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.