Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (46 page)

‘Yes.’

‘If you ask me, I think that Soltyk was a little in the wrong.’

‘I dare say.’

Tarr’s sympathies were all with Kreisler. He had never been attracted by the Poles of Paris: deep square races were favoured by him: and Kreisler was an atavistic creature whom on the whole he preferred. Some of his passion for Bertha flowed over on to her fellow countryman.

What hand had his present companion in the duel, he wondered; her indifference or her patronage of Kreisler seemed to point to something unexplained. Kreisler’s ways were still mysterious!

As they were finishing the meal, after turning her head towards the entrance-door Anastasya remarked, with mock concern:

‘There is your fiancée. She seems rather upset—.’

Tarr looked towards the door. Bertha’s white face was close up against one of the narrow panes, above the lace curtain. There was four foot of window on either side of the door.

Her eyes were round, vacant and dark, the features very white and heavy, the mouth steadily open in painful lines. As he looked the face
drew gradually away, and then sank into the medium of the night, in which it had appeared. It withdrew with a glutinous, sweet slowness: the heavy white jowl seemed dragging itself out of some fluid trap where it had been caught like a weighty body.

Tarr knew how the pasty flesh would nestle against the furs, the shoulders swing, the legs move just as much as was necessary for progress, with no movement of the hips. Everything about her in the chilly night would give an impression of warmth and system: the sleek cloth fitting the square shoulders tightly, the underclothes carefully tight as well, the breath from her nostrils the slight steam from a contented machine.

He caught Anastasya’s eye and smiled.

‘Your fiancée is pretty’ she said, affecting to think that that was the correct answer to the smile.

‘She’s not my fiancée. But she’s a pretty girl.’

‘I heard you were engaged—.’

‘No.’

‘It’s no good’ he thought. But he must spare Bertha in future such discomforting sights.

B
ERTHA
was still being taken in carefully prepared doses of about an hour a day: from say half-past four to a quarter to six. Anyone else would have found this much Bertha insupportable under any conditions: only Tarr had been used to such far greater doses that this was the minimum he considered necessary for a cure.

He came to her daily with the dull regularity of an old gentleman at a german watering-place taking his spring-water at the regulation hour. But the cure
*
was finishing: there were signs of a new robustness, hateful to her (equivalent to a springy walk and a contented and sunny eye) that heralded departure. His clockwork visits, with their brutal regularity, did her as much harm as they did him good.

The news of Soltyk’s death, then Kreisler’s, affected the readily melodramatic side of her nature peculiarly. Death had made himself ‘de la partie.’
*
Kreisler had left her alone for a few days: this is what had occupied him. The sensational news made her own case, and her own tragic sensations, more real: they had received, in an indirect way, the authority of Death. Death—real living Death—was somewhere upon the scene: His presence was announced, was felt. He had struck down somebody among them.

In the meantime this disposed of Otto Kreisler for ever. Tarr, as well, appeared to feel that they were left in a tête-à-tête: a sort of chaperon had been lost in Otto. His official post as protector or passive ‘obstacle’ had been a definite status: if he stayed on now it would have to be as something else. The day of the arrival of the news of Kreisler’s end he talked of leaving for England. Bertha’s drawn face, longer silences, and above all her sharp darting glances, embarrassed him very much.

He did not go to England at once. In the week or two succeeding his meeting with Anastasya in the restaurant he saw her frequently. In this way a chaperon was found to take Kreisler’s place. Bertha was officially presented to her successor. When she learnt that Anastasya
had definitely been chosen, her energy reformed: she braced herself for a substantial struggle.

O
N
August the tenth Tarr had an appointment with Anastasya at his studio in Montmartre. They had arranged to dine at a restaurant with a terrace upon the rue de l’Obelisk. It was their tenth meeting. Tarr had just come from his daily cure. He hurried back and found her lounging against the door, reading the newspaper.

‘Ah there you are! You’re late, Mr. Tarr.’

‘Have you been waiting long?’

‘No. Fräulein Lunken I suppose—.’

‘Yes. I couldn’t get away.’

‘Poor Bertha!’

‘Poor Bertha!’

He let her in. The backwardness of his senses was causing him some anxiety: his intellect now stepped in, determined to do their business for them. He put his arm round her waist and planting his lips firmly upon hers, began kissing. Meanwhile he slipped a hand sideways beneath her coat, and pressed still tighter an athletic, sinuous hulk against him. The various bulging and retreating contacts of her body brought monotonous german reminders and the senses obediently awoke.

It was the first time he had kissed her: she showed no disinclination, but no return. Was Miss Vasek in the unfortunate position of an unawakened mass? He felt a twinge of anxiety. Had she not perhaps, though, so rationalized her intimate possessions that there was no precocious fancy left? Mature animal ardour must be set up perhaps: he had the sensation of embracing a tiger, who was not unsympathetic but rather surprised. Perhaps he had been too sudden or too slow—he had not the technique
des fauves, des grands fauves
:
*
he ran his hand upwards along her body: all was statuesquely genuine. His hand took a more pensive course. She took his hand away.

‘We haven’t come to that yet’ she said.

‘Haven’t we?’

‘I didn’t think we had.’

Smiling at each other, they separated.

‘Let us take your greatcoat off. You’ll be hot in here.’

Her coat was all in florid redundancies of heavy cloth, like a Tintoretto mantle.
*
Underneath she was wearing a very plain dark belted smock and skirt, like a working girl, which exaggerated the breadth and straightness of her shoulders. Not to sentimentalize it, she had open-work stockings on underneath, such as the genuine girl would have worn on her night-out, at two-and-eleven-three the pair.
*

‘You look very well’ Tarr said.

‘I put these on for you.’

Tarr had, while he was kissing her, recovered his sensual balance; his senses indeed had flared up in such a way that the reason had been offended and exercised some check at last. Hence a conflict:
they
were not going to have the credit—!

He became shy: he was ashamed of his sudden interest, which had been so long in coming, and hid it instinctively from her. He was committed to the rôle marked out by reason.

‘I am very flattered’ Tarr said ‘by your thoughtfulness.’

‘I am on show Tarr.’

He sat smoking, his eyes upon the floor lest his sudden cupidity should be too apparent.

‘Do you think we shall always be the audience?’

‘Whatever do you mean by that—who are your
we
?’

‘I meant the remark about “on show,” menfolk of course being the audience.’

‘I see what you mean: I should think the spectators’ rôle was the one to be preferred but I can quite imagine the audience breaking up and the rôles being reversed. Meantime I’m the puppet.’

Fixing upon him a diabolical smile, set in a precocious frill of double chin and punctuated with prominent dimples she lay back in the chair. A most respectable bulk of hip occupied the space between the two arms of the chair, not enough completely to satisfy a Dago,
*
but too much to please a dandy of the West. Tarr furtively noted this opulence and compared it with Bertha’s. He confessed that it outdid his fiancée’s.

‘Yes I am even a peep-show for all peeping Toms and Dicks—you know when the Principal Boy turns round, you know the supreme moment of Pantomime?’
*

‘When she is stern-on?’

‘Well I’m like that too when I’m going away and not facing the audience, and tell me how you would like to be a show-girl anyway Tarr? You shake your head—a little girlishly—all the same I can see you’re not the show-girl sort, but why should I? I have got these things here’ she laid a hand upon the nearest breast to it ‘as a stark high-brow I ask you, can you respect such objects upon a person, right on top of a person?’

‘I don’t mind them. I think they are nice.’

‘Not as a high-brow, it’s imposs;
*
they class me, I am one of the Bertha-birds, all the small boobies know what I’m made for when I run to catch a bus. “Look at that milch-cow short of wind—here! wait till I catch you bending!” It’s beastly.’

‘What’s it matter what they say? They are street-arabs
*
merely.’

‘They roam the gutters but they have eyes in their heads.’

‘I am all for a breast or two.’

‘No, you are laughing at me too—you are being a small boobie.’

‘No’ Tarr quavered: then he added at once: ‘I am hallucinated.’

‘That’s what it is, you have hit the nail on the head, once I was like you and liked this—I might even learn to love it again’ she muttered, casting her eyes into a distant recess.

‘The Man dreams but what the Boy believed.’
*

‘The Man dreams—what is that? What the Child believes to be real with his eyes open, the Man can only believe in—in his sleep and then not quite—I know, there was a time when I was a child of nature who took myself for granted from top to toe, I was mad then.’

‘You make me mad now, in a way. Yes’ he touched himself with the tips of his fingers: ‘I am mad, that’s correct: just a touch of passion and off you go again—you are a mad believer once more for the moment!’

‘Have you just a touch of passion?’

‘Just a touch.’ He grinned passionately. ‘Something is real.’

She sighed, and licked her lips.

‘Aside from that’ she said, and lifted up her breast a little way in the palm of her proud hand, ‘what would you do under the circumstances Tarr—it’s a handicap, there’s no blinking the fact.’

‘I should do nothing.’

‘And there is nothing to do—
rien à faire!
it’s all part of the beastly shop-window—I have to stick frills around them even, just as
pork-merchants in their shop-fronts decorate the carcasses of their sucking-pigs.’

Tarr laughed as he pictured to himself the lattice-work of the silk receptacle, and as she threatened deliberately to pout, remarked:

‘It is part of the reality is lady’s underwear—what the child
believes
and the adult only dreams, though they both see it—when visited with a little passion which goes a long way I can believe and become quite genuinely mad, but I am with you if you object to those ravings which would then issue from my mouth being given out as reason, or even as beauty. It’s not Beauty. It is Belief, if you like.’

‘Of course it’s not—we agree in the most marvellous way Tarr. These things, all things that are stamped feminine gender, is not a thing that bears cold print, unless it is to be read by madmen.’

‘Of course not.’

‘But as you say a little passion goes a long way and I can go anywhere and pass myself off as a most lovely creature. It’s a fact.’

‘Can you do that?’

‘Why yes—I’ll pass myself off on you if you’re not careful.’

‘Je ne demande pas mieux!’ Tarr said indifferently, peering over at her as if through a gathering mist.

‘I’m still here’ she answered. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

‘It’s—it’s not the
thing itself
—.’

‘Why no. But it is no use, no woman should be intelligent, it’s no use.’

But Tarr rejoined, with mock-indignation:

‘Nor he-men for the matter of that, it’s six one and half a dozen the other—have you ever considered what a man has to carry about with him too?’

‘What.’

‘lt’s just the same, I am a man, I trim my moustaches for instance as though this hole here were the better for a black frill of hair—is it?—it’s as bad as your sacro-sanct dugs, my kisser’s no better!’

‘I don’t think so: men have never sat down and become lace-makers to embellish their strange hairy beauties like us women. Their little pigs stay at home.’

‘I think they are just as bad. They are terrible.’

‘Oh no.’

Tarr decided to marry Anastasya after they had finished talking, for the sake of her little pigs, that went to market so beautifully.

‘I think Tarr I know your opinion of women with intellects—how right you are, how right you are!’

‘Not at all!’

‘No, you are, I agree with you all along the line: it must madden you to hear me talking about this in such a matter-of-fact way—have I disgusted you, I expect so? Some things
should
be sacro-sanct!’

She crossed her legs. The cold grape-bloom mauve silk stockings ended in a dark slash each against her two snowy stallion thighs which they bisected, visible, one above the other, in naked expanses of tempting undercut, issuing from a dead-white foam of central lace worthy of the
Can-Can
exhibitionists
*
of the tourist resorts of
Paris-by-night
.

Tarr grinned with brisk appreciation of the big full-fledged baby’s coquetry pointing the swinish moral under the rose and mock-modestly belowstairs, and he blinked and blinked as if partly dazzled, his mohammedan eye
*
did not refuse the conventional bait; his butcher-sensibility pressed his fancy into professional details, appraising this milky ox soon to be shambled in his slaughter-box, or upon his high divan.

‘Sacro-sanct’ she repeated heavily, letting fall upon him a slow and sultry eye, not without a Bovril-bathos
*
in its human depths—like all conversational cattle, it hinted! Expelling its wistfulness, it looked him squarely in the whites, and she said passionately: