees
best: it is the classical situation when friendship cools and the friend becomes a stranger. His irritated eye fixed upon this transformation, Kreisler watched, through fancy’s telescope, the distant and ill-omened haste of the departing rat: when suddenly he no longer, so it seemed, had need of his far-glass, for the naked eye struck, from where he sat beneath the Café awning, the familiar back of the object of his thoughts. There was the Vokt-back—surely it must be his!—disappearing round a corner, as though trying to avoid a meeting.

The blood rushed into his head with force, his body started, to spring forward in pursuit of this unsociable shape. Rushing words of insult were spawned on his struggling silent lips, he fidgeted in a sort of static fit, gazing blankly at the spot where he had seen the figure. That it was no longer there galled him beyond measure: it was as though he had considered Ernst as in duty bound to remain at the corner, immobile, his back towards him, a visible target and food for his anger. He made a sign to the waiter, to indicate that his drink would go into his ‘tick’ account,
*
the waiter nodding shortly without moving: he then at full steam headed for Vokt’s house—the direction also that the back had taken—resolved to force something out of him.

Kreisler, letting instinct guide his steps, took the wrong turning, following in fact his customary morning track. Suddenly he found himself some distance beyond Vokt’s street, near Juan Soler’s Academy. He gazed down it towards the Atelier,
*
then took off his glasses and began carefully wiping them. While doing this he heard words of greeting and found Vokt at his elbow.