Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (44 page)

Louis appeared apathetic both as to the pistols and the good advice.

‘Leave him both!’ Kreisler called, his revolver still trained on Soltyk. Bitzenko put them both down, a foot away from Soltyk, and walked hurriedly out of the zone of fire where he found himself beside Jan, who had withdrawn upon the arrival of Kreisler and his Automatic.

‘Will you take up one of those pistols or both?’ Kreisler asked.

‘Kindly point that revolver somewhere else and allow us to go!’ the indignant physician called back.

‘I’m not speaking to you, pig-face! It’s
you
I’m addressing. Take up that pistol!’

He was now five or six yards from them.

‘Herr Soltyk is unarmed! The pistols you want him to take have only one charge. Yours has twelve.
*
In any case it would be murder!’

Kreisler walked up to them. He was very white, much quieter and acting with some effort. He stooped down to take up one of the pistols. The doctor aimed a blow at his head. It caught him just in front of the ear, on the right cheek bone: he staggered sideways; tripped and fell. The moment he felt the blow he pulled the trigger of the Browning, which still pointed towards his principal adversary. Soltyk threw his arms up, Kreisler was struggling upwards to his feet, he fell face forwards on top of him.

Believing this to be a new attack, Otto seized the descending body round the middle, rolling over on top of it. It was quite limp. He then thought the other man had fainted or perhaps ruptured himself. He drew back quickly: two hands grasped him and flung him down on his stomach. This time his glasses went. Scrambling after them, he remembered his Automatic which he had dropped: he shot his hands out to left and right, forgetting his glasses, to recover the revolver. He felt that a blow was a long time in coming.

‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’

The doctor’s voice, announcing that in french, he heard at the same time as Bitzenko’s panting in his ear:

‘What are you looking for? Come quickly!’

‘Where is the Browning?’ he asked. At that moment his hand struck his glasses: he put them on and got to his feet.

At Bitzenko’s words he had a feeling of a new order of things having set in, a sensation he remembered having experienced on two other occasions in his past life. They came in a fresh surprising tone: it was as though they were the first words he had heard that day. Something was ripped open, and everything was fresh loud and new. The words themselves appeared to signify a sudden removal, a journey, novel conditions.

‘Come along, I’ve got the gun. There’s no time to lose.’ It was all over; he must embrace practical affairs. The Russian’s voice was business-like: something had finished for him too. Kreisler saw the others standing in a peaceful group; the doctor was getting up from beside Soltyk.

He rushed over to Kreisler and shook his fist in his face and tried to speak. But his mouth was twisted down at the corners, and he could hardly see. The palms of his hands pressed into each of his eyes, the next moment he was sobbing, walking back to his friends. Jan was looking at Kreisler but it seemed with nothing but idle curiosity.

Bitzenko’s bolt was shot: Kreisler had been unsatisfactory. All had ended in a silly accident: this was hardly a real corpse at all. But something was sent to console him. The Police had got wind of the duel. Bitzenko his compatriot and Kreisler were walking down the field, intending to get into the road at the farther end and so reach the nearest station. The taxi had been sent away, Kreisler having no more money, and Bitzenko’s feeling in the matter being that, should Kreisler fall, a corpse can always find some sentimental soul to look after it. There was always the Morgue, a most satisfactory place for a body.

Half-way along the field, a car passed them on the other side of the hedge at full tilt. Once more the Russian was in his element. His face cleared: he looked ten years younger—in the occupants of the car he had recognized members of the police force!

Calling ‘run!’ to Kreisler he took to his heels, followed by his compatriot—whose neck shot in and out and whose great bow legs could almost be heard twanging as he ran. They reached another hedge, ran along the farther side of it, Bitzenko bent double as though to escape a rain of bullets. Eventually he was seen careering across an open space quite near the river, which lay a couple of hundred yards beyond the lower end of the field. There he lay ambushed for a moment, behind a shrub: then he darted forward again, eventually disappearing along the high road in a cloud of dust. As to his athletic young friend, he made straight for the railway-station, which he reached without incident, and returned immediately to Paris and to bed. Kreisler for his part conformed to Bitzenko’s programme of flight: he scrambled through the hedge, crossed the road, and escaped almost unnoticed.

The truth was that the Russian had attracted the attention of the police to such an extent by his striking flight, that without a moment’s hesitation they had bolted helter-skelter after him. They contented themselves with a parting shout or two at Kreisler. Duelling was not an offence that roused them very much and capture in such cases was not so material that they would feel very disposed for a cross-country run. But they were so impressed by the Russian’s business-like way of disappearing that they imagined this must have been a curiously venal sort of duel: that he was the principal they did not doubt for a moment. So they went after him in full cry, rousing two or three villages in their passage, whose occupants followed at their heels, pouring with frantic hullabaloo in the direction of the capital. Bitzenko,
however, with admirable resourcefulness, easily outwitted them. He crossed the Seine near Saint Cloud,
*
and got back to Paris in time to read the afternoon newspaper reports of the duel and flight with a tranquil satisfaction.

F
IVE
days after this, in the morning, Otto Kreisler mounted the steps of the police station of a small town near the german frontier. He was going to give himself up.

Bitzenko had pictured his principal, in the event of a successful outcome to the duel, seeking rapidly by train the german frontier, disguised in some extraordinary manner. Had the case been suggested to him of a man in this position without sufficient money in his pocket to buy a ticket, he would then have imagined a figure of melodrama hurrying through France, dodging and dogged by the police, defying a thousand perils. Whether Kreisler were still under the spell of the Russian or not, this was the course, more or less, taken by him. He could be trusted not to go near Paris: that city nothing would have persuaded him to re-enter.

The police disturbing the last act of his sanguinary farce was a similar contretemps to Soltyk’s fingers in his throat. At the last moment everything had begun to go wrong: for this he had not been prepared because the world had shown no tendency up till then to interfere.

Soltyk had died when his back was turned, so to speak: he got the contrary of comfort out of the thought that he could claim to have done the deed. The police had rushed in and broken things off short, swept everything up and off—the banquet had terminated in a brutal raid. A sensation of shock and dislocation remained in Otto’s mind: he had been hurried so much! He had never needed leisure, breathing space, so much: had he been given time—only a little time—he might have put that to rights—this sinister regret could only imply a possible mutilation of the corpse.

A dead man has no feeling, he can be treated as an object: but a living man needs time—does not a living man need so much time to develop his movements, to lord it with his thoughtful body, to unroll his will?
Time
is what be needs clearly. As a tramp, hustled away from a Café by the personnel, protests, at each jerk the waiter gives him,
that he is a human being, probably a
free
human being—yes probably
free
; so Kreisler complained to his fate that he was a living man, that he required
time
—that above all it was
time
he needed—to settle his affairs and withdraw from life. He whined and blustered to no effect.

Soltyk’s death dismayed him deeply: if you will think of a demented person who has become possessed of the belief that it is essential for the welfare of the world that he should excuperate
*
into a bird’s nest while standing upon one leg on the back of a garden seat, but who is baulked, first of all by the seat giving way, and secondly by the bird’s nest catching fire and vanishing because of the use by the bird of certain chemical substances in its construction, combined with the heat of the sun, you will have a parallel for Kreisler’s superstitious disappointment.

He was superstitious as well in the usual way about this decease: in the course of his spiritless and brooding tramp he questioned if it were not he that had died, and not Soltyk at all, and if it were not a ghost who was now wandering off nowhere in particular.

One franc and a great many coppers remained to him. As he jumped from field to road and road to field again in his flight, they rose and fell in a little leaden wave in his pocket, breaking dully upon his thigh. This little wave rose and fell many times, till he began to wait for it and its monotonous grace. It was like a sigh: it heaved and clashed down in a foiled way. That evening he spent it on a meal in a small village hotel. The night was dry: he slept in an empty barge. Next day, at four in the afternoon, he arrived at Meaux.
*
Here he exchanged what he stood up in, hat and boots as well as clothes, for a shabby workman’s outfit. He gained seven francs and fifty centimes on the transaction. He caught the early train for Rheims,
*
travelling 35 kilometres of his journey at a sou a kilometre. A meal near the station, and he took another ticket to Verdun.
*
Believing himself nearer the frontier than he actually was, he set out on foot: at the next large town, Marcade,
*
he had too hearty a meal. His money gave out before the frontier was nearly reached. For two days he had eaten hardly anything: he tramped on in a dogged careless spirit.

The
nearness
of his home-frontier began to rise like a wall in front of him. This question had to be answered: Did he want to cross the german frontier? Did he really want, having reached it, to cross it?

His answer to this question had been to mount the steps of the local police-station.

His prussian severity of countenance, now that he was dressed in every point like a vagabond—without hat and his hair disordered, five days’ beard on his chin—this sternness of the german officer-caste gave him the appearance of a forbidding ruffian. The ‘agent’ on duty, who barred his passage brutally before the door of the inner office, scowling too, classed him as a dangerous vagabond. His voluntary entrance into the police station he regarded as an act not only highly suspicious and unaccountable in itself, but of the last insolence.

‘Qu’est-ce qu’il te faut?’

‘Foir le gommissaire’ returned Kreisler.

‘Tu ne peux pas le voir. Il n’y est pas.’
*

A few more laconic sentences followed. The ‘agent’ reiterated sulkily that the official he desired to see was not there. But he was eyeing Kreisler doubtfully and turning something over in his mind.

The day before two Germans had been arrested in the neighbourhood as spies.
*
They were now under lock and key in this particular building, until further evidence should be collected. It was extremely imprudent for a German to loiter on the frontier on entering France, it was naturally much wiser for him to push on at once—looking neither to right nor to left—for the interior. This was generally realized by Germans. But the two men in question were carpenters by profession: both carried huge foot-rules
*
in their pockets. Upon this discovery their captors were in a state of consternation: they shut them up, with their implements, in the most inaccessible depths of the local clink. But it was in the doorway of this building that Kreisler now stood.

The ‘agent’ who had recognized a German by his accent at length turned and disappeared through the door. He reappeared with two colleagues. They crowded the doorway and surveyed Kreisler blankly. One asked in a very knowing voice:

‘What’s the game Fritz?
*
What are you doing here? Come about your pals?’

‘I had tuel and killt man;
*
I have walked for more days—.’

‘Yes we know all about that!’

‘So you had a duel eh?’ asked another: they all laughed with nervous suddenness at the picture of this hobo defending his honour at twenty paces.

‘Well is that all you have to say?’

‘I would eat.’

‘Yes I daresay! Your two pals inside also have big appetites. But look sharp, come to the point! Have you anything to tell us about your compatriots inside there?’

His throttling by Soltyk had been Kreisler’s last milestone: he had changed, he now knew he was beaten, and that there was nothing to do but to die. His body ran to the german frontier as a chicken’s does down a yard, headless, from the block.

It was a dull and stupid face he presented to the official. He did not understand him. He muttered that he was hungry. He could hardly stand; leaning his shoulder against the wall, he stood with his eyes upon the ground. The police bristled. He was making himself at home! What a toupet!
*

‘
Va-t’en!
If you don’t want to tell us anything, clear out—look sharp about it. A pretty lot of trouble you cursed Germans are giving us! You’ll none of you speak when it comes to the point: you all stand staring like boobies. But that won’t pay here. Off you go—double march!’

The two others turned back into the office and slammed the door. The first police officer stood before it again, looking truculently at Kreisler. He said:

‘Passez votre chemin! Don’t stand gaping there!’

Then, giving him a shake, he hustled him to the top of the steps. A parting shove sent him staggering down into the road.

Kreisler walked on for a little. Eventually, in a quiet square, near the entrance of the town, he fell upon a bench, drew his legs up and went to sleep.