Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (28 page)

He began thinking about her with a slow moistening of the lips. ‘I
shall possess
her!’ he said to himself, seeing himself in the rôle of the berserker warrior,
*
ravening and irresistible: the use of the word
shall
in that way was enough.

But this
infernal
dance! He was no longer romantically ‘desperate,’ but bored with his useless position there. His attention was now concentrated on a practical issue, that of the ‘possession’ of Anastasya
though even that depended on a juicy vocabulary, hissed in the form of an incantation and he lost sight of it the moment he ceased deliberately to attend to it.

He was tired as though he had been dancing the whole evening. Getting up, he threw his cigarette away; he even dusted his coat a little with his hand. He then, not being able to get at the white patch on the shoulder, took it off and shook it. A large grey handkerchief was used to flick his boots with.

‘So!’ he grunted, smartly shooting on his coat.

The central room, when he got into it, appeared a different place: people were standing about and waiting for the next tune. He had become a practical man, surrounded by facts: but he was much more worried and tired than at the beginning of the evening.

To get away was his immediate thought. But he felt hungry: he made for the refreshment room. On the same side as the door, a couple of feet to the right, was a couch: the improvised trestle-bar with the refreshments ran the length of the opposite wall: the room was quiet and almost empty. Out of the tail of his eye, as he entered, he became conscious of something. He turned towards the couch: Soltyk and Anastasya were sitting there, and looking at him with the abrupt embarrassment people show when an absentee under discussion suddenly appears. He flushed and was about to turn back to the door. This humiliating full-stop beneath their eyes must be wiped out at once: he walked on steadily to the bar, with a truculent swagger.

A consciousness of his physique beset him: the outcast feeling returned in the presence of these toffs—class-inferiority-feeling beset him. He must be leisurely: he
was
leisurely. He thought when he stretched his hand out to take his cup of coffee that it would never reach it. He felt a crab dragged out of its hole, which was in this case perhaps the conservatory.
Inactive
, he was ridiculous: he had not reckoned on being watched. This was a fiasco: here he was posing nude for Anastasya and the Russian.

He munched sandwiches without the faintest sense of their taste. Suddenly conscious of an awkwardness in his legs, he changed his position: his arms were ludicrously disabled. The sensation of standing neck-deep in horrid filth beset him. The noise of the dancing began again and filled the room: this purified things somewhat.

But his anger kept rising. He stood there deliberately longer now: in fact on and on, almost in the same position. She should wait his pleasure till he liked to turn round, and—then. He allowed her laughter to accumulate on his back, like a coat of mud. In his illogical vision he felt her there behind him laughing and laughing interminably. Soltyk was sharing it of course. More and more
his
laughter became intolerable: the traditional solution again presented itself. Laugh! Laugh! He would stand there letting the debt grow, they might gorge themselves upon his back. The attendant behind the bar began observing him with severe curiosity: he had stood in almost the same position for five minutes and kept staring darkly past her, very red in the face.

Then suddenly a laugh burst out behind him—a blow, full of insult, in his ears: he nearly jumped off the ground: after his long immobility the jump was of the last drollery: fists clenched, his face emptied of every drop of colour, in the mere action he had almost knocked a man standing beside him off his feet. The laugh, for him, had risen with tropic suddenness, a simoom of intolerable offence: it had swept him from stem to stern, or whirled him completely round rather, in a second. A young english girl, already terrified at Kreisler’s appearance, and a man, almost as much so, stood open-mouthed in front of him. As to Anastasya and Soltyk, they had entirely disappeared, long before in all probability.

To find that he had been struggling and perspiring in the grasp of a shadow, was a fresh offence merely. It counted against the absentees but even more it swelled the debt against a more terrible, abstract, antagonist. He had been again beating the air: this should have been a climax—of blows, hard words, definite things. But still there was
nothing
.

He smiled, rather hideously, at the two english people near him and walked away. All he wanted now was to get away from the English Club as soon as possible, this ill-fated Club.

While making towards the vestibule he was confronted again with Fräulein Liepmann.

‘Herr Kreisler, I wish to speak to you’ he heard her say.

‘Go to the devil!’ he answered in a muffled voice, without paying more attention. Her voice bawled suddenly in his ear:

‘Besotted fool! if you don’t go at once I’ll get—.’

Turning on her like lightning, with exasperation perfectly meeting hers, his right hand threatening, quickly raised towards his left shoulder, he shouted with a crashing distinctness:

‘Lass’ mich doch, gemeine alte Sau!’
*

The hissing, thunderous explosion was the last thing in teutonic virulence: the muscles all seemed gathered up at his ears like reins, the flesh tightened and white round his mouth, everything contributed to the effect.

Fräulein Liepmann took several steps back: with equal quickness Kreisler turned away, rapped upon the counter, while the attendant looked for his hat; then passed out of the club. Fräulein Liepmann was left with the heavy, unforgettable word ‘sow’ deposited in her boiling spirit, that, boil as it might, would hardly reduce this word to tenderness or digestibility.
Sow
, common-old-sow—the words went on raging through her spirit like a herd of Gadarene Swine.
*

W
ITH
a little scratching (as the concierge pushed it with her finger-tips) with the malignity of a little, quiet, sleek animal, the letter from Germany crept under the door the next morning. It lay there through the silence of the next hour or two, until Kreisler woke. Succeeding to his first brutal farewells to his dreams, no hopes leapt upon his body, a magnificent stallion’s, uselessly refreshed: big and limp, upon his back, he had no desire to move his limbs. Soon he saw the letter across the room, quiet, unimportant, rather matter-of-fact and sly.

Kreisler felt it an indignity to have to open this letter: until his dressing was finished it remained where it was. He might have been making some person wait. Then he took it up and, opening it, drew out, between his forefinger and thumb, the cheque: this he deposited with as much contempt as possible and a
pfui
of the best upon the extreme edge of his washhand stand. He turned to the letter: he read the first few lines, pumping at a cigarette, reducing it mathematically to ash. Cold fury entered his mind with a bound at the first words.

‘Here is your monthly cheque, but it is the last—.’

They were the final words giving notice of a positive stoppage: this month’s money was sent to enable him to settle up his affairs and come to Germany at once.

He read the first three lines over and over, going no further, although the news begun in these first lines was developed throughout the two pages of the letter. Then he put it down beside the cheque, and crushing it under his fist, said monotonously to himself, without much more feeling than the sound of the word contained: ‘Schwein. Schwein. Schwein!’

He got up and pressed his hand upon his forehead; it was wet: he put his hands in his pockets and one of these came into contact with a fifty-centime piece.
*
He took his hands out again slowly, went to his
box and underneath an old dressing-gown found writing paper and envelopes. Then, referring to his father’s letter for the date, he wrote the following lines:

‘7
th June
19—

‘S
IR
,—I shall not return as you suggest, not in person, but my body will no doubt be sent to you about the middle of next month. If—keeping to your decision—no money is sent, it being impossible to live without money, I shall on the seventh of July, this day next month, shoot myself.

‘O
TTO
A
DOLF
K
REISLER
.’

Within half an hour this was in the post: then he went and had breakfast with more tranquillity and relish than he had known for many days. He sat up stiffly at his Café table. He smacked his lips as he drank. The coffee was very hot.

He had come to a respectable decision: his revolt of the night before had been the reverse of that. Death—like a monastery—was before him, with equivalents of a slight shaving of the head, a handful of vows, some desultory farewells: there would be something like the disagreeableness of a dive for one not used to deep water. His life might almost have been regarded as a long and careful preparation for voluntary death, or self-murder.

Instead of rearing pyramids against Death, if you imagine some more uncompromising race meeting its obsession by means of an unparalleled immobility in life, a race of statues, in short, throwing flesh in Death’s path instead of basalt, there you would have a people among whom Kreisler would have been much at home.

I
N
a large fluid but nervous handwriting, the following letter lay, read, Bertha still keeping her large blue ox-eye
*
upon it from a distance:

‘D
EAR
B
ERTHA
,—I am writing at the Gare St. Lazare,
*
on my way to England. You have made things much easier for me in one way of course, but more difficult in another. (I may mention that
the whimsical happenings between you and your absurd countryman in full moonlight are known to me: they were recounted with a wealth of detail that left nothing to the imagination. I don’t know whether that little red-headed bitch—the colour of Iscariot,
*
so perhaps she is—is a friend of yours? Kreisler! I was offered an introduction to him the other day, which I refused: it seems he has introduced himself.) Before, I had contemplated retiring to a little distance for the purpose of reflection: this last
coup
of yours necessitates a much further withdrawal—a couple of hundred miles at least, I have judged: and as far as I can see I shall be some months—say ten—away. You are now a free woman (is that right?) Let your new exploit develop naturally, right up to
fiançailles
, or elsewhere I mean. I release you, Bertha. But for God’s sake get married quickly. It’s all up with you otherwise. My address for the next few months will be 10 Waterford Street, London, W.C.—Yours,

‘S
ORBETT
.’

Sorbert was his second name; and Sorbett or Sherbet his
nom d’amour:
he spelt it with two T’s because his fiancée had never disciplined herself to suppress final consonants.
*

Bertha was in her little kitchen. It was near the front door: next to it was her studio or
salon
, then bedroom: along a passage at right angles the rooms rented by Clara Vamber, her friend.

The letter had been laid upon the table, by the side of which stood the large gas-stove, its gas stars blasting away luridly at sky-blue saucepans with Bertha’s breakfast. While attending to the eggs and coffee, she gazed over her arm reflectively at the letter: it was a couple of inches too far away for her to be able to read it.

Ten minutes before the postman had hurled it in at the door. It was now four days after the dance, and since she had last seen Tarr. On this particular morning she had ‘felt’ he would turn up. ‘Could he have heard anything about the Kreisler incident?’ she had speculated:—the possibility of this was terrifying! But perhaps it would be as well if he had. It might at any future time crop up: she would tell him if he had not already heard: he should hear it from her! The great boulevard-sacrifice of the other night had appeared folly long ago: but so peculiarly free from any form of spite, she did not feel unkindly towards Kreisler, poor devil, that would be absurd. She would take the blame herself.

So Sorbert had been expected to breakfast, on the authority of intuition; bread was being fried in fat. What manner of man would appear, how far informed—or if
not
informed, still all their other difficulties were there inevitably were they not, enough to go on with. Could fried toast and honey play a part in such troubles? Ach! troubles often reduced themselves to fried bread and honey: they could sow troubles, why not help to quell troubles? She had had a second intuition however that he
knew
: not knowing how stormy their interview might be (and the stormier the better of course—it might all along have been just that storm that they had needed!) she neglected no minute precautions, any more than the sailor would neglect to stow away even the smallest of his sails at the sulky approach of a simoom.—The simoom, however, had left her becalmed and taken the train for Dieppe
*
instead of coming in her direction!

B
ERTHA
went on turning the bread over in the pan, taking the butter from its paper and dropping it into its earthenware dish: rinsing and wiping cutlery and plates, regulating the gas. Frequent truculent exclamations spluttered out if anything went wrong: ‘Verdammte Zündhölzchen!’ ‘Donnerwetter!’
*
She employed the oaths of Goethe
*
which had become rakish and respectable; one eyebrow was raised in humorous reflective irritation. She would flatten the letter out and bend down to examine a sentence, stopping her cooking for a moment.

‘Salaud!’ she exclaimed, after having read the letter all through again, putting it down. She turned with coquettish contemptuousness to her frying-pan. Clara’s door opened, and Bertha crumpled the letter into her pocket. Clara entered sleepy-eyed and affecting ill-humour. Her fat body was a softly distributed burden, which she carried with aplomb: she had a gracefully bumpy forehead, a nice whistling mouth—a nest of plump tissue, soft, good and discreet grey eyes. The Library of the Place Saint-Sulpice was where she spent her days.