Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (49 page)

To-day he must break the news to Bertha that he could no longer regard himself as responsible. The debt was not to be repudiated but he must tell her that he only had himself to pay with, and that his person had been seized and was held by somebody else.

He passed through her iron gateway with a final stealth, although making his shoes sound loudly upon the gravel. It was like entering a vault. The trees looked like weeds, the meaning or taste of everything, of course, had died: the concierge looked like a new one. He had bought a flower for his button-hole: he kept smelling it as he approached the house.

During the last week or more he had got in the habit of writing his letters at Bertha’s, to fill up the time. Occasionally he would do a drawing of her (a thing he had never done formerly) to vary the monotony. This time there would be no letter-writing: this visit would be more like the old ones.

‘Come in Sorbett’ she said, as she opened the door. The formality of the terms upon which they at present met must not be overlooked: prerogatives of past times were proudly rejected. The same depressed atmosphere as the day before, and the days preceding that, penetrated his consciousness. She appeared stale, in some way she was deteriorated and shabby, her worth in the market as in his eyes had dwindled, she was extremely pitiable. Her ‘reserve’ (a natural result of the new equivocal circumstances) removed her to a distance, as it seemed; it also shut her up inside herself, in an unhealthy dreary
and faded atmosphere, she who was naturally so over-expansive. She was shut up with a mass of reserves and secrets, new and old. One was a corpse, as Kreisler was one of her secrets. Mournfully reproachful, she mounted guard over her store of bric-à-brac that had gone out of fashion and was getting musty in a neglected shop: such was her manner, such were her sensations.

Greeted with long mournful glances, he felt she had thought out what she should say; this interview meant a great deal to her. The abject little room seemed to be thrust forward to awaken his memories and ask for pity. An intense atmosphere of teutonic suicide permeated everything: he could not move an eyelid or a muscle without wounding or slighting something: it was like being in a dark kitchen at night, where you know at every step you will put your foot upon a beetle—there was indeed a still closer analogy to this in the disgust he felt for these too naked and familiar things upon which he was treading. He scowled at Beethoven, who scowled back at him like a reflection in a mirror: it was the fate of both of them to haunt this room. The Mona Lisa was there and the breton sabots
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and jars. She might have a change of scenery sometimes!—he had the feeling that these tiresome things had been deliberately left in the same place to reproduce a former mood in him. His photograph was prominent on her writing-table: she seemed to say (with a sort of sickly idiocy) ‘You see,
he
is faithful to me!’

She preceded him to her sitting-room: as he looked at her back he thought of her as taking a set number of paces, then turning round abruptly, confronting him. From a typical and similar enervation of the will to that which was at the bottom of his troubles, he could hardly stop himself from putting his arm round her waist while they stood for a moment close to each other: he did not wish to do this in response to any renewed desire, but merely because it was the one thing he must not do. To throw himself into the abyss of perplexity he had just escaped from was an almost irresistible temptation: the dykes set up were perpetually threatened by his neurasthenia in this fashion. He kept his hands in his pockets.

When they had reached the room, she turned round, as he had half imagined, and caught hold of his hands.

‘Sorbert! Sorbert!’

The words were said separately, each emphatic, each significant. The second was a repetition only of the first. She seemed calling him
by his name to conjure back his self again. Her face was a strained and energetic mask.

‘What is it Bertha?’

‘I don’t know!’

She dropped his hands, drooped her head to the right, and turned away.

She sat down. He sat down opposite her, his hat still on his head.

‘Anything new?’ he asked.

‘Anything new? Yes!’ She gazed fierily at him, with an insistent meaning.

He concluded this was just the usual, with nothing more behind it than what was always there.

‘Well. I have something new as well!’

‘Have you Sorbett?’

‘To begin with how have my visits struck you lately? How did you explain them?’

‘Oh, I did not: why bother about an explanation? Why do you ask?’

‘I thought I might as well clear that up.’

‘Well?’

‘My explanation to myself was this: I did not want to leave you brusquely and I thought a blurred interlude of this sort would do no harm to either of us. Our loves could die in each other’s arms so to speak—a comfort to both.’

She stared with incredulous fixity at the floor: her spirit seemed arched over like a swan, and to be gazing down hypnotically.

‘That was what I said to myself. The real reason was simply that being very fond of you, I could not make up my mind to give you up. I claim that my visits were not frivolous.’

‘Well?’

‘I would have married you, if you had considered that advisable.’

‘Yes? And—?’

‘The rest I find it rather difficult to say.’

‘What is difficult?’

‘Well, I still like you very much. Yesterday I met a woman, we got on well, I have just left her. I love her too. I can’t help that. What must I do?’

Bertha turned a slightly stormier white.

‘Who is she?’

‘You know her. She is Anastasya Vasek.’

The news struck through something else, and, inside, her ego shrank to an almost wizened being. It seemed glad of the protection the cocoon, the ‘something,’ afforded her.

‘You did not—find out what my news was.’

‘I did not. Is there anything particular—?’

‘Yes. I am enceinte.’
*

He thought about this in a clumsy and incredulous way. What a woman, there was no end to her—a Roland for his Oliver:
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now she was going to have a baby! With what regularity she countered him. Perhaps Anastasya was getting one too? Bertha’s news rose up in opposition to the night he had just spent. Hopes of swagger sex in the future were dashed a little. He was crestfallen at once. He looked up with a gleam of hope.

‘Whose child is it?’

‘Kreisler’s.’

No, no good! There you are! he thought.

Tarr got up and stepped over to her with a bright relieved look in his face.

‘Poor Mensch!’ he said. ‘That’s a bad business. But don’t go on about it or worry yourself: we can get married and it can always pass as mine: if we do it quickly enough.’

She looked up at him obliquely and sharply, with suspicion grown a habit. When she saw the pleasant, assured expression, she saw that at last things had turned. Sorbert was denying reality! He was ending with miracles—against himself. Her instinct had always told her that generosity would not be lost.

She could have told him at this juncture the actual circumstances under which the child had come. But the idea having occurred to her she had the presence of mind to refrain. She knew that by that her case would be so terribly weakened (whatever the satisfaction to her) that Tarr might immediately take back what he had said.

W
HEN
he got outside Bertha’s house, Bertha waving to him from the window with tears in her eyes, he came in for the counter-attack.
One after the other the protesting masses of good sense rolled up. He picked his way out of the avenue with a reasoning gesticulation of the body; a chicken-like motion of sensible fastidious defence in front of vulgar violence. At the gate he exploded in harsh laughter, looking bravely and raillingly out into the world through his glasses; then he tramped slowly off in his short jacket, his buttocks moving methodically just beneath its rim.

‘Ha ha! Ha ha! Kreisleriana’
*
he shouted without his voice.

The indignant plebs of his glorious organism rioted around his mind.

‘Ah-ha! Ah-ha! dirty practical joker, dirty intellect, where are you leading us now?’ They were vociferous. ‘You have kept us fooling in this neighbourhood so long and now you are pledging us to your fancy fool for ever. Ah-ha! Ah-ha!’

A faction clamoured ‘Anastasya!’ Certain sense-sections attacked him in vulnerable spots with Anastasya’s voluptuous banner unfurled and fragrant. He buffeted his way along, as though spray were dashing in his face, watchful behind his glasses. He met his thoughts with a contemptuous stiff veteran smile: this capricious and dangerous master had an offensive stylistic coolness, similar to Wellington breakfasting at Salamanca while Marmont hurried exultingly into traps:
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they were of the same metal, enemies of demagogues and haters of the mob.

Those thoughts that bellowed ‘Anastasya!’ however, held him up. He answered them.

‘Anastasya! Anastasya! You shall have her, what do you take me for? you will still have your Anastasya all right, I am not selling myself or you, a man such as I am does not dispose of himself in such a matter as this. I am going to marry Bertha Lunken: well and what of it, shall I be any the less my own master for that? If I want to sleep with Anastasya I shall do so. “Why marry Bertha Lunken and shoulder all that contagious mess?” Because it is only the points or movements in life that matter, and one of those points is in question; namely, to keep faith with another person: then I show my world by choosing the “premier venu” to be my body-servant and body-companion my contempt for it and for my body, too. Are you satisfied?’

Anastasya he sacrificed with a comparatively light heart. He came back to his earlier conclusions: such successful people as Anastasya and himself were by themselves: it was as impossible to combine or
wed
them as to compound the genius of two great artists. If you mixed together into one whole Gainsborough and Goya
*
he argued, you would get
nothing
. A subtle lyrical wail would gain nothing from living with a rough and powerful talent, or vice versa: success is always personal. More than ever he was steadily convinced that above a certain level co-operation, group-genius was a slavish pretence and in fact absurd. Mob-talent or popular art was a good thing, it was a big, diffuse, vehement giant; but he was quite sure the only songs of the popular muse that were exciting were composed by great individuals, submerged in an unfavourable time.

He saw this quite clearly: he and Anastasya could not combine otherwise than at present: it was like a mother being given a child to bear the same size already as herself. Anastasya was in every way too big; she was too big physically, she was mentally outsize: in the sex department, she was a Juggernaut.
*
Did sex not alter the nature of the problem? No. The sexual sphere seemed to him to be an average from which
everything
came, from it everything rose or attempted to rise: there was no mysterious opposition extending up into Heaven, and dividing Heavenly Beings into Gods and Goddesses. God was man: the woman was a lower form of life. Everything started female and most so continued: a jellyish diffuseness spread itself and gaped upon all the beds and bas-fonds of everything: above a certain level sex disappeared, just as in highly-organized sensualism sex vanishes. On the other hand,
everything
beneath that line was female. Jameson, Lowther, Jeffries, Willie Silver, Eddie Watt, Massie, Polden, MacKenzie—he enumerated acquaintances palpably below that absolute line: a lack of energy, permanently mesmeric
*
state, almost purely emotional, they all displayed it, they were true ‘women.’ That line had been crossed by Anastasya: he would not be a pervert because he had slept with her, but more than that would be peculiar.
*

That evening he met Anastasya as appointed: the moment he saw her he was completely routed: he was humbled and put out of conceit with his judgment. This, he realized later, was the cause of his lack of attachment. He needed an empty vessel to flood with his vitality, and not an equal and foreign vitality to coldly exist side by side with. He had taken into sex the procédés and selfish arrangements of life in general. He had humanized sex too much. He frequently admitted
this, but with his defence lost sight of the flagrancy of the permanent fact.

For the first time he now saw in Anastasya an element of protection and safety: she was a touch-wood and harbour from his perplexed interior life. She had a sort of ovation from him.

They went to the same restaurant as the night before. He talked quietly, until they had drunk too much, and Bertha was not mentioned.

‘And what about Bertha?’ At last she asked:

‘Never mind about Bertha.’

‘Is she extinct?’

‘No. She threatens an entirely new sort of eruption.’

‘Oh. In what way new—?’

‘It doesn’t matter: it won’t come our way.’

‘Are you going there to-morrow?’

‘I suppose I must. But I shall not make many more visits.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I shall give up going I say.’ He shifted restlessly in his chair: he had enough Bertha for one day.

After breakfast next morning Anastasya left to go to the painting school. Butcher, whom he had not seen for some days, came in. Tarr agreed to go down into town and have lunch with him; he put on a clean shirt. Talking to Butcher while he was changing, he stood behind his bedroom door: men of ambitious physique, like himself, he had always noticed, were inclined to puff themselves out or let their arms hang in a position favourable to their muscles while changing before another man: to avoid this he seldom exhibited himself unclothed.

After lunch he left Butcher and went to the Mairie of a fashionable Quarter
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and made enquiries about civil marriages. After that he went to a lawyer.

He was particularly amiable with Bertha that day, he told her about his going to the Mairie, and he made an appointment with her at the lawyer’s for the next day.