Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (42 page)

‘Khudin, will you act for me—you understand—assist Jan in his preparations for the final scene?’

The angry voices of his friends on the one hand threatened the approaching Bitzenko, on the other hand reproached their friend.

‘Louis! Remain where you are! take no notice of this clown!’

‘Send for the manager! Waiter! Are these people to be allowed to disturb us! This is a great scandal!’

Soltyk, flung suddenly into a state of shrill excitement, was exclaiming:

‘This is too boring—it is past belief, really quite past belief! Will you
settle
with those persons—Jan will you please go over and
settle
—arrange what you please, so that we can be left in
peace
?’

Bitzenko stopped a few yards from the table and signalled to Jan. Jan rose and, in the midst of cries and protests hurled after him by his compatriots, went over to Bitzenko, his face lighted by what was an internal grin, as it were—an exultant tightening in the regions out of sight where all his passions had their existence for himself alone.

Tarr was astonished at the rapid tragic trend of these farcical negotiations.

‘How angry that man must be to do that’ he thought. But he had not been smacked the evening before; yet he remembered he had been passably angry.

T
HE
new partnership of Kreisler and Bitzenko was one purely of action: but a miraculous solidarity resulted upon the spot and they operated as one man. Their schemes and energies flew direct from mind to mind, without the need for words; Bitzenko with his own hand had brushed the back of Kreisler’s coat; on tiptoe doing this he looked the picture of an amiable child: they were together there in Kreisler’s room before they started like two little schoolboys dressing up in preparation for some escapade.

When he had entered the Sports Aquatiques, Kreisler had been anxious: his eyes had picked out Soltyk in a delicate flurry, he had been afraid that he might escape him. Soltyk looked so securely bedded in life—he wanted to wrench him out: he was not at all bad-tempered at the moment: he would have extracted him quite ‘painlessly’ if required: but bleeding and from the roots he must come out! (Br-r-rr. The berserker rage.)

He was quite quiet and well-behaved; above all things, the
well-behaved!
The mood he had happened on for this occasion was a virulent snobbery.

The
duel
theme suggested this. With eagerness he recalled that he was a german gentleman, with a
university education
, who had never worked,
a member of an honourable family!
—he remembered each detail socially to his advantage: he had arbitrarily revived even the title of Freiherr that, it was rumoured in his family, his ancestors had borne. With Bitzenko he had referred to himself as ‘the Freiherr Otto Kreisler.’

The snob that emerged was, in this obsession of disused and disappearing life, the wild assertion of vitality: it was the clamour for universal recognition that life and the beloved self were still there: he was almost dead (he had promised his father his body for next month and must be punctual), but people already had begun treading upon him and treating him as a corpse: as to fighting with a man who was practically dead to all intents and purposes, one mass of worms—a worm, in short—that was not to be expected of anybody, not even with the poorest sense of values. So he became a violent snob.

At the opening of the late offensive, Kreisler had fixed his eyes upon Soltyk from his table with alert provocation. He had practised these manners in the
Luitpold
*
for many a year: he knew the proper way to
fix
. As to the Poles, a gentle flame of social security and ease danced in their eyes and gestures: he was out in the dark, they were in a lighted room! He wished their fathers’ affairs would deteriorate and their fortunes fall to pieces, that their watches could be stolen, and their tick attacked by insidious reports: as he watched them he felt more and more of an outcast. He saw himself the little official in a german provincial town that his father’s letter foreshadowed: or a clerk in a
Reisebureau
, looking up the times of the trains for Paris or the Tyrol. One or two of them pointed him out: his
fixing
was an
operation that could not escape notice: it was a contemptuous laugh of Soltyk’s that brought him to his feet.

As he was slapping his enemy he woke up out of his nightmare: he was like a sleeper having the first inkling of his solitude when he is woken by the violent climax of his dream, still surrounded by tenacious influences: but had anyone struck him then, the blow would have had as little effect as a blow aimed at a waking man by a phantom of his sleep. The noise around him was a receding accompaniment.

Next Soltyk’s quietness developed hypnotic tendencies: the sweet white of the face made him sick. To overcome this he stepped forward again to strike the dummy a further blow, and then it moved suddenly. As he raised his hand his glasses almost jumped off his nose and at that point he was seized by the waiters. Hurried out on to the pavement he could still see, at the bottom of a huge placid mirror just inside the swing-door, the wriggling backs of the band of Poles. Drawing out his card-case he had handed the waiter a visiting-card. The waiter at first refused it. Then he took it shrugging his shoulders and shuffled off with it. Kreisler saw in the mirror the tearing up of his card. Fury once more, not so much because it was a new slight as that he feared his only hope, Soltyk, might slip through his fingers.

The worry of the hour or so in which Bitzenko was negotiating told on him so much that when at last his emissary announced that an arrangement had been come to, in the sense desired by him, he questioned him incredulously.

Bitzenko accompanied Kreisler to the door of his lodgings, and promising to return within half an hour, disappeared with nervous speed. Tarr, having, as he had stipulated, left the critical phase over, Bitzenko first went in search of a friend to serve as Second. The man upon whom his choice had fallen was already in bed: at once, half asleep, without preparation of any sort, he consented to do what was asked of him.

‘Will you be a Second in a duel to-morrow morning at half-past six?’

‘Yes.’

‘At half-past six?’

‘Yes’: and after a minute or two, ‘is it you?’

‘No, a German a friend of mine.’

‘All right.’

‘You will have to get up at five.’

Bitzenko’s next move was to go to his rooms, put a gently ticking little clock, with an enormous alarum on the top, under his arm, and so return to Otto Kreisler. He informed his friend of these last arrangements made in his interests: he suggested it would be better if he put him up for the night, to save time in the morning. He attached himself to Kreisler’s person: until it were deposited in the large cemetery near by or else departed from the Gare du Nord in a deal box for burial in Germany, it should not leave him. In the event of victory and he being no longer responsible for it, it would of course disappear as best it could. The possible subsequent conflict with the police was not without charm for Bitzenko: he regarded the police force, its functions and existence, as a pretext for adventure. But that was another matter, distinct from this.

The light was blown out. Bitzenko curled himself up upon the floor: he insisted. Kreisler must be fresh in the morning and do him justice. The Russian could hear the bed shaking for some time, he pricked his ears but could not make head or tail of it. Kreisler was trembling violently: a sort of exultation at the thought of his success caused this nervous convulsion.

At about half-past four in the morning Kreisler was dreaming of Vokt and a pact he had made with him in his sleep never to divulge some secret, which there was never any possibility of his doing in any case, as he had completely forgotten what it was. His whole being was shattered by a dreadful explosion. With his eyes suddenly wide open he saw the little clock quivering upon the mantelpiece beneath its large alarum. When it had stopped Kreisler could hardly believe his ears, as though this sound had been going to accompany life, for that day at least, as a destructive and terrifying feature. Then he saw the Russian, already on foot, his white and hairy little body had apparently emerged from the scratch bed simultaneously with the detonation of his clock, as though it were a mechanism set for the same hour.

They both dressed without a word. Kreisler wrote a short letter to his father, entrusting it to his Second. His last few francs were to be spent on the taxi that would take them to the place of meeting, outside the fortifications.
*

They found the other Second sound asleep: he was more or less dressed by Bitzenko. They set out in their taxi to the rendezvous by way of the Bois.
*

The chilly and unusual air of the early morning, the empty streets and shuttered houses, destroyed all feeling of reality for Kreisler. Had the duel been a thing to fear, it would have had an opposite effect. His errand did not appear as an inflexible reality either, following upon events that there was no taking back: it was a caprice they were pursuing, as though, for instance, they had woken up in the early morning and decided to go fishing: they were carrying it out with a dogged persistency, with which whims are often served.

He kept his mind away from Soltyk. He seemed a very long way off, it would be fatiguing for the mind to go in search of him.

Nature, with immense fugue,
*
had pushed Kreisler to a certain course: this feat accomplished, nature had departed, assured that his life would go steadily on in the bed gauged for it by this upheaval. But she had left the Russian with him to see that all was carried out according to her wishes. Kreisler’s german nature that craved discipline, a course marked out, had got more even than it asked for: it had been presented with a mimic Fate.

Bitzenko took his pleasure morosely. The calm and assurance of the evening before had given place to a brooding humour: he was only restored to a silent and intense animation on hearing his ‘Browning’
*
speak. This he produced somewhere in the Bois, and insisted upon his principal having a little practice, as they had plenty of time to spare. This was a very imprudent step, it might draw attention to their movements, but Bitzenko overruled their objections. Kreisler proved an excellent shot. Then the Russian himself, with impassible face, emptied a couple of chambers into a tree trunk. He put his ‘Browning’ back into his pocket hastily, after this, as though startled at his own self-indulgence.

A piece of waste land, on the edge of a wood, well hidden on all sides, had been chosen for the duel. The enemy was not on the ground when they drove up. Kreisler was quite passive; he was in good hands. Until this was all over he had nothing to worry about.

Bitzenko’s friend was a tall, powerfully built young russian painter, who, with his great bow legs, would take up some straggling and extravagantly twisted pose of the body, and remain immobile for minutes together, with an air of ridiculous detachment. This combination of a tortured, restless attitude, and at the same time the statuesque tendency, suggested something like a contemplative contortionist.
A mouth of almost anguished attention associated with little calm indifferent eyes, produced similar results in the face.

Fresh compartment—The duel became for him as he stood on the damp grass conventional: it was a duel like another. He was seeking reparation by arms: had he not been libelled and outraged? ‘A beautiful woman’ was at the bottom of it. Life had no value for him!
Tant pis
for the other man who had been foolhardy enough to cross his path! His coat collar turned up he looked sternly towards the road, his moustaches blowing a little in the wind. He asked Bitzenko for a cigarette. That gentleman did not smoke, but the other Russian produced a khaki cigarette
*
with a long mouthpiece. He struck a light. As Kreisler lit his cigarette, his hand resting against the other’s, a strange feeling shot through him at the contact of this flesh. He moistened his lips and spat out a piece of the mouthpiece he had bitten through.

The hour arranged came round and there was still no sign of the other party. The possibility of a hitch in the proceedings dawned upon Kreisler. Personal animosity for Soltyk revived. He looked towards his companions, alone there on the ground of the encounter: they were an unsatisfactory pair. These Russians! he reproached himself for having chosen Bitzenko in this affair.

Bitzenko, on the other hand, was deep in thought: he was rehearsing his part of Second. The duel in which he had blinded his adversary was a figment of his boyish brain, confided with tears in his voice one evening to a friend. His only genuine claim to be a man of action was that, in a perfect disguise, he had assisted the peasants to set fire to his own manor-house during the revolution of 1906,
*
for the fun of the thing and in an access of revolutionary sentiment. Later on he had assisted the police with information in the investigation of the affair, also anonymously. All this he kept to himself: but he referred to his past in Russia in a way that conjured up more luridness than the flames of his little château (which did not burn at all well) warranted. As to duelling, he knew nothing at all about that, but hoped soon to do so.

Kreisler felt his hands getting so cold that he thought they might fail him in the duel. But a car was heard beyond the trees, on the Paris road. This masterful sound struck steadily and at once into brutish apathy: it so plainly knew what it wanted. Men in their soft bodies still contained the apathy of the fields: their mind had burst out of them and taken these crawling pulps up on its back.

It was Soltyk’s new four-seater bought with the commission derived from a sale of jewels, family heirlooms, belonging to Miss Vasek: with its load of hats it drew up. The four members of the other party came on to the field, the fourth a young polish doctor. They walked quickly. Bitzenko went to meet them—Pochinsky protested energetically that the duel must not proceed.