Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (31 page)

Elsa had admitted that Fräulein Vasek was responsible for the statement ‘
I
was the cause of Kreisler’s behaviour,’ etc. That was one of those things (seeing there was no evidence to confirm or even suggest it) which at once place a woman on a peculiar pinnacle of bad taste, incomprehensibleness and horridness. Bertha’s personal estimation of Kreisler received a complex fillip.
*

This ridiculous version—coming after her version and superseding it with her cats of friends was, why, a sort of
rival version
. And in such exquisite taste! Such pretentiousness should discredit it in advance, it should with decent people.

Bertha took some minutes to digest Elsa’s news: she flushed and frowned: the more she thought of this rival version of Fräulein Vasek’s the more repulsive it appeared. It was a startlingly novel view, it gave proof of a perfect immodesty. It charged hers full tilt. For three days now this story of hers had been her great asset, she had staked her little all upon it. Now some one had coolly set up shop next door, to
sell an article in which she, and she alone, had specialized. Here was an unexpected, gratuitous,
new
inventor of Versions come along: and what a version, to start with!

Bertha’s version had been a vital matter: Fräulein Vasek’s was a matter of vanity clearly. The contempt of the workman, sweating for a living, for the amateur, possessed her.

But there was a graver aspect to the version of this poaching Venus. In discrediting Bertha’s suggested account of how things had happened, it attacked indirectly her action, proceeding, ostensibly, from those notions. Her meeting Kreisler at present depended for its reasonableness upon the ‘hunger’ theory; or, if that should fail, something equally touching and primitive. Were she forced to accept, as Elsa readily did, the
snub-by-Anastasya
theory, with its tale of ridiculous reprisals, further dealings with Kreisler would show up in a bare and ugly light. Her past conduct also would have its primitive slur renewed. She saw all this immediately: her defiance had been delivered with great gusto—‘I am meeting Herr Kreisler to-morrow!’ The shine had soon been taken off that.

The weak point in Anastasya’s calm and contradictory version was the rank immodesty of the form it took.

Bertha’s obstinacy awoke: in a twinkling her partisanship of Kreisler was confirmed. She had a direct interest now in their meeting: she was most curious to hear what he had to say as to his alleged attempt in Fräulein Vasek’s direction.

‘Well, I’m going to Renée’s now to fetch her for dinner. Are you coming?’ Elsa said, getting up.

‘No. I’m going to dine here to-night’ and Bertha accompanied her to the door, humming an especially ‘gay’ air, with the most off-hand of expressions to leave in no doubt the true meaning of the tune.

P
EOPLE
appear with a startling suddenness sometimes out of the fog of Time and Space: so Kreisler appeared—such an apparition! Bertha did not visualize her countryman very readily: and the next day she was surprised when she saw him below her windows. He stared up at the house with eager speculation: he examined the house and studio opposite. Behind the curtains Bertha stood with the
emotions of an ambushed sharp-shooter; she felt on her face the blankness of the house wall, all her body was as unresponsive as a brick: the visitor beneath appeared almost to be looking at her face, magnified and exposed instead of at the walls of the house and its windows.

Then it appeared to her that it was
he
, the enemy, getting in: she wished to stop him there, before he came any farther: he was a bandit, a house-breaker, after all a dangerous violent person.

Yet in the processes of his uncertainty he looked so innocuous and distant, for the moment. His first visit: there he was, so far, a stranger. Why should these little obstacles of strangeness—which gate to enter, which bell to ring—be taken away from this particular individual? He should remain ‘stranger’ for her, where he came from:
she
did not want him any nearer to her. But he had burrowed his way through, was at the bell already, and would soon be at herself: he would be at her! He would be breaking into her: she did not wish him inside, he was well enough where he was.
She
found here, in her room, was very different from
she
found outside, in restaurant or street: the clothing of this décor was a nakedness: she revolted immobile and alarmed.

For a moment she struggled up from the obstinate dream, made of artificial but tenacious sentiments, shaped by ‘contretemps’
*
of all sorts which had been accumulating like a snow-ball ever since her last interview with Tarr. Still somewhat rapt in this interview she rolled in its nightmarish, continually metamorphosed substance, through Space: where would it land her—this electric, directionless, vital affair? The ‘Indifference’ and the ‘Difference,’ they had floated her, successfully, away in
some
direction. Again the bell rang: then the knocker, the little copper gargoyle, began to thunder. She could see him, almost, through the wall, standing phlegmatic and erect. They had not spoken yet: but they had been some minutes ‘in touch.’

Perhaps this visitor was after all
mad
? Elsa, with her warnings for her, came into her mind: however much she resisted the facts, there was very little reason for this meeting. It was now unnecessary. It had been exploded actually by Anastasya. She was going through with something that no longer meant anything at all.

As the bell rang a third time she walked to the door. Kreisler was a little haggard, different from the day before. He had expected to be asked in: instead, hardly saying anything, she came out on the narrow
landing and closed the door behind her with a bang. Surprised, he felt for the first stair with his foot: it was eight in the evening, very dark on the staircase and he stumbled several times. Bertha felt she
could
not say the simplest word to him. She had the impression that some lawyer’s clerk had come to fetch her for a tragic interview; and she, having been sitting fully dressed for unnecessary hours in advance, was now urging him silently and violently before her, following.

That afternoon she had received a second letter from Sorbert.

‘M
Y DEAR
B
ERTHA
.—Excuse me for the quatsch
*
I wrote the other day. Simply, I think we had better say, finally, that we will try and get used to not seeing each other, and give up our idea of marriage. Do you agree with me? As you will see, I am still here, in Paris. I am going to England this afternoon.—Yours ever,

S
ORBETT
.’

On the receipt of this letter—as on the former occasion a little—she first of all behaved as she would have done had Sorbert been there: she acted silent resignation, and ‘went about her work as usual,’ for the benefit of the letter, in the absence of its author. The reply, written an hour or so before Kreisler arrived, had been an exaggerated falling in with the view expressed.—‘Of course, Sorbert: far better that we should part! far far better!’ and so forth. But soon this letter of his began to molest her. It even threatened her mannerisms. She was just going to take up a book and read, when, as though something had claimed her attention, she put it down: she got up, her head turned back over her shoulder, then suddenly flung herself down upon the sofa as though it had been rocks and she plunging down on to them from a high cliff. She sobbed until she had tired herself out.

So Kreisler and she now walked up the street as though compelled by some very strange circumstances, only, to be in each other’s company. He appeared depressed, he too had come under the spell of some meaningless duty: his punctuality even suggested fatigued and senseless waiting, careful timing. His temporary destination reached, he delivered himself up indifferently into her hands. He remarked that it was hot: she did not answer. They said nothing but walked on away from her house: neither seemed to require any explanation for these peculiar manners.

Before they got to the Café de l’Observatoire Kreisler attempted to make up for his lapse into strangeness: he discovered, however, that he had not been alone, and desisted.

Bertha looked in at the door, at the clock inside, as they took up their place on the quieter ‘terrasse.’ She asked herself how long she would stop. A half-hour, she thought.

‘W
HO
is that, then—Anass—what?’ Kreisler asked, after some moments of gradually changing silence, when Miss Vasek began to be mentioned by Bertha. He was stretched out in massive abandon and seemed interested in nothing in the world.

This meeting had been the only event of the day for him: at first he had looked forward to it a little, but as it approached he had grown fidgety, he began counting the time, it became a burden. What useless errand was he on now, he pondered, and could not make out how he had come to let himself in for this at all. It was a mystery. He would not have gone. But the appointment being made, and fixed in his mind, and he having felt it in the distance all day, he knew if he did
not
go that he would be still more uncomfortable. In the empty evening he would have been at the mercy of this thing-not-done, like an itch.

Bertha, for her part, had now recovered: Kreisler’s complete abstraction and indifference were a soothing atmosphere. He seemed to know as little why he was there as she, or less. He was plainly only waiting for her to disappear again. As to there being anything compromising in this meeting, that could be dismissed on every count: and he looked very unlikely to suggest another. Elsa’s description of his conduct with women came to mind, as she sat beside this aloof and lounging statue.
This
was the man who had caused her fresh misgivings! When a dog or cow has passed a trembling child without any signs of doing it mischief, the child sometimes is inclined to step after it and put forth a caressing hand. She felt almost drawn to this inoffensive person.

Kreisler had created a situation not unlike that of the Dance-night: there they sat, she pressing him a little now, he politely apathetic. It seemed for all the world as though Bertha had run after him
somewhere and forced a meeting upon him, to which he had grudgingly consented. Bertha was back in what would always be for him her characteristic rôle. And so now she appeared still to be following him up, to the discomfort of both, for some unexplained reason.

‘No I don’t know who you mean’ he said, replying to descriptions of Anastasya. ‘A tall girl you say? No, I can’t bring to mind a tall girl, answering to that description.’

He liked fingering over listlessly the thought of Anastasya, but as a stranger: the subject gave him a little more interest in Bertha, just as, for her, it had a similar effect in his favour. Forthwith she was quite convinced that Fräulein Vasek had been guilty of the most offensive, the most self-complacent, mistake.
Pfui!

Bertha now had achieved a simplification or synopsis of the whole matter as follows:

Anastasya Vasek, alleged bastard of a Grand Duke, a beautiful and challengingly original Modern Girl,
*
arrives, bespangled and replete with childish self-confidence, upon the scene of her (Bertha’s) simple little life—her plain blunt womanhood contrasted with this pretentious super-sex: this audacious interloper had discovered her kissing, and being kissed in return by an absurd individual in the middle of the street. Bertha had disengaged herself rapidly from this compromising embrace, and had explained that she had been behaving in that way solely because he had captured her pity through his miserable and half-starved appearance; that, even then, he had assaulted her, and she had been found in that delicate situation entirely independent of her own will. Anastasya’s lip had curled, and she had received these explanations in silence. Then, upon their nervous repetition, she had negligently observed, with the perfect effrontery of the minx that she was—‘You were no doubt being hugged by Herr Kreisler in the middle of the pavement as you admit and as we all were able to observe, the motives the ordinary ones. You might have waited till—but that’s your own business. On the other hand, the reason of his devastated appearance this evening and of all the rest of his goings-on, was
this
. He had the colossal neck
*
to wish to make up to me: I sent him about his business, and he “manifested” in the way you know.’

Reducing all the confused material of this affair to such essential proportions, Bertha saw clearly the essence of her action. Definite withdrawal from the circle of her friends had now become essential. It was being accomplished with as much style as possible: Kreisler
provided the style. She cast a glance upon this at her silent abstracted companion, and smiled. The smile was not ill-natured.

It was her first instinct now to wallow still more in this unbecoming situation. She desired even to be seen with Kreisler. The meanness, the strangeness, the
déchéance
, in consorting with this sorry bird, must be heightened into poetry and thickened with luscious fiction.
They had driven her to this
—
they were driving her!
Very well—she was weary, she was
lasse
(she drooped beside Otto as she pondered), she would satisfy them. She would satisfy Sorbert—it was what he wanted, was it not? She would be faithful to his wishes, his last wishes.

Kreisler was the central, irreducible element in this mental pie: he was the egg-cup that kept up the crust. She tried to interest herself in Kreisler and satisfy Tarr, her friends, the entire universe, more thoroughly.

D
ESTINY
has more power over the superstitious: they attract constantly bright fortunes and disasters within their circle. Destiny had laid its trap in the unconscious Kreisler. It had fixed it with powerful violent springs.—Eight days later (dating from the Observatoire meeting) it snapped down upon Bertha.

Kreisler’s windows had been incandescent with steady saffron rays coming over the roofs of the Quarter: it was a record conflagration of
der Gang
. His small shell of a room had breasted them with pretence of antique adventure: the old boundless yellow lights streamed from their abstract Eldorado:
*
they were a Gulf Stream
*
for our little patch of a world, making a people as quiet as the English. Men once more were invited to be the motes in the sunbeam and to play in the sleepy surf upon the edge of remoteness.