Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (30 page)

The hungry touch had been an improvisation: she had then almost said ‘until he had bought a packet of cigarettes’ but saw just in time that that would draw the retort ‘if he had the money to buy cigarettes, why not food?’

‘You make him quite a romantic figure: I’m afraid he’s been working on your feelings my dear girl! I saw no signs of an empty stomach myself’ said Fräulein van Bencke.

‘He refreshed himself extensively at the dance in any case! You can put your mind at rest as to his present emptiness’ Renée Liepmann said.

The subject languished. The Liepmann had taken her stand on boredom: she was committed to the theory of the unworthiness of this discussion. Bertha’s speeches provoked no further comment: it was as if she had been putting in her little bit of abuse of the common enemy.

The certain lowering of the vitality of the party when she came on the scene with her story offended Bertha, there should have been noise and movement. It was not quite the lifelessness of scepticism: but it bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the manner of people listening to speeches they do not believe. She persevered, but her intervention had killed the topic and they merely waited until she had ended her war-dance upon its corpse.

As to Tarr and the references to Iscariot in his letter, he had fallen in with the red-headed member of the party by chance: learning that he had not seen Bertha since the night of the ball with roguish pleasantness this girl had remarked that ‘he’d better look after her better, why hadn’t he come to the dance with his fiancée? Oh là là! the goings-on, the goings-on!’ Tarr had not understood.

Bertha had had an adventure, he then was told;
all
of them, for that matter, had had an adventure, but
especially Bertha
.—Oh,
Bertha would tell him all about it. But, upon Tarr insisting, Bertha’s adventure, in substance, had been told.

Now retrospectively, her friends insisted upon passing by the two remarkably unanimous-looking forms on the Boulevard, in stony silence: she shouted to them and kissed Kreisler loudly; it was no use! They refused to take any notice. She sulked and kept to herself day after day. She would make a change in her life: she might go back to Germany; she might go to another quarter of Paris. To go on with her daily life as though nothing had happened was out of the question. A series of demonstrations were called for, of a fairly violent order.

Her burly little clock struck four. Hurrying on reform-clothes,
*
she went out to buy lunch. The dairy lay almost next door to Vallet’s restaurant. Crossing the road in front of the restaurant she caught sight of Kreisler’s steadily marching figure approaching. First she side-stepped and half turned: but the shop would be reached before they met, so she went on, with quickening step and downcast eye. But her eye, covertly observing him (calculating distances and speeds) saw him hesitate—evidently having just caught sight of
her
—and then turn down a side street nearly beside the dairy for which she was making. There was something depressing about this action of Kreisler’s. Even the pariahs fled from her. How alone she was in this world,
mon Dieu
!

B
UT
Herr Kreisler, on his side, had been only a few paces from his door when he caught sight of Bertha. As his changed route would necessitate a good deal of tiresome circling to bring him back practically to the spot from which he had started, he right-about-faced in a minute or two, the danger past, as he thought. The result was, that, as Bertha left the shop, there was Kreisler, approaching again, with the same fatal, martial monotony, almost in the same place as before.

She was greeted affably, as though to say ‘Caught! both of us!’ He was under the impression, however, that she had lain in wait for him: he was so accustomed to think of her in that character. Had she been in full flight he would have imagined that she was only decoying him: she was a woman of that sort—one of the stickers!

‘How do you do? I’ve just been buying my lunch.’

‘So late?’

‘I thought you’d left Paris!’ She had no information of this sort, but was inclined to rebuke him for
not
leaving Paris.

‘I? Who told you that I should like to know! I shall never leave Paris; at least—.’

There was a sudden wealth of enigmatic significance in this, said lightly—the heartbreak note—the colossal innuendo did not escape her, sensible to such nuances.

‘How are our fair friends?’ asked he.

‘Our—? Why Fräulein Liepmann I suppose you mean and—. Oh I haven’t seen them since the other night.’

‘Indeed! Not since the other night—?’

She made her silence swarm with unuttered thoughts, like a glassy shoal with innumerable fish: her eyes, even, stared and darted about, glassily.

It was very difficult, now she had stopped, to get away: the part she had adopted with her friends, of Otto’s champion, seemed to have imposed itself on her. Her protégé could not be hurried away from exactly: the fact that he did not this time hurry away from her, even, had its weight.

His more brutal instincts had latterly remained within close call: even quite novel appetites had put in an appearance. The fact that she was a pretty girl did its work on a rather recalcitrant subject.

Surely for a quiet ordinary existence pleasant little distractions were suitable? The time had to be filled up somehow.

Without any anxiety about it, he began to talk to Bertha with the idea of a subsequent meeting. Like other women, she no doubt had a—she no doubt had all—had what all—. He had avoided her not to be reminded of disquieting events: but she turned, as he stood in front of her, into a bit of comfort. What he particularly needed was a certain quietude, enlivened by healthy appetites.

‘I was cracked the other night, quite potty!
*
I’m not often in that state’ he said. Bertha’s innuendoes had to receive recognition.

‘I’m glad to hear that’ she answered.

To have been kissed was after all to have been kissed: Bertha threw a little fascination into her attitude—she flexed one knee, juiced her lips a little and cocked a serious eye into non-committal distances.

‘I’m afraid I was rather rude to Fräulein Liepmann before leaving: did she speak about it?’

‘I think you were rude to everybody!’

‘Ah well—.’

‘I must be going. My lunch—.’

‘Oh I’m so sorry, have I kept you from your lunch? I was so glad to meet you—under more normal conditions! I had some things I wished to say to you. Ahem!’ He gave the stiff little cough of his student days. ‘I wonder if you would procure me the extreme pleasure of seeing you again?’

Bertha looked at him in astonishment, taking in this sensational request. See Kreisler again! How—when—why? The result as regards the Liepmann circle! This pleaded for Kreisler: it would be carrying out her story: this insistence upon it would destroy that subtle advantage, now possessed by her friends. Presented with rather the same compromising spectacle again they would be somewhat nonplussed! All the arguments in favour of seeing more of Kreisler marshalled themselves with rapidity. In deliberately exposing herself to criticism, she would be effacing, in some sense, the extreme
involuntariness
of the Boulevard incident. It was in a jump of defiance or ‘carelessness,’ her mind’s eye on those cattish troublesome friends, that she exclaimed:—

‘Yes, of course, if you wish it! Why not!’

‘You like Cafés? There’s such a good concert—.’

‘Good! Very well!’ she answered very quickly, in her trenchant tone, imparting all sorts of unnecessary meanings to her simple acceptance: she had answered as men accept a bet or the Bretons clinch a bargain in the fist. ‘Certainly! Fine! Cafés! Schön. Thanks a thousand times. Good-bye!
Auf wiedersehen!
’

Kreisler was leisurely: he met her vehemence with sleepy amusement.

‘I should then like to go with you to the Café de l’Observatoire to-morrow evening!’ He stood smiling down at her ‘faraway’ frowning ox-eye. ‘When can I meet you?’

‘Will you come and fetch me at my house?’

Shivers went down her back as she said it. She was now thoroughly committed. She was delighted, or rather excited. Each fresh step was a thrill. But the details had not been reckoned on: of course they would have to
meet
: Kreisler was like a physician conducting a little, unpleasant, operation, in an ironical, unhurrying way.

‘Well it’s understood: we shall see each other tomorrow’ he said. With a smile of half raillery at her rather upset expression, he left
her upon his invariable stiff bow, his hat held up in the air, derisively high. So much fuss about a little thing, such obstinacy in doing it! What was it after all? Meeting him!—his smiling was only natural. She showed with too little disguise the hazardous quality, as she considered it, of this consent: she would wish him to feel the largeness of the motive that prompted her, and for him to participate too in the certain horror of meeting himself! Well well well! What a goose! A plump and pleasing goose, however! Yes! He marched away with the rather derisive smile still upon his face.

B
ACK
in her rooms, Bertha examined, over her lunch, with stupefaction, the things she had been up to—her conversations, farewell letters, appointments, and all the rest. All in a few hours! What a strange proceeding though! Was she quite responsible for her actions?

She was prevented from brooding over Sorbert’s going. Of Kreisler she thought very little: her women friends held the centre of the stage. As she imagined their response to the new situations she was creating, she saw them staring open-mouthed at her supersession: Tarr to Kreisler: from bad to worse.

The key to her programme was a cumulative obstinacy: a person has made some slip in grammar, say: he makes it again on purpose so that his first involuntary speech may appear deliberate.

She resumed her customary pottering, dawdling from one domestic task to another. Fräulein Elsa von Arnim, one of the Dresden sisters, interrupted her. At the knock she thought of Tarr and Kreisler simultaneously, welded in one, and her heart beat in double-time. Elsa had a cold reception.

‘Isn’t it hot? It’s simply grilling out in the street. I had to go into the gardens and get under the trees. I left the studio quite early.’

Fräulein von Arnim sat down, giving her hat a toss and squinting up at it.

These dirty anaemic sisters had a sort of soiled, insignificant handsomeness. They explained themselves, roughly, by describing in a cold-blooded lazy way their life at home. A stepmother, prodigiously smart, well-to-do, neglecting them; sent first to one place, then another (now Paris) to be out of the way. Yet the stepmother supplies them superfluously from her superfluity.

They talked about themselves as twin parcels, usually on the way from one place to another, expensively posted here and there sealed and registered, the Royal Mail, but without real destination. They enjoyed nothing at all; unless it was the society of Fräulein Liepmann. Their stepmother neglected them, she was very smart and well-off, she gave them plenty of money, and despatched them hither and thither, always out of the way.

‘Oh! Bertha, I didn’t know your dear “Sorbert” was going to England.’—
Deiner Sorbert
was the bantering formula for Tarr. Bertha was incessantly talking about him—to them, to the charwoman, to the greengrocer opposite, to everybody she met: so Tarr was for them her possession, her Tarr.

‘Didn’t you? Oh yes he’s gone.’

‘You’ve not quarrelled—with your Sorbert?’

‘What’s that to do with you, my dear?’ Bertha gave a brief, indecent laugh. ‘By the way, I’ve just met Herr Kreisler. He’s going to take me to a wine-restaurant tomorrow night, isn’t it lovely!’

‘Wine-restaurant with—! Well! I like your taste!’

‘What’s the matter with Herr Kreisler? You were all friendly enough with him a week ago.’

Elsa looked at her with a cold-blooded scrutiny, puffing cigarette smoke towards her as though in an attempt to reach her with its impalpable scented cloud.

‘But he’s a vicious brute, but above all a brute, simply. Besides, there are other reasons for avoiding Herr Kreisler: you know the reason of his behaviour the other night? It was, it appears, because Anastasya Vasek snubbed him. He was nearly the same when the Fuchs wouldn’t take an interest in him. He can’t leave women alone: he follows them about and annoys them, and then becomes—well, as you saw him the other night—when he’s shaken off. He is impossible. He is a really hopeless brute who should be given as wide a berth as possible.’

‘Where did you hear all that! I don’t think that Fräulein Vasek’s story is true for a moment, I am certain—.’

‘Well, he once was like that with me. Yes think of it! Even with me. He began hanging around, and—. You know the story of his engagement?’

‘What engagement?’

‘He was engaged to a girl and she married his father instead of marrying him.’

Bertha struggled a moment a little baffled.

‘Well what is there in that? I don’t see anything in that. You are all so unfair—that’s my complaint. His fiancée married! I’ve known several cases—.’

‘Yes. That
by itself
—.’

Elsa was quite undisturbed. She was talking to a child. She offered it advice but it must take it or leave it. In a few moments Bertha returned to the charge.

‘Did Fräulein Vasek give that particular explanation of Herr Kreisler’s behaviour?’

‘No. We put two and two together. She did say something, yes, she did as a matter of fact say that she thought she had been the cause of Kreisler’s behaviour.’

‘How funny! I can’t stand that girl! she’s so unnatural, she’s such a
poseuse
! Don’t you think, Elsa? But what a funny thing to say! You can depend on it that
that
, anyhow, is not the explanation.’

‘No?’

‘Why no! Certainly not!’

‘Sorbert has a rival perhaps?’

This remark was met in staring silence. It was an unnecessary intrusion of something as inapropos as unmanageable: it deserved no reply, it would get none from her. She had no intention of conceding the light tone required.