Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (38 page)

‘More of a drudge than a mother—we really get very little from France except tidiness.’

‘I expect you are ungrateful.’

‘Perhaps so. But I cannot get over a dislike for latin facilities. Suarès finds a northern rhetoric of ideas in Ibsen,
*
for instance, exactly similar to the word-rhetoric of the South: but in latin countries you have a democracy of vitality, the best things of the earth are in everybody’s mouth and nerves.
The artist has to go and find them in the crowd
. You can’t have “freedom” both ways and I prefer the
artist
to be free, and the crowd not to be “artists”—I don’t know if you understand what I mean? What does all our emotional talk about the wonderful artist-nation, etc., amount to?—we exclaim and point because we find thirty-five million petits-maîtres,
*
each individually possessing
very little taste, really, living together and prettifying their towns and themselves. Imagine England an immense garden city, on Letchworth lines (that is the name of a model Fabian township near London),
*
or Germany (it almost has become that) a huge reform-dressed,
*
bestatued State. Every individual Frenchman has the trashiest taste possible: you are more astonished when you come across a severe artist in France than elsewhere: for his vitality is hypnotically beset by an ocean of cheap Salon artistry: his best instinct is to become rather aggressively harsh and simple. The reason that a great artist arouses more fury in France than in England is not because the French are
more interested in Art
—they are less interested: it is because they are all “artistic” and all artists—little ones. In their case it is professional jealousy.’

‘But what difference does the attitude of the crowd make to the artist?’

‘Well, we were talking about Paris, which is the creation of the crowd. The man really thinking in these gardens to-day (a rare event) the man thinking on the quays of Amsterdam three centuries ago, think much the same thoughts. The thought is one thing, the form another: the artist’s work I believe is nowhere so unsafe as in the hands of an “artistic” public. As to living in Paris, Paris is very intelligent: but no friendship is a substitute for the blood-tie; and intelligence is no substitute for the response that can only come from the narrower recognition of your kind.’

‘Do you think blood matters?’

‘I have been talking about an average: what I said would not apply to works of very personal genius: country is left behind by that. Intelligence also.’

‘Don’t you think that work of very personal genius often
has
a country?’

‘I don’t believe it has.’

‘May it not break through accidents of birth and reach perfect conditions somewhere in a different time or place?’

‘I suppose you could find a country or a time for almost
anything
: but I am sure the
best
has in reality no Time and no Country—that is why it accepts without fuss any country or time for what they are worth, and is “up-to-date,” usually.’

‘But is the best work always up-to-date?’

‘It always has that appearance, its manners are perfect.’

‘I am not so sure that a personal code is not as good as the current code. The most effectual men have always been those whose notions were diametrically opposed to those of their time’ she said carefully.

‘I don’t think that is so, except in so far as all effectual men are always the enemies of every time. Any opinion of their contemporaries that they adopt they support with the uncanny authority of a plea from a hostile camp. All activity on the part of a good mind has the stimulus of a paradox. To produce is the sacrifice of genius.’

They seemed to have an exotic grace to him as they promenaded their sinuous healthy intellects in this elegant landscape: there was no other pair of people who could talk like that on those terraces. They were both of them barbarians, head and shoulders taller than the polished stock around; they were highly strung and graceful. They were out of place.

‘Your philosophy reminds me of Jean-Jacques’ she said.

‘Does it? How is that I wonder?’

‘Well, your hostility to a tidy rabble, then what you say about an uncultivated bed to build on brings to mind the doctrine of the natural man.
*
You want a human landscape similar to Jean-Jacque’s rocks and waterfalls.’

‘I see what you mean: but I think you are mistaken about that: what I think is really the exact opposite of what Jean-Jacques thought.—He preached wild nature and unspoilt man: his was propaganda for instinct as against intellect. I don’t say that at all: it is a question of expediency and the temporal and physical limitations of our human state. For a maximum human fineness much should be left crude and unformed: for instance, crudity in an individual’s composition is necessary for him to be able to create. There is no more absolute value in stupidity and formlessness than there is in dung, but they are necessary. The conditions of creation and of life disgust me—the birth of a work of art is as dirty as that of a baby. But there is no alternative to creation except the second-rate. Of course if you like the second-rate, as so many people do, there’s nothing more to be said.’

‘So you would discourage virtue, self-sacrifice and graceful behaviour?’

‘No, praise them very much: also praise deceit, lechery and panic.’

‘But they cancel each other.’

‘No, whatever a man does, praise him: in that way you will be acting as the artist does: if you are not an artist, you will not act in that way.
An artist should be impartial like a god. Our classifications are inartistic.’

‘Rousseau again—?’

‘If you really want to saddle me with him, I will help you. My passion for art has made me fond of chaos. It is the artist’s fate almost always to be exiled among the slaves: he gets his sensibility blunted.’

‘He becomes in fact less of an artist?’

‘He’s hard-boiled.’

‘If that is so, wouldn’t it be better to be something else?’

‘No I think it’s about the best thing to be.’

‘With women he is also apt to be undiscriminating.’

‘For that he is notorious at all times!’

‘I think that is a pity: that is no doubt because I am a woman, and am conscious of not being a slave.’

He looked at her pleasantly, the first time he had turned to her since they had been talking, and replied:

‘But such women as you are condemned to find themselves surrounded by slaves!’

Her revolving hips and thudding skirts carried her forward with the orchestral majesty of an ocean-going ship. He suddenly became conscious of the monotonous racket. At that moment the drums began beating to warn everybody of the closing of the gates. They had dinner in a Bouillon
*
near the Seine. They parted about ten o’clock.

F
OR
the first time since his ‘return’ Tarr found no Kreisler at the Café Toucy. The waiter told him that Kreisler had not been there at all that evening. Tarr reconsidered his responsibilities. He could not return to Montmartre without first informing himself of Kreisler’s whereabouts and state of mind. The ‘obstacle’ had been eluded: he must get back into position again.

To Bertha’s he had no intention going if he could help it. A couple of hours at tea-time was what he had constituted as his day’s ‘amount’ of her company. Kreisler’s own room would be better, so he turned in that direction. There was a light—the window had been pointed out to him on several occasions by Otto. This perhaps was sufficient, Tarr felt: he might now go home, having located him. Since he was
there on second thoughts he decided to go up and make sure. Striking matches as he went, he plodded up the dark staircase. Arrived at the top floor, he was uncertain at which door to knock. He chose one with a light beneath it.

In a moment someone called out ‘Who is it?’ Recognizing the voice, Tarr answered, and the door opened slowly. Kreisler was standing there in his shirt sleeves, glasses on and a brush in his hand.

‘Ah come in’ he said.

Tarr sat down and Kreisler went on brushing his hair. When he had finished he put the brush down quickly, turned round and pointing to the floor, said, in a voice suggesting that that was the first of several questions:

‘Why have you come
here
?’

Tarr at once recognized that he had gone a step too far. Otto felt no doubt that his keeper had come in search of his charge, and to find out why he had absented himself from the Café.

‘Why have you come here?’ Kreisler asked again, in an even tone, pointing steadily with his forefinger to the centre of the floor.

‘Only to see you of course. I thought perhaps you weren’t well.’

‘Ah, so! I want you, my dear english friend, now that you are here, to explain yourself a little. Why do you honour me with so much of your company?’

‘Is my company disagreeable to you?’

‘I wish to know, sir, why I have so much of it!’ The Korps
student
was coming to the top: his voice had risen and the wind of his breath appeared to be making his moustaches whistle.

‘I, of course, have reasons, besides the charm of your society, for seeking you out.’

Tarr was sitting stretched on one of Kreisler’s two chairs looking up frowningly. He was annoyed at having let himself in for this interview. Kreisler stood in front of him without any expression in particular, his voice rather less guttural than usual, even a little shrill. Tarr felt ill at ease at this sudden breath of storm, he kept still with difficulty.

‘You have reasons? You have reasons! Heavens! Outside! Quick! Out! Out!’

There was no doubt this time that it was in earnest: he was intended rapidly to depart. Kreisler was pointing to the door. His cold grin was slightly on his face again, and an appearance of his hair having receded
on his forehead and his ears gone close against his head warned Tarr definitely where he was. He got up. For a moment he stood in a discouraged way, as though trying to remember something.

‘Will you tell me what on earth’s the matter with you to-night?’ he asked.

‘Yes! I don’t want to be followed about by an underhand swine like you any longer! By what devil’s impudence did you come here to-night? For a week I’ve had you in the Café: what did you want with me? If you wanted your girl back, why hadn’t you the courage to say so? I saw you with another lady to-night. I’m not going to have you hovering and fawning around me. Be careful I don’t come and pull your nose when I see you with that other lady! You hear me? Be careful!’

‘Which?’

‘Oh
that
! You’re welcome to that little tart—go and stick your nose in it, I give you leave!’

‘I recommend you to hold your tongue! I’ve heard enough, you understand, enough! Where her senses were when she picked up a bird like you—.’ Tarr’s german hesitated. He had stepped forward with an air as though he might strike Kreisler.

‘Heraus, Schwein!’ shouted Kreisler, in a sort of incredulous drawling crescendo, shooting his hand towards the door and urging his body like the cox of a boat:
*
like a sheep-dog he appeared to be collecting Tarr together and urging him out.

Tarr stood staring at him.

‘What—.’

‘Heraus! Out! Quicker! Quicker! Out!’

His last word dropped like a plummet to the deepest tone his throat was capable of: it was so absolutely final that the grace given, even after it had been uttered, for this hateful visitor to remove himself, was a source of astonishment to Tarr. Should he maintain his position it could only be for a limited time, since after all he had no right where he was: sooner or later he would have to go and make his exit unless he established himself there and made it his home, henceforth: a change of lodging he did not contemplate. In such cases the room even must seem on its owner’s side, and to be vomiting forth the intruder: the instinct of ownership makes it impossible for any but the most indelicate to resist a feeling of hesitation before the idea of resistance in another man’s shell!

He stood for a few seconds in a tumultuous hesitation, when he saw Kreisler run across the room, bend forward and dive his arm down behind his box. He watched with uncomfortable curiosity this new move, as one might watch a surgeon’s haste at the crisis of an operation, searching for some necessary instrument, mislaid for the moment. He stepped towards the door: the wish not to ‘obey’ or to seem to turn tail either, had alone kept him where he was. He had just reached the door when Kreisler, with a bound, was back from his box, flourishing an old dog-whip in his hand.

‘Ah you go? Look at this!’ He cracked the whip once or twice. ‘This is what I keep for hounds like you! Crack!’ He cracked it again, in rather an inexperienced way. He frowned as though it had been some invention he were showing off, but which would not quite work at the critical moment.

‘If you wish to see me again you can always find me here. You won’t get off so easily next time!’ He cracked the whip smartly: then he slammed-to the door.

Tarr could imagine him throwing the whip down in a corner of the room and then going on with his undressing.

When Kreisler had jumped to the doorway Tarr had stepped out with a half-defensive, half-threatening gesture and then gone forward with strained slowness, lighting a match at the head of the stairs.

The thing that had chiefly struck him in the Kreisler under this new aspect was a pettiness in his movements and behaviour, a nimbleness where perhaps he would have expected more stiffness and heroics; the clown-like gibing form his anger took, a frigid disagreeable slyness and irony, a juvenile quickness and coldness.

With the part he had played in this scene Tarr was extremely dissatisfied. First of all, he felt he had withdrawn too quickly at the appearance of the whip, although he had, in fact, commenced his withdrawal before it had appeared. Then, he argued, he should have stopped at the appearance of this instrument of disgrace. To stop and fight with Kreisler, what objection was there to that, he asked himself? It was to take Kreisler too seriously? But what less serious than fighting? He had saved himself from something ridiculous, merely to find himself outside Kreisler’s door with a feeling of primitive dissatisfaction.