Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (13 page)

Through girlhood her strong german senses had churned away at her, and claimed an image from her gentle and dreamy mind. In its turn the mind had accumulated its impressions of men, fancies from books and conversations, and it had made its hive. So her senses were presented with the image that was to satisfy and rule them. They flung themselves upon it as she had flung herself upon Tarr.

This image left considerable latitude. Tarr had been the first to fit—rather paradoxically, but all the faster for that.

This ‘high standard aryan bitch,’ as Tarr had described her, had arrived, with him, at the full and headlong condition we agree to name ‘love.’ Thereupon the image, or type, was thrown away: the individual, the good Tarr, took its place.

Bertha had had several
Schatzes
*
before Tarr. They had all left the type-image intact. At most it had been a little blurred by them. It had almost been smashed for one man, physically much of a muchness
with Sorbert: but that gentleman had never got quite near enough in to give the coup de foudre
*
to the type picture or eikon.
*
Tarr had characteristically supposed this image to have little sharpness of outline left: it would not be a very difficult matter for anyone to extort its recognition, he would have said if asked.

‘Vous êtes mon goût, Sorbet. Du bist mein Geschmack’
*
she would say.

Tarr was not demonstrative when she said this. Reciprocate he could not exactly; and he could not help reflecting whether to be her Geschmack was very flattering.—There
must
be something the matter with him: perhaps there
was
something the matter after all, of which he was not aware! But why no, to be a Geschmack of that sort meant nothing at all: it was all right: he could put his mind at ease.

All Bertha’s hope centred in his laziness: she watched his weaknesses with a loving eye. He had much to say about his under-nature: she loved hearing him talk about that: she listened attentively.

‘It is the most dangerous quality of all to possess’ and he would sententiously add—‘only the best people possess it, in common with the obscure and humble.’ At this she would smile indulgently and then brightly nod her head. ‘It is like a great caravanserai
*
in which scores of people congregate: a disguise in which such an one, otherwise Pasha, circulates among unembarrassed men incog.
*
diverting himself and learning the secrets of men. You can’t learn the secrets of men if they smell greatness in you.’ The danger that resided in these facilities was however plain enough to this particular Pasha. The Pasha had been given a magic mask of humbleness: but the inner nature seemed flowing equally to the mask and the unmasked magnificence. As yet he was unformed, but he wished to form wholly Pasha.

Meantime this under-nature’s chief use was as a precious
villégiature
*
for his energy. Bertha was the country wench encountered by the more exalted incarnation on its holidays, or, wandering idle Khalife,
*
in some concourse of his surreptitious life.

Tarr’s three days’ unannounced and unexplained ‘leave’ had made Bertha very nervous indeed. She suffered from the incomplete, unsymmetrical appearance her life now presented. Everything spread out palpably before her, where she could arrange it like a roomful of furniture, that was how she liked it: even in her present shakedown of a life, Tarr had noticed the way he was treated as material
for ‘arrangement.’ But she had never been able to indulge this idiosyncrasy much in the past; this was not the first time that she had found herself in a similar position. Hence her certain air of being at home in these casual quarters, which belied her.

The detested temporary makeshift dwelling had during the last few days been given a new coat of sombre thought. Found in accidental quarters, had she not been over-delicate in not suggesting an immediate move into something more home-like and permanent? People would leave her camped there for the rest of her natural life unless she were a little brutal and got
herself
out somehow. But no shadow of unkindness ever tainted her abject genuineness. Where cunning efforts to retain this slippery customer abounded, she never blamed or turned upon him. Long ago she had given herself without ceremony and almost at sight, indeed: she awaited his thanks or no thanks patiently.

But the itch of action was on her. Tarr’s absences were like light: his presence was a shadow. They were both stormy. The last three days’ leave taken without comment had caused her to overhaul the precarious structure in which she had dwelt for so long: something had to be done, she saw that. There had to be a reconstruction. She had trusted too much in Fate and obedient waiting Hymen.
*

So a similar ferment to Tarr’s was in full operation in Bertha.

Anger with herself, dreary appetite for action, would help her over farewells: she was familiar enough with them, too, in thought. She would not on her side stir a hand to change things: he must do that. She would only facilitate such action as he cared to take, easing up in all directions for him.

The new energy delivered attack after attack upon her hope: she saw nothing beyond Tarr except measures of utility. The ‘heart’ had always been the most cherished ornament of her existence: Tarr would take that with him (as she would keep his ring and the books he had given her). She could not now get it back for the asking. Let it go! What use had she for it henceforth? She must indulge her mania for tasteful arrangement in future without this. Or rather what heart she had left would be rather like one of those salmon-coloured, corrugated gas office stoves, compared to a hearth with a fire of pine.

With reluctance Tarr got up, and went over to her. He had not brought his indifference there to make it play tricks, perform little
feats; nor did he wish to press it into inhuman actions. It was a humane ‘indifference,’ essentially.

‘You haven’t kissed me yet’ he said, in imitation of her.

‘Why kiss you, Sorbert?’ she managed to say before her lips were covered with his. He drew her ungraciously and roughly into his arms, and started kissing her mouth with a machine action.

Docilely she covered him with her inertia. He was supposed to be performing a miracle of bringing the dead to life. Gone about too crudely, the willing mountebank, Death, had been offended: it is not thus that great spirits are prevailed upon to flee. Her ‘indifference’—the great, simulated and traditional—would not be ousted by an upstart and younger relative. By Tarr himself, grown repentant, yes. But not by another ‘indifference.’

Then his brutality stung her offended spirit, that had been pursing itself up for so many hours. Tears began rolling tranquilly out of her eyes in large dignified drops. They had not been very far back in the wings. He received them frigidly. She was sure, thought he, to detect something unusual during this scene.

Then with the woman’s bustling, desperate, possessive fury, she suddenly woke up. She disengaged her arms wildly and threw them round his neck, tears becoming torrential. Underneath the poor comedian that played such antics with such phlegmatic and exasperating persistence, this distressed being thrust up its trembling mask, like a drowning rat. Its finer head pierced her blunter wedge.

‘Oh dis Sorbert! Dis! Est-ce que tu m’aimes? M’aimes-tu? Dis!’
*

‘Yes—yes—yes. But don’t cry.’

A wail, like the buzzing on a comb covered with paper, followed.

‘Oh dis—m’aimes-tu? Dis que tu m’aimes!’
*

A blurting, hurrying personality rushed right up into his face. He was very familiar with it. It was like the sightless clammy charging of a bat. Humbug had tempestuously departed: their hot-house was suffering a blast of outside air. He stared at her face groping up as though it scented mammals in his face: it pushed to right, then to left, and rocked itself.

A complicated image developed in his mind as he stood with her. He was remembering Schopenhauer:
*
it was of a chinese puzzle of boxes within boxes, or of insects’ discarded envelopes. A woman had at the centre a kernel, a sort of very substantial astral baby:
*
this brat was apt to swell—she then became
all
baby. The husk he held now
was a painted mummy-case, say. He was a mummy-case, too. Only he contained nothing but innumerable other painted cases inside, smaller and smaller ones. The smallest was not a substantial astral baby, however, or live core, but a painting like the rest.—His kernel was a painting, in fact: that was as it should be! He was pleased that it was nothing more violent than that.

He was half sitting upon the table: he found himself patting her back. He stopped doing this. His face looked heavy and fatigued. A dull, intense infection of her animal despair had filled it.

He held her head gently against his neck: or he held her skull against his neck. She shook and sniffed softly.

‘Bertha, stop crying, do please stop crying. I’m a brute. It’s fortunate for you that I am a brute. I am only a brute. There’s nothing to cry for.’

He overestimated deafness in weepers: and when women flooded their country he always sat down and waited. Often as this had happened to him, he had never attempted to circumvent it. He behaved like a person taking a small dog for a necessary walk at the end of a lead.

Turned towards the window, he looked at the green stain of the foliage outside. Something was cleared up at this point; nature was not friendly to him; its metallic tints jarred. Or at least nature was the same for all men: the sunlight seen like an adventurous stranger in the streets was intimate with Bertha. The scrap of crude forest had made him want to abstract himself from his present surroundings, but strictly unaccompanied. Now he realized that this nature was tainted with her. If he went away he would only be
playing
at liberty: he had been quite right in not availing himself of the invitations of the Spring. The settlement of this present important question stood between him and pleasure. A momentary well-being had been accepted: but the larger spiritual invitation he had rejected. That he would only take up when he was free. In its annual expansion nature sent its large unstinting invitations. But nature loved the genius and liberty in him.—Tarr felt the invitation would not have been so cordial had he proposed taking a wife and family! This was his unpleasant discovery.

Bestirring himself, he led Bertha passively protesting to the settee. Like a sick person she was half indignant at being moved: he should have remained, a perpendicular bed for her, till the fever had
decently passed. But revolted at the hypocrisy required, he left her standing at the edge of the settee.

Bertha stood crouching a little, her face buried in her hands, in ruffled absurdity. The only moderately correct procedure under the circumstances would be to walk out of the door at once and never come back: but with his background of months of different behaviour this could not be compassed he was quite aware, so he sat frowning at her.

She sank down upon the couch, head buried in the bilious cushions. He composed himself for what must follow. On one side of him Bertha, a lump of half-humanity, lay quite motionless and silent, and upon the other the little avenue was equally still. He, of course, between them, was quite still as well. The false stillness within, however, now gave back to the scene without its habitual character. It still seemed strange to him: but all its strangeness now lay in its humdrum and natural appearance. The quiet inside, in the room, was what did not seem strange to him: with that he had become imbued. Bertha’s numb silence and abandon was a stupid tableau vivant of his own mood. His responsibility for all this was quite beyond question: this indeed was
him
. How could he escape that conclusion? There he sat, the cause of all this. It all fitted exactly as far as it went.

In this impasse of arrested life he stood sick and useless: they progressed from stage to stage of their weary farce. The confusion grew every moment. It resembled a combat between two wrestlers of approximately equal strength: neither could really win. One or other of them was usually wallowing warily or lifelessly upon his stomach while the other tugged at him, examining and prodding his carcase. His liking, contempt, realization of her authentic devotion to him, his confused but exigent conscience, dogged preparation to say farewell, all dove-tailed with precision. There she lay a sheer-hulk, he could take his hat and go. But once gone in this manner he could not stay away, he would have to come back.

He turned round, and sitting on the window-sill, began again staring at Bertha.

Women’s psychic discharges affected him invariably like the sight of a person being sea-sick. It was the result of a weak spirit, as the other was the result of a weak stomach, they could only live on the retching seas of their troubles on the condition of being quite empty. The lack of art or illusion in actual life enables the sensitive man to
exist, Tarr reflected: likewise, but contrariwise, the phenomenal lack of nature in the average man’s existence is lucky and necessary for him.

From a prolonged contemplation of Bertha Tarr now gathered strength, it seemed: his dislocated feelings were brought into a new synthesis.

Launching himself off the window-sill, he remained as though suspended in thought: then he sat down provisionally at the writing-table, within a few feet of the couch. He took up a book of Goethe’s poems, an early present to him from Bertha. In cumbrous field-day dress of gothic characters, squad after squad, these pieces paraded their message. As he turned the pages he stopped at
Ganymed
*
to consider the Spring from another angle.

Du rings mich anglühst

Frühling, Geliebter!

Mit tausendfacher Liebeswonne

Sich an mein Herz drängt

Deiner ewigen Wärme

Heilig Gefühl,

Unendliche Schöne!

The book, left there upon a former visit, he now thrust into his breast pocket. As soldiers used to go into battle sometimes with the Bible upon their persons, he prepared himself for a final combat, with Goethe laid upon his heart. Men’s lives have been known to have been saved through a lesser devoutness.