Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (23 page)

They were crossing the terrace to the street. His heart beat a slow march now. The image in the wear and tear of his recent conflicts had become somewhat used and inanimate. The Reality, in its lightning correction of this, dug into his mind. There once more the real figure had its separate and foreign life. He was disagreeably struck by a certain air of depression and cheerlessness in the two persons before him. This one thing that should have been pleasant, displeased him: he was angry as though she had been shamming melancholy.

They were not talking—the best proof of familiarity. A strange figure occurred to him; he felt he was a man with every organ—bone—tissue complete, but made of cheap perishable stuff, who could only live for a day and then die of use.

Now a reality under his nose, Anastasya had, in coming to life, drawn out all his energy, like a distinct being nourished by him: whereas the image, intact in his mind, had returned him more or less the vigour spent. Her listlessness seemed a complement of the weakness he now felt: energy was ebbing away from both.

He sent a bloodshot stare after them: then he got up and began walking after her. Soltyk, on hearing steps, turned round: but he made no remark, he took Anastasya’s arm, they crossed the street and got into a passing tram. Kreisler went back to the Café.

It was like returning to some hall where there had been a banquet, to find empty chairs, empty bottles, dirt and disorder. The vacant seats around seemed to have been lately vacated. Then there was the sensation of being left high and dry—of the withdrawal of a fluid medium. The Café Berne was a solitary place. Everything began to thrust itself upon him—the people, insignificant incidents, as though this indifferent life of facts, in the vanishing of the life of the imagination, had now become important, being the only thing left. Common Life seemed rushing in and claiming him, to emphasize his defeat, and the new condition this inaugurated.

He went to Vallet’s for dinner. During the whole day he had been in feverish hurry, constantly seeing time narrowing in upon him: now he had a sensation of intolerable leisure. The first glee at the absence of pressure had entirely passed.

The useless ennui of his life presented itself to him for the thousandth time, but now with a chilly clearness. It was a very obvious fact indeed, it had waited with great calm: now it said: ‘As soon as you can give me your attention—well, what are you going to do with me?’ Sooner or later he must marry and settle down with this stony fact and multiply its image: things had gone too far: the fact pointed that out and he did not demur.

And how about his father, what was that letter going to contain? Mr. Kreisler senior had got a certain amount of pleasure out of him: the little Otto had satisfied in him in turn the desire of possession (that objects such as your watch, your house, which could equally well belong to anybody, do not satisfy), of authority (that servants do
not satisfy), of self-complacency (that self does not)—he had been to him, later, a kind of living cinematograph and
Reisebuch
*
combined; and, finally, he had inadvertently lured with his youth a handsome young woman into the paternal net. There was no further satisfaction that he now could ever be expected to procure to this satiated parent. Henceforth he must be a source only of irritation and expense.

Dinner completed and mind made up, he walked along the Boulevard. The dark made him adventurous: he peered into never visited Cafés as he passed. He noticed it was already eight. Supposing he should meet some of the women on the way to Fräulein Liepmann’s? He made a movement as though to slink down a side street: next moment he was walking on obstinately in the direction of the Liepmann’s house however. His weakness drew him on, back into the vortex:
*
anything at all was better than going back into that terrible colourless mood. His room, the Café, waited for him like executioners. For a time he had escaped from that world: wild horses would not drag him back, not yet. The night was young. Dressed as he was, extremely untidy, he would go to Fräulein Liepmann’s flat.

Only humiliation, he knew, awaited him in that direction. If Anastasya were there (he would have it that she would be found wherever he least would care to see her) then anything might happen. But so much the better: he wanted her to be there! He asked nothing better: to suffer still more by her was his peculiar wish, up to the hilt,
physically
, as it were, under her eyes. That would be a relief from present torment. He must look in her eyes; he must excite in her the maximum of contempt and of dislike. He desired to be in her presence again, with the fullest consciousness that his mechanical idyll was vetoed by Fate. Not stoic enough to leave things as they were, he could not go away with this incomplete and, physically, uncertain picture behind him. It was as though a man had lost a prize, and then required of his judges a written stamped and sealed statement to that effect. He wished to shame her: if he did not directly insult her he would at least insult her by thrusting himself upon her. Then, at the height of her disgust, he would pretend again to make advances. He believed he would insult her. His programme, as he sketched it out, grew, at the last, obscene.

As to the rest of the party, a sour glee possessed him at thought of
their
sensations by the time he had done with them; already he saw their faces in fancy, when he should ring the flat bell and present
himself—old morning suit, collar none too clean, dusty boots, dishevelled head. His self-humiliation was wedded with the notion of retaliation. In his schooldays Kreisler had been the witness of a drama affording a parallel to what he was now preparing. His memory hovered about the image of a bloodstained hand, furiously martyred. But he could not recall to what the hand belonged. The scene he could not reconstruct had taken place in his fourteenth year, and it had proceeded beneath the desk of his neighbour during an algebra lesson. The boy next to him had jabbed his neighbour in the hand with a penknife: the latter, pale with rage, had held his hand out in sinister invitation, hissing ‘Do it again! Do it again!’—The boy next to Kreisler had looked at the hand for a moment and complied. ‘Do it again!’ came still fiercer. This boy had seemed to wish to see his hand a mass of wounds and to delect himself with the awful feeling of his own black passion.

Kreisler did not know how he should wipe out his score, but he wanted it bigger, more crushing. The bitter fascination of suffering drew him on, to substitute real wounds for imaginary. But Society at the same time must be taught to suffer, he had paid for that.

Near Fräulein Liepmann’s house he rubbed his shoulder against a piece of whitewashed wall with a broad grin. He went rapidly up the wide stairs leading to the entresol, considering a scheme for the commencement of the evening. This seemed so happy that he felt further resourcefulness in misconduct would not be wanting.

K
REISLER
pressed the bell. A hoarse low Z-like blast, braying softly into the crowded room, announced him. Kreisler still stood safely outside the door.

There was a rush in the passage within; the hissing and spitting sounds inseparable from the speaking of the german tongue: someone was percussioning louder than the rest with a muscular german tongue, and squealing dully as well. They were square-shouldered flat-heeled Maenads,
*
disputing among themselves the indignity of door-opener. The most anxious to please gained the day: the door was pulled ajar: an arch voice said:

‘Wer ist da?’

‘Der Herr Kreisler, gnädiges Fräulein!’
*

The roguish vivacious voice died away, however: the opening of the door showed in the dark vestibule Bertha Lunken with her rather precious movements imposed upon german robustness.

The social effect had been instantaneous. The disordered hair, dusty boots, the white patch on the jacket had been registered by the super-bourgeois eye that they had had the good luck at the outset to encounter.

‘Who is it?’ a voice cried from within.

‘It’s Herr Kreisler’ Bertha answered with dramatic quietness. ‘Come in Herr Kreisler; there are still one or two to come.’ Bertha spoke in business-like accent, she bustled to close the door, to efface politely her sceptical reception of him by her handsome wondering eyes.

‘Ah Herr Kreisler! I wonder where Fräulein Vasek is?’ he heard someone saying.

He looked for a place to hang his hat. Fräulein Lunken preceded him into the room. Her expression was that of an embarrassed domestic foreseeing horror in his master’s eye. Otto in his turn appeared. The chatter seemed to him to swerve a little bit upon his
right hand: bowing to two or three people he knew near the door, sharply from the hips, he went over to Fräulein Liepmann and bending respectfully down, kissed her hand. Then with a naïve air, but conciliatory, began:

‘A thousand pardons, Fräulein Liepmann, for presenting myself like this: Herr Vokt and I have been at Fontenay des Roses
*
all the afternoon: we made a stupid mistake about the time of the trains and I have only just got back—I hadn’t time to change. I suppose it doesn’t matter? It will be quite “intime,” and bohemian, won’t it? Herr Vokt had something to do: he’s coming on later if he can manage it.’

With genuine infantile glee he delivered himself of his fairytale—he had hit upon it while waiting at the door. Seeing the weakness these ladies always displayed for his late friend and that he was almost sure not to turn up, he would use him to cover the self-inflicted patch from the whitewashed wall: but he would get other patches he promised himself (and find other lies to cover them up) till he could hardly move about for this plastering of small falsehoods.

His hostess had been looking at him with indecision.

‘I am glad to hear Herr Vokt’s coming: I haven’t seen him for ages. You’ve plenty of time to change, you know, if you like: Herr Eckhart and several others haven’t turned up yet. You live quite near don’t you, Herr Kreisler?’

‘Yes, third to the right and second to the left, and keep straight on!’

‘So!’

‘Yes. But I don’t think I’ll trouble about it. I shall be all right like this. I think I’ll do don’t you, Fräulein Liepmann?’ He took a couple of steps and looked at himself complacently in a glass.

‘You are the best judge of that.’

‘Yes that is so of course isn’t it, Fräulein? I have often thought that: how curious the same notion should occur to you! I thought I was alone in that belief. Society pretends—but it is all one!’ Again Kreisler smiled and affecting to consider the question as settled, turned to a man standing near him, with whom he had worked at Juan Soler’s. In doubt as to whether he intended to go and change or not (he was, perhaps, just talking to his friend a moment before going?) his slightly frowning hostess moved away.

The company was not socially brilliant but ‘interesting.’ On this occasion it was rather on its mettle, both men and women in their
several ways, dressed and anointed, as scrupulously toiletted as if this were a provincial Court. An Englishwoman who was a great friend of Fräulein Liepmann’s was one of the organizers of the Bonnington Club: through her they had been invited to go there, it was upon a correct institution that they awaited, evening-suited, the word of command to march.

Five minutes later Kreisler found Fräulein Liepmann in his neighbourhood again. She stood beside him at first without speaking. She had a pale fawn-coloured face, looking like the protagonist of a
crime passionel
. At every turn she multiplied her social responsibilities, yet her manner implied that the quite ordinary burdens of life were beyond her strength. The two rooms with folding doors, which formed her salon and where her guests were now gathered, had not been furnished casually or without design. The ‘Concert’ of Giorgione
*
did not hang there for nothing: the books lying about had been flung down by a careful hand. Fräulein Liepmann required a certain variety of admiration: but being very energetic she had a great contempt for other people, so she drew up, as it were, a list of her attributes, carefully and distinctly underlining each: with each new friend she went over again the elementary points, as a teacher would go over with each new pupil the first steps of accidence or geography—first showing him his locker, where the rulers were put and where, when he got them dirty, he could wash his hands. She took up her characteristic attitudes, one after the other, as a model might; that is, those simplest and easiest to grasp.

Her room dress and manner were a kind of chart to the way to admire Fräulein Liepmann. The different points in her
Geist
one was to gush about, the various scattered hints one was to let fall about her naturally rather tragic life-story, the particular way one was to regard her playing of the piano. The observant newcomer would feel that there was not a candlestick or antimacassar
*
in the room but had its lesson for him. To have two or three dozen people, her ‘friends,’ repeating things after her in this way did not give her very much satisfaction, she had not the sensation of its being very great; but she had many of the characteristics of the schoolmarm and she continued untiringly with her duties—namely teaching ‘Liepmann’ with the solemnity, resignation and half-weariness (with occasional explosions of anger) that a woman would teach ‘twice two are four, twice three are six.’ Her best friends were her best pupils of course. Even the
rooms were furnished with somewhat the severity of the schoolroom: a large black piano—for demonstrations—corresponded more or less to the blackboard. It was in the piano that anybody would have had to look really for her
Geist
.

‘Herr Spicker just tells me that dress is
de rigueur
. Miss Bennett says it doesn’t matter. But it would be awkward if you couldn’t get in.’ She was continuing their late conversation. ‘You see it’s not so much an artists’ club as a place where the english
Société
permanent in Paris, meet: it’s a bore: you know how correct they are.’