Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  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.

  Now he was joining battle again with the most chivalrous sentiments: the reserves had been called up, his nature was mobilized. As his will gathered force and volume (in its determination to ‘throw’ her once and for all) he unhypocritically keyed up its attitude. While he had been holding her just now he had been at a considerable disadvantage because of his listless emotion. But with emotion equal to hers, he could accomplish anything. Leaving her would be child’s play, absolutely child’s play. He projected the manufacture of a more adequate sentiment.

  Any indirectness was out of the question: a ‘letting down softly,’ kissing and leaving in an hour or two, as though things had
not changed—that must not be dreamt of, now. The genuine section of her (of which he had a troubled glimpse): that mattered, nothing else—he must appeal obstinately to that. Their coming together had been prosecuted on his side with a stupid levity: that he would retrieve in their parting. Everything that was most opposite to his previous lazy conduct must now be undertaken by him. Especially he frowned upon Humour, that inveterate enemy of anglo-saxon mankind.

  The first skirmish of his comic Armageddon* had opened with the advance of his mysterious and vaunted ‘indifference.’ That had dwindled away at the first onset. A new and more potent principle 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 then been her rapid provisional conclusion.

  Suddenly she got up without speaking, rather spectrally; she went over to the writing-table for her handkerchief. Not an inch or a muscle would she move until quite herself again—dropping steadily down all the scale of feeling to normal—that had been the idea. With notable 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 the storm might return. Once lunch had swept through the room, things would be better. So 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 recognized the existence of a possible higher plane of feeling as between Bertha and himself, he was anxious to avoid display. According to his present dispositions it was true that he ran the risk of outdoing his former callousness. Saturated with morbid english shyness, that cannot tolerate passion and its nakedness, it was a choice of brutalities, merely, in fact. This shyness, he contended, in its need to show its heart, will discover subtleties and refinements of expression, unknown to less gauche and hence less delicate nations. But if he happened to be hustled out of his shell the anger that coexisted with his modesty was the most spontaneous thing he possessed.

  He got up, obsequiously reproducing in his own movements and expression her matter-of-factness.

  ‘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. Arranging her hair in the mirror, she went out to the kitchen.

  The intensity of her recent orgasm carried her on for about five minutes into ordinary life: for so long her seriousness was tactful. Then her nature began to give way: again it broke up into fits and starts of self-consciousness. The mind was called in, did its work clumsily as usual: she became her ordinary self.

  Sitting upon 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, and that increased her artificiality. For 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? Very sweet. 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 a 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 weapon for her.

  ‘What is the time?’ The time? What cheek! He was almost startled. He took his heavy watch out and presented its big bold dial 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 as a matter of fact. My visit is a sort of trial trip of this new mood. The mood was connected with you. I wanted to find out what it meant, and how it would be affected by your presence. That was the test.’

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

  ‘Shall I tell what the mood was?’

  ‘That’s as you like.’

  ‘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 invested by a solicitor in conversation with his client.

  ‘Oh, is that all? That is disappointing.’ The little 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 with it some image of the family physician or gouty attorney. It all centred round the watch, as it were, 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. I am of opinion that our accounts should be brought 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 or something of that sort.

  ‘My dear Sorbert I am aware of that. You needn’t trouble to go any further. But why are you entering into these calculations, and sums of profit and loss?’

  ‘Because my sentimental finances, if I may employ 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 wide-eyed swoops, full of self-possessed wildness.

  ‘I exonerate you Sorbert’ 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—à bout de force!’ she always heaved this french phrase out with much energy. ‘If you’ve made up your mind to go—do so Sorbert—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 my responsibility. It would break my heart to leave things upside down like that—all our books in a ghastly muddle, our desks open, and just walk away for ever—perhaps to set up shop somewhere else, who knows? What a prospect! I can’t bear it!’

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

  The unbusinesslike element in the situation had been allowed by her to develop for obvious reasons. She now resisted her Sorbert’s dishonest attempt to set this right, and to benefit, first (as he had done) by disorder, and lastly to benefit by order.

  ‘We can’t in any case improve matters by talking. I—I, you needn’t fear for me Sorbert, I can look after myself. Only don’t let us wrangle’ with appealing gesture and saintishly smiling face. ‘Let us part friends. Let us b
e worthy of each other!’

  Bertha always opposed to Tarr’s treacherous 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 compelling statement still remained unuttered.

  ‘Bertha, listen. Let us, just for fun, throw all this overboard, I mean the cargo of inflated stuff that makes us go statelily, no doubt, but—. Haven’t we quarrelled enough, and said these things to each other till we’re both sick of them? Our quarrels have been our undoing. Look. A long chain of little quarrels has fastened us down: we should neither of us be here if it hadn’t been for them.’

  Bertha gazed at Tarr half wonderingly. Something out of the ordinary was on foot, it was plain.

  Tarr proceeded.

  ‘I have accepted from you a queer sentimental dialect of life—please don’t interrupt me, I have something I want particularly to say—I should have insisted on your expressing yourself in a more metropolitan speech.* Let us drop it. There is no need to converse in the drivelling idiom we for the most part use. 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 unprincipled pleasure in the novelty, but I experience a genuine horror as the fatal consequences begin to take shape. 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. This I feel acutely, no I do in fact. My ill-humour occasionally takes your direction—yours, for its part, heading 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! what a heart!’