Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (34 page)

Sleeping like a log, he woke his legs rather cramped and tired and not thoroughly rested. But as soon as he was up, work came quite easily. He got his paints out, and without beginning on his principal canvas, took up a new and smaller one, by way of diversion to avoid characteristically a frontal attack. Squaring up a drawing of three naked youths sniffing the air, with rather worried hellenic faces and heavy nether limbs, he stuck it on the wall with pins, and then drew his camp-easel up alongside it. He squared up his canvas upon the floor with a walking-stick, and fixed it upon the easel. A pencil had to be shaved continually for some time until its leaden point satisfied him.

By the end of the afternoon he had got a witty pastiche on the way suggestive of the work of the hellenizing world—it might have been the art of some malicious Syrian poking fun at the greek culture.
*
Two colours principally had been used, mixed in piles upon two palettes: the first was a smoky, bilious saffron, the second a pale transparent lead. The significance of the thing depended first upon the suggestions of the pulpy limbs, strained dancers’ attitudes and empty faces; secondly, the two colours, and the simple yet contorted curves.
*

The day’s work done, his depression again grasped him, like an immensely gloomy companion who had been idling impatiently while he worked: he promenaded this personality in ‘Montmartre-by-Night,’ without improving his character. Nausea glared at him from every object met: sex surged up and martyrized him, but he held it down rather than satisfy himself with the first-met, probably poxed.
*

The next day, même jeu. He sat for hours in the fatiguing evening among a score of relief ships or pleasure boats,
*
hesitating, but finally
rejecting relief and pleasure, mainly because of his besetting fear of the pox. For many minutes he would sit and look at a ‘fire-ship,’
*
calculating risks and clinical pros and cons: he peered into their mouths when they laughed and carefully noted if they touched spirits and with what freedom. But he paid for the drink and left. The next day it was the same thing.

Meantime his work made some progress: but to escape these persecutions he worked excessively. His eyes began to prick; and on the sixth day he woke up with a headache. All that day he was sick and unable to work.

The fascination of the omnibuses bound for the Rive Gauche
*
became almost irresistible: Tarr decided that he should have left Paris for a while. He had been granted the necessary resolution to break: he could have gone away—anywhere, even. Yet he had decided to go no farther than Montmartre, in the robust conceit of his young freedom.

He sat in his Cafés asking himself why he did not simply take the bus down the hill or hail a passing taxi: she was not of the least importance, so why make so much fuss as though she were.

His resentment against Bertha was quite active: there was plenty of room for the satisfaction of this impulse, and the equally strong one to see her again. The road back to the Quartier Berthe would probably have been taken immediately, but it needed as much of an effort, in the contrary direction, to get back, as it had to get away.

At last one evening he started. He went deliberately up to an omnibus ‘Clichy—St. Germain’ and took his seat under its roof. He was resolved to luxuriate in his weakness, now he had got started: he would do most thoroughly what he had been wanting to do for a week.

He would be treading the floor of Bertha’s absurd flat again now and basking in her banality: the terrible german middle-classishness would again hem him in. Also he would make it his business to find out what had been happening in his absence: perhaps even, he might condescend to hang about a little outside and attempt to surprise her in some manner. Then he would behave ‘en maître,’ there would be no further question of his having given her up and renounced his rights: he would behave just as though he had never gone away at all: he would claim his full rights with quite superfluous appeals to
her love. In brief, he would conduct himself without any dignity or honesty at all—he was on his mettle.

But once on the way in his bus, a wave of excitement overran him: what awaited him? She might really have given him up. She might not be there any more. But like Kreisler he found it difficult to think of her as fleeing, and not pursuing.

S
OME
days later, in the evening, Tarr was to be found in a strange place. Decidedly, his hosts could not have explained it, how he got there: he displayed no consciousness of the anomaly. For the second time—after dining with her and her following at Restaurant Séguin, he had returned to Fräulein Liepmann’s flat. As inexplicable as Kreisler’s former visits, these ones that Tarr began to make were not so perfectly unwelcome: also of course there was a glimmering of meaning in them for Bertha’s women friends. Two nights before he had presented himself at the door of the flat as though he had been an old and established visitor there, shaken hands and sat down. He had listened to their music, drunk their Mokka and gone away apparently satisfied. Did he regard his official standing with Bertha as a sanction, giving him a right to their hospitality? At all events it was a prerogative he had never exercised before, except on one or two occasions in her company, quite at the start.

Their explanation of this occurrence was that the young Englishman was in despair. His separation from Bertha (or her conduct with Kreisler) had hit him hard: he wished for mediation, or merely consolation.

Neither of these guesses was right: it was really something quite absurd: in reality Tarr was revisiting the glimpses of the moon, or the old, distant battlefields of love, in a tourist spirit, not without some preoccupations of a distinctly scientific or historical nature. It was rather as if he had been an official despatched by the Tarr Society to find where Tarr had slept, or taken his meals, with a view to putting up medallions or brass-plates: also for the collection of data for the Society’s archives. But ten days away from his love affair with Bertha, Tarr was now coming back to the old haunts and precincts of his infatuation: he was living it all over again in memory, the central and all the accessory figures still in exactly the same place. Quite suddenly, everything to do with ‘those days,’
as he thought of a week or two before (or what had ended officially then) had become of absorbing interest, though curiously remote. Bertha’s women friends were delightful landmarks: Tarr could not understand how it was he had not taken any interest in them before. They had so much the german savour of that life lived with Bertha about them.

But not only with them, but with Bertha herself he was likewise carrying on this mysterious retrospective life: he was so delighted, in fact, to be free of her, that he willingly poetized her personality and everything to do with it. It was, as a taste, on a par with the passion for the immediate past of the great Victorian Epoch.

On this second visit to Fräulein Liepmann’s Tarr met Anastasya Vasek. She, at least, was nothing to do with his souvenirs:
*
yet, not realizing her as an absolute newcomer at once, he accepted her as another proof of how delightful all these people in truth were. He patronized her as a modern aesthete would patronize an antima-cassar.

So far he had been a very silent guest. What would this enigma eventually say, when it decided to speak? the Liepmann circle wondered.

‘How is Bertha?’ they had asked him.

‘She has got a cold’ he had answered. It was a fact that she had caught a summer cold several days before. How strange! they thought. So he sees her still!

‘She hasn’t been to Flobert’s lately’ Renée Liepmann: said, ‘I’ve been so busy or I’d have gone round to see her: she’s not in bed is she?’

‘Oh no, she’s just got a slight summer cold, she’s a little hoarse that’s all. She’s very well otherwise’ Tarr answered.

Bertha disappears: Tarr turns up tranquilly in her place. Was he a substitute? It was most mysterious, and might turn out to be aggravating. The first flutter over, their traditional hostility for him reawakened: had he not always been an arrogant, eccentric and unpleasant person—
Homme égoïste. Homme sensuel!
in van Bencke’s famous words. So what was he up to?

On observing him talking with new liveliness, to which they were quite unaccustomed and which he never showed with them, with the beautiful Anastasya, their suspicions began to take form. They did not of course say: ‘
Perhaps getting to like Germans, and losing his first, he has come here to find another
.’ And yet the conclusions to which they eventually came could without much alteration have been reduced to
this simple statement. On his side, comfortable in his liberty, Tarr was still enjoying the satisfactions of slavery.

Tarr had been
Homme égoïste
so far it was certain, but
Homme sensuel
was an exaggeration. His sensual nature had remained undeveloped: his Bertha, if she had not been a joke, would not have satisfied him. Her milkmaid’s physique—the
oreiller de chair fraîche où on ne peut aimer
*
—had not succeeded in waking his senses: there was no more reality in their sex relations than in their other relations. But he had never wished for that sort of reality: his intellect had conspired to the effect that his senses never should be awakened, in that crude way: it was some such soothing milking process that nature wished him to have in place of passion, as he dimly understood.

The whole of the meaning of his attachment to stupidity became more clear and consistent as he persevered, indeed: his artist’s asceticism could not support anything more serious than such an elementary rival: when he was on heat, it turned his eyes away from the highest beauty, and deliberately it dulled the extremities of his senses, so that he had nothing but rudimentary inclinations left.

But perhaps that chapter was closing: in the interests of his animalism he was about to betray the artist in him: for he had of late been saying to himself that he must really endeavour to find a more suitable lady-companion, one he need not be too ashamed of. ‘Life’ would be given a chance.

Anastasya’s highly artistic beauty suggested an immediate solution.

Sorbert was now dragged out of his luxury of reminiscence without knowing it, he began discriminating between the Bertha enjoyment felt through the pungent german medium of her friends, and this novel artistic sensation. Yet as an intruder this novelty met with some resistance.

Tarr asked Fräulein Vasek from what part of Germany she came.

‘My parents are russian. I was born in Berlin and brought up in America. We live in Vienna’ she answered. ‘I am a typical Russian, therefore.’

So she accounted for her jarring on his maudlin german reveries.

‘Lots of russian families have settled latterly in Germany haven’t they?’ he asked.

‘Russians are still rather savage: the more bourgeois a place or thing is the more it attracts them. German watering places, musical centres
and so on, they like about as well as anything. Often they settle there if they can afford to.’

‘Do you regard yourself as a Russian or a German?’

‘Oh a Russian. I’m thoroughly russian.’

‘I’m glad of that’ said Tarr impulsively quite forgetting where he was and the nature of his occupation.

‘Don’t you like Germans then?’

‘Now you remind me of it I suppose I do: very much, in fact.’ He shook himself with self-reproach and gazed round benignly upon his hosts. ‘Else I shouldn’t be here,’ he added. ‘They’re such a nice, modest, assimilative race: I admire their sense of duty so much; they make perfect servants, they’re excellent mercenary troops.
*
I much prefer them to people of aristocratic or artistic race, who are apt to make a nuisance of themselves.’

‘I see you know them really à fond.’ She laughed in the direction of the Liepmann.

He made a deprecating gesture.

‘Not much. But they are an accessible and friendly people.’

‘You are English?’

‘Yes.’

He treated his hosts with a warm affability which sought to make up for past affronts: this was only partially successful, it appeared.

The two von Arnims came over and made an affectionate demonstration around and upon Anastasya. She got up, scattering them abruptly, and went over to the piano.

‘What a big brute!’ Tarr thought. ‘She would be just as good as Bertha to make a fuss of, though on the large side, and you get a respectable human being into the bargain!’ He was not convinced offhand that she would be as satisfactory. Let us see how it would be, he reflected, when it came to the point; this even more substantial machine, of repressed, moping senses, did attract certainly: to take it to pieces, bit by bit, and penetrate to its intimacy, might give a similar pleasure to undressing Bertha. But he fell into a reverie—it was really because she was so big that he was sceptical: women possessed of such an intense life as Anastasya always appeared on the verge of a dark spasm of unconsciousness: with their organism of fierce mechanical reactions their self-possession must be rather a bluff, and to have on your hands a blind force of those dimensions! He shuddered: for the moment he was saved.

Surrender to a woman was a sort of suicide for an artist. Nature, who never forgives an artist, would never allow
her
to forgive. So he has two enemies instead of one. With any ‘superior’ woman he had ever met, this feeling of being with a parvenu
*
never left him and Fräulein Vasek was not an exception. An artist, she would be a vulgar one.

On leaving, Tarr recognized that he no longer would come back to enjoy a diffused form of Bertha there: the prolongations of his Bertha period had passed its climax. On leaving Renée Liepmann’s, nevertheless, he went to the Café Toucy, some distance away, but with an object. To make his present frequentations quite complete, it only needed Kreisler. Otto was there, very much on his present visiting list. He visited him regularly at the Café Toucy, where he was constantly to be found.