Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (37 page)

T
ARR
soon regretted this last anti-climax stage of his adventure: he would have left Kreisler alone, but he felt that by frequenting him he could save Bertha from something disagreeable. With disquiet and misgiving every night now he sat in front of his prussian friend; he watched him gradually swallowing enough spirits to work him up to his pitch of characteristic madness.

‘After all let us hear really what it all means, your Kreisler stunt, and Kreisler?’ he said to her four or five days after his reappearance. ‘Do you know that I act as a dam, or rather a dyke, to his outrageous flood of liquorous spirits every night? Only my insignificant form is between you and destruction, or you and a very unpleasant Kreisler, at any rate. I’m afraid he may do you some mischief one of these fine days. Have you seen him when he’s drunk?—What, after all, does
Kreisler
mean? Satisfy my curiosity.’

Bertha shuddered and looked at him with dramatically wide-open eyes, as though there were no answer.

‘It’s nothing Sorbert, nothing’ she said, as though Kreisler were the bubonic plague
*
and she were making light of it.

‘Why aren’t you kinder to him? He really has something to complain of.’

He had neglected the coincidence of his own reappearance and Bertha’s refusal to see Kreisler. He must avoid finding himself manœuvred into appearing the cause: a tranquil and sentimental revenant
*
was the rôle he had chosen. He encouraged Bertha to see his boon companion and relax her sudden exclusiveness: but he hesitated to carry out thoroughly his part of go-between and reconciler. At length he began to make enquiries. After all, to have to hold back his successor to the favours of a lady, from going and seizing those rights (temporarily denied him presumably), was an uncomfortable situation. At any moment now it seemed likely that Kreisler would turn upon him.

Better leave lovers to fight out their own quarrels! All his retrospective pleasure was being spoilt. Bertha was tempted to explain, in as dramatic a manner as possible, the situation to Tarr: but she hesitated always because she thought it would lead to a fight. She was often, as it was, anxious for Tarr.

‘Sorbert, I think I’ll go to Germany at once’ she said to him, on the afternoon of his second visit to Renée Liepmann’s.

‘Why, because you’re afraid of Kreisler?’

‘No but I think it’s better.’

‘But why, all of a sudden?’

‘My sister will be home from Berlin, in a day or two—.’

‘And you’d leave me here to “mind” the dog.’

‘No. Don’t see Kreisler any more, Sorbert. Dog is the word indeed! He is mad: he is worse than mad. Promise me, Sorbert’—she took his hand—‘not to go to the Café any more!’

‘Do you want him at your door at twelve to-night?—I feel I may be playing the part of—gooseberry
*
do you call it—.’

‘Don’t Sorbert. If you only knew!—He was here this morning, hammering for nearly half an hour. But all I ask you is to go to the Café no more. There is no need for you to be mixed up in all this: I alone am to blame.’

‘Have you known Otto long—before you knew me for instance?’

‘No only a week or two—since you went away.’

‘I must ask Kreisler. But he seems to have very primitive notions about himself.’

‘Don’t bother any more with that man Sorbert. You don’t do any good. Don’t go to the Café to-night!’

‘Why to-night?’

‘Any night.’

The chief cause of separation had become an element of insidious
rapprochement
.
*
He left her silently apprehensive face at the front door, staring after him mournfully.

So that night, after his second visit to Fräulein Liepmann’s, he did not seek out Kreisler at his usual headquarters with his first enthusiasm.

A
LREADY
before a considerable pile of saucers, representing a considerable bill up-to-date for the accommodating Tarr, Kreisler sat quite still, his eyes very bright, smiling to himself. Tarr did not at once ask him ‘what Kreisler meant’ as he had intended; ‘Kreisler’ looked as though it meant something a little different on that particular evening. He acknowledged Tarr’s arrival slightly, seeming to include him in his reverie. Then they sat without speaking, this meeting redolent of the unpleasant atmosphere of police-court romance.
*

Tarr still kept his retrospective luxury before him, as it maintained the Kreisler side of the transaction in a desired perspective. Anastasya, whom he had just left, had come as a diversion. He got back, with her, into the sphere of ‘real’ things again, not fanciful retrospective ones. This would be a reply to Kreisler (an Anastasya for your Otto) and restore the balance: at present they were perched upon a sort of three-legged affair. The fourth party would make things solid and less precarious.

To maintain his rôle of intermediary and go on momentarily keeping his eye on Kreisler’s threatening figure, he must himself be definitely engaged in a new direction, beyond the suspicion of hankerings after his old love. Did he, however, wish to enter into a new attachment with Anastasya? That could be decided later: he would take the first steps, retain her if possible, and out of this charming expedient pleasant things might arise. For the moment he was compelled to requisition her. She might be regarded as a casual travelling companion: thrown together on a casanovaesque stage-coach journey,
*
anything might happen. Delight, adventure and amusement were always achieved: his itch to see his humorous concubine is turned into a ‘retrospective luxury,’ visits to the Liepmann circle, mysterious relationship with
Kreisler: this, in its turn, suddenly turning rather prickly and perplexing, he now, through the agency of a beautiful fourth party, turns it back again into fun; not serious enough for Beauty—destined, therefore, rather for her subtle, rough, satiric sister.

Once Anastasya had been relegated to her place rather of expediency, he could think of her with more freedom: he looked forward to his work in her direction. There would be no harm at all in anticipating a little: she might at once be brought upon the boards, as though the affair were already settled and ripe for publicity.

‘Do you know a girl called Anastasya Vasek? She is to be found at your german friend’s, Fräulein Liepmann’s.’

‘Yes I know her’ said Kreisler, looking up with unwavering blankness. His introspective smile vanished. ‘What then?’ was implied in his look. What a fellow this Englishman was, to be sure! What was he after now? Anastasya was a much more delicate point with him than Bertha.

‘I’ve just got to know her. She’s an attractive girl, don’t you agree?’ Kreisler’s reception of these innocent remarks he could not make out at all.

‘Is she?’ Kreisler looked at him almost with astonishment.

There is a point beyond which we must hold people responsible for accidents: innocence then loses its meaning. Beyond this point Tarr had transgressed. Whether Tarr knew anything or not, the essential reality was that Tarr was beginning to get at him with Anastasya, just having been for a week a problematic figure suddenly appearing between him and his prey of the rue Martine. The habit of civilized restraint had done something to keep Kreisler baffled and passive for a week. His new self-elected boon companion also was an open-handed person: he had been preparing lately to borrow money from him. Anastasya brought on the scene was another kettle of fish. What did this new stunt signify? ‘Bertha Lunken will have nothing more to do with you. You mustn’t annoy her any more. In the meantime, I am getting on very well with Anastasya Vasek!’ Was that the idea?

Kreisler ruminated the question as to whether Tarr had heard the whole story of his assault upon his late fiancée: the possibility of his knowing increased his contempt for this shifty gentleman.

Kreisler was disarmed for the moment by the remembrance of Anastasya.

‘Is Fräulein Vasek working in a studio?’ he asked.

‘She’s at Serrano’s, I think’ Tarr answered.

‘So you go to Fräulein Liepmann’s?’

‘Sometimes.’

Kreisler reflected a little.

‘I should like to see her again.’

Tarr began to scent another mysterious muddle. Would he never be free of Herr Kreisler? Perhaps he was going to be followed there as well. In deliberate meditation Kreisler appeared to be coming round to Tarr’s opinion: for his part too, Fräulein Vasek was a nice young lady. ‘Yes, she is attractive, as you say!’—his manner began to suggest that Tarr had put her forward as a substitute for Bertha.

For the rest of the evening Kreisler would talk of nothing but Anastasya. How was she dressed? Had she mentioned him? and so forth. Tarr felt inclined to say ‘But you don’t understand! She is for
me. Bertha
is your young woman now!’ Only in reflecting on this possible remark, he was confronted with the obvious reply ‘But
is
Bertha my young woman? I have been denied my male rights since you put in an appearance! It’s up to you to find me a substitute.’

T
ARR
had Anastasya in solitary promenade two days after this conversation. He had worked the first stage consummately: he swam with ease beside his big hysterical black swan, seeming to guide her with a golden halter. They were swimming at the moment with august undulations of thought across the Luxembourg Gardens on this sunny and tasteful evening, about four o’clock. The Latins and Scandinavians who strolled upon the Latin terrace were each of them a microscopic hero, but better turned out than the dubious too spacious and slapdash heroes of 1840’s Vie de Bohème and revolutionary storm and stress.
*

The inviolate, constantly sprinkled and shining lawns by the Lycée Henri Trois
*
were thickly fringed with a sort of seaside humanity, who sat facing them and their coolness as though it had been the sea. Leaving these upland expanses to the sedentary swarms of mammas and papas, Tarr and Anastasya crossed over beneath the trees past the children’s carousals grinding out their antediluvian lullabies.

This place represented the richness of three wasted years, three incredibly gushing, thick years—what had happened to this delightful muck? He had just turned seventeen when he had arrived there, and had wandered in this children’s outdoor nursery almost a child himself. All this profusion had accomplished for him was to dye the avenues of a Park with personal colour for the rest of his existence.
No one
, he was quite convinced, had squandered so much of the imaginative stuff of life in the neighbourhood of these terraces, ponds, and lawns. So this was more nearly
his Park
*
than it was anybody else’s: he should never walk through it without bitter and soothing recognition from it. Well, that was what the ‘man of action’ accomplished. In four idle years he had been, when most inactive, experimenting with the man of action’s job. He had captured a Park!—well! he had spent himself into the earth, the trees had his sap in them.

He remembered a day when he had brought a newly purchased book to the bench there, his mind tearing at it in advance, almost writing it in its energy. He had been full of such unusual abounding faith: the streets around these gardens, in which he had lodged alternately, were so many confluents and tributaries of memory, charging in upon it on all sides with defunct puissant tides. The places, he then reflected, where childhood has been spent, or where, later, dreams of energy have been flung away, year after year, are obviously the healthiest spots for a person where such places exist: but perhaps, although he possessed the Luxembourg Gardens so completely, they were completely possessed by thousands of other people! So many men had begun their childhood of ambition in this neighbourhood. His hopes, too, no doubt, had grown there more softly because of the depth and richness of the bed. A sentimental miasma made artificially in Paris a similar good atmosphere where the mind could healthily exist as was found by artists in brilliant, complete and solid times. Paris was the most human city we had.

‘
Elle dit le mot, Anastase, né pour d’éternels parchemins
.’
*
He could not, however, get interested: was it the obstinate Eighteenth-Century animal vision? Those Eighteenth-Century hams—the rosy cheeks and cupid mouths and gigantic bottoms, those shapes once they got into your head, perhaps got in the way and obstructed? When you plunge into these beings, must they be all quivering with unconsciousness, like life with a cat or a serpent?—But her sex would throw clouds over
her eyes: she was a woman—it was no good. Again he must confess Anastasya could only offer him something too
serious
: he could not play and joke so well with that.

Then to his Bertha he was after a fashion true;
*
the protective instinct that people with a sense of their own power have for those not equals with whom they have been associated existed with him: he would have given to Bertha the authority of his own spirit, to prime her with himself that she might meet on equal terms and vanquish any rival. A slight hostility to Anastasya made itself felt, like a part of Bertha left in himself protesting and jealous.

‘I suppose she knows all about Bertha’ he thought. (‘Homme sensuel! Homme égoïste!’ he remembered.) She seemed rather shy with him.

‘How do you like Paris?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know yet. Do you like it?’ She had a flatness in speaking english because of her education in the United States.

‘I don’t like to be quite so near the centre of the world, you feel the machinery at work. Then it’s too exciting and prevents you from working. But here I am. It’s certainly difficult to live in London after Paris.’

‘I should have thought everything was so perfected here that the machinery did not obtrude—’ she objected.

‘Perhaps that is so; but I think that Paris works that the other countries may live and create: that is the rôle France has chosen. The french spirit seems to me rather spare and impoverished at present.’

‘You regard it as a mother-drudge?’