CHAPTER XI
Tarr had not gone to England. Kreisler had not been sufficient to accomplish this. He still persisted in his self-indulgent system of easy stages. A bus ride distant, he would be able to keep away. But in any case he did not wish to go to England, nor anywhere else, for that matter. Paris was much the most suitable domicile, independently of Bertha, with his present plans.
In the neighbourhood of the Place Clichy, in an old convent, he found a room big enough for four people. There, on the day of the second of the letters, he arrived in a state of characteristic misgiving. It was the habitual indigestion of Reality. He was very fond of reality. But he was like a man very fond of what did not agree with him. It usually ended, however, by his assimilating it.
The insouciant, adventurous, those needing no preparation to live, he did not admire, but felt he should imitate.—A new room was a thing that had to be fitted into as painfully as a foot into some new and too elegant boot. The things deposited on the floor, the door finally closed on this new area to be devoted exclusively to himself, the blankest discomfort descended on him. To undo and let loose upon the room his portmanteau’s squashed and dishevelled contents—like a flock of birds, brushes, photographs and books flying to their respective places on dressing-table, mantelpiece, shelf or bibliothèque; boxes and parcels creeping dog-like under beds and into corners, taxed his character to the breaking-point. The unwearied optimism of these inanimate objects, the way they occupied stolidly and quickly room after room, was appalling. Then they were packed up things, with the staleness of a former room about them, and the souvenir of a depressing time of tearing up, inspecting, and interring.
This preliminary discomfort was less than ever spared him here. He had cut his way to this decision (to go and live in Montmartre), through a bristling host of incertitudes. A place would have had to be particularly spacious to convince him. This large studio-room was worse than any desert. It had been built for something else, and would never be right.—A large square whitewashed box was what he wanted to pack himself into. This was an elaborate carved chest of a former age. He would no doubt pack it eventually with consoling memories of work. He started work at once, in fact. This was his sovereign cure for new rooms.
Half an hour after his taking possession, it being already time for the apéritif, he issued forth into the new quarter. There were a few clusters of men. The Spanish men dancers were coloured earth-objects, full of basking and frisking instincts; the atmosphere of the harlot’s life went with them, and Spanish reasonableness and civility. He chose a café on the Place Clichy. The hideous ennui of large gimcrack shops and dusty public offices pervaded other groups of pink, mostly dark-haired Frenchmen drinking appetizers. They responded with their personalities on the café terraces to the emptiness of the boulevard.
He had not any friends in Montmartre. But he had not been at the café above a few minutes, when he saw a familiar face approaching. It was a model (Berthe, by name, though bringing no reminder with her of the other “Berthe” he knew) with an English painter he saw for the first time, but whom he had just heard about in connexion with this girl. Berthe knew Tarr very slightly. But she chose a table near him, with a nod, and shortly opened conversation. She meant to talk to him evidently. She asked about one or two people Tarr knew.
“Do you wish me to present you?” she said, looking towards her protector. “This is Mr. Tarr, Dick.”
So it was done.
“Why don’t you come and sit here?” That too was done, partly from inquisitiveness.
The young Englishman annoyed Tarr by pretending to be alarmed every time he was addressed. He had a wide-open, wondering eye, fixed on the world in timid serenity. It did not appear at first to understand what you said, and rolled a little alarmedly, even so only to be filled the next moment with some unexpected light of whimsical intelligence. It had understood all the time! It was only its art to surprise you, and its English affectation of unreadiness and childishness.
He was a great big child, wandering through life! The young Latin wishes to impress you with his ability to look after himself. General idiocy of demeanour, on the other hand, is the fashionable English style. This young man was six feet one, with a handsome beak in front of his face, meant for a super-Emersonian mildness. His “wide awake” was large, larger than Hobson’s. Innumerable minor Tennysons had planted it on his head, or bequeathed a desire for it to this ultimate Dick of long literary line. His family was allied to much Victorian talent. But, alas, thought Tarr, how much worse it is when the mind gets thin than when the blood loses its body, in merely aristocratic refinement. Intellectual aristocracy in the fifth generation!—but Tarr gazed at the conclusive figure in front of him, words failing. Words failed, too, for maintaining conversation with it. He soon got up, and left, his first apéritif at Montmartre unsatisfactory.
He did not take possession of his new life with very much conviction. After dinner he went to a neighbouring music hall, precariously amused, soothed by the din. But he eventually left with a headache. The strangeness of the streets, cafés, and places of entertainment depressed him deeply. Had it been an absolutely novel scene, he would have found stimulus in it. But it was like a friend grown indifferent, or something perfectly familiar with the richness of habit taken out of it. Tarr was gregarious in the sense that usually he liked his room and some familiar streets with their traces of familiar men. And where more energetic spirit suggested some truer solitude to him, he would never have sought it where a vestige of inanimate friendship remained.
Here, where he had chosen to live, he appeared as though fallen in some intermediate negative existence. Unusually for him, he felt alone. To be alone was essentially a nondescript, lowered, and unreal state for him.
The following morning Tarr woke, his legs rather cramped and tired, and not thoroughly rested. But as soon as he was up, work came quite easily.
He got his paints out, and without beginning on his principal canvas, took up a new and smaller one by way of diversion. Squaring up a drawing of three naked youths sniffing the air, with rather worried Greek faces and heavy nether limbs, he stuck it on the wall with pins and drew his camp easel up alongside it. He squared up his canvas on the floor with a walking-stick, and fixed it on the easel. To get a threadlike edge a pencil had to be sharpened several times.
By the end of the afternoon he had got a witty pastiche on the way. Two colours principally had been used, mixed in piles on two palettes: a smoky, bilious saffron, and a pale transparent lead. The significance of the thing depended first on the psychology of the pulpy limbs, strained dancers’ attitudes and empty faces; secondly, the two colours and the simple yet contorted curves.
Work over, his depression again grasped him, like an immensely gloomy companion who had been idling impatiently while he worked. He promenaded this companion in “Montmartre by Night,” without improving his character. Nausea glared at him from every object met. Sex surged up and martyrized him, but he held it down rather than satisfy himself with its elementary servants.
The next day, même jeu. He sat for hours in the fatiguing evening among a score of relief ships or pleasure boats, hesitating, but finally rejecting relief or pleasure. And the next day it was the same thing.
Meantime his work progressed. But to escape these persecutions he worked excessively. His eyes began to prick, and on the sixth day he woke up with a headache. He was sick and unable to work.
Tarr decided he had been mistaken in remaining in Paris. The fascination of the omnibuses bound for the Rive gauche was almost irresistible. Destiny had granted him the necessary resolution to break. He could have gone away—anywhere, even. His will had then offered him a free ticket, as it were, to any end of the earth. Or simply, and most sensibly, to London. And yet he had decided to go no farther than Montmartre, in the unwisdom of his sense of energy and freedom of that moment. Now the “free ticket” was not any more available. His Will had changed. It offered all sorts of different bus tickets, merely, which would conduct him, avec and sans correspondence, in the direction of the Quartier du Paradis.
Why not go back again, simply, in fact? The mandates of the governing elements in our nature, resolves, etc., were childish enough things. His resentment against Bertha, and resolve to quit, would always be there. There was room in life for the satisfaction of this impulse, and the equally strong one to see her again. The road back to the Quartier du Paradis would probably have been taken quite soon, only it needed in a way as much of an effort in the contrary direction to get back as it had to get away. He did not know what might await him either. She might really have given him up and changed her life. He had not the necessary experience to dismiss that possibility.
But at last one evening he did go. He went deliberately up to an omnibus “Clichy—St. Germain,” and took his seat under its roof. He was resolved to glut himself, without any atom of self-respect or traces of “resolve” remaining, in what he had been wanting to do for a week. He would go to Bertha’s rooms, even find out what had been happening in his absence. He might even, perhaps, hang about a little outside, and try to surprise her in some manner. Then he would behave en maître, there would be no further question of his having given her up and renounced his rights. He would behave just as though he had never gone away or the letters been sent. He would claim her again with all the appeals he knew to her love for him. He would conduct himself without a scrap of dignity or honesty. Once the “resolution” and pride of his retiring had been broken down, it was thenceforth immaterial to what length he went. In fact, better be frankly weak and unprincipled in his actions and manner, go the whole length of his defeat and confusion. In such completeness there remains a grain of superiority and energy.
But once started in his bus, a wave of excitement and anxiety surged in him with hot gushes.—What awaited him? He fancied all sorts of strange developments.—Perhaps, after all, his journey would not satisfy his weaker movement, but confirm and establish definitely his more sensible resolves. Perhaps weaknesses would find at last the door closed against them.
He smiled at the city as they passed through it, with the glee of a boy on a holiday excursion.