CHAPTER V
When he got outside Bertha’s house, Bertha waving to him from the window with tears in her eyes, he came in for the counter-attack.
One after the other the protesting masses of good sense rolled up.
He picked his way out of the avenue with a reasoning gesticulation of the body; a chicken-like motion of sensible fastidious defence in front of buffonic violence. At the gate he exploded in harsh laughter, looking bravely and railingly out into the world through his glasses. Then he walked slowly away in his short jacket, his buttocks moving methodically just beneath its rim.
“Ha ha! Ha ha! Kreisleriana!” he shouted without his voice.
The indignant plebs of his glorious organism rioted around his mind.
“Ha ha! Ha ha! Sacré farceur, where are you leading us?” They were vociferous. “You have kept us fooling in this neighbourhood so long, and now you are pledging us to your idiotic fancy for ever. Ha ha! Ha ha!”
“Be reasonable! What are you doing, master of our destiny? We shall all be lost!”
A faction clamoured, “Anastasya!” Certain sense-sections attacked him in vulnerable spots with Anastasya’s voluptuous banner unfurled and fragrant.
He buffeted his way along, as though spray were dashing in his face, watchful behind his glasses. He met his thoughts with a contemptuous stiff veteran smile. This capricious and dangerous master had an offensive stylistic coolness, similar to Wellington breakfasting at Salamanca while Marmont hurried exultingly into traps; although he resembled his great countryman in no other way.
Those thoughts that bellowed, “Anastasya!” however, worried him. He answered them.
“Anastasya! Anastasya!! I know all about that! What do you take me for? You will still have your Anastasya. I am not selling myself or you. A man such as I does not dispose of himself in a case like this. I am going to marry Bertha Lunken. Well? Shall I be any the less my own master for that reason? If I want to sleep with Anastasya, I shall do so. Why marry Bertha Lunken, and shoulder all that semi-contagious muck? Because it is only the points or movements in life that matter, and one of those points indicates that course, namely, to keep faith with another person: and secretly to show my contempt for the world by choosing the premier venu to be my body-servant and body-companion; my contempt for my body too.”
He sought to overcome his reasons by appeals to their corporate vanity.
He had experienced rather a wrench as regards Anastasya. The swanky sex with which he had ornamented his future could not be dismissed so easily. He was astonished that it could be dismissed at all, and asked himself the reason. He sacrificed Anastasya with a comparatively light heart. It was chiefly his vanity that gave trouble.
He came back to his earlier conclusions. Such successful people as Anastasya and himself were by themselves. It was as impossible to combine or wed them as to compound the genius of two great artists. If you mixed together into one whole Gainsborough and Goya you would get nothing, for they would be mutually destructive. Beyond a certain point of perfection individual instinct was its own law. A subtle lyrical wail would gain nothing from living with a rough and powerful talent, or vice versa. Success is always personal. Co-operation, group-genius was, he was convinced, a slavish pretence and absurdity. Only when the group was so big that it became a person again, as with a nation, did you get mob-talent or popular art. This big, diffuse, vehement giant was the next best thing to the great artist; Patchin Tcherana coming just below.
He saw this quite clearly. He and Anastasya were a superfluity, and destructive conflict. It was like a mother being given a child to bear the same size already as herself. Anastasya was in every way too big; she was too big physically. But did not sex change the whole question, when it was a woman? He did not agree to this. Woman and the sexual sphere seemed to him to be an average from which everything came: from it everything rose, or attempted to rise. There was no mysterious opposition extending up into Heaven, and dividing Heavenly Beings into Gods and Goddesses. There was only one God, and he was a man. A woman was a lower form of life. Everything was female to begin with. A jellyish diffuseness spread itself and gaped on the beds and in the bas-fonds of everything. Above a certain level of life sex disappeared, just as in highly organized sensualism sex vanishes. And, on the other hand, everything beneath that line was female. Bard, Simpson, Mackenzie, Townsend, Annandale—he enumerated acquaintances evidently below the absolute line, and who displayed a lack of energy, permanently mesmeric state, and almost purely emotional reactions. He knew that everything on the superior side of that line was not purged of jellyish attributes; also that Anastasya’s flaccid and fundamental charms were formidable, although the line had been crossed by her. One thing was impressive, however. The loss of Anastasya did not worry him, except magnified through the legal acquisition of Bertha. What did he want? Well, he did not want Anastasya as much as he should. He was incorrigible, he concluded. He regarded the Anastasya evening as a sort of personal defeat even. The call of duty was nevertheless very strong. He ought to love Anastasya; and his present intentions as regards his despicable fiancée were a disgraceful betrayal, etc. etc. The mutterings of reason continued.
That evening he met Anastasya. The moment he saw her he realized the abysses of indignity and poorness he was flinging himself into with Bertha Lunken. A sudden humbleness entered him and put him out of conceit with his judgment, formed away from bright objects like Anastasya. The selfishness that caused his sentimentality when alone with Bertha was dissipated or not used in presence of more or less successful objects and people. None of his ego was required by his new woman. She possessed plenty of her own. This, he realized later, was the cause of his lack of attachment. He needed an empty vessel to flood with his vitality, and not an equal and foreign vitality to exist side by side with coldly. He had taken into sex the procédés and selfish arrangements of life in general. He had humanized sex too much. He frequently admitted this, but with his defence lost sight of the flagrancy of the permanent fact.
He felt in Anastasya for the first time now an element of protection and safety. She was a touchwood and harbour from his perplexed interior life. She had a sort of ovation from him. All his obstinacy in favour of his fiancée had vanished. With Anastasya’s appearance an entirely different world was revealed that demanded completely new arguments.
They went to the same restaurant as the night before. He talked quietly, until they had drunk too much, and Bertha was not mentioned.
“And what of Bertha?” she asked finally.
“Never mind about Bertha.”
“Is she extinct?”
“No. She threatens an entirely new sort of eruption.”
“Oh. In what way new⸺?”
“It doesn’t matter. It won’t come our way.”
“Are you going there to-morrow?”
“I suppose I must. But I shall not make many more visits of⸺”
“What’s that?”
“I shall give up going, I say.” He shifted restlessly in his chair.
After breakfast next morning they parted, Tarr going back to work. Butcher, whom he had not seen for some days, came in. He agreed to go down into town and have lunch with him. Tarr put on a clean shirt. Talking to Butcher while he was changing, he stood behind his bedroom door. Men of ambitious physique, like himself, he had always noticed, were inclined to puff themselves out or let their arms hang in a position favourable to their muscles while changing before another man. To avoid this embarrassment or absurdity, he made a point of never exhibiting himself unclothed.
His conversation with Butcher did not fall on matters in hand. As with Anastasya, he was unusually reticent. He had turned over a new leaf. He became rather alarmed at this himself when he realized it. After lunch he left Butcher and went to the Mairie of the Quartier du Paradis and made inquiries about civil marriages. He did it like a sleep-walker.
He was particularly amiable with Bertha that day, and told her of his activities at the Mairie and made an appointment with her there for the next day.
Daily, then, he proceeded with his marriage arrangements in the afternoons, saw Bertha regularly, but without modifying the changed “correctness” of his attitude. The evenings he spent with Anastasya.
By the time the marriage preliminaries had been gone through, and Bertha and he could finally be united, his relations with Anastasya had become as close as formerly his friendship with Bertha had been. With the exception of the time from three in the afternoon to seven in the evening that he took off every day to see his fiancée, he was with her.
On September 29. three weeks after Bertha had told him that she was pregnant, he married her—in the time between three in the afternoon and seven in the evening set aside for her. Anastasya knew nothing about these things. Neither Bertha nor she were seeing their German women friends for the moment.
After the marriage at the Mairie Bertha and Tarr walked back to the Luxembourg Gardens and sat down. She had not during the three intervening weeks mentioned Anastasya. It was no time for generosity; she had done too much of that. Fräulein Vasek was the last person for whom she felt inclined to revive chivalry. She let Tarr marry her out of pity, and never referred to his confidence about his other love.
They sat for some time without speaking, as though they had quarrelled. She said, then:
“I am afraid, Sorbert, I have been selfish⸺”
“You—selfish? How’s that? Don’t talk nonsense.” He had turned at once to her with a hurried fondness genuinely assumed.
She looked at him with her wistful, democratic face, full of effort and sentiment.
“You are very unhappy, Sorbert⸺”
He laughed convincingly.
“No, I’m all right. Don’t worry about me. I’m a little meditative. That is only natural on such a solemn occasion. I was thinking, Bertha, we must set up house somewhere, and announce our marriage. We must do this for appearance’ sake. You will soon be incapacitated⸺”
“Oh, I shan’t be just yet.”
“In any case, we have gone through this form because⸺We must make this move efficacious. What are your ideas as to an establishment? Let us take a flat together somewhere round here. The Rue Servandoni is a nice street. Do you know it?”
“No.” She put her head on one side and puckered up her forehead.
“Near the Luxembourg Museum.”
They discussed a possible domicile.
He got up.
“It’s rather chilly. Let’s get back.”
They walked for some time without speaking. So much unsaid had to be got rid of, without necessarily being said. Bertha did not know at all where she was. Their “establishment,” as discussed by Tarr, appeared very unreal, and also, what there was of it, disagreeable. She wondered what he was going to do with her.
“You remember what I said to you some weeks ago—about Anastasya Vasek. I am afraid there has been no change in that. You do not mind that?”
“No, Sorbert. You are perfectly free.”
“I am afraid I shall seem unkind. This is not a nice marriage for you. Perhaps I was wrong to suggest it?”
“How, wrong? I have not been complaining.”
They arrived at the iron gate.
“Well, I’d better not come up now. I will come along to-morrow—at the usual time.”
“Good-bye, Sorbert. A demain!”
“A demain!”