Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (32 page)

Now, from within, his windows looked as suddenly harsh and familiar: unreasonable limitations gave its specific colour to thin glass.

The clock struck eight: like eight metallic glittering waves dashing discordantly together in a cavern, its strokes rushed up and down in Bertha’s head. She was leaning upon the mantelshelf, head sunk forward, with the action of a person about to be sick.

A moment before she had struggled up from the bed—the last vigour at her disposal being spent in getting away from that at all costs.

‘Oh Schwein! Schwein! Ich hass dich—ich hass dich! Schwein!
Pfui!
du hässlicher Mensch du!’
*

All the repulsion of her being, in a raw indecent heat, seemed turned into this tearful sonority, pumped up in spasms and hissing on her lips as she spat out the usual epithets for the occasion. The deepening sing-song of the ‘hässlicher Mensch!’ was accompanied by a disgusting sound like the brutal relishing and gobbling of food. The appetite of hatred spat and gobbled while it lasted. Her attitude was reminiscent of the way people are seen to stand, bent awkwardly forward, neck craned out, slowly wiping the dirt off their clothes, or spitting out the remains of their polluted drink, cursing the person who has victimized them, after the successful execution of some practical joke. This had been, too, a practical joke of the primitive and whimsical order, in its madness and inconsequence. But it was of a solemn and lonely kind, more like the tricks that desperate people play upon themselves: at its consummation there had been no chorus of intelligible laughter.—An uncontrolled satyrlike figure had suddenly leapt away from the battling Amazon—it was all over, the day was lost, she lay convulsed upon her back, her mouth smeared with blood: in a struggle that had been outrageous and extreme, rolling in each other’s arms, like confederates beneath the same ban of the world’s law, only calling to each other hoarsely under their breaths, Bertha and he had fought out the simple point, mysteriously fierce, like snarling animals. A joke too deep for laughter, parodying the phrase alienating sorrow and tears, had been achieved in this encounter.

A folded blouse lay upon the corner of Kreisler’s bleak trunk. Bertha’s arms and shoulders were bare, her hair hanging in wisps and strips: generally, a Salon picture
*
was the result. For purposes of work (he had asked her to sit for him) the blouse had been discarded. A jagged tear in her chemise over her right breast also seemed the doing of a Salon artist of facile and commercial invention: a heavy Susannalike breast
*
heaved uncontrollably.

Kreisler stood at the window. His eyes had an expressionless lazy stare, his lips were open. His conscious controls and the entire body were still spinning and stunned: his muscles teemed with actions not
finished, sharp, when the action finished: he was still swamped with violence. His sudden immobility, as he stood there, made the posthumous riot of movement rise to his brain like wine from a feeble body. Satisfaction however had damped and softened everything except this tingling prolongation of action.

Bertha’s hidden face was strained into an old woman’s bitter mask, inane tears soaking into it. A watchful fate appeared to be inventing morals to show her the folly of her perpetual romancing: this was its last cynical invention: what had occurred was senseless, there was not a visible pinshead of compensation. It never occurred to her that such things could be arrived at without traversing romance. But where oh where was the romance in this occurrence? The terrible
absence of romance
crushed her.

The famous embrace upon the evening-boulevard had been followed by a vast scaffolding of fable and ingenious explanation. What was this to be followed by? By nothing. Her heart sank: with the ultimate thud of nightmare it struck bottom. This was an end of all explanations. She recognized the logic of this act—more repulsive by far than its illogic. Oh what a fool she had been, for this was a dark insult—the
Shicksal
, the Shicksal had spat in her face.

A separate framework of time had been arranged for it to happen in, this last disrespectful attack. A moment before, it was quite impossible to say how long, Otto Kreisler, the swine-man standing at that window over there, had been tranquilly scratching away at his wretched drawing. In a pose improvised by her with quick ostentatious understanding—it represented the most captivating moment of a lady’s toilette, the hair down, a comb in her hand—she had sat a humorous indulgence in her eye for her not very skilful colleague: she had been partly undressed: the scene was significant.

That stage had been preceded (as she dizzily went backwards) by one in which she had been assailed by sudden anxieties: startled by his request to draw her ‘shoulders’—her bare shoulders, arms and probably breasts, she could not refuse her breasts—immediately she had repressed the unworthy prejudice by which she had been assailed: she had come to sit for him and her body of course was a most beautiful thing, whereas the mere idea that there was any danger was extremely repulsive where there was any question of a beautiful thing—
Pfui!
He was an artist (a bad one, poor chap, but professional!) they were two priests of Beauty.

‘Shall I strip?’ she had asked jauntily, cocking her big blue eye. ‘I have rather good legs.’

‘I don’t want your legs at the moment’ Kreisler had replied.

‘No? Oh. To the waist?’

‘Just the arms and breasts, I think.’

‘The arms and breasts? Good.’

While he was working they had not talked. Then he had put down his paper and chalk, stretched, and delivered himself of the unusual remark:

‘Your arms are like bananas!’

‘Oh!’

A shiver of anxiety had penetrated her at the word ‘bananas’: anybody who could regard her arms in that light was inartistic: she was distinctly glad that her ‘good’ legs had not been wanted. He was a modern artist of course and it was natural, perhaps inevitable, that he should compare her arms to bananas.

‘Oh are they like that? they are rather flat. I hope you’ve made a good drawing. May I see?’

The rationale of the exposure must be emphasized a little now that she was not posing and that she had scented a freshness in his manner. He had got up: before she quite knew what was happening he had caught hold of both her arms above the elbow, chafing them violently up and down, remarking:

‘You have pins and needles Fräulein?’ Fräulein used here had a disquieting sound: she drew herself away, with understanding, but upon the defence.

‘No thank you: now I will put my clothes on if you have finished. I’m a little cold. It’s fresh.’

He knew it was not fresh as she was perspiring; he smiled—a ‘dangerous,’ a very equivocal, smile.

They had eyed each other uncertainly for a moment, he with a flushed fixed extremely stupid smile. She was afraid to move away now—she fixed him absent-mindedly with knit brow, her large eye revolving slightly. He straddled close up to her, growing more male every moment, his eyes settling down ‘masterfully’ into her one heavily-focussed optic, and then he coughed.

‘Let me chafe your arm! I like doing it.’

‘No.—Thanks!’ she had replied sharply without moving.

She could see a gold-stopping and a gap on the right of his mouth as his lip curved up in the extension of his grin, become now an even
lurid danger-signal. His eye fell some inches and with dismay she observed its lid drooping with a suggestive promise of a ‘dangerous’ passion. His gaze reposed with obvious boldness upon her bust.

‘Your breasts are good!’ he almost shouted, shooting up a hand to finger one—she thrust his hand away with force and shouted back:

‘Yes: they are good. But I don’t wish you to touch me: you understand that?’

With the fury of a person violently awakened to some insult he had flung himself upon her: her tardy panting expostulation, defensive prowess, disappeared in the whirlpool towards which they had both with a strange deliberateness and yet aimlessness, been steering.

An iron curtain rushed down upon that tragedy: he was standing there at the window now as though to pretend that nothing had passed to his knowledge; she had been dreaming things, merely. The monotony and silence of the posing had prepared her for the strangeness now: that other extreme joined hands with this. She saw side by side and unconnected, the silent figure engaged in drawing her bust and the other one full of blindness and violence. Then there were two other figures, one getting up from the chair, yawning, and the present lazy one at the window—four in all, that she could not for some reason bring together, each in a complete compartment of time of its own. It would be impossible to make the present idle figure at the window interest itself in these others. The figure talked a little to fill in an interval; it had drawn: it had suddenly flung itself upon her and done something disgusting: and now it was standing idly by the window, becalmed, and completely cut off from its raging self of the recent occurrence. It could do all these things: it appeared to be in a series of precipitate states: in this it resembled a switchback, rising slowly, in a steady innocent way, to the top of an incline, and then plunging suddenly down the other side with a catastrophic rush. The fury of her animal hostility did not survive this phase for long.

She had come there, got what she did not expect, and must now go away again, it was simple enough: to Kreisler there was nothing more to be said. There never had been anything to say to him: he was a mad beast as everyone had always been right in remarking.

Now she had to take her departure as though nothing had happened. It was nothing actually, nothing in fact had happened: what did it matter what became of her? The body was of little importance: what was the good (seeing what she knew and everything) of storming against this person?

She had done up her hair; her hat was once more on her head: she went towards the door, her face really haggard, the inevitable consciousness of drama providing the customary unnecessary emphasis. Kreisler turned round, went towards the door also, unlocked it, let her pass without saying anything, his eyes severely fixed upon the floor at his feet, and, waiting a moment, closed it indifferently again with a slight bang. She was let out as a workman would have been, who had been there to mend a shutter or rectify a bolt.

B
ERTHA
made her way home in a roundabout fashion. She did not court at that moment a meeting with anyone she knew. The streets were loftily ignorant of her small affairs. Thank God for bricks and mortar, for strangers, for the indifference of nature and its great extent! Ha! ha! with fat dejected back guffawed the shattered Bertha, the importance of our human actions! Is it more than the kissing of the bricks?

As she tramped on she experienced anger and astonishment at finding herself walking away in this matter-of-fact manner. That the customary street scene would absolutely not mix with the obsessional nature of her late experience perplexed her.

Nature no doubt was secret enough: but not to tell this experience of hers to
anybody
would be shutting her in with Kreisler, somehow for good: she would then never be able to escape the contamination of that abominable little attic of his. Was it not one of those things that in some form one should be able to tell? She had a growing wish to make it known at once somewhere or other.

The moral of the late event had had its chance of influencing her radically but it had not succeeded: nothing
radically
was changed: she began dreaming immediately of sacrifices, of the proper presentation of this harsh event: yet, spasmodically, disgust with Kreisler reappeared.
Kreisler by doing this had made an absolute finishing with Kreisler perhaps impossible?
That was an evil notion that she shook roughly off. No! Of Otto Kreisler—
enough
! No more of him, at least.
Pfui!
Of
that
no more!

There was nobody now on her side in any sense whatever, or upon whose side she could range herself. She was a sort of Kreisler
now. Kreisler himself had taken his place beside her women friends, Tarr and so on, in a disgusting and dumbfounding way: the list of people who preyed on her mind and pushed her to all these ill-assorted actions. Kreisler she had set up as a ‘cause’ against her friends: in a manner peculiar to himself he had betrayed her and placed himself in the ranks of her critics. He had certainly carried out in the fullest fashion their estimate of him. So Kreisler had acted satanically on behalf of her friends.

She had seen Elsa and her sister twice that week. The others had not been near her. Now she could hardly go on talking about Kreisler. In examining likelihoods of the immediate future, she concluded that she would have to break still more with her women friends to make up for having to retire from her Kreisler positions. To counteract their satisfaction she must accentuate her independence, even to insult and contempt.

The recent outrage took up too much space: it seemed to require the other factors in the situation to come back and be referred to it. But this was not admissible: getting closed in with Kreisler—a survival, perhaps, of her vivid fear of a little time before, when he had locked the door, and she knew that resisting him would be useless—must be at all costs avoided. Everything pointed to the necessity of a confidante.

Whom could she tell? Clara? Madame Vannier?

Once home, she lay down and cried for some time. She did this in a businesslike way: she lay down, put her face into a pillow and bellowed softly.

She now began to regret a lost opportunity: should she have left Kreisler so undramatically?
Something
should have been done: there would have been the normal relief. Dramatic revenge even occurred to her: she thought of going back at once to his room: life could not get started quite clearly again until something had been done against him, or in some way where he was. She rolled over and cried on the other side.

Kreisler grew in importance: he had been a shadowy and unimportant nobody. Of this he had shown no consciousness. Rather dazed and machine-like, Bertha had treated him as she had found him: suddenly, without any direct articulateness, he had revenged himself as a machine might do, in a nightmare of violent action. At a leap he was in the rigid foreground of her life: in an immense clashing wink he
had drawn attention to himself, but for such a comparatively short time, and the next moment there he had stood, abstracted and baffling as before: once more it was difficult to realize he was there, he was the machine again, a bone-headed nobody.