Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (45 page)

At ten o’clock, the town lethargically retiring, all its legs moving slowly, like a spent insect, an ‘agent’ came gradually along the square. He stopped opposite the sleeping Kreisler, surveying him with lawful indignation.

‘En voilà un qui ne se gêne pas, ma foi!’ He swayed energetically up to him.

‘Eh! le copain! Tu voudrais coucher à la belle étoile?’

He shook him.

‘Oh là! Tu ne peux pas passer la nuit ici!
Houp!
Dépêche-toi. D’bout!’
*

Kreisler responded only by a tired movement as though to bury his skull in the bench. A more violent jerk rolled him upon the ground.
Thereupon he awoke and as he lay there he protested in german, with a sort of dull asperity. He scrambled to his knees and then to his feet.

At the sound of the familiar gutturals of the neighbouring Empire the patriot in the policeman came to life. Kreisler stood there, muttering partly in german and partly in french, he was very tired. He spoke with some bitterness of his attempt to get into the police station: he criticized the inhospitable reception he had received. The ‘agent’ understood several words of german—notably ‘Ja’ and ‘Abort.’ The consequence was that however much might be actually intended on any given occasion, by anyone speaking in german, it could never equal in scope intensity and meaning what he thought he distinguished.

He was at once convinced that Kreisler was threatening an invasion
*
—he scoffed loudly in reply. He understood Kreisler to assert that the town in which they stood would soon belong to Germany and that he would then sleep not upon a bench, but in the best bed their dirty little hole of a village could offer. He approached this contumelious Boche
*
threateningly. Eventually he distinctly heard himself apostrophized as a ‘sneaking
flic.’
At that his hand grasped Kreisler’s collar, he threw him in the direction of the police station. He had miscalculated the distance: Kreisler, weak for want of food, fell at his feet. Getting up, he scuffled a short while. Then, it occurring to him that here was an excellent opportunity of getting a dinner and being lodged after all in the Bureau de Police, he suddenly became docile.

Arrived at the police station—with several revolts against the brutal handling he was subjected to—he was met at the door by the same inhospitable man as earlier in the day. This person was enraged beyond measure: he held Kreisler, while his comrade went into the office to report: he held him as a restive horse is held, and jerked him several times against the wall, as if he had been resisting with a desperate fougue.

Two men, one of whom he had formerly seen, came and looked at him. No effort was made to discover if he were really at fault: by this time they were persuaded that he was a ruffian, if not a spy then a murderer, although they were inclined to regard him as a criminal enigma. They felt they could no longer question his right to a night’s lodging. He was led to a cell where he was given some bread and water at his urgent request.

On the following morning he was taken up before the Commissaire. When Kreisler was brought in, this gentleman had just finished cross-examining for the fifteenth time the two german carpenters detained as spies. They had not much peace: they were liable to be dragged out of their cells several times in the course of an afternoon, as often as a new theory of their guilt should occur to one of the numerous staff of the police station. They would be confronted with their foot-rules and watched in breathless silence; or be cross-questioned and caught out as to their movements during the month previous to their arrest. The Commissaire was perspiring all over with the intensity of his last effort to detect something. Kreisler was led in and prevented from becoming in any way intelligible during a quarter of an hour by the furious interruptions of the enraged officer. At last he succeeded in conveying that he was quite unacquainted with the two carpenters; moreover, that all he needed was food, that he had decided to give himself up and await the decision of the Paris authorities as regards his duel. If they were not going to take any action, he would return to Paris—at least as soon as he had received a certain letter; and he gave his address. He was sent back to his cell in disgrace.

He slept the greater part of the day. The next he spent nervous and awake. In the afternoon a full confirmation of his story reached the authorities. It was likely the following morning, he was told, that he would be sent to Paris. It meant, then, that he was going to be tried, as a kind of murderer: there would be the adverse witnesses who would maintain that he shot a defenceless man deliberately.

He became extremely disturbed as he sat and reflected upon what was in store for him—Paris, the vociferous courts, the ennuis of a criminal case. All the circumstances of this now distant affair would be resuscitated. Then the Russian—he would have to see him again. Sorrow for himself bowed him down. This prospective journey to Paris was ridiculous—noise, piercing noise, effort, awaited him revengefully. There was no detail he could not forecast. The energy and obstinacy of the rest of the world, the world that would cross-question him and drag him about from spot to spot, at last setting him to pick oakum,
*
no doubt, these frightened him as something mad. Bitzenko appealed most to this new-born anxiety: Bitzenko was like some much-relished dish a man has one day eaten too much of, and will never be able to see again without wishing to vomit.

On the other hand, he became quite used to his cell: his mind was sick and this room had a clinical severity. It had all the severity of a place in which an operation might suitably be performed. He became fond of it. He lay upon his bed: he turned over the shell of many empty and depressing hours he had lived: in all these listless concave shapes he took a particular pleasure. ‘Good times’ were avoided: days spent with his present stepmother, before his father knew her, gave him a particularly numbing and nondescript feeling.

He sat up, listening to the noises from the neighbouring rooms and corridors. It began to sound to him like one steady preparation for his removal: steps bustled about getting this ready and getting that ready as though for a departure.

The police station had cost him some trouble to enter: but from the start they had been attracted to each other. There is no such thing as a male building perhaps, all buildings are probably female: what are they?—they are the most highly developed ‘things.’ This small modern edifice was having its romance; Otto Kreisler was its
liebhaberei
.

It was now warning him, it was full of rumours: it echoed sharply the fact of its policemen.

After his evening meal he took up his bed in his arms and placed it upon the opposite side of the cell, beneath the window. He sat there for some time as though resting after this effort. The muttering of two children on a doorstep in the street below came to him on the evening light with dramatic stops and emptiness. It bore with it an image, like an old picture, bituminous
*
and with a graceful queer formality: this fixed itself before him in the manner of a mirage. He watched it muttering.

Slowly he began to draw off his boots. He took out the laces, and tied them together for greater strength. Then he tore several strips off his shirt and made a short cord of them. He went through these actions with an unconscious deftness, as though it were a routine. He measured the drop from the bar of the ventilator with puckered forehead calculating the necessary length of cord, like a boy preparing the accessories of some game. It was only a game, too: he recognized what these proceedings meant, but shunned the idea that it was serious. In the way that a person disinclined to write a necessary letter may take up his pen, resolving to begin it merely, but writes more
and more until it is in fact completed, so Kreisler proceeded with his unattractive task.

Standing upon the bed, he attached the cord to the ventilator. He tested its strength by holding it some inches from the top, and then, his shoulders hunched, swaying his whole weight languidly upon it for a moment. Adjusting the noose, he smoothed his hair back after he had slipped it over his head. He made as though to kick the bed away, playfully, then stood still, staring in front of him. The last moment must be one of realization. His caution had been due to a mistrust of some streaks of him, the most suspect that connected with the nebulous tracts of sex.

A sort of heavy confusion burst up as he withdrew the restraint. It reminded him of Soltyk’s hands upon his throat. The same throttling feeling returned: the blood bulged in his head: he felt dizzy—it was the Soltyk struggle over again. But, as with Soltyk, he did not resist: he gently worked the bed outwards from beneath him, giving it a last steady shove. He hung, gradually choking—the last thing he was conscious of his tongue.

The discovery of Kreisler’s body caused a profound indignation among the staff of the police station. They remembered the persistence with which this unprincipled vagrant had attempted to get into the building. It was clear to their minds that his sole purpose had been to hang himself upon their premises. From the first he had mystified them. Now their uneasy suspicions were bitterly confirmed. Each man felt that this corpse had personally insulted him and made a fool of him, still worse. They thrust it savagely into the earth, with vexed and disgusted faces.

Herr Kreisler paid without comment what was claimed by the landlord in Paris for his son’s rooms; and writing to the authorities at the frontier-town about the burial, paid exactly the sum demanded by this town for disposing of the body, without comment of any sort.

A
NASTASYA
had personally liked Kreisler. That was why the spectacle of Fräulein Lunken excusing herself, in the process putting Kreisler in a more unsatisfactory light, had annoyed her. But apart from that, Bertha’s undignified rigmarole after the Club dance had irritated
her: to cut it short she brutally announced that Kreisler’s behaviour was due simply to the fact that he fancied himself in love with her, Anastasya. ‘He was not worrying about Fräulein Lunken: he was in love with me’ the statement amounted to, it had been an irritated exhibition of frankness as immodestly presented as possible, to shock this little bourgeois fool. Bertha! how could Tarr consort with such a
dumm
cow? Her aristocratic woman’s sense did not appreciate the taste for the slut, the Miss or the suburban queen. The apache, the coster-girl,
*
the whore—all that had
character
, oh yes! Her romanticism, in fact, was of the same order as Bertha’s but much better class.

Two days after the duel she met Tarr in the street. They agreed to meet at Vallet’s for dinner. The table at which she had first come across Otto Kreisler was where they sat.

‘You knew Soltyk didn’t you?’ he asked her.

‘Yes. Poor Soltyk!’

She looked at Tarr doubtfully. A certain queer astonishment in her face struck Tarr. She spoke with a businesslike calm about his death.

‘I knew him only slightly’ she then said. ‘You know how he made a living? He sold
objets d’art
. I had several things I wanted to sell, he put the thing through for me, and advised me about some other things I was disposing of in Vienna.’

‘He was your agent, or something of the sort.’

‘That’s it. He was an excellent business-man, I think. I believe he was rather too sharp for me over one transaction.’

‘Indeed?’

‘I think so. I’m not quite sure yet.’

‘You can’t do anything about it, I suppose?’

‘Not now.’

She knew people referred to her as the ‘woman in the case.’ Soltyk possessed a rather ridiculous importance, being dead—the fact was bigger than the person. Her sinister prominence she took no interest in, but with Tarr she preferred to make clear the nature of the public misunderstanding.

Kreisler she had come to abominate: to have killed, to have killed someone she knew—it was a hostile act to bring death so near to her! She hoped he might never come back to Paris: she did not wish to meet Kreisler again.

‘I don’t know what grounds there are for it, but they say Soltyk was not killed in a duel’ Tarr continued. ‘Kreisler is to be charged with murder or at least manslaughter.’

‘Yes I have heard too that Kreisler shot him before he was ready or something—.’ She shrugged her shoulders.

‘He was shot when he was unarmed, that’s the story. There was no duel at all.’

‘Oh that is not the version I have heard.’

She did not seem interested in this subject.

‘I was Kreisler’s Second for half an hour’ Tarr said in a minute.

‘How do you mean, for half an hour—?’ she asked laughing.

‘I happened to be there and was asked to help him until somebody else could be found. I did not suspect him, I may say, of meaning to murder your business agent!’

‘Of course not. What was the cause of it all, do you know?’

‘According to Kreisler, there had been some smacking and caning earlier in the day—.’

‘Yes. I as a matter of fact was a somewhat puzzled witness of that. Herr Kreisler met Soltyk and myself. We had just been finishing up the last of the deals of which I spoke.’