Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (33 page)

The real central figure all along, but purposely veiled, had been Tarr. He had been as really all-important (though to all appearance eliminated) as Kreisler had been of no importance, though propped up in the foreground. Sorbert at last could no longer be suppressed. He kept coming forward now in her mind. But his presence, too, was perplexing: she had grown so used to regarding him, though seeing him daily, as an uncertain, a departing figure, that now he had really gone that did not make much difference. So his proceedings, a carefully prepared anaesthesia for himself, had had their due effect, and drugged her too.

The bell rang. She stood up in one movement and stared towards the door. The bell rang a second and third time. How much persistence on the part of this visitor would draw her to the door? She did not know. Was it Elsa? She had lighted her lamp, and her visitor could therefore have seen that she was at home.

At length Bertha went to the door with affected alacrity, and opened it sharply. Kreisler was there. The opening of the door had been like the tearing of a characterless mask off a hideous and startling face.

There did not seem room for them where they were standing: like a great terrifying poster, cut out on the melodramatic stairway, he loomed in her distended eyes. She remained stone-still in front of him with a pinched expression, as though about to burst out crying. There was something deprecating in her paralysed gesture, like a child’s.

Caricatured and enlarged to her eyes, she wanted to laugh for a moment: the surprise was complete. Her mind formed his image rather like a person compelled to photograph a ghost. Kreisler! It was as though the world were made up of various animals, each of a different kind and physique even, and this were the animal Kreisler, whose name alone conjured up certain peculiar and alarming habits: a wild world, not of uniform men and women, but of very divergent and strangely-living animals—Kreisler, Liepmann, Tarr. This was not an apparition from the remote Past, but from a Past almost a Present, a half-hour old, far more startling: the too raw and too new colours of an image hardly digested, much less faded were his. Last seen she
had been still in the sphere of an intense agitation: his ominous and sudden reappearance, so hardly out of that crashing climax, had the effect of swallowing up the space and time in between. It was like the chilly return of a circling storm: she had taken it for granted that it depended on her to see him or not, that in short he was passive except when persistently approached. But here he was, this time, at last,
following
! ‘The Machine’ was following her!

H
E
took a step forward: her room was evidently his destination.

‘Schurke!’ Bertha exclaimed shrilly, at the same time retreating into the passage way. ‘Go!’

Arrived in the room, he did not seem to know what next to do. So far he had been evidently quite clear as to his purpose: he had in fact been experiencing the same necessity as she—he, to see his victim. To satisfy this impulse he decided that he would seek for pardon. So he had come.

A moment before she had felt that she
must
see him again, at once, before going further with her life: he, more vague but more energetic, had come, at the end of twenty minutes.

They now stood together, quite tongue-tied. He stood leaning on his cane, and staring in front of him. Bertha stood quite still, as she would sometimes do when a wasp entered the room, waiting to see if it would blunder about and then fly out again. He was dangerous, he had got in, he might in the same manner go off again in a minute or two.

He stood there without saying anything, just as though he had been sent for and it were for her to speak. She would have been inclined to send him back to his room, and
then
, perhaps, go to
him
: but she could not find anything to say to him now any more than before.

Constantly on the point of ‘throwing him out,’ in her energetic german idiom, it yet evidently would then be the same as before, nothing would be gained. Meantime she was intimidated by his unexplained presence. So she stood, anxious as to what he might have come there to do, gradually settling down into a ‘proud and silent indignation,’ behind which her curiosity became active.

Kreisler was unable to prevail upon himself to go through the stupid form of apology. He had got there, that would have to be sufficient.

In order to be able to do something, she attempted to represent to herself the
outrage
—the thing this gentleman had done to her. But she discovered she could not. She could not feel as normally she should that anything in particular had happened. It was nothing, it was a bagatelle! How could it be of any importance, she could not feel that it was anything but necessary.

She had wished to
free
Sorbert, all her actions derived from that. So what did Kreisler mean? At last his significance was as clear as daylight. He meant
always
and
everywhere
merely that
she could never see Tarr again!
Kreisler always could only mean one thing, that Tarr had gone out of her life.

She now faced him, her face illuminated with happy tragic resolve.—Supposing she had
given
herself to a man to compass this sacrifice? as it was, everything (except the hatefulness and violence of the act) had been spared her: and in informing Sorbert that there was something, now, between them, she would be nobly lying, and turning an involuntary act into a voluntary one.

Even with Kreisler now she could, too, be tragically forbearing.

‘Herr Kreisler I think I have waited long enough: will you please leave my room?’

He stirred gently like a heavy flower in a light current of air: but he turned towards her and said:

‘I don’t know what to say to you. Is there nothing I can do to make up to you—? I shall go and shoot myself, Fräulein—I cannot support the thought of what I have done!’

This dreadful man appeared to possess a genius for making things more difficult.

‘All I ask you is to go, you hear?’ she exclaimed angrily. ‘That will be the best thing you can do for me.’

‘Fräulein, I
can’t
, it’s quite impossible, do listen to me for a moment, I cannot even refer to what has happened without offence, Fräulein—I am mad—-mad—mad! You have shown yourself a good friend, heavens! that is the way I repay you! Were you anywhere but here and unprotected, there would be a man to answer to for this outrage!’
*

He drew himself up and placed his hand upon his breast.

‘I will be that man myself! I come to ask your permission!’

His appetite directed him to a more and more urgent, dramatic hypocrisy. His eye shone and he even smiled at the conclusion of his mock-eloquence.

Bertha was very dignified, she warmed to her new clemency as she proceeded:

‘Let us leave all that, if you please. It was my fault. You must have been mad, as you say, but if you wish to show yourself a gentleman now, the obvious thing is to go away, as I have said, and not to molest or remind me any further of what has passed. There is nothing more to say, is there? Go now, please!’

Kreisler flung himself upon his knees, and seized her hand. She received this with puzzled protestation, retreating, while he followed her upon his knees.

‘Fräulein you are an angel, you don’t know how much good you do me! You are
so
good, so good! There is nothing too much you can ever ask of Kreisler, I have done something I can never undo. It is as though you had saved my life. Enough! Excuse me! Otto Kreisler you can always count on! Adieu, Fräulein. Adieu! Adieu!’

Giving her hand a last hug, he sprang to his feet, and Bertha heard him next stormily descending the stairs: then, further away, she heard him passing rapidly down the Avenue.

A brilliant light of grateful confusion on all the emotions emanating from Kreisler had been afforded by this demonstration: the notion he had evoked in parting, that they had been doing something splendid together—a life-saving, a heroism—found a hospitable ground in her spirit. Taking one thing with another, things had been miraculously transformed. Her late depression now merged in a steadily growing exaltation.

T
ARR
had not gone to England. Still practising his self-indulgent system of easy stages, he had settled upon a spot a bus-ride distant from the buxom attraction: now he had a rival it would be doubly easy to keep away, so there was no need to go to England, nor anywhere else for that matter. For his present studies Paris was necessary: he must not be driven out of it. Behind the Place Clichy,
*
in what had been a
convent, he found a room big enough for a regiment, an enormous room. Its size appalled him once he was installed.

The insouciant, adventurous (Those who needed no preparation to live) the adventurous or rather the improvising hand-to-mouths, he did not admire, but felt he should imitate: with Tarr a new room had to be fitted into as painfully as a foot into some new and too elegant shoe. The things deposited on the floor, the door finally closed upon this new area to be devoted exclusively to himself, the sheerest discomfort began to undo him. To unpack and let loose upon the room his portmanteau’s squashed and dishevelled contents—brushes, photographs and books like a flock of birds flying to their respective places on dressing-table, mantelpiece, shelf or bibliothèque;
*
boxes and parcels creeping dog-like under beds and into corners—this initial disorder taxed his character to the breaking point. The sturdy optimism shown by these inanimate objects, the way they occupied stolidly and quickly room after room, made a most disagreeable impression. Then they were
packed-up
things, with the staleness of a former room about them, and charged with the memories of a depressing time of tearing up, inspecting and rejecting. These sensations were the usual indigestion of Reality, from which this fastidious soul suffered acutely, without ever recognizing the cause.

These preliminary discomforts were less than ever spared him here: he had cut his way to this decision through a bristling host of incertitudes. This large studio-room was worse than any desert: it had been built for something else, it would never be right. A largish whitewashed box was what he wanted, to pack himself into: this was the ceremonious carved chest of a former age. Even the awful size of his new easel was dwarfed: the high divan in the centre of its background appeared a toy. Once he had packed this place with consoling memories of work it would improve and might become quite perfect: he would see, time would tell. He started work at once, in fact. This was his sovereign cure for new rooms.

For the present he would not remain in this squalid cathedral a moment longer than he could help. A half-hour after entering into possession he left it tired out and swam out into the human streams of his new Quarter, so populous in contrast to the one he had left. The early lunch-breakfasts were started. In front of the Café near the Place Pigalle
*
that he chose there were a few clusters of men. The Spanish men dancers were coloured earth-objects, full of basking and
frisking instincts: the atmosphere of the harlot’s life went with them, along with spanish reasonableness and civility. The hideous ennui of large gim-crack shops and dusty public offices pervaded other groups of pink mostly dark-haired Frenchmen, drinking appetizers: they responded with their personalities on the Café terraces to the emptiness of the Boulevard.

Even before his drink had been brought, there was a familiar unwelcome face approaching. It was Berthe, a model (though bringing no reminder with her of the other ‘Berthe’ he knew), she was with an english painter. He knew the painter by sight. Berthe chose a table near him, with a nod. She meant to talk to him.

‘Do you wish me to present you?’ she said, looking towards her protector. ‘This is Mr. Tarr, Dick.’

It was done.

‘Why don’t you come and sit here?’ That too was done.

The young Englishman annoyed Tarr by pretending to be alarmed every time he was addressed. He had a wide-open, wondering eye, fixed, upon the world in timid serenity. This inoffensive eye did not appear at first to understand what you said and would roll a little with alarm. Then it seemed suddenly to be laughing. It had understood all the time! It had only been its art to surprise you, and its english unreadiness. This was a great big youngster, he wandered through life! Why is it, Tarr over and over again asked himself, that the young Latin wishes to impress you with his ability to look after himself, whereas idiocy of demeanour has always been considered stylish in England, both with old and young? The present specimen was six foot one, with a handsome Wellington beak
*
in front of his face. His wideawake was larger if anything than Hobson’s: innumerable minor Tennysons
*
had planted it upon his head, or bequeathed a desire for it to this ultimate Dick of long literary line. Dick’s family was allied to much Victorian talent: but, alas! thought Tarr, how much worse it is when the mind gets thin than when the blood loses its body, in merely aristocratic refinement: intellectual aristocracy in the fifth generation!—but Tarr gazed at the conclusive figure in front of him, words failing him for the moment. Words failed, too, for maintaining conversation with this dummy: how he hoped Berthe would bleed him of some of his Victorian cash and perhaps give him syphilis! He soon got up and left. He had found one place in his new home to give a wide berth to!

After dinner Tarr went to a neighbouring Music Hall, precariously amused, soothed by the din: but he eventually left with a headache. The strangeness of the streets, Cafés and places of entertainment depressed him deeply. Had it been an absolutely novel scene, he would have found stimulus in it. Tarr liked his room and some familiar streets with their traces of familiar men: where more energetic impulses suggested some truer solitude to him, he would never have sought it where a vestige of inanimate familiarity remained.

Unusually for him, Tarr felt alone, that was a nondescript, lowered and unreal state, for him.