CHAPTER IV
The new summer heat drew heavy pleasant ghosts out of the ground, like plants disappeared in winter; spectres of energy, bulking the hot air with vigorous dreams. Or they had entered into the trees, in imitation of Pagan gods, and nodded their delicate distant intoxication to him. Visions were released in the sap, with scented explosion, the spring one bustling and tremendous reminiscence.
Tarr felt the street was a pleasant current, setting from some immense and tropic gulf, neighboured by Floridas of remote invasions. He ambled down it puissantly, shoulders shaped like these waves; a heavy-sided drunken fish. The houses, with winks of the shocked clockwork, were grazed, holding along their surface thick soft warmth. It poured weakly into his veins. A big dog wandering on its easily transposable business, inviting some delightful accident to deflect it from maudlin and massive promenade. In his mind, too, as in the dog’s, his business was doubtful—a small black spot ahead in his brain, half puzzling but peremptory.
The mat heavy light grey of putty-coloured houses, like thickening merely of hot summer atmosphere without sun, gave a spirituality to this deluge of animal well-being, in weighty pale sense-solidarity. Through the opaquer atmosphere sounds came lazily or tinglingly. People had become a Balzacian species, boldly tragic and comic: like a cast of “Comédie Humaine” humanity off for the day, Balzac sleeping immensely in the cemetery.
Tarr stopped at a dairy. He bought saladed potatoes, a petit suisse. The coolness, as he entered, felt eerie. The dairyman, in blue-striped smock and black cap, peaked and cylindrical, came out of an inner room. Through its glasses several women were visible, busy at a meal. This man’s isolation from the heat and mood of the world outside, impressed his customer as he came forward with a truculent “Monsieur!” Tarr, while his things were done up, watched the women. The discreet voices, severe reserve of keen business preoccupations, showed the usual Paris commerçante. The white, black, and slate-grey of dresses, extreme neatness, silent felt over-slippers, make their commercial devotions rather conventual. With this purchase—followed by one of strawberries at a fruiterer’s opposite—his destination was no longer doubtful.
He was going to Bertha’s to eat his lunch. Hence the double quantity of saladed potatoes. He skirted the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens for fifteen yards. Crossing the road, he entered the Rue Martine, a bald expanse of uniformly coloured rosy-grey pavement, plaster, and shutter. A large iron gate led into a short avenue of trees. At its end Bertha lived in a three-story house.
The leaden brilliant green of spring foliage hung above him, ticketing innumerably the trees, sultry smoke volumes from factories in Fairyland. Its novelty, fresh yet dead, had the effectiveness of an unnecessary mirage. The charm of habit and monotony he had come to affront seemed to have coloured, chemically, these approaches to its home.
He found Bertha’s eye fixed on him with a sort of humorous indifferent query from the window. He smiled, thinking what would be the veritable answer! On finding himself in the presence of the object of his erudite discussion, he felt he had got the focus wrong. This familiar life, with its ironical eye, mocked at him too. It was aware of the subject of his late conversation. The twin of the shrewd feeling embodied in the observation, “One can never escape from oneself,” appeared.
This ironical unsurprised eye at the window, so vaguely apropos, offended him. It seemed to be making fun of the swaggering indifference he was bringing to bask in the presence of its object. He became slightly truculent.