Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (24 page)

‘Yes I see; of course that makes a difference! But I asked, I happened to ask, an english friend of mine to-day—a founder of the club as it happens, a Master Lowndes’ (this was a libel on Lowndes) ‘he told me it didn’t matter in the least, these were his very words. You take my word for it Fräulein Liepmann—it won’t matter a bit—not a bit!’ he reiterated a little boisterously, nodding his head sharply, his eyelids clapping to like metal shutters, rather than winking. Then, in a maundering tone, yawning a little and rubbing his glasses as though they had now idled off into gossip and confidences:

‘I’d go and dress only I left my keys at Soler’s: I shall have to sleep out to-night, I shan’t be able to get my keys till the morning.’ Suddenly in a new tone, the equivalent of a vulgar wink:

‘Ah this life, Fräulein—this life, this life! Its accidents often separate one from one’s Smokkin for days, sometimes months of Sundays—you know what I mean? One has no control over—well! Now my Smokkin bless its little silk lapels—it’s a good one, I have always been accustomed to the very best—leads a very independent life: sometimes it’s with me, sometimes not. It was a very expensive fashionable article. That has been its downfall.’

‘Do you mean you haven’t got a “frac”?’

‘Oh how brutal—no certainly, not that heaven forbid! You misunderstand me.’ He reflected a moment.

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘Not at all! Ah before I forget, Fräulein Liepmann! if you still want to know about that little matter—I wrote to my mother the other day as I said I would, and in her reply she tells me that Professor Heymann is still at Karlsruhe; he will probably take a class in the country this summer as usual, she had heard he would—to the Jura
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I think. It is so lovely!—The remainder of the party!’ he added beaming as the bell again rang.

He could not be prevented from accompanying these people to their informal dance. But with his remark about Vokt anyway he felt as safe as if he had a ticket or passe-partout in his pocket: he strutted up and down like a peacock for a few moments eyeing the assembly with disdain.

Kreisler was standing alone nearly in the middle of the room, his arms folded and staring at the door. He would use this fictitious authority and licence to its utmost limit. Something unusual in his presence besides his dress and the disorder even of that suggested itself to his fellow-guests, they supposed he had been drinking.

Rustlings and laughter in the hall persisted for some minutes. Social facts, abstracted in this manner, appeal to the mind with the strangeness of masks, each sense, isolated, being like a mask upon another, and Otto speculated and dreamt, with military erectness. There was an explosion of excitement: Anastasya appeared. She came out of that social flutter astonishingly inapposite, like a mask come to life. The little fanfare of welcome continued. She was much more outrageous than Kreisler could ever hope to be, bespangled and accoutred like a bastard princess or aristocratic concubine of the household of Peter the Great,
*
jangling and rumbling like a savage raree show
*
through abashed capitals.

Her amusement often had been to disinter in herself the dust and decorations of some ancestress: she would float down the windings of her Great Russian and Little Russian
*
blood, living in some imagined figure for a time as you might in towns met with upon a majestic river.

‘We are new lives for our ancestors, not theirs a playground for us. We are the people who have the Reality.’ Tarr lectured her later. To which she replied:

‘But they had such prodigious lives! I don’t like being anything out and out, life is so varied. I like wearing a dress with which I can enter into any milieu or circumstances: that is the only real self worth the name.’

Anastasya regarded her woman’s beauty as a bright dress of a harlot; she was only beautiful for that, so why humbug? Her splendid and bedizened state was assumed with shades of humility: even her tenderness and peculiar heart appeared beneath the common infection and almost disgrace of that state.

Kreisler’s sympathy, however, was not of an order to enter into these considerations. He had come there with the express object of doing her some indignity: all he saw accordingly was the fact of her being ‘dressed up’ and the warmth with which she returned the Liepmann’s greeting. At this he frowned over at her with something like the severity of a stern pastor from his pulpit whose eye falls upon some face among his flock especially reprobate. His last meeting with her had caused the instant suicide of his dreams, from despair: now his original
béguin
was on all hands slowly giving place to hard puerile dislike: for there must be
activity
and its stimulus between him and her.

Going up to her, at her smile he took her hand and kissed it with as much devotion as any Quattrocento
*
lips could have displayed. ‘So here we meet again’ he said.

On finding himself speaking to her like this, and she apparently none the worse for anything that might have passed (he interpreted a certain hesitation—‘my attire, my attire! Most natural! She’ll get over that’—and smiled blandly), he felt for a moment that another nightmare was over: the
It’s all right after all
feeling returned. The matter-of-fact reality favoured him: here he was talking to her, there was no obstacle really in the way at all of their becoming very friendly. He had been dreaming. But the Liepmann seemed hanging doubtfully upon their rear. There
was
something wrong. Obstacles accumulated ominously once he began reflecting.

His plan of outrage forgotten, he attempted to make the best of the situation.

‘I quite forgot about the dance—I happened to be passing Fräulein Liepmann’s a moment ago, I thought I would look in; I am wondering if I can go like this?’ With a naïf haste he began repairing the breach.

‘I feel quite out of it in this high-distinguished gathering! I expect, I hope, that our friends’ preparations are pessimistic, I mean that the affair will not be so terribly correct as those suggest.’

‘You mean their dressing up? For heaven’s sake never wear dress clothes’ she said with concern. ‘It wouldn’t suit you at all. I shouldn’t like you so well in them.—You want me to like you I believe?’

Kreisler, at these sudden revolutions, the ‘situation’ all at once denying its hopelessness and protesting that it was quite an ordinary peaceful kind little ‘situation’ if one at all, had become anxious and nervous. For the moment he was certainly unmanned by this balmy
atmosphere. And at once the ‘too good to be true’ sensation and despondency set in, in accustomed manner.

‘Now I must just mark time—one two!’ said he to himself: ‘her attitude to me must be held in suspense until a better moment. I must leave her where she is just so: perhaps I’d better not keep her any longer.’ He was making room for an imaginary Fräulein Liepmann or some other intruder, stepping aside, bringing his discourse to an end and looking round. There, sure enough, Fräulein Liepmann stood.

‘I didn’t know you knew Herr Kreisler’ she said to Anastasya Vasek.

‘Oh yes, very well.’

‘Yes, yes’ Kreisler cooed slowly.

‘Did you say Herr Vokt was coming on to the Club?’ Fräulein Liepmann asked him.

‘Yes, a very little later.’

‘Herr Spicker said he saw him about four.’

‘Herr Spicker again!’ Kreisler expostulated angrily; ‘again this Spicker! He could not have seen Vokt at four because I had him safely at Fontenay des Roses at four!’ He caught Anastasya Vasek’s eye. She had seen Kreisler at about four o’clock too, but alone and a long way from Fontenay des Roses. He grinned at her stupidly.

‘Herr Spicker’ Fräulein Liepmann began again.

‘Fräulein!’ uttered Kreisler solemnly ‘speak no more of Spicker! I cannot bear to hear you quote that person, It suggests a credulity that—. There he sits, a dubious oracle, in the corner’: he indicated a bloated and rigid individual who was not Spicker at all: ‘there he sits, encyclopaedic but misguided, uncanny—misinformed. It is as I tell you; our mutual friend Ernst Vokt is coming on very shortly! That is what I tell you: that then must be true!’ Fräulein Liepmann gave up the riddle. A dissipated Swede was leering at Anastasya with greedy invitation, standing with his chest thrown out as though he were going to wrestle with her and she was now taken off to be introduced to him.

‘Ah that’s done it’ thought Kreisler. ‘That Spicker! Which is Spicker?’ and he turned and surveyed the company truculently once more.

The new confidence in the turn things were taking had only been skin deep: Otto was soon back in the old rôle again. His hostess’s discovery of his little deception had contributed to this. He imagined she had seen through it, and was in fact thoroughly informed. A clatter
of conversation surrounded him. Table d’hôte at a boarding-house it sounds like, as though their voices were pitched one note above the clatter of forks and plates, he thought, and took a free cigarette from a box on the piano.

A viennese painter named Eckhart was one of the next arrivals. He was very uniform, all his features machine made for each other to a fraction of an inch—to go with a dull fat stock-size trunk. Eckhart had passed a year or so in Spain; from Malaga, just before returning, he had written to Fräulein Liepmann, with whom he had constantly corresponded from the most romantic spots in the Peninsula, asking if it were any use his taking Paris on his way back to Vienna—meaning should he ‘take’ Fräulein Liepmann of course—matrimonially absorb her on the way. Or should he, on the other hand, return by way of the Mediterranean? Fräulein Liepmann had been inclined to write back and suggest a third route by way of England, the Baltic and Berlin: but asked to fix his itinerary in this way she was really rather perplexed. Should she allow him to have a try at her on his way back? She had never heard of a General writing to a fortress in a country he was invading and asking it if he should storm it on his way, or, on the other hand, not include it in his campaign: should such a thing occur, what would the fortress answer? No doubt that it would be very honoured to be stormed by His Excellency, but, not being quite prepared, would prefer he should have a go at its neighbour instead, that was of course supposing it to be in the same condition as herself. She had replied at length:
she should be very glad to see him, but only as a friend
. This answer brought him back by way of Paris, in a state of uncomfortable suspense. On arriving there, he sat down in front of her and opened the siege.

Fräulein Liepmann knew that the most unexciting man may show up very well as a lover: but she found him the dullest of Generals, and it was the dullest siege she had ever sat through. So she made a sortie, and drove him away. She had allowed him to come back to Paris to have another look at him: she knew she would not accept him, but she would not have been quite easy in her mind, if she had not had another look at him. There he was—robust, bearded, cheap efficient blue eyes, thirty-eight, always in a hurry (except in love-making), obstinate and always reading the newspaper or his private correspondence (in a great hurry), when he was not doing dull engravings. No!

The result of the sortie however had been to arouse him to considerable activity: instead of going to Vienna he had actually settled in Paris, and Fräulein Liepmann was getting more of a siege than she had bargained for. But still worse, another admirer was about to arrive from Russia (coming in a bee-line, he, with whom there was no question of alternative routes!) and what would happen when the rival armies met before the fortress? The Russian was a parti she had quite given up as lost and her pleasure at learning of his tardy decision was impaired by the presence of Eckhart.

The bourgeois-bohemian life is a stirring one.

In this assembly almost all exuded a classic absurdity. There was a couple near the door: these were ‘der Mathematiker’ and Isolde. Isolde was a person bordering on the albino, very large, very golden-amber and even pink, spectacled, the upper eyelids covered with horizontal clean-cut blinkers of fat; she tramped about, her steady blue eyes, a schoolmistress’s mouth and soft large jaw, made her extremely grim. But a vulgar, harsh, jocular spirit inhabited her: according to her friends the two rooms she occupied were never cleaned. It was there that much strange life was lived in company with der Mathematiker, steaks cooked and Bach played in gargantuan intermixture; much music, much meat, including her own. She was a gigantic blonde slut.

Der Mathematiker, as he was generally called in this circle, was a little man about thirty-five, rather like Paul Verlaine in old age;
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a very brilliant mathematician, it was said, who would soon get a chair at a University. Therefore Isolde rather contemptuously allowed him to remain near her, in shrewd elephantine condescension. He was about a third her size, but he ate enormously, and, although he did not grow, felt perhaps that this in some way equalized matters. In the restaurant four beefsteaks one after the other would have to be brought him, and Isolde assured you that in their solitary orgies in her den she had known him eat as many as six—after six hours, say, of violin playing. When near her, he would hop and dance about as though to exaggerate the contrast.

Der Mathematiker always made faces at Fräulein Liepmann. No one knew what this signified. With teutonic intuition for such things they supposed it meant that he secretly loved her. This was not at all certain—it might be he hated her: and this mysterious circumstance helped der Mathematiker’s prestige, along with his violin playing.
When, from his place in a dark corner, he was observed to be putting his tongue out at Fräulein Liepmann, everyone pretended not to notice, and they all experienced an agreeable thrill.

Isolde had apparently chopped away from some dress portions that had formerly concealed certain parts of her body, which the seductive glamour of night-light tempted out; two immense breasts coyly buried their nipples in its flamboyant cotton.

Other members were less sympathetic than these two: there were a couple of sisters named von Arnim, from the Baltic provinces whose love for each other was a byword. They were very ‘grand dame’: they missed no function such as this dance. There was a german Countess who was very poor and came principally to get models for nothing. One of the initiatory ceremonies in this society was to sit for the Countess: if anyone shied at this, it was a very bad mark. Then two girls from Dresden who professed a sort of adoration for Fräulein Liepmann were present: but in this group of women one and all must be in love with each other (even Isolde fell into this convention) and where their leader was concerned worship was added to love.