CHAPTER II
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, it is difficult 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 round her 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. They were 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 to deserve, 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 want to be alone in those things. I like it to be subterranean as well.”
“Well, I have a cave! I’ve got all that, too. I promise you.”
Her promise was 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 eye did 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 was German about her.
He took her to a large, expensive, and quiet restaurant. 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?”
“Life is anything that could live and die. Art is 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 the real coming through. Death is the one attribute that is peculiar to life. It is the something that it is impossible to imagine in connexion with art. Reality is entirely founded on this fact, that of Death. All action revolves 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 is art? 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 are life; if we were talking on a stage we should be art. 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, do not. That is why you can say that the true statue can be smashed, and yet not die.”
“Still, what is it? What is art?”
“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. Death is 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 that we do 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.”
“Still I 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 merely the dead, then?”
“No, but deadness is the first condition of art. A hippopotamus’s armoured hide, a turtle’s shell, feathers or machinery on the one hand; that opposed 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 of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick, flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. 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 about life. 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 a gâteau 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 for her. 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 with you?”
“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 in sex, in fighting, and in affairs. The nearest the general run of men can get to Art is Action. Real, bustling, bloody action is what they want! Sex is their form of art: the battle of existence in enterprise, Commerce, is their picture. The moment they think or dream you 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 is individual; 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 the individuals. 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! But waste; 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 the Efficient Chimpanzee!”
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 first person!” Distant reminiscences of Bertha, grateful to him at present.
Kisses succeeded.
“I don’t want you!” Tarr said.
“Oh! Tell me what you want?”
“I want a woman!”
“But I am a woman, stupid!”
“I want a slave.”
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 a mauvais lieu.”
“Give me a kiss, you efficient chimpanzee!”
Tarr scowled at her, but did not alter the half-embrace in which they sat.
“You won’t give me a kiss? Silly old inefficient chimpanzee!”
She sat back in her chair, and head down looked through her eyelashes at him with demure menace.
“Garçon! garçon!” she called.
“Mademoiselle?” the garçon said, 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?”
The garçon withdrew 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. With one solitary 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 the trop-plein of 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.