CHAPTER I
Some days later, in the evening, Tarr was to be found in a strange place. Decidedly his hosts could not have explained how he got there. He displayed no consciousness of the anomaly.
He had introduced himself—now for the second time—into Fräulein Lipmann’s æsthetic saloon, after dining with her and her following at Flobert’s Restaurant. As inexplicable as Kreisler’s former visits, these ones that Tarr began to make were not so perfectly unwelcome. There was a glimmering of meaning in them for Bertha’s women friends. He had just walked in two nights before, as though he were an old and established visitor there, shaken hands and sat down. He then listened to their music, drank their coffee and went away apparently satisfied. Did he consider that his so close connexion with Bertha entitled him to this? It was at all events a prerogative he had never before availed himself of, except on one or two occasions at first, in her company.
The women’s explanation of this eccentric sudden frequentation was that Tarr was in despair. His separation from Bertha (or her conduct with Kreisler) had hit him hard. He wished for consolation or mediation.
Neither of these guesses was right. It was really something absurder than that that had brought him there.
Only a week or ten days away from his love affair with Bertha, Tarr was now coming back to the old haunts and precincts of his infatuation. He was living it all over again in memory, the central and all the accessory figures still in exactly the same place. Suddenly, everything to do with “those days,” as he thought of a week or two before (or what had ended officially then) had become very pleasing. Bertha’s women friends were delightful landmarks. Tarr could not understand how it was he had not taken an interest in them before. They had so much of the German savour of that life lived with Bertha about them!
But not only with them, but with Bertha herself he was likewise carrying on this mysterious retrospective life. He was so delighted, as a fact, to be free of Bertha that he poetized herself and all her belongings.
On this particular second visit to Fräulein Lipmann’s he met Anastasya Vasek. She, at least, was nothing to do with his souvenirs. Yet, not realizing her as an absolute new-comer at once, he accepted her as another proof of how delightful these people in truth were.
He had been a very silent guest so far. They were curious to hear what this enigma should eventually say, when it decided to speak.
“How is Bertha?” they had asked him.
“She has got a cold,” he had answered. It was a fact that she had caught a summer cold several days before.—“How strange!” they thought.—“So he sees her still!”
“She hasn’t been to Flobert’s lately,” Renée Lipmann said. “I’ve been so busy, or I’d have gone round to see her. She’s not in bed, is she?”
“Oh, no, she’s just got a slight cold. She’s very well otherwise,” Tarr answered.
Bertha disappears. Tarr turns up tranquilly in her place. Was he a substitute? What could all this mean? Their first flutter over, their traditional hostility for him reawakened. He had always been an arrogant, eccentric, and unpleasant person: “Homme égoïste! Homme sensuel!” in Van Bencke’s famous words.
On seeing him talking with new liveliness, not displayed with them, to Anastasya, suspicions began to germinate. Even such shrewd intuition, a development from the reality, as this: “Perhaps getting to like Germans, and losing his first, he had come here to find another.” Comfortable in his liberty, he was still enjoying, by proxy or otherwise, the satisfaction of slavery.
The arrogance implied by his infatuation for the commonplace was taboo. He must be more humble, he felt, and take an interest in his equals.
He had been “Homme égoïste” so far, but “Homme sensuel” was an exaggeration. His concupiscence had been undeveloped. His Bertha, if she had not been a joke, would not have satisfied him. She did not succeed in waking his senses, although she had attracted them. There was no more reality in their sex relations than in their other relations.
He now had a closer explanation of his attachment to stupidity than he had been able to give Lowndes. It was that his artist’s asceticism could not support anything more serious than such an elementary rival, and, when sex was in the ascendant, it turned his eyes away from the highest beauty and dulled the extremities of his senses, so that he had nothing but rudimentary inclinations left.
But in the interests of his animalism he was turning to betray the artist in him. For he had been saying to himself lately that a more suitable lady-companion must be found; one, that is, he need not be ashamed of. He felt that the time had arrived for Life to come in for some of the benefits of Consciousness.
Anastasya’s beauty, bangles, and good sense were the very thing.
Despite himself, Sorbert was dragged out of his luxury of reminiscence without knowing it, and began discriminating between the Bertha enjoyment felt through the pungent German medium of her friends, and this novel sensation. Yet this sensation was an intruder. It was as though a man having wandered sentimentally along an abandoned route, a tactless and gushing acquaintance had been discovered in unlikely possession.
Tarr asked her from what part of Germany she came.
“My parents are Russian. I was born in Berlin and brought up in America. We live in Dresden,” she answered.
This accounted for her jarring on his maudlin German reveries.
“Lots of Russian families have settled latterly in Germany, haven’t they?” he asked.
“Russians are still rather savage. The more bourgeois a place or thing is the more it attracts them. German watering places, musical centres and so on, they like about as well as anything. They often settle there.”
“Do you regard yourself as a Russian—or a German?”
“Oh, a Russian. I⸺”
“I’m glad of that,” said Tarr, quite forgetting where he was, and forgetting the nature of his occupation.
“Don’t you like Germans then?”
“Well, now you remind me of it, I do:—Very much, in fact,” He shook himself with self-reproach and gazed round benignantly and comfortably at his hosts. “Else I shouldn’t be here! They’re such a nice, modest, assimilative race, with an admirable sense of duty. They are born servants; excellent mercenary troops, I understand. They should always be used as such.”
“I see you know them à fond.” She laughed in the direction of the Lipmann.
He made a deprecating gesture.
“Not much. But they are an accessible and friendly people.”
“You are English?”
“Yes.”
He treated his hosts with a warm benignity which sought, perhaps, to make up for past affronts. It appeared only to gratify partially. He was treating them like part and parcel of Bertha. They were not ready to accept this valuation, that of chattels of her world.
The two Kinderbachs came over and made an affectionate demonstration around and upon Anastasya. She got up, scattering them abruptly and went over to the piano.
“What a big brute!” Tarr thought. “She would be just as good as Bertha to kiss. And you get a respectable human being into the bargain!” He was not intimately convinced that she would be as satisfactory. Let us see how it would be; he considered. This larger machine of repressed, moping senses did attract. To take it to pieces, bit by bit, and penetrate to its intimacy, might give a similar pleasure to undressing Bertha!
Possessed of such an intense life as Anastasya, women always appeared on the verge of a dark spasm of unconsciousness. With their organism of fierce mechanical reactions, their self-possession was rather bluff. So much more accomplished socially than men, yet they were not the social creatures, but men. Surrender to a woman was a sort of suicide for an artist. Nature, who never forgives an artist, would never allow her to forgive. With any “superior” woman he had ever met, this feeling of being with a parvenu never left him. Anastasya was not an exception.
On leaving, Tarr no longer felt that he would come back to enjoy a diffused form of Bertha there. The prolongations of his Bertha period had passed a climax.
On leaving Renée Lipmann’s, nevertheless, Tarr went to the Café de l’Aigle, some distance away, but with an object. To make his present frequentation quite complete, it only needed Kreisler. Otto was there, very much on his present visiting list. He visited him regularly at the Café de l’Aigle, where he was constantly to be found.
This is how Tarr had got to know him.