Tarr (Oxford World's Classics)

by Wyndham Lewis

  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 rose-grey pavement plaster and shutter. A large iron gate led into a short avenue of trees: at its extremity Bertha lived in a three-storey house.

  The leaden brilliant green of spring foliage hung above him, ticketing innumerably the trees. In the distance, volume behind volume, the vegetation was massed, poising sultry smoke blocks 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 upon 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 after all: this familiar life, with its ironical eye, mocked at him, too. It was aware of the subject of his late conversation. Some kind of twin of the shrewd feeling embodied in the observation ‘one can never escape from oneself’ appeared.

  But that ironical unsurprised eye at the window, so vaguely à propos, offended him. It had the air of scoffing (with its quizzing downward cock, and puzzled frowning eyebrow on one side only) or of ironically welcoming the swaggering indifference he was bringing to bask in the presence of its object. He retaliated with a certain truculence he had not at all intended to display.

  ‘Have you had lunch yet my dear?’ he asked, as she opened the door to him—‘I’ve brought you some strawberries.’

  ‘I didn’t expect you, Sorbet. No, I have not had lunch. I was just going to get it.’ (Sorbet, or in english, Sherbet, was his love-name, a perversion of his strange second name, Sorbert.)

  Bertha’s was the intellectually-fostered hellenic type of german handsomeness. It would make you think that german mothers must have replicas and photographs of the Venus of Milo* in their rooms during the first three months of their pregnancy. Of course they in fact have. Also this arid, empty intellectualist beauty is met with in german art periodicals.

  Bertha had been a heavy blond westphalian* baby: her body now, a self-indulgent athlete’s, was strung to heavy motherhood. Another baby could not be long delayed. To look at a man should be almost enough to effect it.

  A great believer in tepid ‘air-baths,’* she would remain, for hours together, in a state of nudity about her rooms. At present she was wearing a pale green striped affair, tight at the waist. It looked as though meant for a smaller woman. It may have belonged to her sister. As a result, her ample form had left the fulness of a score of attitudes all over it, in flat creasings and pencillings—like the sanguine of an Italian master* in which the leg is drawn in several positions, one on top of the other.

  ‘What have you come for, Sorbert?’

  ‘To see you. What did you suppose?’

  ‘Oh, you have come to see me?’

  ‘I brought these things. I thought you might be hungry.’

  ‘Yes, I am rather.’ She stopped in the passage, Dryad-like on one foot,* and stared into the kitchen. Tarr did not kiss her. He put his hand on her hip—a way out of it—which rolled elastically beneath his fingers: with a little superficial massage he propelled her into the room. His hand remarked that she was underneath in her favourite state of nakedness. He frowned as he reflected that this might subsequently cause a hitch.

  Bertha went into the kitchen with the provisions. She lived in two rooms on one side of the front door. Her friend, Fräulein Lederer, to whom she sub-let, lived on the other side of it, the kitchen promiscuously existing between, and immediately facing the entrance.

  Tarr was in the studio or salon. It was a complete bourgeois-bohemian* interior. Green silk cloth and cushions of various vegetable and mineral shades covered everything, in mildewy blight. The cold repulsive shades of Islands of the Dead,* gigantic cypresses, grottoes of teutonic nymphs, had installed themselves massively in this french flat. Purple metal and leather steadily dispensed with expensive objects. There was the plaster-cast of Beethoven (some people who have frequented artistic circles get to dislike this face extremely), brass jars from Normandy,* a photograph of Mona Lisa (Tarr could not look upon the Mona Lisa without a sinking feeling).*

  A table beside the window, laid with a white cloth, square embroidered holes at its edges, was where Tarr at once took up his position. Truculence was denoted by his thus going straight to his eating place—this would be understood by Bertha.

  Installed in the midst of this admittedly ridiculous life, he gave a hasty glance at his ‘indifference’ to see whether it were O.K. Seen by its light, upon opening the door, Bertha had appeared unusual. This impressed him disagreeably. Had his rich and calm feeling of bounty towards her survived the encounter, his ‘indifference’ might also have remained intact.

  He engrossed himself in his sense of physical well-being. From his pocket he produced a tin box containing tobacco, papers and a little steel machine for rolling cigarettes given him by Bertha. A long slim hinged shell, it nipped-in a little cartridge of tobacco, which it then slipped with inside a paper tube, and, slipping out again empty, the cigarette was made.

  Tarr began manufacturing cigarettes. Reflections from the shining metal in his hand scurried about amongst the bilious bric-à-brac. Like a layer of water lying upon one of oil, the light heated stretch by the windows appeared distinct from the shadowed portion of the room.

  This place was cheap and dead, but rich with the same lifelessness as the trees without. These looked extremely near and familiar at the opened windows, breathing the same air continually as Bertha and her bilious barracks. But they were dusty rough and real.

  Bertha came in from the kitchen. She took up where she had dropped upon his arrival a trivial rearrangement of her writing-table: or whether this had been her occupation or not as he appeared at the gate beneath, drawing her ironical and musing eye downwards to himself, it was at this window before which the writing-table stood that her face had appeared. A new photograph of Tarr was being placed in the centre of this writing-table now. Ten days previously it had been taken in that room. It had ousted a Klinger* and generally created a restlessness, to her eye, in the other objects. She now allowed it to fall on its back, with an impatient exclamation, then began propping it up with a comic absorption, her eye still ironic.

  ‘Ah, you’ve got the photographs have you? Is that me?’

  She handed it to him.

  ‘Yes, they came yesterday!’

  ‘Yesterday’ he had not been there! Whatever he asked at the present moment would draw a softly-thudding answer, heavy german reproach concealed in it with tireless ingenuity. These photographs would under other circumstances have been produced on his arrival with considerable exclamatory abandon.

  Tarr had looked rather askance at this portrait and Bertha’s occupation. There was his photograph, calmly, with an air of permanence, taking up its position on her writing-table, just as he was preparing to vanish for good.

  ‘Let’s see yours’ he said, still holding the photograph.

  What strange effects all this complicated activity inside had on the surface, his face. A set sulky stagnation, every violence dropping an imperceptible shade on to it, the features overgrown with this strange stuff—that twist of the head that was him, and that could only be got rid of by breaking his neck.

  ‘They’re no good’ said she overpoweringly off hand closing the drawer, handing her photographs, sandwiched with tissue paper, to Sorbert. ‘That one’—a sitting pose, face yearning from photograph, lighted, not with a smile, but sort of sentimental illumination, the drapery arranged like a poster—‘I don’t think that’s so bad.’ She was very slangy and nimble, he knew what to expect.

  ‘What an idiot!’ he thought as he gazed at the photograph, ‘what a face!
’

  A consciously pathetic ghost of a smile, a clumsy sweetness, the energetic sentimental claim of a rather rough but frank self. There was a photograph of her in riding-habit. This was the best of them: he softened.

  Then came a photograph of them together.

  How strangely that twist of his, or set angle of the head, fitted in with the corresponding peculiarities of the woman’s head and bust. What abysms of all that was most automatic and degrading in human life: rubbishy hours and months formed the atmosphere around these two futile dolls!

  He put the photographs down and looked up. She was sitting on the edge of the table: the dressing-gown was open and one large thigh, with ugly whiteness, slid half out of it. It looked dead, and connected with her like a ventriloquist’s dummy with its master. While looking at those decorous photographs it was not possible to refrain from some enquiry as to where his good sense had gone when he had had them taken. But here was this significant object, popping out pat enough to satisfy anybody: the exhibition appeared to be her explanation of the matter. The face was not very original, perhaps: but a thigh cannot be stupid!

  He gazed surlily. Her expression of moistly magnetized reverie at this moment was supremely absurd, as he saw it side by side with one of the two main pillars of their love: he smiled and turned his face to the window. She pretended to become conscious suddenly of something amiss; she drew the dressing-gown over the pièce de résistance with a suggestion of disgust.

  ‘Have you paid the man yet? What did he charge? I expect—.’

  Tarr took up the packet again.

  ‘Oh, these are six francs. I forget what the big ones are. I haven’t paid him yet. He’s coming to photograph Miss Lederer to-morrow.’

  They sat without saying anything.

  Tarr examined the room as you do a doctor’s waiting-room.

  It was really quite necessary for him to learn to turn his back upon this convenience, things had gone too far, he had ceased even, he realized, to see it objectively. To turn the back, that appeared at first sight a very easy matter: that is why so far he had not succeeded in doing so. Never put on his mettle, his standing army of will was not sufficient to cope with it. But would this little room ever appear worth turning his back on? It was really more serious than it looked: he must not underestimate it. It was the purest distillation of the commonplace: he had become bewitched by its strangeness. It was the farthest flight of the humdrum unreal: Bertha was like a fairy visited by him, and to whom he ‘became engaged’ in another world, not the real one. So much was it the real ordinary world that for him with his out-of-the-way experience it was a phantasmagoria. Then what he had described as his disease of sport was perpetually fed: sex even, with him, according to his analysis, being a sort of ghost, was at home in this gross and bouffonic* illusion. Something had filled up a blank and become saturated with the blankness.

  But Bertha, though unreal, was undeniably a good kind fairy and her feelings must be taken into consideration. How much would Bertha mind a separation? Tarr saw in her one of those clear, humorous, superficial natures (like a Venetian or a Viennese only much stupider) the easy product of a genial and abundant life. But he miscalculated the depths of obedient attachment he had awakened.

  They sat impatiently waiting: a certain formality had to be observed. Then the business of the day could be proceeded with. Both were bored in different degrees, with the part imposed by the punctilious and ridiculous god of love. Bertha, into the bargain, wanted to get on with her cooking: she would have cut considerably the reconciliation scene. All her side of the programme had been conscientiously observed.

  ‘Berthe, tu es une brave fille!’

  ‘Tu trouves?’

  ‘Oui.’*

  More inaction followed on Tarr’s part. She sometimes thought he enjoyed these ceremonies.

  Through girlhood her strong german senses had churned away at her, and claimed an image from her gentle and dreamy mind. In its turn the mind had accumulated its impressions of men, fancies from books and conversations, and it had made its hive. So her senses were presented with the image that was to satisfy and rule them. They flung themselves upon it as she had flung herself upon Tarr.

  This image left considerable latitude. Tarr had been the first to fit—rather paradoxically, but all the faster for that.

  This ‘high standard aryan bitch,’ as Tarr had described her, had arrived, with him, at the full and headlong condition we agree to name ‘love.’ Thereupon the image, or type, was thrown away: the individual, the good Tarr, took its place.

  Bertha had had several Schatzes* before Tarr. They had all left the type-image intact. At most it had been a little blurred by them. It had almost been smashed for one man, physically much of a muchness with Sorbert: but that gentleman had never got quite near enough in to give the coup de foudre* to the type picture or eikon.* Tarr had characteristically supposed this image to have little sharpness of outline left: it would not be a very difficult matter for anyone to extort its recognition, he would have said if asked.

  ‘Vous êtes mon goût, Sorbet. Du bist mein Geschmack’* she would say.

  Tarr was not demonstrative when she said this. Reciprocate he could not exactly; and he could not help reflecting whether to be her Geschmack was very flattering.—There must be something the matter with him: perhaps there was something the matter after all, of which he was not aware! But why no, to be a Geschmack of that sort meant nothing at all: it was all right: he could put his mind at ease.

  All Bertha’s hope centred in his laziness: she watched his weaknesses with a loving eye. He had much to say about his under-nature: she loved hearing him talk about that: she listened attentively.

  ‘It is the most dangerous quality of all to possess’ and he would sententiously add—‘only the best people possess it, in common with the obscure and humble.’ At this she would smile indulgently and then brightly nod her head. ‘It is like a great caravanserai* in which scores of people congregate: a disguise in which such an one, otherwise Pasha, circulates among unembarrassed men incog.* diverting himself and learning the secrets of men. You can’t learn the secrets of men if they smell greatness in you.’ The danger that resided in these facilities was however plain enough to this particular Pasha. The Pasha had been given a magic mask of humbleness: but the inner nature seemed flowing equally to the mask and the unmasked magnificence. As yet he was unformed, but he wished to form wholly Pasha.

  Meantime this under-nature’s chief use was as a precious villégiature* for his energy. Bertha was the country wench encountered by the more exalted incarnation on its holidays, or, wandering idle Khalife,* in some concourse of his surreptitious life.

  Tarr’s three days’ unannounced and unexplained ‘leave’ had made Bertha very nervous indeed. She suffered from the incomplete, unsymmetrical appearance her life now presented. Everything spread out palpably before her, where she could arrange it like a roomful of furniture, that was how she liked it: even in her present shakedown of a life, Tarr had noticed the way he was treated as material for ‘arrangement.’ But she had never been able to indulge this idiosyncrasy much in the past; this was not the first time that she had found herself in a similar position. Hence her certain air of being at home in these casual quarters, which belied her.

  The detested temporary makeshift dwelling had during the last few days been given a new coat of sombre thought. Found in accidental quarters, had she not been over-delicate in not suggesting an immediate move into something more home-like and permanent? People would leave her camped there for the rest of her natural life unless she were a little brutal and got herself out somehow. But no shadow of unkindness ever tainted her abject genuineness. Where cunning efforts to retain this slippery customer abounded, she never blamed or turned upon him. Long ago she had given herself without ceremony and almost at sight, indeed: she awaited his thanks or no thanks patiently.

  But the itch of action was on her. Tarr’s absences were like light: his presenc
e was a shadow. They were both stormy. The last three days’ leave taken without comment had caused her to overhaul the precarious structure in which she had dwelt for so long: something had to be done, she saw that. There had to be a reconstruction. She had trusted too much in Fate and obedient waiting Hymen.*

  So a similar ferment to Tarr’s was in full operation in Bertha.

  Anger with herself, dreary appetite for action, would help her over farewells: she was familiar enough with them, too, in thought. She would not on her side stir a hand to change things: he must do that. She would only facilitate such action as he cared to take, easing up in all directions for him.

  The new energy delivered attack after attack upon her hope: she saw nothing beyond Tarr except measures of utility. The ‘heart’ had always been the most cherished ornament of her existence: Tarr would take that with him (as she would keep his ring and the books he had given her). She could not now get it back for the asking. Let it go! What use had she for it henceforth? She must indulge her mania for tasteful arrangement in future without this. Or rather what heart she had left would be rather like one of those salmon-coloured, corrugated gas office stoves, compared to a hearth with a fire of pine.

  With reluctance Tarr got up, and went over to her. He had not brought his indifference there to make it play tricks, perform little feats; nor did he wish to press it into inhuman actions. It was a humane ‘indifference,’ essentially.

  ‘You haven’t kissed me yet’ he said, in imitation of her.

  ‘Why kiss you, Sorbert?’ she managed to say before her lips were covered with his. He drew her ungraciously and roughly into his arms, and started kissing her mouth with a machine action.

  Docilely she covered him with her inertia. He was supposed to be performing a miracle of bringing the dead to life. Gone about too crudely, the willing mountebank, Death, had been offended: it is not thus that great spirits are prevailed upon to flee. Her ‘indifference’—the great, simulated and traditional—would not be ousted by an upstart and younger relative. By Tarr himself, grown repentant, yes. But not by another ‘indifference.’