Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (25 page)

At the head of a formidable group of her own was a corpulent young Dutchwoman, named van Bencke. She was rather comely, with the professional pianist’s pout and frown, and in a shabby ‘Reformkleide,’
*
with a terribly rich dark-featured dutch stockbroker always on one side of her, and an equally well-off little dutch Countess on the other. This proximity of great gold-fields to this personality appeared as inevitable as the geologic dispositions of nature: evidently there was something about her that attracted large quantities of money: so these cumbrous masses of gold hung on her steps. She had only to lift a finger for gold to pour out of either of these quiescent figures.

The dutch Countess was an anaemic and silent young woman, and it was always a source of wonderment that these robust lavas of wealth could belong in that insignificant soil. But with such auxiliaries van Bencke was able to satisfy a social ambition equal to Fräulein Liepmann’s.

Eckhart had hardly entered and doggedly invested Fräulein Liepmann, when the party became complete on the advent of Soltyk. He navigated about the salon with an ease that showed he had been born on smiling and treacherous seas and that he condescended in this puddle. But being a Pole, Soltyk participated in an hereditary polish of manner. He went up to Fräulein Vasek at once. After talking
for a few minutes he left her, evidently in quest of somebody. It was a man in the farther room, soon found, and with whom he was still deep in conversation when they all left the house.

Fräulein Vasek had not shown any further sign of remembering Kreisler’s existence, although he had followed her constantly with his eyes: this, thought he, was as it should be. To ‘mark time’ was his cue, until the opportunity arrived
to strike
. But marking time was a depressing occupation; he definitely accepted what his consequent despondency suggested. The little appearance things had of being better after all was only so much more playing with the mouse—he the mouse and the
Schicksal
of course the cat. Fluctuations of luck had been apparent, not real. He determined to be hard in future towards the coquetries of life, followed by nothing substantial.

Yet the actual course of events was so much more complicated than Kreisler’s forecast. All was passing differently. Soltyk showed interest in nothing in the world but his discussion with an unknown man in a corner. He was the instrument designed to carry off some of Kreisler’s wrath; he seemed deliberately disappointing him. All this company, the confederates of Fate, acted in an unexpected and maliciously natural way.

But if they were cool and matter-of-fact, he could be so too: for the rest of the evening he was more and more obstinately matter-of-fact in his actions, to meet this unfair advantage and wilful sobriety of nature.

Lost in thought, he was constantly forgetting his dusty worn clothes, and the ticklish nature of his position. The further rôle he had assigned himself for that evening would be equally forgotten: then he would be recalled to it all with sudden nausea, wishing for a moment to take his leave and disappear. Finding himself unconventionally dressed, he felt in fact a sort of outcast. He entered thoroughly into the part his situation and appearance suggested. He did not become deprecatory, but haughty and insurgent. Kreisler was the true revolutionary, since he was the perfect snob, with revenge for a motive.

The Bonnington Club was not far away. They had decided to walk, as the night was fine. It was about half-past nine when they started. Seven or eight led the way in a suddenly made self-centred group; once outside in the spaciousness of the night-streets, the party seemed to break up into sections, held together in the small lighted rooms.

Soltyk and his friend, whom Otto did not recognize, still deep in conversation, and then a quieter group, followed. Fräulein Lunken had stayed behind with another girl to put out the lights. Instead of running on with her companion to join the leading band, she stopped with Kreisler, whom she had found bringing up the rear alone.

‘Not feeling gregarious to-night?’ she asked.

Kreisler walked slowly, increasing, at every step, the distance between them and the next group, as though hoping that, should he draw her far enough back in the rear, like an elastic band she would in panic shoot forward.

‘Do you know many english people?’

He couldn’t say that he did, with some gruffness: and then she must enter upon a long eulogy of the english. Was that necessary? To hell with this Club, in fact with all english clubs. He muttered sceptically. She seemed then to be saying something about Soler’s: eventually she was recommending him a new spanish professor. Why spanish?

‘Do you happen to know of an english professor?’

‘No, I don’t think there are any.’

‘I suppose not.’

Kreisler cursed this chatterbox and her complaisance in accompanying him.

‘I must get some cigarettes’ he said briskly, as a bureau de tabac was there. ‘But don’t you wait, Fräulein: catch the others up. You see?’

Having purposely loitered over his purchase, when he came out upon the Boulevard again there she was as before. ‘Aber! aber! what’s the matter with her?’ Kreisler glared at her in impatient astonishment.

The answer to that irritated question was complex, though Bertha had not stopped behind to consort with this fish-out-of-water for nothing; though her motives, as he divined, had little to do with him. She did not live in a state of constant harmony with the Liepmann circle: her comeliness without distinction made her suspect, she was thought to be too interested in the ordinary world; and her finances were inadequate. So, as a dreadfully respectable adventuress, she should have been more humble. As it was, as a pretty girl, she was too insubordinate, and Tarr—he was a chronic source of difficulty. He was her fiancé she had announced: but he was uncompromisingly
absent from all their gatherings, and bowed to them, when met in the street, as it seemed to them derisively, even. He had been excommunicated long ago by Fräulein van Bencke most loudly and most picturesquely.

‘Homme sensuel!’ she had called him. She averred she had caught his eye resting too intently on her well-filled-out bosom.

‘Homme égoïste!’
*
(this referred to his treatment of Bertha, supposed and otherwise).

Tarr considered that these ladies were partly induced to continue their friendship for Bertha through the hope of rescuing her from her fiancé, or doing as much harm to both as possible. Bertha alternately went to them a little for sympathy, and defied them with a display of Tarr’s opinions.

By analogy Kreisler had, in her mind, been pushed into the same boat with Tarr. She always felt herself a little
without
the circle, since Tarr was so much outside: here was another outsider, that was all. So this was a little conspiracy.

So, Bertha still in this unusual way clinging to him (although she had ceased plying him with conversation), they proceeded along the solitary backwater of Boulevard in which they were. Pipes lay all along the edge of excavations to their left, where a network of old drains was being brought up to date. They tramped on under the small uniform trees Paris is planted with, in imitation of the scorching Midi.

Kreisler ignored his surroundings: he was escorting himself, self-guarded siberian exile,
*
from one cheerless place to another. To Bertha nature still had the usual florid note of bald romance: the immediate impression caused by the moonlight was implicated with a thousand former impressions; she did not discriminate. It was in fact the lunar-illumination of several love-affairs.

Kreisler, more restless, renovated his susceptibility every three years or so: the moonlight for him was hardly nine months old, and belonged to Paris, where there was no romance, no romance whatever. For Bertha the darkened trees rustled with the delicious and tragic suggestions of the passing of time and lapse of life. The black unlighted windows of the tall houses held within, for her, breathless and passionate forms, engulfed in intense eternities of darkness and whispers. Or a lighted one (in its contrast to the bland light of the moon) so near, suggested something infinitely distant. There was
something fatal in the rapid never-stopping succession of their footsteps—loud, deliberate, continual noise of their trotting.

Her strange companion’s dreamy roughness, this romantic enigma of the evening, suddenly captured her fancy. The machine, the sentimental, the indiscriminate side of her, awoke.

She took his hand. Rapid soft and humble she struck the deep german chord, vibrating rudimentarily in the midst of his cynicism the germanic bass that underlies all the weighty, all-too-weighty music in the world.

‘You are suffering! I know you are suffering. I wish I could do something for you.—Can not I?’

Kreisler began tickling the palm of her hand slightly. When he saw it interrupted her words, he left off, holding her hand solemnly as though it had been a fish slipped there for some obscure reason. Her hand—her often trenchant hand with its favourite gesture of sentimental over-emphasis—being captive, made her discourse almost quiet.

‘I know you have been wronged or wounded: treat me as a sister, suppose that I am your own sister and let me help you if I can. You think my behaviour odd: do you think I’m a funny girl? Ach! all the same we walk about and torment each other enough! I knew you were not drunk when you came in, I saw you were half-cracked about something—. Why not go back? Perhaps it would be better not to come on to this place—? Why not go back?’

He quickened his steps, and still gazing stolidly ahead, drew her by the hand.

‘I only should like you to feel I am your friend’ she continued.

‘Right!’ with promptness came through his bristling moustaches.

‘You’re afraid I—’ she looked at the ground, he ahead.

‘No’ he said. ‘But you shall know my secret! Why should not I avail myself of your sympathy? You must know that my “Frac”—useful to waiters, that is why I get so much for the poor suit—this “Frac” is at present
not
in my lodgings. No: not in my apartment—my Frac! That seems puzzling to you?—Have you happened to notice an imposing edifice in the Rue de Rennes, with a foot-soldier constantly on guard? Yes, in the Rue de Rennes. Well, he mounts guard, night and day, over my suit!’ Kreisler pulled his moustache with his free hand.—‘Why keep you in suspense?—my “Frac” is not on my back because—it is
in pawn!
It was popped last month to meet a small debt. Now, Fräulein,
that you are acquainted with the cause of my slight, rather wistful—
meditative
appearance, you will be able to sympathize adequately with me! My suffering, as you put it, is now no longer mysterious—I have given you the clue—the pawn-ticket, so to speak.’

She was crying a little, engrossed directly, now, in herself. He thought he should console her and remarked:

‘Those are the first tears ever shed over my “Frac.” But do not distress yourself Fräulein Lunken, the waiters have not yet got it!’

Kreisler did not distinguish Bertha from the others. At the beginning he was distrustful: if not ‘put up’ to doing this, she at least hailed from an objectionable quarter. Now he accepted her bonafides,
*
but ill-temperedly substituted complete boredom for mistrust. At the same time he would use this little episode to embellish his programme.

He had not been able to shake her off: here she still was: he was not even sure yet that he had had the best of it. His animosity for her friends vented itself upon her: he would anyhow give her what she deserved for her persistence. He took her hand again. Then suddenly he stopped, put his arm round her waist, and drew her forcibly against him.

Bertha succumbed to the instinct to ‘give up,’ even sententiously ‘destroy.’ She remembered her resolve—a double one of sacrifice—and pressed her lips, shaking and wettened, to his. This was not the way she had wished: but, God! what did it matter?
It mattered so little
,
ANYTHING
, and above all
she!
This was what she had wanted to do: and now she had done it!

The ‘resolve’ was a simple one. In her uncertain emotional manner she had been making up her mind to it ever since Tarr had left that afternoon. Tarr wished to be released; he did not want her, was embarrassed, not so much by their formal engagement as by his liking for her (this secured him to her, she thought she discerned). A stone hung round his neck, he fretted the whole time: it would always be so. Good. This she understood. The situation was plain. Then
she
would release him. But since it was not merely a question of
words
(of saying ‘we are no longer engaged’—she had already been very free with them) but of facts, she must bring these substantialities about. By putting herself in the most definite sense out of his reach—far more than if she should leave Paris—their continued relations must be made impossible. Somebody else—and a somebody else who was at the same time
nobody
, and who would evaporate and leave no trace the moment he had served her purpose—must be found. She must be able to stare pityingly and resignedly (but silently) if he were mentioned. Kreisler exactly filled this ticket. And he arose not too unnaturally.

This idea had been germinating while Tarr was still with her that morning. So, a profusion of self-sacrifice being offered her in the person of Kreisler, she behaved as she had done, with gusto. It was a clear and satisfactory action.

Should Tarr wish it undone
, it could easily be conjured: the smudge on Kreisler’s back was a guarantee, and did the trick in more ways than he had counted on. But in any case his whole personality was a perfect alibi for the heart, to her thinking. While at the back of her mind there always appeared that possibility, that, with the salt of jealousy, and a really big row, Tarr could perhaps be landed and secured even now?

Next moment (the point thus gained) she pushed Kreisler more or less gently away. It was like a stage-kiss: the needs of their respective rôles had been satisfied. He kept his hands on her biceps: she was accomplishing a soft withdrawal.