His glasses were still on his nose. They had weathered the storm, tightly riding his face, because of Soltyk’s partiality for his neck.
Staretsky took Soltyk by the arm.
“Come along, Louis. Surely you don’t want any more of it? Let’s get out of this. I refuse to act as second. You can’t fight without seconds!”
Soltyk was panting, his mouth opening and shutting. He first turned this way, then that. His action was that of a man avoiding some importunity.
“C’est bien, c’est bien!” he gasped in French. “Je sais. Laisse-moi.”
All his internal disorganization was steadily claiming his attention.
“Mais dépêche-toi donc! Filons. Nous avons plus rien à faire ici.” Staretsky slipped his arm through his. Half supporting him, he began urging him along towards the car. Soltyk, stumbling and coughing, allowed himself to be guided.
Khudin and the doctor had been talking together, as the only two men on the field in full possession of their voices and breath. When they saw their friends moving off, they followed.
Bitzenko, recuperating rapidly, started after them.
Kreisler saw all this at first with indifference. He had taken his handkerchief out and was dabbing his neck. Then suddenly, with a rather plaintive but resolute gait, he ran after his second, his eye fixed on the retreating Poles.
“Hi! A moment! Your Browning. Give me your Browning!” he said hoarsely. His voice had been driven back into the safer depths of his body. It was a new and unconvincing one.
Bitzenko did not appear to understand.
Kreisler plucked the revolver out of his pocket with the deftness of an animal. There was a report. He was firing in the air.
Staretsky had faced quickly round, dragging Soltyk. Kreisler was covering them with the Browning.
“Halt!” he shouted. “Stop there! Not so quickly! I will shoot you like a dog if you will not fight!”
Still holding them up, he ordered Bitzenko to take over to them one of the revolvers provided for the duel.
“That will be murder! If you assist in this, sir, you will be participating in a murder! Stop this⸺”
Staretsky was jabbering at Bitzenko, his arm through his friend’s. Soltyk stood wiping his face with his hand, his eyes on the ground. His breath came heavily, and he kept shifting his feet.
Bitzenko’s tall young Russian stood in a twisted attitude, a gargoyle Apollo. His mask of peasant tragedy had broken into a slight smile.
“Move and I fire! Move and I fire!” Kreisler kept shouting, moving up towards them, with stealthy grogginess. He kept shaking the revolver and pointing at them with the other hand, to keep them alive to the reality of the menace.
“Don’t touch the pistols, Louis!” said Staretsky, as Bitzenko came over with his leather dispatch-case. He let go of Soltyk’s arm and folded his own.
“Don’t touch them, Louis. They daren’t shoot!”
Louis appeared apathetic both as to the pistols and the good advice.
“Leave him both,” Kreisler called, his revolver still trained on Staretsky and Soltyk.
Bitzenko put them both down, a foot away from Soltyk, and walked hurriedly out of the zone of fire.
“Will you take up one of those pistols, or both?” Kreisler said.
“Kindly point that revolver somewhere else, and allow us to go!” Staretsky said loudly.
“I’m not speaking to you, pig-face! It’syouI’m addressing. Take up that pistol!”
He was now five or six yards from them.
“Herr Soltyk is unarmed! The pistols you want him to take only have one charge. Yours has twelve. In any case it would be murder!”
Kreisler walked up to them. He was very white, much quieter, and acted with effort. He stooped down to take up one of the pistols. Staretsky aimed a blow at his head. It caught him just in front of the ear, on the right cheek-bone. He staggered sideways, tripped, and fell. The moment he felt the blow he pulled the trigger of the Browning, which still pointed towards his principal adversary. Soltyk threw his arms up: Kreisler was struggling towards his feet: he fell face forwards on top of him.
Kreisler thought this was a new attack. He seized Soltyk’s body round the middle, rolling over on top of it. It was quite limp. He then thought the other man had fainted; ruptured himself⸺? He drew back quickly. Two hands grasped him and flung him down on his stomach. This time his glasses went. Scrambling after them, he remembered his Browning, which he had dropped. He shot his hands out to left and right—forgetting his glasses—to recover the Browning. He felt that a blow was a long time in coming.
“He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s dead!”
Staretsky’s voice, announcing that in French, he heard at the same time as Bitzenko’s saying:
“What are you looking for? Come quickly!”
“Where is the Browning?” he asked. At thatmoment his hand struck his glasses. He put them on and got to his feet.
At Bitzenko’s words he had a feeling of a new order of things having set in, that he remembered having experienced once or twice before in life. They came in a fresh surprising tone. It was as though they were the first words he had heard that day. They seemed to imply a sudden removal, a journey, novel conditions.
“Come along, I’ve got the Browning. There’s no time to lose.” It was all over; he must embrace practical affairs. The Russian’s voice was businesslike. Something had finished for him, too. Kreisler saw the others standing in a peaceful group; the doctor was getting up from beside Soltyk.
Staretsky rushed over to Kreisler, and shook his fist in his face and tried to speak. But his mouth was twisted down at the corners, and he could hardly see. The palms of his hands pressed into each of his eyes, the next moment he was sobbing, walking back to his friends.
Bitzenko’s bolt was shot. Kreisler had been unsatisfactory. All had ended in a silly accident, which might have awkward consequences for his second. It was hardly a real corpse at all.
But something was sent to console him. The police had got wind of the duel. Bitzenko, his compatriot and Kreisler were walking down the field, intending to get into the road at the farther end, and walk to the nearest station. The taxi had been sent away, Kreisler having no more money, and Bitzenko’s feeling in the matter being that should Kreisler fall, a corpse can always find some sentimental soul to look after it. And there was always the Morgue, dramatic and satisfactory.
They were already half-way along the field when a car passed them on the other side of the hedge at full tilt.
The Russian was once more in his element. His face cleared. He looked ten years younger. In the occupants of the car he had recognized members of the police force!
Calling “Run!” to Kreisler he took to his heels, followed by his young fellow-second, whose neck shot in and out, and whose great bow-legs could almost be heard twanging as he ran. They reached a hedge, ran along the farther side of it. Bitzenko was bent double as though to escape a rain of bullets. Eventually he was seen careering across an open space quite near the river, which lay a couple of hundred yards beyond the lower end of the field. There he lay ambushed for a moment, behind a shrub. Then he darted forward again, and eventually disappeared along the high road in a cloud of dust. His athletic young friend made straight for the railway station, which he reached without incident and returned at once to Paris. Kreisler conformed to Bitzenko’s programme of flight. He scrambled through the hedge, crossed the road and escaped almost unnoticed.
The truth was that the Russian had attracted the attention of the police to such an extent by his striking flight, that without a moment’s hesitation they had bolted helter-skelter after him. They contented themselves with a parting shout or two at Kreisler. Duelling was a very venial offence; capture in these cases was not a matter of the least moment. But they were so impressed by the Russian’s businesslike way of disappearing that they imagined this must have been a curiously immoral sort of duel. That he was the principal they did not doubt for a moment.
So they went after him in full cry, rousing two or three villagers in their passage, who followed at their heels, pouring with frantic hullabaloo in the direction of Paris. Bitzenko, however, with great resourcefulness, easily outwitted them. He crossed the Seine near St. Cloud, and got back to Paris in time to read the afternoon newspaper account of the duel and flight with infantile solemnity and calm.
Five days after this, in the morning, Otto Kreisler mounted the steps of the police-station of a small town near the German frontier. He was going to give himself up.
Bitzenko had pictured his principal, in the event of his succeeding against Soltyk, seeking rapidly by train the German frontier, disguised in some extraordinary manner. Had the case been suggested to him of a man in this position without sufficient money in his pocket to buy a ticket, he would then have imagined a melodramatic figure hurrying through France, dodging and dogged by the police, defying a thousand perils. Whether Kreisler were still under the spell of the Russian or not, this was the course, more or less, he took. He could be trusted not to go near Paris. That city dominated all his maledictions.
The police disturbing the last act of his sanguinary farce was a similar contretemps to Soltyk’s fingers in his throat. At the last moment everything had begun to go wrong. He had not prepared for it, because, as though from cunning, the world had shown no tendency up till then to interfere.
Soltyk had died when his back was turned, so to speak. He got the contrary of comfort out of the thought that he could claim to have done the deed. The police had rushed in and broken things off short, swept everything away, ended the banquet in a brutal raid. A deep sore, a shocked and dislocated feeling remained in Kreisler’s mind. He had been hurried so much! He had never needed leisure, breathing space, so much. The disaster of Soltyk’s death was raw on him! Had he been given time—only a little time—he might have put that to rights. (This sinister regret could only imply a possible mutilation of the corpse.)
A dead man has no feeling. He can be treated as an object and hustled away. But a living man needs time!—time!
Does not aliving manneed so muchtimeto develop his movements, to lord it with his thoughtful body, to unroll his will?Timeis what he needs!
As a tramp being hustled away from a café protests, at each jerk the waiter gives him, that he is a human being, probably afreehuman being—yes, probablyfree; so Kreisler complained to his fate that he was a living man, that he requiredtime—that above all it wastimehe needed—to settle his affairs and withdraw from life. But his fate was a harsh Prussian gendarme. He whined and blustered to no effect.
He was superstitious as well in the usual way about this decease. In his spiritless and brooding tramp he questioned if it were not he that had died and not Soltyk, and if it were not his ghost that was now wandering off nowhere in particular.
One franc and a great many coppers remained to him. As he jumped from field to road and road to field again, in his flight, they rose and fell in a little leaden wave in his pocket, breaking dully on his thigh. This little wave rose and fell many times, till he began to wait for it, and its monotonous grace. It was like a sigh. It heaved and clashed down in a foiled way.
He spent the money that evening on a meal in a village. The night was dry and was passed in an empty barge. Next day, at four in the afternoon, he arrived at Meaux. Here he exchanged his entire wardrobe for a very shabby workman’s outfit, gaining seven francs and fifty centimes on the exchange. He caught the early train for Rheims, travelling thirty-five kilometres of his journey at a sou a kilometre, got a meal near the station, and took another ticket to Verdun. Believing himself nearer the frontier than he actually was, he set out on foot. At the next large town, Pontlieux, he had too hearty a meal. He had exhausted his stock of money long before the frontier was reached. For two days he had eaten hardly anything; and tramped on in a dogged and careless spirit.
Thenearnessof the German frontier began to riselike a wall in front of him. This question had to be answered: Did he want to cross it after all?
His answer was to mount the steps of the localgendarmerie.
His Prussian severity of countenance, now that he was dressed in every point like a vagabond, without hat and his hair disordered, five days’ beard on his chin—this sternness of the German warrior gave him the appearance of a scowling ruffian. Theagenton duty, who barred his passage brutally before the door of the inner office, scowling too, classed him as a depraved cut-throat vagabond, and considered his voluntary entrance into the police-station as an act not only highly suspicious and unaccountable in itself, but of the last insolence.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il te faut?”
“Foir le Commissaire,” returned Kreisler.
“Tu ne peux pas le voir. Il n’y est pas.”
A few more laconic sentences followed, theagentreiterating sulkily that the magistrate was not there. But he was eyeing Kreisler doubtfully and turning something over in his mind.
The day before, two Germans had been arrested in the neighbourhood as spies, and were now locked up in this building until further evidence should be collected on the affair. It is extremely imprudent for a German to loiter on the frontier on entering France. It is much wiser for him to push on at once—neither looking to right nor left—pretending especially not to notice hills, unnatural military-looking protuberances, ramparts, etc.—to hurry on as rapidly as possible to the interior. But the two men in question were carpenters by profession, and both carried huge foot-rules in their pockets. The local authorities on this discovery were in a state of the deepest consternation. They shut them up, with their implements, in the most inaccessible depths of the local police-station. And it was in the doorway of this building—all the intermittant inhabitants of which were in a state of hysterical speculation, that Kreisler had presented himself.
Theagent, who had recognized a German by his accent and manner, at last turned and disappeared through the door, telling him to wait. He reappeared with several superiors. All of them crowded in the doorway and surveyed Kreisler blankly. One asked in a voice of triumphant suspicion:
“And what are you doing there, my good fellow?”
“I had tuel, and killed the man; I have walked for more days⸺”
“Yes, we know all about that!”
“So you had a duel, eh?” asked another, and they all laughed with nervous suddenness at the picture of this vagabond defending his honour at twenty paces.
“Well, is that all you have to say?”
“I would eat.”
“Yes! your two friends inside also have big appetites. But come to the point. Have you anything to tell us about your compatriots inside there?”
Since his throttling by Soltyk, Kreisler had changed. He knew he was beaten. There was nothing to do but to die. His body ran to the German frontier as a chicken’s does down a yard, headless, from the block.
Kreisler did not understand the official. He muttered that he was hungry. He could hardly stand. Leaning his shoulder against the wall, he stood with his eyes on the ground. He was making himself at home! “What a nerve!”
“Va t’en! If you don’t want to tell us anything, clear out. Be quick about it! A pretty lot of trouble you cursed Germans are giving us. You’ll none of you speak when it comes to the point. You all stand staring like boobies. But that won’t pay here. Of you go!”
They all turned back into the office, and slammed the door. Theagentstood before it again, looking truculently at Kreisler. He said:
“Passez votre chemin! Don’t stand gaping there!”
Then, giving him a shake, he hustled him to thetop of the steps. A parting shove sent him staggering down into the road.
Kreisler walked on for a little. Eventually, in a quiet square, near the entrance to the town, he fell on a bench, drew his legs up and went to sleep.
At ten o’clock, the town lethargically retiring, all its legs moving slowly, like a spent insect, heavily boarding itself in, anagentcame gradually along the square. Kreisler’s visit to the police-station was not known to this one. He stopped opposite the sleeping Kreisler, surveying him with lawful indignation.
“En voilà un joli gigolo!” He swayed energetically up to him.
“Eh! le copain! Tu voudrais coucher à la belle étoile?”
He shook him.
“Oh, là! Tu ne peux pas dormir ici!Houp!Dépêches-toi. Mets-toi debout!”
Kreisler responded only by a tired movement as though to bury his skull in the bench. A more violent jerk rolled him on the ground.
He woke up and protested in German, with a sort of dull asperity. He got on to his feet.
At the sound of the familiar gutturals of the neighbouring Empire, theagentbecame differently angry. Kreisler stood there, muttering partly in German and partly in French; he was very tired. He was telling bitterly of his attempt to get into the police-station, and of his inhospitable reception. Theagentunderstood several words of German—notably “ja” and “lager beer” and “essen.” The consequence was that he always thought he understood more than was really said in that language. However much might be actually intended on any given occasion by the words of that profound and teeming tongue, it could never equal in scope, intensity, and meaning what he heard.
So he was convinced that Kreisler was threatening an invasion, and scoffed loudly in reply. He understood Kreisler to assert that the town in which they stood would soon belong to Germany, and that hewould then sleep, not on a bench, but in the best bed their dirty little hole of a village could offer. He approached him threateningly. And eventually the functionary distinctly heard himself apostrophized as a “sneaking ‘flic’,” a “dirty peeler.” At that he laid his hand on Kreisler’s collar, and threw him in the direction of the police-station. He had miscalculated the distance. Kreisler, weak for want of food, fell at his feet; but, getting up, scuffled a short time. Then, it occurring to him that here was an unhoped for way of getting a dinner, and being lodged after all in thebureau de police, he suddenly became passive and complaisant.
Arrived at the police-station—with several revolts against the brutal handling to which he was subjected—he was met at the door by the same inhospitable man. Exasperated beyond measure at this unwelcome guest turning up again, the man sent his comrade into the office to report, while he held Kreisler. He held him as a restive horse is held, and jerked him several times against the wall, as if he had been showing signs of resistance.
Two men, one that he had formerly seen, came and looked at him. No effort was made to discover if he were really at fault or not. By this time they were quite convinced that he was a desperate character, and if not a spy, then anyway a murderer, although they were inclined to regard him as a criminal mystery. At all events they no longer could question his right to a night’s lodging.
Kreisler was led to a cell, given some bread and water at his urgent request, and left alone.
On the following morning he was taken up before thecommissaire de police. When Kreisler was brought in, this gentleman had just finished cross-examining for the fifteenth time the two German carpenters who were retained as spies. They were not let alone for an instant. They would be dragged out of their cells three times in the course of an afternoon, as often as a new and brilliant idea should strike one of the numerous staff of the police-station.They would be confronted with their foot-rules, and watched in breathless silence; or be keenly cross-questioned, confused and contradicted as to the exact hour at which they had lunched the day before their arrest. Thecommissairewas perspiring all over with the intensity of his last effort to detect something. Kreisler was led in, and prevented from finishing any sentence or of becoming in any way intelligible during a quarter of an hour by the furious interruptions of the enraged officer. At last he succeeded in asserting that he was quite unacquainted with the two carpenters; moreover, that all he needed was food; that he had decided to give himself up and await the decision of the Paris authorities as regards the deed. If they were not going to take any action, he would return to Paris—at least, as soon as he had received a certain letter; and he gave his address. Thecommissaireconsidered him with exhausted animosity and he was sent back to his cell.
He slept the greater part of the day, but the next he spent nervous and awake. In the afternoon a full confirmation of his story reached the authorities. It was likely that the following morning he would be sent to Paris. It meant, then, that he was going to be tried as a kind of murderer. He could not allege complete accident. The thought of Paris, the vociferous courts, the ennuis of a criminal case about this affair, so thoroughly ended and boringly out of date, disturbed him extremely. Then the Russian—he would have to see him again. Kreisler felt that he was being terribly worried once more. Sorrow for himself bowed him down. This journey to Paris resembled his crossing of the German frontier. He had felt that it was impossible to see his father. That represented an effort he would do anything to avoid. Resentment against his parent had vanished. It was this that made a meeting so difficult. It was a stranger, with an ill will that had survived his own, awaiting him. Noise, piercing noise, effort, awaited him revengefully. He knew exactly what his fatherwould do and say. If there had been a single item that he could not forecast!—But there was not the least item. Paris was the same. The energy and obstinacy of the rest of the world, the world that would question him and drag him about, these frightened him as something mad. Bitzenko appealed most to this new-born timidity. Bitzenko was like some favourite dish a man has one day eaten too much of, and will never be able again to enjoy, or even support.
On the other hand, he became quite used to his cell. His mind was sick, and this room had a clinical severity. It had all the economical elements of a place in which a human operation might be performed. He became fond of it as patients get an appetite for the leanness of convalescent life. He lay on his bed. He turned over the shell of many empty and depressing hours he had lived. He took particular pleasure in these listless concave shapes. His “good times” were avoided. Days spent with his present stepmother, before his father knew her, gave him a particularly numbing and nondescript feeling.
He sat up, listening to the noises from the neighbouring rooms and corridors. It began to sound to him like one steady preparation for his removal. Steps bustled about getting this ready and getting that ready.
The police-station had cost him some trouble to enter. But they had been attracted to each other from the start. Something in the form of an illicit attachment now existed between them. Buildings are female. There is no such thing as a male building. This practical and pretentious small modern edifice was having its romance. Otto Kreisler was its romance.
It was now warning him. It echoed sharply and insistently the feet of its policemen.
After his evening meal he took up his bed in his arms and placed it on the opposite side of the cell, under the window. He sat there for some time asthough resting after this effort. The muttering of two children on a doorstep in the street below came to him on the evening light with melodramatic stops and emptiness. It bore with it an image, like an old picture, bituminous and with a graceful, queer formality. It fixed itself before him like a mirage. He watched it muttering.
He began slowly drawing off his boots. He took out the laces, and tied them together for greater strength. Then he tore several strips off his shirt, and made a short cord of them. He went through these actions deliberately and deftly, as though it were a routine and daily happening. He measured the drop from the bar of the ventilator, calculating the necessary length of cord, like a boy preparing the accessories of some game. It was only a game, too. He realized what these proceedings meant, but shunned the idea that it was serious. Just as an unmoral man with a disinclination to write a necessary letter takes up the pen, resolving to begin it merely and writes more and more until it is, in fact, completed, so Kreisler proceeded with his task.
Standing on his bed, he attached the cord to the ventilator. He tested its strength by holding it some inches from the top, and then, his shoulders hunched, swaying his whole weight languidly on it for a moment.
Adjusting the noose, he smoothed his hair back after he had slipped it over his head. He made as though to kick the bed away, playfully, then stood still, staring in front of him. The last moment must be one of realization. He was not a coward. His caution was due to his mistrust of some streaks of him, the sex streak the powerfullest.
A sort of heavy confusion burst up as he withdrew the restraint. It reminded him of Soltyk’s hands on this throat. The same throttling feeling returned. The blood bulged in his head. He felt dizzy; it was the Soltyk struggle over again. But, as with Soltyk, he did not resist. He gently worked the bed outwards from under him, giving it a last steady shove.He hung, gradually choking, the last thing he was conscious of, his tongue.
The discovery of his body caused a deep-felt indignation among the staff at the police-station. They remembered the persistence with which this unprincipled and equivocal vagrant (as which they still regarded him) had attempted to get into the building. And it was clear to their minds that his sole purpose had been to hang himself on their premises. He had mystified them from the first. Now their vague suspicions were bitterly confirmed, and had taken an unpardonable form. Each man felt that this corpse had personally insulted and made a fool of him. They thrust it savagely into the earth, with vexed and disgusted faces.
Herr Kreisler paid without comment what was claimed by the landlord in Paris for his son’s room; and writing to the authorities at the frontier town about the burial, paid exactly the sum demanded by this town for disposing of the body.
The sight of Bertha’s twistings and turnings, her undignified rigmarole, had irritated Anastasya. This was why she had brutally announced, as though to cut short all that, that Kreisler’s behaviour was due simply to the fact that he fancied himself in love with her, Anastasya. “He was not worrying about Fräulein Lunken. He was in love withme;” the statement amounted to that. There was no disdainful repudiation or self-reference in her statement; only a piece of information.
Bertha’s intuitions and simplifications had not been without basis. This “hostile version” had contained a certain amount of hostile intention.
But Anastasya had another reason for this immodest explicitness. She personally liked Kreisler. The spectacle of Bertha excusing herself, and in the processputting Kreisler in a more absurd and unsatisfactory light, annoyed her extremely.
How could Tarr consort with Bertha, she questioned? Her aristocratic woman’s sense did not appreciate the taste for a slut, a miss or a suburban queen. The apache, the coster girl, fisher-lass, all that hadcharacter, oh, yes. Her romanticism, in fact, was of the same order as Butcher’s only better.
Two days after the duel she met Tarr in the street. They agreed to meet at Lejeune’s for dinner.
The table at which she had first come across Kreisler was where they sat.
“You knew Soltyk, didn’t you?” he asked her.
“Yes. It was a terrible affair. Poor Soltyk!”
She looked at Tarr doubtfully. A certain queer astonishment in her face struck Tarr. It was the only sign of movement beneath. She spoke with a businesslike calm about his death. There was no sign of feeling or search for feeling.
She refused to regard herself as the “woman in the affair.” She knew people referred to her as that. Soltyk possessed a rather ridiculous importance, being dead; a cadaveric severity in the meaning of the image, Soltyk, for her. The fact was bigger than the person. He was like a boy in his father’s clothes.
Kreisler, on the other hand, she abominated. To have killed,heto have killed!—and to have killed some one she knew! It was a hostile act to bring death so near her. She knew it was hostile. She hoped he might never come back to Paris. She did not want to meet Kreisler.
But these feelings were not allowed to transpire. She recognized them as personal. She was so fastidious that she refrained from using them in discussing the affair when they would have given a suspect readiness and “sincerity” to her expression. She rather went to the other extreme.
“They say Soltyk was not killed in a duel,” Tarr continued. “Kreisler is to be charged with murder, or at least manslaughter.”
“Yes, I have heard that Kreisler shot him before he was ready or something⸺”
“I heard that he was shot when he was unarmed. There was no duel at all.”
“Oh, that is not the version I have heard.”
She did not seem revengeful about her friend.
“I was Kreisler’s second for half an hour,” Tarr said in a minute.
“How do you mean, for half an hour?” She was undemonstrative but polite.
“I happened to be there, and was asked to help him until somebody else could be found. I did not suspect him, I may say, of meaning to go to such lengths.”
“What was the reason of it all—do you know?”
“According to Kreisler, they had done some smacking earlier in the day⸺”
“Yes. Herr Kreisler met Soltyk and myself. I think that Soltyk then was a little in the wrong.”
“I dare say.”
Tarr’s sympathies were all with Kreisler. He had never been attracted by Poles, and as such rather than a Russian he thought of Soltyk. Deep square races he preferred. And Kreisler was a clumsy and degenerate atavism bringing a peculiarity into too elastic life.
Some of Tarr’s absurd friendliness for Bertha flowed over on to her fellow-countryman.
Had Anastasya more of a hand in the duel than he would naturally believe? Her indifference to Soltyk’s death, and her favouring Kreisler, almost pointed to something unusual. Kreisler’s ways were still mysterious!
That was all they said about the duel. As they were finishing the meal, after turning her head towards the entrance door, Anastasya remarked, with mock concern:
“There is your fiancée. She seems rather upset.”
Tarr looked towards the door. Bertha’s white face was close up against one of the narrow panes, above the lace curtain. There were four and a halffeet of window on either side of the door. There were so many objects and lights in the front well of the shop that her face would not be much noticed in the corner it had chosen.
Her eyes were round, vacant, and dark, the features very white and heavy, the mouth steadily open in painful lines. As he looked the face drew gradually away, and then disappeared into the melodramatic night. It was a large trapped fly on the pane. It withdrew with a glutinous, sweet slowness. The heavy white jowl seemed pulling itself out of some fluid trap where it had been caught like a weighty body.
Tarr knew how the pasty flesh would nestle against the furs, the shoulders swing, the legs move just as much as was necessary for progress, with no movement of the hips. Everything about her in the chilly night would give an impression of warmth and system. The sleek cloth fitting the square shoulders tightly, the underclothes carefully tight as well, the breath from her nostrils the slight steam from a contented machine.
He caught Anastasya’s eye and smiled.
“Your fiancée is pretty,” she said, pretending that was the answer to the smile.
“She’s not my fiancée. But she’s a pretty girl.”
“Oh, I understood you were engaged⸺”
“No.”
“It’s no good,” he thought. But he must spare Bertha in future such discomforting sights.
Bertha was still being taken in carefully prepared doses of an hour a day: from half-past four to a quarter to six. Any one else would have found this much of Bertha insupportable under any conditions. But Tarr’s eccentric soul had been used to such far greater doses that this was the minimum he considered necessary for a cure.
Tarr came to her every day with the regularity of an old gentleman at a German “Bad” taking his spring water at the regulation hour. But the cure was finishing. There were signs of a new robustness, (hateful to her) equivalent to a springy walk and a contented and sunny eye, that heralded departure. His daily visits, with their brutal regularity, did her as much harm as they did him good.
The news of Soltyk’s death, then Kreisler’s, affected the readily melodramatic side of her nature peculiarly. Death had made himselfde la partie. Kreisler had left her alone for a few days. This is what had occupied him. The sensational news, without actually pushing her to imitation, made her own case, and her own tragic sensations, more real. They had received, in an indirect and cousin-thrice-removed sort of way, the authority of Death. Death—real living Death—was somewhere on the scene. Hispresence was announced, was felt. He had struck down somebody among them.
In the meantime this disposed of Kreisler for ever. Tarr as well appeared to feel that they were left intête-à-tête. A sort of chaperon had been lost in Kreisler. His official post as protector or passive “obstacle” had been a definite status. If he stayed on, it would have to be as something else. On the day on which the news of Kreisler’s end arrived, he talked of leaving for England. Her more drawn face, longer silences, sharp glances, once more embarrassed him.
He did not go to England at once. In the week or two succeeding his meeting with Anastasya in the restaurant he saw her frequently. So a chaperon was found. Bertha was officially presented to her successor. When she learnt that Anastasya had been chosen, her energy reformed. She braced herself for a substantial struggle.
The apparition at the window of the restaurant was her first revived activity.
On August the tenth Tarr had an appointment with Anastasya at his studio in Montmartre. They had arranged to dine in Montmartre. It was their seventh meeting. He had just done his daily cure. He hurried back and found her lounging against the door, reading the newspaper.
“Ah, there you are! You’re late, Mr. Tarr.”
“Am I? I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long?”
“Not very. Fräulein Lunken⸺”
“She—I couldn’t get away.”
“No, itisdifficult to get away, apparently.”
He let her in. He was annoyed at the backwardness of his senses. His mind stepped in, determined to do their business for them. He put his arm roundher waist, and planting his lips fully on hers, began kissing her. He slipped his hands sideways beneath her coat, and pressed an athletic, sinuous hulk against him. The various bulging and retreating contact of her body brought monotonous German reminders.
It was the first time he had kissed her. She showed no bashfulness or disinclination, but no return. Was she in the unfortunate position of an unawakened mass; and had she so rationalized her intimate possessions that there was no precocious fancy left until mature animal ardour was set up? He felt as though he were embracing a tiger, who was not unsympathetic, but rather surprised. Perhaps he had been too sudden. He ran his hand upwards along her body. All was statuesquely genuine. She took his hand away.
“We haven’t come to that yet,” she said.
“Haven’t we!”
“I didn’t think we had.”
Smiling at each other, they separated.
“Let me take your coat off. You’ll be hot in here.”
Her coat was all in florid redundancies of heavy cloth, like a Tintoretto dress. Underneath she was wearing a very plain dark blouse and skirt, like a working girl, which exaggerated the breadth and straightness of her shoulders. Not to sentimentalize it, she had open-work stockings on underneath, such as the genuine girl would have worn on her night out, at one and eleven-three the pair.
“You look very well,” Tarr said.
“I put these on for you.”
Tarr had, while he was kissing her, found his senses again. They had flared up in such a way that the reason had been offended, and resisted. Hence some little conflict.Theywere not going to have the credit⸺!
He became shy. He was ashamed of his sudden interest, which had been so long in coming, and instinctively hid it. He was committed to the rôle of a reasonable man.
“I am very flattered at your thinking of me in that way. I am afraid I do not deserve⸺”
“I want you todeserve, though. You are absurd about women. You are like a schoolboy!”
“Oh, you’ve noticed that?”
“It doesn’t require much⸺”
She lay staring at him in a serious way. Squashed up as she was lying, a very respectable bulk of hip filled the space between the two arms of the chair, not enough to completely satisfy a Dago, but too’ much to please a dandy of the west. He compared this opulence with Bertha’s and admitted that it outdid his fiancée’s. He did this childish measuring in the belief that he was not observed.
“You are extremely recalcitrant to intelligence, aren’t you?” she said.
“In women, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose I am. My tastes are simple.”
“I don’t know anything about your tastes, of course. I’m guessing.”
“You can take it that you are right.”
He began to feel extremely attracted to this intelligent head. He had been living for the last week or so in the steady conviction that he should never get the right sensual angle with this girl. It was a queer feeling, after all, to see his sensuality speaking sense. He would marry her.
“Well,” she said, with pleasant American accent in speaking English, “I feel you see some disability in sensible women that does not exist. It doesn’t irritate you too much to hear a woman talking about it?”
“Of course not—you. You are so handsome. I shouldn’t like it if you were less so. Such good looks” (he rolled his eyes appreciatively) “get us out of arty coldness. You are all right. The worst of looks like yours is that sense has about the same effect as nonsense. Sense is a delightful anomaly just as rot would be! You don’t require words or philosophy. But they give one a pleasant tickling all the same.”
“I am glad you are learning. However, don’t praise me like that. It makes me a little shy. I know how you feel about women. You feel that good sense gets in the way.”
“It interferes with the senses, you mean? I don’t think I feel that altogether⸺”
“You feel I’m not a woman, don’t you? Not properly a woman, like your Bertha. There’s no mistake about her!”
“One requires something unconscious, perhaps. I’ve never met any woman who interested me but was ten times more stupid than I. I wantto be alonein those things. I like it to be subterranean as well.”
“Well, I have a cave! I’ve got all that, too. Ipromiseyou.”
Herpromisewas slow and lisping. Tarr once more had to deal with himself.
“I—am—a woman; not a man. That is the fact.” (“Fact” was long and American.) “You don’t realize that—I assure you I am!” She looked at him with a soft, steady smile, that drew his gaze and will into her, rather than imposed itself on him.
“I know.” He felt that there was not much to say.
“No, you know far less than you think. See here; I set out thinking of you in this way—‘Nothing but a female booby will please that man!’ I wanted to please you, but I couldn’t do it on those lines. I’m going to make an effort along my own lines. You are like a youngster who hasn’t got used to the taste of liquor; you don’t like it. You haven’t grown up yet. I want to make you drunk and see what happens!”
She had her legs crossed. Extremely white flesh showed above the black Lisle silk, amidst linen as expensive as the outer cloth was plain. This clever alternating of the humble and gorgeous! Would the body be plain? The provocation was merely a further argument. It said, “Young man, what is there you find in your Bertha that cannot be provided along with superior sense?” His Mohammedan eyedid not refuse the conventional bait. His butcher’s sensibility pressed his fancy into professional details. What with her words and her acts he was in a state of strong confusion.
She jumped up and put on her coat, like a ponderous curtain showering down to her heels. Peep-shows were ended!
“Come, let’s have some dinner. I’m hungry. We can discuss this problem better after a beefsteak!” A Porterhouse would have fitted, Tarr thought.
He followed obediently and silently. He was glad that Anastasya had taken things into her hands. The positions that these fundamental matters got him into! Should he allow himself to be overhauled and reformed by this abnormal beauty? He was not altogether enjoying himself. He felt a ridiculous amateur. He was a butcher in his spare moments. This immensely intellectual ox, covered with prizes and pedigrees, overwhelmed him. You required not a butcher, but an artist, for that! He was not an artist in anything but oil-paint. Oil-paint and meat were singularly alike. They had reciprocal potentialities. But he was afraid of being definitely distracted.
The earlier coldness all appeared cunning; his own former coldness was the cunning of destiny.
He felt immensely pleased with himself as he walked down the Boulevard Clichy with this perfect article rolling and sweeping beside him. No bourgeoise this time! He could be proud of this anywhere! Absolute perfection! Highest quality obtainable. “The face that launched a thousand ships.” A thousand ships crowded in her gait. There was nothing highfalutin about her, Burne-Jonesque, Grail-lady, or Irish-romantic. Perfect meat, perfect sense, accent of Minnesota, music of the Steppes! And all that was included under the one inadequate but pleasantly familiar heading,German. He became more and more impressed with what wasGermanabout her.
He took her to a large, expensive, and quietrestaurant. They began with oysters. He had never eaten oysters before. Prudence had prevented him. She laughed very much at this.
“You are a savage, Tarr!” The use of his surname was a tremendous caress. “You are afraid of typhoid, and your palate is as conservative as an ox’s. Give me a kiss!”
She put her lips out; he kissed them with solemnity and concentration, adjusting his glasses afterwards.
They discussed eating for some time. He discovered he knew nothing about it.
“Why, man, you never think!”
Tarr considered. “No, I’m not very observant in many things. But I have a defence. All that part of me is rudimentary. But that is as it should be.”
“How—as it should be?”
“I don’t disperse myself. I specialize on necessities.”
“Don’t you call food⸺?”
“Not in the way you’ve been considering it. Listen. Life is art’s rival and vice versa.”
“I don’t see the opposition.”
“No, because you mix them up. You are the archenemy of any picture.”
“I? Nonsense! But art comes out of life, in any case. What is art?”
“My dear girl—life with all the nonsense taken out of it. Will that do?”
“Yes. But what is art—especially?” She insisted with her hands on a plastic answer. “Are we in life, now?What is art?”
“Lifeis anything that could live and die.Artis peculiar; it is anything that lives and that yet you cannot imagine as dying.”
“Why cannot art die? If you smash up a statue, it is as dead as a dead man.”
“No, it is not. That is the difference. It is the God, or soul, we say, of the man. It always has existed, if it is a true statue.”
“But cannot you say of some life that it could not die?”
“No, because in that case it is therealcoming through.Deathis the one attribute that is peculiar tolife. It is the something that it is impossible to imagine in connexion with art. Reality is entirely founded on this fact, that ofDeath. Allactionrevolves round that, and has it for motif. The purest thought is totally ignorant of death. Death means the perpetual extinction of impertinent sparks. But it is the key of life.”
“But what isart? You are talking about it as though I knew what it was!”
“What is life, do you know? Well, I know what art is in the same way.”
“Yes, but I ask you as a favour to define it for me. A picture is art, a living person is life. We sitting here arelife; if we were talking on a stage we should beart. How would you define art?”
“Well, let’s take your example. But a picture, and also the actors on a stage, are pure life. Art is merely what the picture and the stage-scene represent, and what we now, and any living person as such, only, donot. That is why you can say that the true statue can be smashed, and yet not die.”
“Still, whatisit? Whatisart?”
“It is ourselves disentangled from death and accident.”
“How do you know?”
“I feel that is so, because I notice that that is the essential point to grasp.Deathis the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person.”
Both their faces lost some of their colour, hers her white, his his yellow. They flung themselves upon each other like waves. The fuller stream came from him.
“You say that the actors on the stage are pure life, yet they represent something thatwedo not. But ‘all the world’s a stage,’ isn’t it? So how do we not also stand for that something?”
“Yes, life does generally stand for that something too; but it only emerges and is visible in art.”
“StillI don’t know what art is!”
“You ought to by this time. However, we can go further. Consider the content of what we call art. A statue is art, as you said; you are life. There is bad art and bad life. We will only consider the good. A statue, then, is a dead thing; a lump of wood or stone. Its hues and masses are its soul. Anything living, quick and changing, is bad art, always; naked men and women are the worst art of all, because there are fewer semi-dead things about them. The shell of the tortoise, the plumage of a bird, makes these animals approach nearer to art. Soft, quivering and quick flesh is as far from art as an object can be.”
“Art is merelythe dead, then?”
“No, butdeadnessis the first condition of art. A hippopotamus’s armoured hide, a turtle’s shell, feathers or machinery on the one hand;thatopposed to naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life, along with infinite elasticity and consciousness of movement, on the other.
“Deadness, then,” Tarr went on, “in the limited sense in which we use that word is the first condition of art. The second is absence ofsoul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick, flame-like ego is imagined for theinsideof it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art;to have no inside, nothing you cannotsee. Instead, then, of being something impelled like a machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.”
Tarr was developing, from her point of view, too much shop. She encouraged him, however, immediately.
“Why should human beings be chiefly represented in art?”
“Because what we call art depends on human beings for its advertisement. As men’s ideas about themselves change, art should change too.”
They had waded through a good deal of food while this conversation had been proceeding. She now stretched herself, clasping her hands in her lap. She smiled at Tarr as though to invite him to smile too, at her beautiful, heavy, hysterical anatomy. She had been driving hard inscrutable Art deeper and deeper into herself. She now drew it out and showed it to Tarr.
“Art is paleozoic matter, dolomite, oil-paint, and mathematics; also something else. Having established that, we will stick a little flag up and come back another day. I want to hear now aboutlife. But do you believe in anything?”
Tarr was staring, suspended, with a smile cut in half, therefore defunct, at the wall. He turned his head slowly, with his mutilated smile, his glasses slanting in an agreeably vulpine way.
“Believe in anything? I only believe in one thing, pleasure of taste. In that way you get back though, with me, to mathematics and paleozoic times, and the coloured powders of the earth.”
Anastasya ordered agâteau reine de Samothrace.
“Reine de Samothrace! Reine de Samothrace!” Tarr muttered. “Donnez-moi une omelette au rhum.”
Tarr looked at her for some time in a steady, depressed way. What a treat for his eyes not to be jibing! She held all the imagery of a perfect world. There was no pathos anywhere in her form. Kindness—bestial kindness—would be an out-of-work in this neighbourhood. The upper part of her head was massive and intelligent. The middle of her body was massive and exciting. There was no animalism out of place in the shape of a weight of jaw. The weight was in the head and hips. But was not this a complete thing by itself? How did he stand as regards it? He had always been sceptical about perfection. Did she and he need each other? His steadfast ideas of the flower surrounded by dung were challenged. She might be a monotonous abstraction, and, if accepted, impoverish his life.She was the summit, and the summit was narrow. Or in any case was not ugliness and foolishness the richest soil? Irritants were useful though not beautiful. He reached back doubtfully towards his bourgeoise. But he was revolted as he touched that mess, with this clean and solid object beneath his eyes. He was not convinced, though, that he was on the right road. He preferred a cabin to a palace, and thought that a villa was better for him than either, but did not want to order his life so rigidly as that.
“What did you make of Kreisler’s proceedings?” she asked him.
“In what way do you mean?”
“Well, first—do you think he and Bertha—got on very well?”
“Do you mean was Bertha his mistress? I should think not. But I’m not sure. That isn’t very interesting, is it?”
“Kreisler is interesting, not Bertha, of course.”
“You’re very hard on Bertha.”
She put her tongue out at him and wrinkled up her nose.
A queen, standing on her throne, was obtruding her “unruly member.”
“What were Kreisler’s relations with you, by the way?” he asked blankly.
Her extreme freedom with himself suggested possible explanations of her manner in discussing Soltyk’s death at the time.
“My relations with Kreisler consisted in a half-hour’s conversation with him in a restaurant, and that was all. I spoke to him several times after that, but only for a few minutes. He was very excited the last time we met. I have a theory that his duel and general behaviour was due to unrequited passion for me. Your Bertha, on the other hand, has a theory that it was due to unrequited passion forher. I wondered if you had any information that might support her case or mine.”
“No. I know nothing about it. I hold, myself, a quite different theory.”
“What is that? That he was in love withyou?”
“My theory has not the charming simplicity of your theory or Bertha’s. I don’t believe that he was in love with anybody. I believe, though, that it was a sex-tumult of sorts⸺”
“What is that?”
“You want to hear my theory? This is it. I believe that all the fuss he made was an attempt to get out of Art back into life again, like a fish flopping about who had got into the wrong tank. It would be more exact to say,back into sex. He was trying to get back into sex again out of a little puddle of Art where he felt he was gradually expiring. What I mean is this. He was an art student without any talent, and was leading a dull, slovenly existence like thousands of others in the same case. He was very hard up. Things were grim that way too. The sex-instinct of the average man, then, had become perverted into a silly false channel. Or it might be better to say that his elementary art-instinct had been rooted out of sex and one or two other things, where it was both useful and ornamental, and naturally flourished, and had been exalted into a department by itself, where it bungled and wrecked everything. It is a measure the need of which hits the eye in these days to keep the art-instinct of the run of men in its place. These art-spirits should be kept firmly embedded insex, infighting, and inaffairs. The nearest the general run of men can get to Art isAction. Real, bustling, bloody action is what they want! Sex istheirform of art: the battle of existence in enterprise, Commerce, istheirpicture. The moment theythinkordreamyou get an immense weight of cheap stagnating passion that becomes a menace to the health of the world. A “cultured” nation is as great a menace as a “free” one. The answer to the men who object to this as high-handed is plain enough. You must answer: No man’s claim isindividual;the claim of an exceptional being is that of an important type or original—is an inclusive claim. The eccentric Many do not matter. They are theindividuals. And anyway Goddam economy in any shape or form! Long live Waste! Curse the principle of Humanity! Mute inglorious Miltons are not mute for God-in-Heaven. They have the Silence. Bless Waste, Heaven bless Waste! Hoch Waste!”
“I’ll drink to that!” said Anastasya, raising her glass. “Here’s to Waste! Hoch!” Tarr drank this toast with gusto.
“Here’s to Waste!” he said loudly. “Waste yourselves, pour yourselves out, let there be no High-Men except such as happen! Economy is sedition. Drink your blood if you have no wine! Butwaste; fling out into the streets; never count your yarn. Accept fools, compromise yourselves with the poor in spirit, fling the rich ones behind you; live like the lions in the forests with fleas on your back. Down with theEfficientChimpanzee!”
Anastasya’s eyes were bloodshot with the gulp she had taken to honour Waste. Tarr patted her on the back.
“There are no lions in the forests!” she hiccuped, patting her chest. “You’re pulling my leg.”
They got to their coffee more or less decorously. But Tarr had grown extremely loquacious and expansive in every way. He began slapping her thighs to emphasise his points, as Diderot was in the habit of doing with the Princesse de Clèves. After that he began kissing her, when he had made a particularly successful remark, to celebrate it. Their second bottle of wine had put many things to flight. He lay back in his chair in prolonged bursts of laughter. She, in German fashion, clapped her hand over his mouth, and he seized it with his teeth and made pale shell-shapes in its brown fat.
In a café opposite the restaurant, where they next went, they had further drinks.
They caressed each other’s hands now as a matter of course! Indifferent to the supercilious and bitter natives, they became lost in lengthy kisses, their arms round each other’s necks. In a little cave of intoxicated affection, a conversation took place.
“Have you had dealings with many⸺?”
“What’s that you say, dear?” she asked with eager, sleepy seriousness. The “dear” reminded him of accostings in the streets.
“Have you been the mistress of many men?”
“No, of course not. Only one. He was a Russian.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“What did you say?”
“How much did he bag?”
“Bag?”
“What did the Russian represent?”
“Nothing at all, Tarr. That’s why I took him. I wanted the experience. But now I want you! You are my firstperson!” Distant reminiscences of Bertha, grateful to him at present.
Kisses succeeded.
“I don’t wantyou!” Tarr said.
“Oh! Tell me what you want?”
“I want a woman!”
“But I am a woman, stupid!”
“I want aslave.”
She whispered in his ear, hanging on his neck.
“No! You may be a woman, but you’re not a slave.”
“Don’t be so quarrelsome. Forget those silly words of yours—slave, woman. It’s all right when you’re talking about art, but you’re hugging a woman at present. This is something that can die! Ha ha! We’re in life, my Tarr.We represent absolutely nothing—thank God!”
“I realize I’m in life, darling. But I don’t like being reminded of it in that way. It makes me feel as though I were in amauvais lieu.”
“Give me a kiss, youefficient chimpanzee!”
Tarr scowled at her, but did not alter the half-embrace in which they sat.
“You won’t give me a kiss? Silly oldinefficient chimpanzee!”
She sat back in her chair, and head down looked through her eyelashes at him with demure menace.
“Garçon! garçon!” she called.
“Mademoiselle?” thegarçonsaid, approaching slowly, with dignified scepticism.
“This gentleman,garçon, wants to be a lion with fleas on his back—at least so he says! At the same time he wants a slave. I don’t know if he expects the slave to catch his fleas or not. I haven’t asked him. But he’s a funny-looking bird, isn’t he?”
Thegarçonwithdrew with hauteur.
“What’s the meaning of your latest tack, you little German art-tart?”
“What am I?”
“I called you German æsthetic pastry. I think that describes you.”
“Oh,tart, is it?”
“Anything you like. Very well made, puffed out. Withonesolitary Russian,bien entendu!”
“And what, good God, shall we call the cow-faced specimen you spend the greater part of your days with⸺”
“She, too, is German pastry, more homely than you though⸺”
“Homely’s the word!”
“But not quite so fly-blown. Less variegated creams and German pretentiousness⸺”
“I see! And takes you more seriously than other people would be likely to! That’s what all your ‘quatch’ about ‘woman’ and ‘slave’ means. You know that!”
She had recovered from the effects of the drinks completely and was sitting up and talking briskly, looking at him with the same serious, rather flattened face she had had during their argument on Art and Death.
“I know you are a famous whore, who becomes rather acid in your cups!—when you showed me your legs this evening, I suppose I was meant⸺”
“Assez! Assez!!” She struck the table with her fist.
“Let’s get to business.” He put his hat on and leant towards her. “It’s getting late. Twenty-five francs, I’m afraid, is all I can manage.”
“Twenty-five francs for what? With you—it would be robbery! Twenty-five francs to be your audience while you drivel about art? Keep your money and buy Bertha an—efficient chimpanzee! She will need it if she marries you!”
Her mouth drawn tight and her hands in her coat pockets, she walked out of the door of the café.
Tarr ordered another drink.
“It’s like a moral tale told on behalf of Bertha,” he thought. That was the temper of Paradise! The morality, in pointing to Bertha, did her no good, but caused her to receive thetrop-pleinof his discontent.
He sat in a grim sulk at the thought of the good time he had lost. This scene had succeeded in touching the necessary spring. His vanity helping, for half an hour he plotted his revenge and satisfaction together. Anastasya had violently flung off the illusion of indifference in which she had hitherto appeared to him. The drinks of the evening were a culture in which his disappointment grew luxuriantly, but with a certain buffoonish lightness. He went back to his studio in half an hour’s time with smug, thick, secretive pleasure settling down on his body’s ungainly complaints.