Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (29 page)

‘Na ja also, lass mich in Ruhe denn!
*
Attend to your cooking!’ she shouted as Bertha began her customary playful greetings.
Bertha always was conscious of her noise, of shallowness and worldliness: this shrewd, slow, monosyllabic bookworm brought out all that was worst in her: she wanted to caper round it, inviting it to cumbrous play, like a small flippant mongrel around a mastiff. She was much more
femme
,
*
she said, but Clara did not regard this as an attainment, she knew. Being
femme
had taken up so much of her energy and life that she could not expect to be so complete in other ways as Clara however, Clara would occasionally show impatience at Bertha’s skittishness: a gruff man-like impatience entering grimly into the man-part, but claiming at the same time its prerogatives.

‘Clara, Soler has told me to send a picture to the Salon d’Automne.’
*

‘Oh!’ Clara was not impressed by success: the large insensitive poster-landscapes of her companion had been removed from her walls. She was preparing her own breakfast and jostled Bertha, usurping more than half the table. Bertha delighted, retorted with trills of shrill indignation. She recaptured the positions lost by her plates. Her breakfast ready she carried it into her room, pretending to be offended with Clara.

Breakfast over she wrote to Tarr. The letter was written quite easily and directly: the convention of her passion was so triumphantly fixed that there was no scratching out or hesitation. ‘I feel so far away from you’—there was nothing more to be said; as it had been said often before, it came promptly to the pen. All the feeling that could find expression was fluent large and assured, like the handwriting. It never questioned the adequacy of these conventional forms.

‘Let Englishmen thank their stars—the good stars of the Northmen and early seamen—that they have such stammering tongues and such a fierce horror of grandiloquence. They are still true in their passion because they are afraid, like children.’

This passage, from an article in the
English Review
,
*
Tarr had shown to Bertha with great relish. She relished it too, as the national antithesis, she knew, was very interesting to this schoolboy. She agreed that Englishmen were very strong and silent.

On the receipt of Tarr’s letter she had felt, to begin with, very indignant and depressed. That he should have had the strength to go away without coming to see her was disquieting and unexpected. So her letter began with a complaint about that. He had at last gone off,
with the first likelihood of permanence since they had known each other. Despite her long preparation, and although she had been the immediate cause of it, she was mortified at her success.

The Kreisler episode had been for her own private edification: she would free Sorbert by an act, in a sort of impalpable way: it had not been destined for publicity. The fact of the women surprising Kreisler and herself had destroyed the perspective. Tarr was not only in the right this time, but he had witnesses to confirm the justice of his action. To end nobly, on her own initiative, had been the idea; to make a last sacrifice to Sorbert in leaving him irrevocably, as she had sacrificed her feelings all along in allowing their engagement to be indefinitely protracted: and now, instead, everything had been turned into questionable meanness: she got no credit anywhere for her noble action.

She wrote her letter quite easily, as usual, but she did not, most unusually, believe in its efficacy. She even wrote it a trifle
more
easily than usual for that reason: its fluency seemed too fluent even to her. She rose a little startled from the table, and for some minutes held it in her hand, about to tear it up. But instead she sealed up the letter, sat down and addressed it.

In the drawer where she was putting Sorbert’s latest letter away were some old ones. A letter of the year before she took out and read. With its two sentences it was more cruel and had more meaning than the one she had just received:—

‘Put off that little Beaver woman. Let’s be alone.’

It was a note she had received on the eve of an expedition to a village near Paris. She had promised to take a girl down with them. She was to show her the place, its hotel and the sketchable woods at the back. The girl had seen the place in her slashing bold and buxom canvases and so they had come to talk about it. The Beaver girl had not been taken: Sorbert and she had spent the night at an inn on the outskirts of the forest. They had come back in the train next day without speaking, having quarrelled in the inn. Wild regret for him suddenly struck her a series of sharp blows: she started crying again, quickly and vehemently.

The whole morning her methodic dusting and arranging depressed her. What was she doing it for? At four o’clock in the afternoon, as often happened, she was still in her dressing-gown and had not yet had lunch.

The
femme de ménage
came at eight every morning, doing Clara’s rooms first. Bertha was in the habit of talking about Sorbert with Madame Vannier.

‘Mademoiselle est triste?’ this good woman said, noticing her dejection. ‘C’est encore Monsieur Sorbert qui vous a fait du chagrin?’

‘Oui madame, il est un salaud!’ Bertha replied, half crying.

‘Oh, il ne faut pas dire ça, mademoiselle: comment, il est un salaud?’
*
Madame Vannier worked silently with the quiet thud of felt slippers. Work was not without dignity for her. Bertha was playing at life. She admired and liked this handsome open-handed young german child of Fortune—she was clean, and educated. Monsieur Tarr was too young for her, though: also too dirty.

At two Madame Vannier took the letter to the post. She remarked that the address was London, England. She gave her head a slight toss.

B
ERTHA
’
S
friends looked for her elsewhere, nowadays, than at her rooms: Tarr was always likely to be found there in impolite possession. She made them come as often as she could; her coquetry as regards her carefully arranged rooms demanded numerous visitors: so it now suffered in the midst of her lonely tastefulness.

Since the dance none of her women friends had come to see her. She had spent an hour or two with them at the Restaurant however. At the dance itself she had kept rather apart: dazed, after a shock, and needing self-collection, was the line indicated by her sinewy but mournful movements. Her account of things could not of course be blurted out, it had to grow out of circumstances. Indeed as long a time as possible must be allowed to elapse before she referred to it directly. It must almost seem as though she were going to say nothing; impressive silence—nothing. Their minds, accustomed to her silence, would, when it came, find the explanation all the more impressive.

At a Café after the dance her account of the thing flowered grudgingly. They were as yet at the stage of exclamations.

‘He came there on purpose to create a disturbance. Whatever for, I wonder!’

‘I expect it was the case of Fräulein Fuchs over again.’ (Kreisler had, on a former occasion, paid his court to a lady of this name, with resounding unsuccess.)

‘If I’d have known what was going on I’d have dealt with him!’ said one of the men.

‘Didn’t you say he told a pack of lies, Renée—?’

Fräulein Liepmann had been sitting, her eyes fixed upon a tram near by, watching the people crawling in and out. The exclamations of her friends did not, it appeared, interest her. It would have been no doubt scandalous if Kreisler had not been execrated: but anything they could say was inadequate when measured with the ‘gemeine alte Sau.’ The terrific corroding of that epithet (known only to her) made her sulky and impatient.

Applied to in this way directly about the lies, she turned to the others slowly and said:—

‘Ecoutez—listen!’ leaning towards the greater number of them (seeming to say “it’s really simple enough, as simple as it is disagreeable: I am going to settle the question for you: let us then discuss it no more”). Her lips were a little white with fatigue, her eyes heavy with disgust at it all: fighting these things she however came to their assistance.

‘Listen: we none of us know anything about that man’; this was an unfortunate beginning for Bertha, as thoughts, if not eyes, would leap in her direction, and Fräulein Liepmann even paused as though about to qualify this: ‘We none of us, I think, want to know anything about him: therefore why this idiot—the last sort of beer-drinking brute—treated us to his bestial and—and—despicable foolery—?’

Fräulein Liepmann shrugged her shoulders with contemptuous indifference.

‘I assure you it is not one of the things that interest me to know
why
such brutes behave like that at certain times. I don’t see any mystery, for my part. Where is the mystery? It seems odd to you does it that H
ERR
K
REISLER
should be an offensive brute?’ she eyes them a moment. ‘To me
NOT
!’

‘We do him far too much honour by discussing him, that’s certain’ said one of them. But Fräulein Liepmann had something further to say.

‘When one is attacked, one does not spend one’s time in considering
why
one is attacked, but in defending oneself. I am just fresh from the “souillures de ce brute.”
*
—If you knew the words he had addressed to me!’

Eckhart was getting very red, his eyes were shining, and he was moving rhythmically in his chair something like a steadily rising sea.

‘Where does he live, Fräulein?’ he asked.

‘
Nein, Eckhart
: one could not allow anybody to embroil themselves with that useless brute.’ The ‘nein, Eckhart’ had been drawled fondly at once, as though that contingency had been weighed. It implied as well an ‘of course’ for his red and dutiful face. ‘I myself, if I meet him anywhere, shall deal with him better than you could: this is one of the occasions for a woman—.’

Bertha’s story had come uncomfortably and difficultly to flower. No one seemed to want to hear it. She wished she had not waited so long. But, the matter put in the light given it by Fräulein Liepmann, she must not delay: she was, there was no question about it, in some sense responsible for Kreisler. It was her duty
to explain
him: but now Fräulein Liepmann had put an embargo on explanations: there were to be no more explanations.

The subject was drawing perilously near the point where it would be dropped: Fräulein Liepmann was summing up, and doing the final offices of the law over the condemned and already unspeakable Kreisler. No time was to be lost. The breaking in now involved inevitable conflict of a sort with Fräulein Liepmann: for she was going to ‘say a word for Kreisler’
after
Fräulein Liepmann’s address: (how much better it would have been before!).

So at this point, looking up from the table, Bertha (listened to with uncomfortable unanimity) began. She was smiling with an affectedly hesitating, timid and drooping face, the neighbourhood of her eyes suffused slightly with blood, her lips purring the words a little:—

‘Renée, I feel that I ought to say something—.’

Renée Liepmann turned towards her composedly.

‘I had not meant to say anything—about what happened to me, that is: I, as a matter of fact, have something particularly to complain of. But I had nothing to say about it. Only, since you are all discussing it, I thought you might not quite understand if I didn’t—. I don’t think, Renée, that Herr Kreisler was quite in his right mind this evening. I may be wrong, but I must say, Renée, he doesn’t
strike me as méchant: I don’t think he was really accountable for his actions. Of course, I know no more about him than you do: this evening was the first time I have ever exchanged more than a dozen words with him in my life and then should not have done so except for—.’

This was said in the sing-song of quick parenthesis, eyebrows lifted, and with little gestures of the hand.

‘He caught hold of me—like this’ she made a violent snatching gesture all of a sudden at Fräulein Liepmann, who did not like this attempt at intimidation and withdrew to a safe distance out of reach. ‘He was kissing me when you came up’ turning to one or two of the others. This was said with dramatic pointedness, the ‘kissing’ spat with a sententious brutality and a luscious disparting of the lips.

‘We couldn’t make out
whatever
was happening—’ one of them began.

‘When you came up I felt quite dazed: I didn’t feel that it was a man kissing me. He was mad, I’m sure he was. It was like being mauled by a brute!’ She shuddered, with rather rolling eyes. ‘He
was
a brute to-night—it was a brute we had with us to-night: he didn’t know what he was doing.’

They were all silent. Her view only differed from the official one in supposing that he was not
always
a brute. She had drawn up short: their silence became conscious and septic. They appeared as though they had not expected her to stop speaking, and were like people surprised naked, with no time to cover themselves.

‘I think he’s in great difficulties—it’s money or something: but all I know for certain is that he was
really
in need of somebody—.’

‘But what makes you think, Bertha—’ one of the girls said, hesitating.

‘I let him in at Renée’s; he looked very peculiar to me, didn’t you notice? I noticed him first when I let him in.’

Anastasya Vasek was sitting with them: she had not joined in the Kreisler-palaver. With the air of a newcomer in some community, participating for the first time at one of their debates on a local and stock subject, she followed their remarks with a polite attention: Bertha she examined as a person would some particularly eloquent chief airing his views at a clan-meeting.

‘I felt he was
really
in need of some hand to help him, he seemed just like a child.’ She sugared her gaze with the maternal illumination. ‘The poor man was ill as well—I thought he would drop—he can’t have eaten anything all day: I am sure he hasn’t. He was walking slower and slower—that’s how it was we were so far behind—he could hardly totter along—when he had smoked a cigarette he went quicker—but he was light-headed all the time. I should have realized, I know—! It was my fault—what happened: at least—.’