Читать книгу Tarr (Musaicum Rediscovered Classics) - Wyndham Lewis - Страница 9

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The new summer heat drew heavy pleasant ghosts out of the ground, like plants disappeared in winter; spectres of energy, bulking the hot air with vigorous dreams. Or they had entered into the trees, in imitation of Pagan gods, and nodded their delicate distant intoxication to him. Visions were released in the sap, with scented explosion, the spring one bustling and tremendous reminiscence.

Tarr felt the street was a pleasant current, setting from some immense and tropic gulf, neighboured by Floridas of remote invasions. He ambled down it puissantly, shoulders shaped like these waves; a heavy-sided drunken fish. The houses, with winks of the shocked clockwork, were grazed, holding along their surface thick soft warmth. It poured weakly into his veins. A big dog wandering on its easily transposable business, inviting some delightful accident to deflect it from maudlin and massive promenade. In his mind, too, as in the dog’s, his business was doubtful—a small black spot ahead in his brain, half puzzling but peremptory.

The mat heavy light grey of putty-coloured houses, like thickening merely of hot summer atmosphere without sun, gave a spirituality to this deluge of animal well-being, in weighty pale sense-solidarity. Through the opaquer atmosphere sounds came lazily or tinglingly. People had become a Balzacian species, boldly tragic and comic: like a cast of “Comédie Humaine” humanity off for the day, Balzac sleeping immensely in the cemetery.

Tarr stopped at a dairy. He bought saladed potatoes, a petit suisse. The coolness, as he entered, felt eerie. The dairyman, in blue-striped smock and black cap, peaked and cylindrical, came out of an inner room. Through its glasses several women were visible, busy at a meal. This man’s isolation from the heat and mood of the world outside, impressed his customer as he came forward with a truculent “Monsieur!” Tarr, while his things were done up, watched the women. The discreet voices, severe reserve of keen business preoccupations, showed the usual Paris commerçante. The white, black, and slate-grey of dresses, extreme neatness, silent felt over-slippers, make their commercial devotions rather conventual. With this purchase—followed by one of strawberries at a fruiterer’s opposite—his destination was no longer doubtful.

He was going to Bertha’s to eat his lunch. Hence the double quantity of saladed potatoes. He skirted the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens for fifteen yards. Crossing the road, he entered the Rue Martine, a bald expanse of uniformly coloured rosy-grey pavement, plaster, and shutter. A large iron gate led into a short avenue of trees. At its end Bertha lived in a three-story house.

The leaden brilliant green of spring foliage hung above him, ticketing innumerably the trees, sultry smoke volumes from factories in Fairyland. Its novelty, fresh yet dead, had the effectiveness of an unnecessary mirage. The charm of habit and monotony he had come to affront seemed to have coloured, chemically, these approaches to its home.

He found Bertha’s eye fixed on him with a sort of humorous indifferent query from the window. He smiled, thinking what would be the veritable answer! On finding himself in the presence of the object of his erudite discussion, he felt he had got the focus wrong. This familiar life, with its ironical eye, mocked at him too. It was aware of the subject of his late conversation. The twin of the shrewd feeling embodied in the observation, “One can never escape from oneself,” appeared.

This ironical unsurprised eye at the window, so vaguely apropos, offended him. It seemed to be making fun of the swaggering indifference he was bringing to bask in the presence of its object. He became slightly truculent.

“Have you had lunch yet, my dear?” he asked, as she opened the door to him. “I’ve brought you some strawberries.”

“I didn’t expect you, Sorbet. No, I’ve not had lunch. I was just going to get it.” (Sorbet, or in English, Sherbert, was his nom d’amour, a perversion of his name, Sorbert).

Bertha’s was the intellectually fostered Greek type of German handsomeness. It is that beauty that makes you wonder, when you meet it, if German mothers have replicas and photographs of the Venus of Milo in their rooms during the first three months of their pregnancy. It is also found in the pages of Prussian art periodicals, the arid, empty intellectualism of Münich. She had been a heavy baby. Her body now, a self-indulgent athlete’s, was strung to heavy motherhood.

A great believer in tepid “air-baths,” she would remain, for hours together, in a state of nudity about her rooms. She was wearing a pale green striped affair, tight at the waist. It looked as though meant for a smaller woman. It may have belonged to her sister. As a result, her ample form had left the fullness of a score of attitudes all over it, in flat creasings and pencillings—like the sanguine of an Italian master in which the leg is drawn in several positions, one on top of the other.

“What have you come for, Sorbet?”

“To see you. What did you suppose?”

“Oh, you have come to see me?”

“I brought these things. I thought you might be hungry.”

“Yes, I am rather.” She stopped in the passage, Dryad-like on one foot, and stared into the kitchen. Tarr did not kiss her. He put his hand on her hip—a way out of it—and led her into the room. His hand remarked that she was underneath in her favourite state of nakedness.

Bertha went into the kitchen with the provisions. She lived in two rooms on one side of the front door. Her friend, Fräulein Goenthner, to whom she sub-let, lived on the other side of it, the kitchen promiscuously existing between, and immediately facing the entrance.

Tarr was in the studio or salon. It was a complete bourgeois-bohemian interior. Green silk cloth and cushions of various vegetable and mineral shades covered everything, in mildewy blight. The cold, repulsive shades of Islands of the Dead, gigantic cypresses, grottos of Teutonic nymphs, had invaded this dwelling. Purple metal and leather steadily dispensed with expensive objects. There was the plaster east of Beethoven (some people who have frequented artistic circles get to dislike this face extremely), brass jars from Normandy, a photograph of Mona Lisa (Tarr hated the Mona Lisa).

A table just by the window, laid with a white cloth, square embroidered holes at its edges, was where Tarr at once took up his position. Truculence was denoted by his thus going straight to his eating-place.

Installed in the midst of this ridiculous life, he gave a hasty glance at his “indifference” to see whether it were safe and sound. Seen through it, on opening the door, Bertha had appeared unusual. This impressed him disagreeably. Had his rich and calm feeling of bounty towards her survived the encounter, his “indifference” might also have remained intact.

He engrossed himself in his sense of physical well-being. From his pocket he produced a tin box containing tobacco, papers, and a little steel machine for rolling cigarettes given him by Bertha. A long slim hinged shell, it nipped in a little cartridge of tobacco, which it then slipped with inside a paper tube, and slipping out again empty, the cigarette was made.

Tarr began manufacturing cigarettes. Reflections from the shining metal in his hand scurried about amongst the bilious bric-à-brac. Like a layer of water lying on one of oil, the light heated stretch by the windows appeared distinct from the shadowed part of the room.

This place was cheap and dead, but rich with the same lifelessness as the trees without. These looked extremely near and familiar at the opened windows, breathing the same air continually as Bertha. But they were dusty, rough, and real.

Bertha came in from the kitchen. She went on with a trivial rearrangement of her writing-table. This had been her occupation as he appeared at the gate beneath, drawing her ironical and musing eye from his image to himself. A new photograph of Tarr was being placed on her writing-table flush with the window. Ten days previously it had been taken in that room. It had ousted a Klinger and generally created a restlessness, to her eye, in the other objects.

“Ah, you’ve got the photographs, have you?—Is that me?”

She handed it to him.

“Yes, they came yesterday!”

“Yesterday” he had not been there! Whatever he asked at the present moment would draw a softly thudding answer, heavy German reproach concealed in it with tireless ingenuity. These photographs would under other circumstances have been produced on his arrival with considerable noise.

Tarr had looked rather askance at this portrait and Bertha’s occupation. There was his photograph, calmly, with an air of permanence, taking up its position on her writing-table, just as he was preparing to vanish for good.

“Let’s see yours,” he said, still holding the photograph.

What strange effects all this complicated activity inside had on the surface, his face. A set sulky stagnation, every violence dropping an imperceptible shade on to it, the features overgrown with this strange stuff—that twist of the head that was him, and that could only be got rid of by breaking.

“They’re no good,” she said, closing the drawer, handing her photographs, sandwiched with tissue-paper, to Sorbert. “That one”—a sitting pose, face yearning from photograph, lighted, not with a smile, but a sort of sentimental illumination, the drapery arranged like a poster—“I don’t think that’s so bad,” she said slangily, meant to be curt and “cheeky.”

“What an idiot!” he thought; “what a face!”

A consciously pathetic ghost of a smile, a clumsy sweetness, the energetic sentimental claim of a rather rough but frank self.

There was a photograph of her in riding habit. This was the best of them. He softened.

Then came a photograph of them together.

How strangely that twist of his, or set angle of the head, fitted in with the corresponding peculiarities of the woman’s head and bust. What abysms of idiocy! Rubbishy hours and months formed the atmosphere around these two futile dolls!

He put the photographs down and looked up. She was sitting on the edge of the table. The dressing-gown was open, and one large thigh, with ugly whiteness, slid half out of it. It looked dead, and connected with her like a ventriloquist’s dummy with its master. It was natural to wonder where his senses had gone in looking at these decorous photographs. This exhibition appeared to be her explanation of the matter. The face was not very original. But a thigh cannot be stupid to the same degree.

He gazed surlily. Her musing expression at this moment was supremely absurd. He smiled and turned his face to the window. She pretended to become conscious suddenly of something amiss. She drew the dressing-gown round her.

“Have you paid the man yet? What did he charge? I expect⸺”

Tarr took up the packet again.

“Oh, these are six francs. I forget what the big ones are. I haven’t paid him yet. He’s coming to photograph Miss Goenthner to-morrow.”

They sat without saying anything.

He examined the room as you do a doctor’s waiting-room.

He had just come there to see if he could turn his back on it. That appeared at first sight a very easy matter. That is why he so far had not succeeded in doing so. Never put on his mettle, his standing army of will was not sufficient to cope with it. But would this little room ever appear worth turning his back on? It was the purest distillation of the commonplace. He had become bewitched by its strangeness. It was the height of the unreal. Bertha was like a fairy that he visited, and “became engaged” to in another world, not the real one. It was so much the real ordinary world that for him with his out-of-the-way experience it was a phantasmagoria. Then what he had described as his disease of sport was perpetually fed. Sex even with him, according to his analysis, being a sort of ghost, was at home in this gross and buffonic illusion. Something had filled up a blank and become saturated with the blankness.

How much would Bertha mind a separation? Tarr saw in her one of those clear, humorous, superficial natures, a Venetian or a Viennese, the easy product of a cynical and abundant life. He under-rated the potency of his fascination. Secondly, he miscalculated the depths of obedient attachment he had wakened.

They sat impatiently waiting. A certain formality had to be observed. Then the business of the day could be proceeded with. They were both bored with the part imposed by the punctilious and ridiculous god of love. Bertha, into the bargain, wanted to get on with her cooking. She would have cut considerably the reconciliation scene. All her side of the programme had been conscientiously done.

“Berthe, tu es une brave fille!”

“Tu trouves?”

“Oui.”

More inaction followed on Tarr’s part. She sometimes thought he enjoyed these ceremonies.

Through girlhood her strong 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 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 female,” as Tarr described her, had arrived, with him, at the full and headlong condition we agree to name “love.” The image, or type, was thrown away. The individual took its place.

Bertha had had several sweethearts 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 resembling Tarr. But he had never got quite near enough to do that. Tarr had characteristically supposed this image to have little sharpness of outline left. He thought it would not be a very difficult matter for any one to extort its recognitions.

“Vous êtes à mon goût, Sorbet. Du bist mein gesmack,” she would say.

Tarr was not demonstrative when she said this. He could not reciprocate. And he could not help reflecting whether to be “her taste” was very flattering. There must be something the matter with him.

All her hope centred in his laziness. She watched his weaknesses with a loving eye. He had much to say about his under-nature. 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. It is like a great caravanserai in which scores of people congregate. It is a disguise in which such a one, otherwise Pasha, circulates among unembarrassed men. He brings away stores of wisdom, with much diversion by the way.” He saw, however, the danger of these facilities. The Pasha had been given a magic mask of humbleness. But the inner nature seemed flowing equally to the mask and the unmasked magnificence. He was as yet unformed, but wished to form wholly Pasha. This under-nature’s chief use was as a precious villégiature for his energy. Bertha was the country wench the more exalted incarnation had met while on its holidays, or, wandering idle Khalife, in some concourse of his surreptitious life.

His three days’ unannounced and uncommented “leave” had made Bertha very nervous. She suffered from the incomplete, unsymmetrical appearance her life now presented. Everything spread out palpably before her, that she could arrange like a roomful of furniture, 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 dwelling in the last few days had 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 homelike and permanent. People would leave her there for the rest of her natural life unless she were a little brutal and got herself out somehow. No shadow of un-nice feeling ever tainted her abject genuineness. Cunning efforts to retain him abounded. But she never blamed or turned on him. She had given herself long ago, at once, without ceremony. She awaited his thanks or no thanks simply.

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 absence had illuminated the undiscipline of her life. During the revealing luridness, she got to work. Reconstruction was begun. She had trusted too much in Fate and obedient waiting Hymen.

So Bertha had a similar ferment to Tarr’s.

Anger with herself, dreary appetite for action, would help her over farewells. She was familiar enough with them, too, in thought. She would not stir a hand to change things. He must do that. She would only facilitate things in all directions for him. The new energy delivered attack after attack upon her hope. She saw nothing beyond Tarr but measures of utility. The “heart” had always been her most cherished ornament. That Tarr would take 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. She did not want it! 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.

Tarr 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. So with reluctance he got up, and went over to her.

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

“Why kiss you, Sorbet?” she managed to say before her lips were closed. He drew her ungraciously and roughly into his arms, and started kissing her on the mouth. She covered him, docilely, 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, Sorbet! Est-ce que tu m’aime? M’aime-tu? Dis!”

“Yes, you know. Don’t cry.”

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

“Oh, dis; m’aimes-tu? Dis que tu m’aime!”

A blurting, hurrying personality rushed right up into his face. It was like the sightless clammy charging of a bat. More eloquent regions had ambushed him. Humbug had mysteriously departed. It was a blast of knifelike air in the middle of their hot-house. He stared at her face groping up as though it scented troubles in his face. It pushed to right and then to left and rocked itself. Intelligent and aware, it lost this intensity.

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 in the middle of her a kernel, a sort of very substantial astral baby. This baby was apt to swell. She then became all baby. The husk he held was a painted mummy-case. 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. That was as it should be!

He was half sitting on the table. He found himself patting her back. He stopped doing this. His face looked heavy and fatigued. A dull, intense infection of her 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. I know I’m a brute. But it’s fortunate for you that I am. I’m only a brute. There’s nothing to cry for.”

He over-estimated 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 felt like a person who is taking a little dog for a walk at the end of a string. His voice appeared husky and artificial near her ear.

Turned towards the window, he looked at the green stain of the foliage outside. Something was explained. Nature was not friendly to him; its metallic tints jarred. Or anyhow, it 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 be away unaccompanied. But it was tainted with her. If he went away now he would only be playing at liberty. He had been right in not accepting the invitations of the spring. The settlement of this question stood between him and pleasure. A momentary well-being had been accepted. The larger spiritual invitation he had rejected. He would only take that 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!

He led her passively protesting to the sofa. Like a sick person, she was half indignant at being moved. He should have remained, a perpendicular bed for her, till the fever had passed. Revolted at the hypocrisy required, he left her standing at the edge of the sofa. She stood crouching a little, her face buried in her hands, in indignant absurdity. The only moderately clean thing to do would be to walk out of the door at once and never come back. With his background of months of different behaviour this could not be done.

She sank down on the sofa, head buried in the bilious cushions. She lay there like an animal, he thought, or some one mad, a lump of half-humanity. On one side of him Bertha lay quite motionless and silent, and on the other the little avenue was equally still. 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 everyday and natural appearance. The quiet inside, in the room, was what did not seem strange to him. He had become imbued with that. Bertha’s numb silence and abandon was a stupid tableau vivant of his own mood. In this impasse of arrested life he stood sick and useless. They progressed from stage to stage of this weary farce. Confusion increased. It resembled a combat between two wrestlers of mathematically equal strength. Neither could win. One or other of them was usually wallowing warily or lifelessly on his stomach, the other tugging at him or examining and prodding his carcass. His liking, contempt, realization of her love for him, his confused but exigent conscience, dogged preparation to say farewell, all dovetailed with precision. There she lay a deadweight. He could take his hat and go. But once gone in this manner he could not stay.

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

Women’s stormy weakness, psychic discharges, always affected him as the sight of a person being seasick. 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. Likewise the phenomenal lack of nature in the average man’s existence is lucky and necessary for him.

Tarr in some way gathered strength from contemplation of Bertha. His contradictory and dislocated feelings were brought into a new synthesis.

Launching himself off the window-sill, he stood still as though suspended in thought. He then sat down provisionally at the writing-table, within a few feet of the sofa. He took up a book of Goethe’s poems that she had given him. In cumbrous field-day dress of Gothic characters, squad after squad, these poems paraded their message. He had left it there on a former visit. He came to the ode named “Ganymed,”

Wie im Morgenglanze

Du rings much anglühst

Frühling, Geliebter!

Mit tausendfacher Liebeswonne

Sich an mein Herz drängt

Deiner ewigen Wärme

Heilig, Gefühl,

Unendliche Schöne!

He put it in his breast-pocket. As soldiers go into battle sometimes with the Bible in their pocket, he prepared himself for a final combat, with Goethe upon his person. Men’s lives have been known to have been saved through a lesser devoutness.

He was engaging battle again with the most chivalrous sentiments. The reserves had been called up, his nature mobilized. As his will gathered force and volume (in its determination to “fling” her) he unhypocritically keyed up its attitude. It resembled extreme cunning. He had felt, while he had been holding her, at a disadvantage because of his listless emotion. With emotion equal to hers, he could accomplish anything. Leaving her would be child’s play. He appeared to be projecting the manufacture of a more adequate sentiment.

Any indirectness was out of the question. A “letting her down softly,” kissing and leaving in an hour or two, as though things had not changed, that must now be eschewed—oh, yes. The genuine section of her, of which he had a troubled glimpse, mattered, nothing else. He must appeal obstinately to that. Their coming together had been prosecuted on his side with a stupid levity. He would retrieve this in the parting. He wished to do everything most opposite to his previous lazy conduct. He frowned on Humour.

The first skirmish of his comic Armageddon had opened with the advance of his mysterious and goguenard “indifference.” This dwindled away at the first onset. A new and more powerful thing had taken its place. This was, in Bertha’s eyes, a difference in Tarr.

“Something has happened; he is different,” she said to herself. “He has met somebody else,” had been her rapid provisional conclusion.

She suddenly got up without speaking. Rather spectrally, she went over to the writing-table for her handkerchief. She had not moved an inch or a muscle until quite herself again, dropping steadily down all the scale of feeling to normal. With matter-of-factness she got up, easily and quietly, making Sorbert a little dizzy.

Her face had all the drama wrung out of it. It was hard, clear, and garishly white, like her body.

If he were to have a chance of talking he must clear the air of electricity completely. Else at his first few words storm might return.

Once lunch had swept through the room, things would be better. He would send the strawberries ahead to prepare his way. It was like fattening a lamb for the slaughter. This idea pleased him. Now that he had accepted the existence of a possible higher plane of feeling as between Bertha and himself, he was anxious to avoid display. So he ran the risk of outdoing his former callousness. Tarr was saturated with morbid English shyness, that cannot tolerate passion and its nakedness. This shyness, as he contended, in its need to show its heart, discovers subtleties and refinements of expression, opposites and between shades, unknown to less gauche and delicate people. But if he were hustled out of his shell the anger that co-existed with his modesty was the most spontaneous thing he possessed. Bertha had always left him alone.

He got up, obsequiously reproducing in his own movements and expression her new normality.

“Well, how about lunch? I’ll come and help you with it.”

“There’s nothing to do. I’ll get it.”

Bertha had wiped her eyes with the attentiveness a man bestows on his chin after a shave, in little brusque hard strokes. She did not look at Tarr. She arranged her hair in the mirror, then went to the kitchen. For her to be so perfectly natural offended him.

The intensity of her past feeling carried her on for about five minutes into ordinary life. Her seriousness was tactful for so long. Then her nature began to give way. It broke up again into fits and starts of self-consciousness. The mind was called in, did its work clumsily as usual. She became her usual self. Sitting on the stool by the window, in the act of eating, Tarr there in front of her, it was more than ever impossible to be natural. She resented the immediate introduction of lunch in this way. The resentment increased her artificiality.

To counterbalance the acceptance of food, she had to throw more pathos into her face. With haggard resignation she was going on again; doing what was asked of her, partaking of this lunch. She did so with unnecessary conscientiousness. Her strange wave of dignity had let her in for this? Almost she must make up for that dignity! Life was confusing her again; it was useless to struggle.

“Aren’t these strawberries good? These little hard ones are better than the bigger strawberries. Have some more cream?”

“Thank you.” She should have said no. But being greedy in this matter she accepted it, with heavy air of some subtle advantage gained.

“How did the riding lesson go off?” She went to a riding school in the mornings.

“Oh, quite well, thank you. How did your lesson go off?” This referred to his exchange of languages with a Russian girl.

“Admirably, thank you.”

The Russian girl was a useful feint for her.

“What is the time?” The time? What cheek! He was almost startled.

He took his heavy watch out and presented its face to her ironically.

“Are you in a hurry?” he asked.

“No, I just wondered what the time was. I live so vaguely.”

“You are sure you are not in a hurry?”

“Oh, no!”

“I have a confession to make, my dear Bertha.” He had not put his watch back in his pocket. She had asked for the watch; he would use it. “I came here just now to test a funny mood—a quite new mood. My visit is a sort of trial trip of this mood. It was connected with you. I wanted to find out what it meant, and how it would be affected by your presence.”

Bertha looked up with mocking sulky face, a shade of hopeful curiosity.

“It was a feeling of complete indifference as regards yourself!”

He said this solemnly, with the pomp with which a weighty piece of news might be delivered by a solicitor in conversation with his client.

“Oh, is that all?” The new barbaric effort was met by Bertha scornfully.

“No, that is not all.”

Catching at the professional figure his manner had conjured up, he ran his further remarks into that mould. The presence of his watch in his hand had brought some image of the family physician or gouty attorney. It all centred round the watch, and her interest in the time of day.

“I have found that this was only another fraud on my too credulous sensibility.” He smiled with professional courtesy. “At sight of you, my mood evaporated. But what I want to talk about is what is left. It would be well to bring our accounts up to date. I’m afraid the reckoning is enormously against me. You have been a criminally indulgent partner⸺”

He had now got the image down to the more precise form of two partners, perhaps comfortable wine merchants, going through their books.

“My dear boy, I know that. You needn’t trouble to go any further. But why are you going into these calculations, and sums of profit and loss?”

“Because my sentimental finances, if I may use that term, are in a bad state.”

“Then they only match your worldly ones.”

“In my worldly ones I have no partner,” he reminded her.

She cast her eyes about in swoops, full of self-possessed wildness.

“I exonerate you, Sorbet,” she said, “you needn’t go into details. What is yours and what is mine. My God! What does it matter? Not much!”

“I know you to be generous⸺”

“Leave that then! Leave these calculations! All that means so little to me! I feel at the end of my strength—au bout de force!” She always heaved this out with much energy. “If you’ve made up your mind to go—do so, Sorbet. I release you! You owe me nothing. It was all my fault. But spare me a reckoning. I can’t stand any more⸺”

“No, I insist on being responsible. We can’t leave things upside down—our books in an endless muddle, our desks open, and just walk away for ever—and perhaps set up shop somewhere else?”

“I do not feel in any mood to ‘set up shop somewhere else,’ I can assure you!”

The unbusinesslike element in the situation she had allowed to develop for obvious reasons. She now resisted his dishonest attempt to set this right, and benefit first, as he had done, by disorder, and lastly by order.

“We can’t, in any case, improve matters by talking. I—I, you needn’t fear for me, Sorbet. I can look after myself, only don’t let us wrangle,” with appealing gesture and saintlily smiling face, “let us part friends. Let us be worthy of each other.”

Bertha always opposed to Tarr’s images her Teutonic lyricism, usually repeating the same phrases several times.

This was degenerating into their routine of wrangle. Always confronted by this imperturbable, deaf and blind “generosity,” the day would end in the usual senseless “draw.” His words still remained unsaid.

“Bertha, listen. Let us, just for fun, throw all this overboard. I mean the cargo of inflated soul-stuff that makes us go statelily, no doubt, but—Haven’t we quarrelled enough, and said these things often enough? Our quarrels have been our undoing. A long chain of little quarrels has bound us down. We should neither of us be here if it hadn’t been for them.”

Bertha gazed at Tarr half wonderingly. She realized that something out of the ordinary was on foot.

Tarr proceeded.

“I have accepted from you a queer sentimental dialect of life, I should have insisted on your expressing yourself in a more logical and metropolitan speech. Let us drop it. There is no need to talk negro, baby-talk, or hybrid drivel from no-man’s-land. I don’t think we should lead a very pleasant married life—naturally. In the second place, you are not a girl who wants an intrigue, but to marry. I have been playing at fiancé with a certain pleasure in the novelty, but I experience a genuine horror at the possible consequences. I have been playing with you!”

He said this eagerly, as though it were a point in his argument—as it was. He paused, for effect apparently.

“You, for your part, Bertha, don’t do yourself justice when you are acting. I am in the same position. I feel this. My ill-humour occasionally falls in your direction—yours, for its part, falling in mine when I criticize your acting. We don’t act well together, and that’s a fact; though I’m sure we should be smooth enough allies off the boards of love. Your heart, Bertha, is in the right place; ah, ça⸺”

“You are too kind!”

“But—but I will go further! At the risk of appearing outrageously paradoxical. This heart in question is so much part of your intelligence, too⸺”

“Thanks! Thanks!”

“—despite your execrable fatuity as an actress! Your shrewdness and goodness give each other the hand.—But to return to my point. I had always till I met you regarded marriage as a thing beyond all argument not for me. I was unusually isolated from this idea, anyway; I had never even reflected what marriage was. You introduced me to marriage! In so doing you are responsible for all our troubles. The approach of this horrible thing, so surprisingly pleasant and friendly at nearer sight, caused revulsion of feeling beyond my control, resulting in sudden fiançailles. Like a woman luxuriously fingering some merchant’s goods, too dear for her, or not wanted enough for the big price, so I philandered with the idea of marriage.”

This simplification put things, merely, in a new callous light. Tarr felt that she must naturally be enjoying, too, his points. He forgot to direct his exposition in such a way as to hurt her least. This trivial and tortured landscape had a beauty for him he could have explained, where her less developed sense saw nothing but a harrowing reality.

The lunch had had the same effect on him that it was intended to have on his victim; not enough to overthrow his resolution, but enough to relax its form.

As to Bertha, this seemed, in the main, “Sorbet all over.” There was nothing new. There was the “difference.” But it was the familiar process; he was attempting to convince himself, heartlessly, on her. Whether he would ever manage it was problematic. There was no sign of his being likely to do so more to-day than any other day. She listened; sententiously released him from time to time.

Just as she had seemed strange to him in some way when he came in, seen through his “indifference,” so he had appeared a little odd to her. This had wiped off the dullness of habit for a moment. This husband she obstinately wanted had been recognized. She had seized him round the shoulders and clung to him, as though he had been her child that some senseless force were about to snatch.

As to his superstition about marriage—was it not merely restlessness of youth, propaganda of Liberty, that a year or so would see in Limbo? For was he not a “marrying man”? She was sure of it! She had tried not to frighten him, and to keep “Marriage” in the background.

So Tarr’s disquisition had no effect except for one thing. When he spoke of pleasure he derived from idea of marriage, she wearily pricked up her ears. The conviction that Tarr was a domesticated animal was confirmed from his own lips. The only result of his sortie was to stimulate her always vigilant hope and irony, both, just a little. He had intended to prepare the couch for her despair!

His last words, affirming Marriage to be a game not worth the candle, brought a faint and “weary” smile to her face. She was once more, obviously, au bout de force.

“Sorbert; I understand you. Do realize that. There is no necessity for all this rigmarole With me. If you think you shouldn’t marry—why, it’s quite simple! Don’t think that I would force you to marry! Oh, no!” (The training guttural unctuous accent she had in speaking English filled her discourse with natural emphasis.) “I always said that you were too young. You need a wife. You’ve just said yourself about your feeling for marriage. But you are so young!” She gazed at him with compassionate, half-smiling moistened look, as though there were something deformed about being so young. A way she had was to treat anything that obviously pointed to her as the object of pity, as though it manifestly indicated, on the contrary, him. “Yes, Sorbet, you are right,” she finished briskly. “I think it would be madness for us to marry!”

A suggestion that their leisurely journey towards marriage was perhaps a mistake was at once seriously, and with conviction far surpassing that he had ventured on, taken up by her. She would immediately call a halt, pitch tents preliminary to turning back. A pause was necessary before beginning the return journey. Next day they would be jogging on again in the same disputed direction.

Tarr now saw at once what had happened. His good words had been lost, all except his confession to a weakness for the matronly blandishments of Matrimony. He had an access of stupid, brief, and blatant laughter.

As people have wondered what was at the core of the world, basing their speculations on what deepest things occasionally emerge, with violence, at its holes, so Bertha often conjectured what might be at the heart of Tarr. Laughter was the most apparently central substance that, to her knowledge, had incontrollably appeared. She had often heard grondements, grumblings, quite literally, and seen unpleasant lights, belonging, she knew, to other categories of matter. But they never broke cover.

At present this gaiety was interpreted as proof that she had been right. There was nothing in what he had said. It had been only one of his bad fits of rebellion.

But laughter Tarr felt was retrogression. Laughter must be given up. He must in some way, for both their sakes, lay at once the foundations of an ending.

For a few minutes he played with the idea of affecting her weapons. Perhaps it was not only impossible to overcome, but even to approach, or to be said to be on the same field with, this peculiar amazon, without such uniformity of engines of attack or defence. Should not he get himself a mask like hers at once, and follow suit with some emphatic sentence? He stared uncertainly at her. Then he sprang to his feet. He intended, as far as he could see beyond this passionate movement (for he must give himself up to the mood, of course) to pace the room. But his violence jerked out of him a shout of laughter. He went stamping about the floor roaring with reluctant mirth. It would not come out properly, too, except the first outburst.

“Ay. That’s right! Go on! Go on!” Bertha’s patient irony seemed to gibe.

This laughter left him vexed with himself, like a fit of tears. “Humour and pathos are such near twins, that Humour may be exactly described as the most feminine attribute of man, and the only one of which women show hardly any trace! Jokes are like snuff, a slatternly habit,” said Tarr to Butcher once, “whereas tragedy (and tears) is like tobacco, much drier and cleaner. Comedy being always the embryo of Tragedy, the directer nature weeps. Women are of course directer than men. But they have not the same resources.”

Butcher blinked. He thought of his resources, and remembered his inclination to tears.

Tarr’s disgust at this electric rush of sound made him turn it on her. He was now put at a fresh disadvantage. How could he ever succeed in making Bertha believe that a person who laughed immoderately meant what he said? Under the shadow of this laugh all his ensuing acts or words must toil, discredited in advance.

Desperately ignoring accidents, he went back beyond his first explosion, and attacked its cause—indicting Bertha, more or less, as responsible for the disturbance.

He sat down squarely in front of her, hardly breathed from his paroxysm, getting launched without transition. He hoped, by rapid plunging from one state to another, to take the wind out of the laugh’s sails. It should be left towering, spectral, but becalmed, behind.

“I don’t know from which side to approach you, Bertha. You frequently complain of my being thoughtless and spoilt. But your uncorked solemnity is far more frivolous than anything I can manage.—Excuse me, of course, for speaking in this way!—Won’t you come down from your pedestal just for a few minutes?” And he “sketched,” in French idiom, a gesture, as though offering her his hand.

“My dear Sorbert, I feel far from being on any pedestal! There’s too little of the pedestal, if anything, about me. Really, Sorbet,” (she leant towards him with an abortive movement as though to take his hand) “I am your friend; believe me!” (Last words very quick, with nod of head and blink of eyes.) “You worry yourself far too much. Don’t do so. You are in no way bound to me. If you think we should part—let us part!”

The “let us part!” was precipitate, strenuous Prussian, almost truculent.

Tarr thought: “Is it cunning, stupidity, disease or what?”

She continued of a sudden, shunting on to another track of generosity:

“But I agree. Let us be franker. We waste too much time talking, talking. You are different to-day, Sorbet. What is it? If you have met somebody else⸺”

“If I had I’d tell you. There is besides nobody else to meet. You are unique!”

“Some one’s been saying something to you⸺”

“No. I’ve been saying something to somebody else. But it’s the same thing.”

With half-incredulous, musing, glimmering stare she drew in her horns.

Tarr meditated. “I should have known that. I am asking her for something that she sees no reason to give up. Next her goût for me, it is the most valuable thing she possesses. It is indissolubly mixed up with the goût. The poor heightened self she laces herself into is the only consolation for me and all the troubles I spring on her. And I ask her brutally to ‘come down from her pedestal.’ I owe even a good deal to that pedestal, I expect, as regards her goût. This blessed protection Nature has given her, I, a minute or two before leaving her, make a last inept attempt to capture or destroy. Her good sense is contemptuous and indignant. It is only in defence of this ridiculous sentimentality that she has ever shown her teeth. This illusion has enabled her to bear things so long. It now stands ready with Indian impassibility to manœuvre her over the falls or rapids of Parting. The scientific thing to do, I suppose, my intention being generous, would be to flatter and increase in some way this idea of herself. I should give her some final and extraordinary opportunity of being ‘noble.’ ”

He looked at her a moment, in search of inspiration.

“I must not be too vain. I exaggerate the gravity of the hit. As to my attempted rape—see how I square up when she shows signs of annexing my illusion. We are really the whole time playing a game of grabs and dashes at each other’s fairy vestment of Imagination. Only hers makes her very fond of me, whereas mine makes me see any one but her. Perhaps this is why I have not been more energetic in my prosecution of the game, and have allowed her to remain in her savage semi-naked state of pristine balderdash. Why has she never tried to modify herself in direction of my ‘taste’? From not daring to leave this protective fanciful self, while I still kept all my weapons? Then her initiative. She does nothing it is the man’s place to do. She remains ‘woman’ as she would say. Only she is so intensely alive in her passivity, so maelstromlike in her surrender, so cataclysmic in her sacrifice, that very little remains to be done. The man’s position is a mere sinecure. Her charm for me.”

To cover reflection, he set himself to finish lunch. The strawberries were devoured mechanically, with unhungry itch to clear the plate. He had become just a devouring-machine, restless if any of the little red balls still remained in front of it.

Bertha’s eyes sought to carry her out of this Present. But they had broken down, depositing her, so to speak, somewhere half-way down the avenue.

Tarr got up, a released automaton, and walked to the cloth-covered box where he had left his hat and stick. Then he returned in some way dutifully and obediently to the same seat, sat there for a minute, hat on knee. He had gone over and taken it up without thinking. He only realized, once back, what it meant. Nothing was settled, he had so far done more harm than good. The presence of the hat and stick on his knees, however, was like the holding open of the front door already. Anything said with them there could only be like words said as an afterthought, on the threshold. It was as though, hat on head, he were standing with his hand on the door-knob, about to add some trifle to a thing already fixed. He got up, walked back to where he had picked up the hat and stick, placed them as they were before, then returned to the window.

What should be done now? He seemed to have played all his fifty-two cards. Everything to “be done” looked behind him, not awaiting him at all. That passive pose of Bertha’s was not encouraging. It had lately withstood stoically a good deal, was quite ready to absorb still more. There was something almost pugnacious in so much resignation.

But when she looked up at him there was no sign of combat. She appeared stilled to something simple again, by some fluke of a word. For the second time that day she had jumped out of her skin.

Her heart beat in a delicate, exhausted way, her eyelids became moistened underneath, as she turned to her unusual fiancé. They had wandered, she felt, into a drift of silence that hid a distant and unpleasant prospect at the end of it. It seemed suddenly charged with some alarming fancy that she could not grasp. There was something more unusual than her fiancé. The circular storm, in her case, was returning.

“Well, Sorbet?”

“Well. What is it?”

“Why don’t you go? I thought you’d gone. It seems so funny to see you standing there. What are you staring at me for?”

“Don’t be silly.”

She looked down with a wild demureness, her head on one side.

Her mouth felt some distance from her brain. Her voice stood on tiptoe like a dwarf to speak. She became very much impressed by her voice, and was rather afraid to say anything more. Had she fainted? Sorbert was a stranger. The black stubble on his chin and brown neck appeared like the symptoms of a disease that repelled her. She noticed something criminal and quick in his eyes. She became nervous, as though she had admitted somebody too trustingly to her rooms. This fancy played on her hysteria, and she really wanted him to go.

“Why don’t you go?” she repeated, in a pleasant voice.

Tarr remained silent, seemingly determined not to answer.

Meantime he looked at her with a doubtful dislike.

What is love? he began reasoning. It is either possession or a possessive madness. In the case of men and women, it is the obsession of a personality. He had presumably been endowed with the power of awaking love in her. He had something to accuse himself of. He had been afraid of giving up or repudiating this particular madness. To give up another person’s love is a mild suicide; like a very bad inoculation as compared to the full disease. His tenderness for Bertha was due to her having purloined some part of himself, and covered herself superficially with it as a shield. Her skin at least was Tarr. She had captured a bit of him, and held it as a hostage. She was rapidly transforming herself, too, into a slavish dependency. She worked with all the hypocrisy of a great instinct.