Bertha was still being taken in carefully prepared doses of an hour a day: from half-past four to a quarter to six. Any one else would have found this much of Bertha insupportable under any conditions. But Tarr’s eccentric soul had been used to such far greater doses that this was the minimum he considered necessary for a cure.

Tarr came to her every day with the regularity of an old gentleman at a German “Bad” taking his spring water at the regulation hour. But the cure was finishing. There were signs of a new robustness, (hateful to her) equivalent to a springy walk and a contented and sunny eye, that heralded departure. His daily visits, with their brutal regularity, did her as much harm as they did him good.

The news of Soltyk’s death, then Kreisler’s, affected the readily melodramatic side of her nature peculiarly. Death had made himself de la partie. Kreisler had left her alone for a few days. This is what had occupied him. The sensational news, without actually pushing her to imitation, made her own case, and her own tragic sensations, more real. They had received, in an indirect and cousin-thrice-removed sort of way, the authority of Death. Death—real living Death—was somewhere on the scene. His presence was announced, was felt. He had struck down somebody among them.

In the meantime this disposed of Kreisler for ever. Tarr as well appeared to feel that they were left in tÊte-À-tÊte. A sort of chaperon had been lost in Kreisler. His official post as protector or passive “obstacle” had been a definite status. If he stayed on, it would have to be as something else. On the day on which the news of Kreisler’s end arrived, he talked of leaving for England. Her more drawn face, longer silences, sharp glances, once more embarrassed him.

He did not go to England at once. In the week or two succeeding his meeting with Anastasya in the restaurant he saw her frequently. So a chaperon was found. Bertha was officially presented to her successor. When she learnt that Anastasya had been chosen, her energy reformed. She braced herself for a substantial struggle.

The apparition at the window of the restaurant was her first revived activity.

CHAPTER II

On August the tenth Tarr had an appointment with Anastasya at his studio in Montmartre. They had arranged to dine in Montmartre. It was their seventh meeting. He had just done his daily cure. He hurried back and found her lounging against the door, reading the newspaper.

“Ah, there you are! You’re late, Mr. Tarr.”

“Am I? I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long?”

“Not very. FrÄulein Lunken?”

“She—I couldn’t get away.”

“No, it is difficult to get away, apparently.”

He let her in. He was annoyed at the backwardness of his senses. His mind stepped in, determined to do their business for them. He put his arm round her waist, and planting his lips fully on hers, began kissing her. He slipped his hands sideways beneath her coat, and pressed an athletic, sinuous hulk against him. The various bulging and retreating contact of her body brought monotonous German reminders.

It was the first time he had kissed her. She showed no bashfulness or disinclination, but no return. Was she in the unfortunate position of an unawakened mass; and had she so rationalized her intimate possessions that there was no precocious fancy left until mature animal ardour was set up? He felt as though he were embracing a tiger, who was not unsympathetic, but rather surprised. Perhaps he had been too sudden. He ran his hand upwards along her body. All was statuesquely genuine. She took his hand away.

“We haven’t come to that yet,” she said.

“Haven’t we!”

“I didn’t think we had.”

Smiling at each other, they separated.

“Let me take your coat off. You’ll be hot in here.”

Her coat was all in florid redundancies of heavy cloth, like a Tintoretto dress. Underneath she was wearing a very plain dark blouse and skirt, like a working girl, which exaggerated the breadth and straightness of her shoulders. Not to sentimentalize it, she had open-work stockings on underneath, such as the genuine girl would have worn on her night out, at one and eleven-three the pair.

“You look very well,” Tarr said.

“I put these on for you.”

Tarr had, while he was kissing her, found his senses again. They had flared up in such a way that the reason had been offended, and resisted. Hence some little conflict. They were not going to have the credit?!

He became shy. He was ashamed of his sudden interest, which had been so long in coming, and instinctively hid it. He was committed to the rÔle of a reasonable man.

“I am very flattered at your thinking of me in that way. I am afraid I do not deserve?”

“I want you to deserve, though. You are absurd about women. You are like a schoolboy!”

“Oh, you’ve noticed that?”

“It doesn’t require much?”

She lay staring at him in a serious way. Squashed up as she was lying, a very respectable bulk of hip filled the space between the two arms of the chair, not enough to completely satisfy a Dago, but too’ much to please a dandy of the west. He compared this opulence with Bertha’s and admitted that it outdid his fiancÉe’s. He did this childish measuring in the belief that he was not observed.

“You are extremely recalcitrant to intelligence, aren’t you?” she said.

“In women, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I am. My tastes are simple.”

“I don’t know anything about your tastes, of course. I’m guessing.”

“You can take it that you are right.”

He began to feel extremely attracted to this intelligent head. He had been living for the last week or so in the steady conviction that he should never get the right sensual angle with this girl. It was a queer feeling, after all, to see his sensuality speaking sense. He would marry her.

“Well,” she said, with pleasant American accent in speaking English, “I feel you see some disability in sensible women that does not exist. It doesn’t irritate you too much to hear a woman talking about it?”

“Of course not—you. You are so handsome. I shouldn’t like it if you were less so. Such good looks” (he rolled his eyes appreciatively) “get us out of arty coldness. You are all right. The worst of looks like yours is that sense has about the same effect as nonsense. Sense is a delightful anomaly just as rot would be! You don’t require words or philosophy. But they give one a pleasant tickling all the same.”

“I am glad you are learning. However, don’t praise me like that. It makes me a little shy. I know how you feel about women. You feel that good sense gets in the way.”

“It interferes with the senses, you mean? I don’t think I feel that altogether?”

“You feel I’m not a woman, don’t you? Not properly a woman, like your Bertha. There’s no mistake about her!”

“One requires something unconscious, perhaps. I’ve never met any woman who interested me but was ten times more stupid than I. I want to be alone in those things. I like it to be subterranean as well.”

“Well, I have a cave! I’ve got all that, too. I promise you.”

Her promise was slow and lisping. Tarr once more had to deal with himself.

“I—am—a woman; not a man. That is the fact.” (“Fact” was long and American.) “You don’t realize that—I assure you I am!” She looked at him with a soft, steady smile, that drew his gaze and will into her, rather than imposed itself on him.

“I know.” He felt that there was not much to say.

“No, you know far less than you think. See here; I set out thinking of you in this way—‘Nothing but a female booby will please that man!’ I wanted to please you, but I couldn’t do it on those lines. I’m going to make an effort along my own lines. You are like a youngster who hasn’t got used to the taste of liquor; you don’t like it. You haven’t grown up yet. I want to make you drunk and see what happens!”

She had her legs crossed. Extremely white flesh showed above the black Lisle silk, amidst linen as expensive as the outer cloth was plain. This clever alternating of the humble and gorgeous! Would the body be plain? The provocation was merely a further argument. It said, “Young man, what is there you find in your Bertha that cannot be provided along with superior sense?” His Mohammedan eye did not refuse the conventional bait. His butcher’s sensibility pressed his fancy into professional details. What with her words and her acts he was in a state of strong confusion.

She jumped up and put on her coat, like a ponderous curtain showering down to her heels. Peep-shows were ended!

“Come, let’s have some dinner. I’m hungry. We can discuss this problem better after a beefsteak!” A Porterhouse would have fitted, Tarr thought.

He followed obediently and silently. He was glad that Anastasya had taken things into her hands. The positions that these fundamental matters got him into! Should he allow himself to be overhauled and reformed by this abnormal beauty? He was not altogether enjoying himself. He felt a ridiculous amateur. He was a butcher in his spare moments. This immensely intellectual ox, covered with prizes and pedigrees, overwhelmed him. You required not a butcher, but an artist, for that! He was not an artist in anything but oil-paint. Oil-paint and meat were singularly alike. They had reciprocal potentialities. But he was afraid of being definitely distracted.

The earlier coldness all appeared cunning; his own former coldness was the cunning of destiny.

He felt immensely pleased with himself as he walked down the Boulevard Clichy with this perfect article rolling and sweeping beside him. No bourgeoise this time! He could be proud of this anywhere! Absolute perfection! Highest quality obtainable. “The face that launched a thousand ships.” A thousand ships crowded in her gait. There was nothing highfalutin about her, Burne-Jonesque, Grail-lady, or Irish-romantic. Perfect meat, perfect sense, accent of Minnesota, music of the Steppes! And all that was included under the one inadequate but pleasantly familiar heading, German. He became more and more impressed with what was German about her.

He took her to a large, expensive, and quiet restaurant. They began with oysters. He had never eaten oysters before. Prudence had prevented him. She laughed very much at this.

“You are a savage, Tarr!” The use of his surname was a tremendous caress. “You are afraid of typhoid, and your palate is as conservative as an ox’s. Give me a kiss!”

She put her lips out; he kissed them with solemnity and concentration, adjusting his glasses afterwards.

They discussed eating for some time. He discovered he knew nothing about it.

“Why, man, you never think!”

Tarr considered. “No, I’m not very observant in many things. But I have a defence. All that part of me is rudimentary. But that is as it should be.”

“How—as it should be?”

“I don’t disperse myself. I specialize on necessities.”

“Don’t you call food??”

“Not in the way you’ve been considering it. Listen. Life is art’s rival and vice versa.”

“I don’t see the opposition.”

“No, because you mix them up. You are the archenemy of any picture.”

“I? Nonsense! But art comes out of life, in any case. What is art?”

“My dear girl—life with all the nonsense taken out of it. Will that do?”

“Yes. But what is art—especially?” She insisted with her hands on a plastic answer. “Are we in life, now? What is art?”

“Life is anything that could live and die. Art is peculiar; it is anything that lives and that yet you cannot imagine as dying.”

“Why cannot art die? If you smash up a statue, it is as dead as a dead man.”

“No, it is not. That is the difference. It is the God, or soul, we say, of the man. It always has existed, if it is a true statue.”

“But cannot you say of some life that it could not die?”

“No, because in that case it is the real coming through. Death is the one attribute that is peculiar to life. It is the something that it is impossible to imagine in connexion with art. Reality is entirely founded on this fact, that of Death. All action revolves round that, and has it for motif. The purest thought is totally ignorant of death. Death means the perpetual extinction of impertinent sparks. But it is the key of life.”

“But what is art? You are talking about it as though I knew what it was!”

“What is life, do you know? Well, I know what art is in the same way.”

“Yes, but I ask you as a favour to define it for me. A picture is art, a living person is life. We sitting here are life; if we were talking on a stage we should be art. How would you define art?”

“Well, let’s take your example. But a picture, and also the actors on a stage, are pure life. Art is merely what the picture and the stage-scene represent, and what we now, and any living person as such, only, do not. That is why you can say that the true statue can be smashed, and yet not die.”

“Still, what is it? What is art?”

“It is ourselves disentangled from death and accident.”

“How do you know?”

“I feel that is so, because I notice that that is the essential point to grasp. Death is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person.”

Both their faces lost some of their colour, hers her white, his his yellow. They flung themselves upon each other like waves. The fuller stream came from him.

“You say that the actors on the stage are pure life, yet they represent something that we do not. But ‘all the world’s a stage,’ isn’t it? So how do we not also stand for that something?”

“Yes, life does generally stand for that something too; but it only emerges and is visible in art.”

“Still I don’t know what art is!”

“You ought to by this time. However, we can go further. Consider the content of what we call art. A statue is art, as you said; you are life. There is bad art and bad life. We will only consider the good. A statue, then, is a dead thing; a lump of wood or stone. Its hues and masses are its soul. Anything living, quick and changing, is bad art, always; naked men and women are the worst art of all, because there are fewer semi-dead things about them. The shell of the tortoise, the plumage of a bird, makes these animals approach nearer to art. Soft, quivering and quick flesh is as far from art as an object can be.”

“Art is merely the dead, then?”

“No, but deadness is the first condition of art. A hippopotamus’s armoured hide, a turtle’s shell, feathers or machinery on the one hand; that opposed to naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life, along with infinite elasticity and consciousness of movement, on the other.

“Deadness, then,” Tarr went on, “in the limited sense in which we use that word is the first condition of art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick, flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. Instead, then, of being something impelled like a machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.”

Tarr was developing, from her point of view, too much shop. She encouraged him, however, immediately.

“Why should human beings be chiefly represented in art?”

“Because what we call art depends on human beings for its advertisement. As men’s ideas about themselves change, art should change too.”

They had waded through a good deal of food while this conversation had been proceeding. She now stretched herself, clasping her hands in her lap. She smiled at Tarr as though to invite him to smile too, at her beautiful, heavy, hysterical anatomy. She had been driving hard inscrutable Art deeper and deeper into herself. She now drew it out and showed it to Tarr.

“Art is paleozoic matter, dolomite, oil-paint, and mathematics; also something else. Having established that, we will stick a little flag up and come back another day. I want to hear now about life. But do you believe in anything?”

Tarr was staring, suspended, with a smile cut in half, therefore defunct, at the wall. He turned his head slowly, with his mutilated smile, his glasses slanting in an agreeably vulpine way.

“Believe in anything? I only believe in one thing, pleasure of taste. In that way you get back though, with me, to mathematics and paleozoic times, and the coloured powders of the earth.”

Anastasya ordered a gÂteau reine de Samothrace.

“Reine de Samothrace! Reine de Samothrace!” Tarr muttered. “Donnez-moi une omelette au rhum.”

Tarr looked at her for some time in a steady, depressed way. What a treat for his eyes not to be jibing! She held all the imagery of a perfect world. There was no pathos anywhere in her form. Kindness—bestial kindness—would be an out-of-work in this neighbourhood. The upper part of her head was massive and intelligent. The middle of her body was massive and exciting. There was no animalism out of place in the shape of a weight of jaw. The weight was in the head and hips. But was not this a complete thing by itself? How did he stand as regards it? He had always been sceptical about perfection. Did she and he need each other? His steadfast ideas of the flower surrounded by dung were challenged. She might be a monotonous abstraction, and, if accepted, impoverish his life. She was the summit, and the summit was narrow. Or in any case was not ugliness and foolishness the richest soil? Irritants were useful though not beautiful. He reached back doubtfully towards his bourgeoise. But he was revolted as he touched that mess, with this clean and solid object beneath his eyes. He was not convinced, though, that he was on the right road. He preferred a cabin to a palace, and thought that a villa was better for him than either, but did not want to order his life so rigidly as that.

“What did you make of Kreisler’s proceedings?” she asked him.

“In what way do you mean?”

“Well, first—do you think he and Bertha—got on very well?”

“Do you mean was Bertha his mistress? I should think not. But I’m not sure. That isn’t very interesting, is it?”

“Kreisler is interesting, not Bertha, of course.”

“You’re very hard on Bertha.”

She put her tongue out at him and wrinkled up her nose.

A queen, standing on her throne, was obtruding her “unruly member.”

“What were Kreisler’s relations with you, by the way?” he asked blankly.

Her extreme freedom with himself suggested possible explanations of her manner in discussing Soltyk’s death at the time.

“My relations with Kreisler consisted in a half-hour’s conversation with him in a restaurant, and that was all. I spoke to him several times after that, but only for a few minutes. He was very excited the last time we met. I have a theory that his duel and general behaviour was due to unrequited passion for me. Your Bertha, on the other hand, has a theory that it was due to unrequited passion for her. I wondered if you had any information that might support her case or mine.”

“No. I know nothing about it. I hold, myself, a quite different theory.”

“What is that? That he was in love with you?”

“My theory has not the charming simplicity of your theory or Bertha’s. I don’t believe that he was in love with anybody. I believe, though, that it was a sex-tumult of sorts?”

“What is that?”

“You want to hear my theory? This is it. I believe that all the fuss he made was an attempt to get out of Art back into life again, like a fish flopping about who had got into the wrong tank. It would be more exact to say, back into sex. He was trying to get back into sex again out of a little puddle of Art where he felt he was gradually expiring. What I mean is this. He was an art student without any talent, and was leading a dull, slovenly existence like thousands of others in the same case. He was very hard up. Things were grim that way too. The sex-instinct of the average man, then, had become perverted into a silly false channel. Or it might be better to say that his elementary art-instinct had been rooted out of sex and one or two other things, where it was both useful and ornamental, and naturally flourished, and had been exalted into a department by itself, where it bungled and wrecked everything. It is a measure the need of which hits the eye in these days to keep the art-instinct of the run of men in its place. These art-spirits should be kept firmly embedded in sex, in fighting, and in affairs. The nearest the general run of men can get to Art is Action. Real, bustling, bloody action is what they want! Sex is their form of art: the battle of existence in enterprise, Commerce, is their picture. The moment they think or dream you get an immense weight of cheap stagnating passion that becomes a menace to the health of the world. A “cultured” nation is as great a menace as a “free” one. The answer to the men who object to this as high-handed is plain enough. You must answer: No man’s claim is individual; the claim of an exceptional being is that of an important type or original—is an inclusive claim. The eccentric Many do not matter. They are the individuals. And anyway Goddam economy in any shape or form! Long live Waste! Curse the principle of Humanity! Mute inglorious Miltons are not mute for God-in-Heaven. They have the Silence. Bless Waste, Heaven bless Waste! Hoch Waste!”

“I’ll drink to that!” said Anastasya, raising her glass. “Here’s to Waste! Hoch!” Tarr drank this toast with gusto.

“Here’s to Waste!” he said loudly. “Waste yourselves, pour yourselves out, let there be no High-Men except such as happen! Economy is sedition. Drink your blood if you have no wine! But waste; fling out into the streets; never count your yarn. Accept fools, compromise yourselves with the poor in spirit, fling the rich ones behind you; live like the lions in the forests with fleas on your back. Down with the Efficient Chimpanzee!”

Anastasya’s eyes were bloodshot with the gulp she had taken to honour Waste. Tarr patted her on the back.

“There are no lions in the forests!” she hiccuped, patting her chest. “You’re pulling my leg.”

They got to their coffee more or less decorously. But Tarr had grown extremely loquacious and expansive in every way. He began slapping her thighs to emphasise his points, as Diderot was in the habit of doing with the Princesse de ClÈves. After that he began kissing her, when he had made a particularly successful remark, to celebrate it. Their second bottle of wine had put many things to flight. He lay back in his chair in prolonged bursts of laughter. She, in German fashion, clapped her hand over his mouth, and he seized it with his teeth and made pale shell-shapes in its brown fat.

In a cafÉ opposite the restaurant, where they next went, they had further drinks.

They caressed each other’s hands now as a matter of course! Indifferent to the supercilious and bitter natives, they became lost in lengthy kisses, their arms round each other’s necks. In a little cave of intoxicated affection, a conversation took place.

“Have you had dealings with many??”

“What’s that you say, dear?” she asked with eager, sleepy seriousness. The “dear” reminded him of accostings in the streets.

“Have you been the mistress of many men?”

“No, of course not. Only one. He was a Russian.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“What did you say?”

“How much did he bag?”

“Bag?”

“What did the Russian represent?”

“Nothing at all, Tarr. That’s why I took him. I wanted the experience. But now I want you! You are my first person!” Distant reminiscences of Bertha, grateful to him at present.

Kisses succeeded.

“I don’t want you!” Tarr said.

“Oh! Tell me what you want?”

“I want a woman!”

“But I am a woman, stupid!”

“I want a slave.”

She whispered in his ear, hanging on his neck.

“No! You may be a woman, but you’re not a slave.”

“Don’t be so quarrelsome. Forget those silly words of yours—slave, woman. It’s all right when you’re talking about art, but you’re hugging a woman at present. This is something that can die! Ha ha! We’re in life, my Tarr. We represent absolutely nothing—thank God!”

“I realize I’m in life, darling. But I don’t like being reminded of it in that way. It makes me feel as though I were in a mauvais lieu.”

“Give me a kiss, you efficient chimpanzee!”

Tarr scowled at her, but did not alter the half-embrace in which they sat.

“You won’t give me a kiss? Silly old inefficient chimpanzee!”

She sat back in her chair, and head down looked through her eyelashes at him with demure menace.

“GarÇon! garÇon!” she called.

“Mademoiselle?” the garÇon said, approaching slowly, with dignified scepticism.

“This gentleman, garÇon, wants to be a lion with fleas on his back—at least so he says! At the same time he wants a slave. I don’t know if he expects the slave to catch his fleas or not. I haven’t asked him. But he’s a funny-looking bird, isn’t he?”

The garÇon withdrew with hauteur.

“What’s the meaning of your latest tack, you little German art-tart?”

“What am I?”

“I called you German Æsthetic pastry. I think that describes you.”

“Oh, tart, is it?”

“Anything you like. Very well made, puffed out. With one solitary Russian, bien entendu!”

“And what, good God, shall we call the cow-faced specimen you spend the greater part of your days with?”

“She, too, is German pastry, more homely than you though?”

“Homely’s the word!”

“But not quite so fly-blown. Less variegated creams and German pretentiousness?”

“I see! And takes you more seriously than other people would be likely to! That’s what all your ‘quatch’ about ‘woman’ and ‘slave’ means. You know that!”

She had recovered from the effects of the drinks completely and was sitting up and talking briskly, looking at him with the same serious, rather flattened face she had had during their argument on Art and Death.

“I know you are a famous whore, who becomes rather acid in your cups!—when you showed me your legs this evening, I suppose I was meant?”

“Assez! Assez!!” She struck the table with her fist.

“Let’s get to business.” He put his hat on and leant towards her. “It’s getting late. Twenty-five francs, I’m afraid, is all I can manage.”

“Twenty-five francs for what? With you—it would be robbery! Twenty-five francs to be your audience while you drivel about art? Keep your money and buy Bertha an—efficient chimpanzee! She will need it if she marries you!”

Her mouth drawn tight and her hands in her coat pockets, she walked out of the door of the cafÉ.

Tarr ordered another drink.

“It’s like a moral tale told on behalf of Bertha,” he thought. That was the temper of Paradise! The morality, in pointing to Bertha, did her no good, but caused her to receive the trop-plein of his discontent.

He sat in a grim sulk at the thought of the good time he had lost. This scene had succeeded in touching the necessary spring. His vanity helping, for half an hour he plotted his revenge and satisfaction together. Anastasya had violently flung off the illusion of indifference in which she had hitherto appeared to him. The drinks of the evening were a culture in which his disappointment grew luxuriantly, but with a certain buffoonish lightness. He went back to his studio in half an hour’s time with smug, thick, secretive pleasure settling down on his body’s ungainly complaints.

CHAPTER III

He went slowly up the stairs feeling for his key. He arrived at the door without having found it. The door was ajar. At first this seemed natural to him, and he continued the search for the key. Then he suddenly dropped that occupation, pushed the door open and went into his studio. The moonlight came heavily through the windows. In a part of the room where it did not strike he became aware of an apparition of solid white. It was solid white flowed round by Naples yellow. It crossed into the moonlight and faced him, its hands placed like a modest statue’s. The hair reached below the waist, and flowed to the right from the head. This tall nudity began laughing with a harsh sound like stone laughing.

“Close the door!” it shouted, “there’s a draught. You took a long time to consider my words. I’ve been waiting. Forgive me, Tarr. My words were acidulated whores, but my heart”—she put her hand on the skin roughly above that organ—“my heart was completely full of sugar! The acidulated demi-mondaine was a trick. It occupied your mind. You didn’t notice me take your key!”

His vanity was soothed. The key in her possession, which could only have been taken in the cafÉ, seemed to justify the harsh dialogue.

She stood before him now with her arms up, hands joined behind her head. This impulse to take her clothes off had the cultural hygienic touch so familiar to him. The Naples yellow of the hair was the same colour as Bertha’s, only it was coarser and thicker, Bertha’s being fine. Anastasya’s dark face, therefore, had the appearance almost of a mask.

“Will you engage me as your model? Je fais de la rÉclame pour les Grecs.”

“You are very Ionian—hardly Greek. But I don’t require a model. I never use nude models.”

“Well, I must dress again, I suppose.” She turned towards a chair where her clothes were piled. But Tarr had learnt the laws of cultural emancipation.

He shouted, “I accept, I accept!” He lifted her up in his arms, kissing her in the mass, as it were, and carried her through the door at the back of the studio leading to his bedroom.

“Tarr, be my love. I don’t want to give you up.”

This was said next morning, the sunlight having taken the place of the moonlight, but striking on the opposite side of the house.

“You won’t hear marriage talked about by me. I want to rescue you from your Bertha habits. Allow yourself to be rescued! We’re very well together, aren’t we? I’m not doing Bertha a bad turn, either, really. I admit my motive is quite selfish. What do you say?”

“I am your slave!”

Anastasya rolled up against him with the movement of a seal.

“Thank you, Tarr. That’s better than having a slave, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I think everything is in order.”

“Then you’re my efficient chimpanzee?”

“No, I’m the new animal; we haven’t found a name for it yet. It will succeed the Superman. Back to the Earth!”

“Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kiss me!”

CHAPTER IV

Tarr crawled towards Bertha that day on the back of a Place St. Michel bus. He did not like his job.

The secret of his visits to Bertha and interminable liaison was that he really never had meant to leave her at all, he reflected. He had not meant to leave her altogether. He was just playing. Or rather, a long debt of disgraceful behaviour was accumulating, that he knew would have to be met. It was deliberately increased by him, because he knew he would not repudiate it. But it would have been absurd not to try to escape.

To-day he must break the fact to Bertha that he could no longer regard himself as responsible. He was faced with the necessity, for the first time, of seriously bargaining. The debt was not to be repudiated, but he must tell her that he only had himself to pay with, and that he had been seized by somebody else.

He passed through her iron gateway with a final stealth, although making his boots sound loudly on the gravel. It was like entering a vault, the trees looked like weeds; the meaning or taste of everything, of course, had died. The concierge looked like a new one.

He had bought a flower for his buttonhole. He kept smelling it as he approached the house.

During the last week or so he had got into the habit of writing his letters at Bertha’s, to fill up the time. Occasionally he would do a drawing of her (a thing he had never done formerly) to vary the monotony. This time there would be no letter-writing. This visit would be more like the old ones.

“Come in, Sorbert,” she said, on opening the door. It was emphasizing the fact of the formality of the terms on which they at present met. Any prerogative of past and more familiar times was proudly rejected.

There was the same depressed atmosphere as the day before, and the days preceding that. She appeared stale, somehow deteriorated and shabby, her worth decreased, and extremely pitiable. Her “reserve” (a natural result of the new equivocal circumstances) removed her to a distance, as it seemed; it also shut her up in herself, in an unhealthy, dreary, and faded atmosphere.

She was shut up with a mass of reserves and secrets, new and old. She seemed sitting on them in rather dismal hen-like fashion, waiting to be asked to come out of herself and reveal something. It was a corpse among other things that she was sitting on, as Kreisler was one of her secrets. Mournfully reproachful, she kept guard over her secrets, a store of bric-À-brac that had gone out of fashion and were getting musty in a neglected shop.

Their meetings sometimes were made painful by activity on Bertha’s part. An attempt at penetration to an intimacy once possessed can be more indecent than the same action on the part of a stranger.

This time he was greeted with long mournful glances. He felt she had thought of what she should say. This interview meant a great deal to her. His friendship meant more to her now than ever. The abject little room seemed to be thrust forward to awaken his memories and ask for pity. An intense atmosphere of Teutonic suicide permeated everything. He could not move an eyelid or a muscle without wounding or slighting something. It was like being in a dark kitchen at night, where you know at every step you will put your foot on a beetle. It had a still closer analogy to this in the disgust he felt for these too naked and familiar things he was treading on. He scowled at Beethoven, who scowled back at him like a reflection in a mirror. It was the fate of both of them to haunt this room. The Mona Lisa was there, and the Breton sabots and jars. She might have a change of scenery sometimes! He felt unreasonably that she must have left things in the same place to reproduce a former mood in him. His photograph was prominent on her writing-table; she seemed to say (with a sort of sickly idiocy), “You see, he is faithful to me!”

She preceded him to her sitting-room. As he looked at her back he thought of her as taking a set number of paces, then turning round abruptly, confronting him. From a typical and similar enervation of the will to that which was at the bottom of his troubles, he could hardly stop himself from putting his arm round her waist while they stood for a moment close to each other. He did not wish to do this as a response to any resuscitating desire. It was only because it was the one thing he must not do. To throw himself into the abyss of perplexity he had just escaped from tempted him. The dykes and simulations of conduct were perpetually threatened by his neurasthenia in this way. He kept his hands in his pockets, however.

When they had reached the room, she turned round, as he had half imagined, and caught hold of his hands.

“Sorbert, Sorbert!”

The words were said separately, each emphatic in significance. The second was a repetition only of the first. She seemed calling him by his name to conjure back his self again. Her face was a strained and anxious mask.

“What is it, Bertha?”

“I don’t know!”

She dropped his hands, drooped her head to the right and turned away.

She sat down; he sat down opposite her.

“Anything new?” he asked.

“Anything new? Yes!” She gazed at him with an insistent meaning.

He concluded this was just over-emphasis, with nothing behind it; or, rather, everything.

“Well, I have something new as well!”

“Have you, Sorbert?”

“First of all, how have my visits struck you lately? What explanation have you found for them?”

“Oh, none. Why find an explanation? Why do you ask?”

“I thought I would explain.”

“Well?”

“My explanation to myself was that I did not want to leave you brusquely, and I thought a blurred interlude of this sort would do no harm to either of us. Our loves could die in each other’s arms.”

She stared with incredulous fixity at the floor, her spirit seeming to be arched like a swan and to be gazing down hypnotically.

“The real reason was simply that, being very fond of you, I could not make up my mind to give you up. I claim that my visits were not frivolous.”

“Well?”

“I would have married you, if you had considered that advisable.”

“Yes? And??”

“I find it very difficult to say the rest.”

“What is difficult?”

“Well, I still like you very much. Yesterday I met a woman. I love her too. I can’t help that. What must I do?”

Bertha turned a slightly stormier white.

“Who is she?”

“You know her. She is Anastasya Vasek.”

The news struck through something else, and, inside, her ego shrank to an almost wizened being. It seemed glad of the protection the cocoon, the something, afforded her.

“You did not—find out what my news was.”

“I didn’t. Have you anything??”

“Yes. I am enceinte.”

He thought about this in a clumsy, incredulous way. It was a Roland for his Oliver! She was going to have a baby! With what regularity he was countered! This event rose up in opposition to the night he had just spent, his new promises and hopes of swagger sex in the future. He was beaten.

“Whose child is it?”

“Kreisler’s.”

“There you are!” he thought.

He got up and stepped over to her with a bright relieved look in his face.

“Poor little girl! That’s a bad business. But don’t worry about it. We can get married and it can always pass as mine—if we do it quickly enough.”

She looked up at him obliquely and sharply, with suspicion grown a habit. When she saw the pleasant, assured expression, she saw that at last things had turned. Sorbert was denying reality! He was ending with miracles, against himself. Her instinct had always told her that generosity would not be wasted!

She did not tell him of the actual circumstances under which the child had come. That would have weakened her happiness and her case.

CHAPTER V

When he got outside Bertha’s house, Bertha waving to him from the window with tears in her eyes, he came in for the counter-attack.

One after the other the protesting masses of good sense rolled up.

He picked his way out of the avenue with a reasoning gesticulation of the body; a chicken-like motion of sensible fastidious defence in front of buffonic violence. At the gate he exploded in harsh laughter, looking bravely and railingly out into the world through his glasses. Then he walked slowly away in his short jacket, his buttocks moving methodically just beneath its rim.

“Ha ha! Ha ha! Kreisleriana!” he shouted without his voice.

The indignant plebs of his glorious organism rioted around his mind.

“Ha ha! Ha ha! SacrÉ farceur, where are you leading us?” They were vociferous. “You have kept us fooling in this neighbourhood so long, and now you are pledging us to your idiotic fancy for ever. Ha ha! Ha ha!”

“Be reasonable! What are you doing, master of our destiny? We shall all be lost!”

A faction clamoured, “Anastasya!” Certain sense-sections attacked him in vulnerable spots with Anastasya’s voluptuous banner unfurled and fragrant.

He buffeted his way along, as though spray were dashing in his face, watchful behind his glasses. He met his thoughts with a contemptuous stiff veteran smile. This capricious and dangerous master had an offensive stylistic coolness, similar to Wellington breakfasting at Salamanca while Marmont hurried exultingly into traps; although he resembled his great countryman in no other way.

Those thoughts that bellowed, “Anastasya!” however, worried him. He answered them.

“Anastasya! Anastasya!! I know all about that! What do you take me for? You will still have your Anastasya. I am not selling myself or you. A man such as I does not dispose of himself in a case like this. I am going to marry Bertha Lunken. Well? Shall I be any the less my own master for that reason? If I want to sleep with Anastasya, I shall do so. Why marry Bertha Lunken, and shoulder all that semi-contagious muck? Because it is only the points or movements in life that matter, and one of those points indicates that course, namely, to keep faith with another person: and secretly to show my contempt for the world by choosing the premier venu to be my body-servant and body-companion; my contempt for my body too.”

He sought to overcome his reasons by appeals to their corporate vanity.

He had experienced rather a wrench as regards Anastasya. The swanky sex with which he had ornamented his future could not be dismissed so easily. He was astonished that it could be dismissed at all, and asked himself the reason. He sacrificed Anastasya with a comparatively light heart. It was chiefly his vanity that gave trouble.

He came back to his earlier conclusions. Such successful people as Anastasya and himself were by themselves. It was as impossible to combine or wed them as to compound the genius of two great artists. If you mixed together into one whole Gainsborough and Goya you would get nothing, for they would be mutually destructive. Beyond a certain point of perfection individual instinct was its own law. A subtle lyrical wail would gain nothing from living with a rough and powerful talent, or vice versa. Success is always personal. Co-operation, group-genius was, he was convinced, a slavish pretence and absurdity. Only when the group was so big that it became a person again, as with a nation, did you get mob-talent or popular art. This big, diffuse, vehement giant was the next best thing to the great artist; Patchin Tcherana coming just below.

He saw this quite clearly. He and Anastasya were a superfluity, and destructive conflict. It was like a mother being given a child to bear the same size already as herself. Anastasya was in every way too big; she was too big physically. But did not sex change the whole question, when it was a woman? He did not agree to this. Woman and the sexual sphere seemed to him to be an average from which everything came: from it everything rose, or attempted to rise. There was no mysterious opposition extending up into Heaven, and dividing Heavenly Beings into Gods and Goddesses. There was only one God, and he was a man. A woman was a lower form of life. Everything was female to begin with. A jellyish diffuseness spread itself and gaped on the beds and in the bas-fonds of everything. Above a certain level of life sex disappeared, just as in highly organized sensualism sex vanishes. And, on the other hand, everything beneath that line was female. Bard, Simpson, Mackenzie, Townsend, Annandale—he enumerated acquaintances evidently below the absolute line, and who displayed a lack of energy, permanently mesmeric state, and almost purely emotional reactions. He knew that everything on the superior side of that line was not purged of jellyish attributes; also that Anastasya’s flaccid and fundamental charms were formidable, although the line had been crossed by her. One thing was impressive, however. The loss of Anastasya did not worry him, except magnified through the legal acquisition of Bertha. What did he want? Well, he did not want Anastasya as much as he should. He was incorrigible, he concluded. He regarded the Anastasya evening as a sort of personal defeat even. The call of duty was nevertheless very strong. He ought to love Anastasya; and his present intentions as regards his despicable fiancÉe were a disgraceful betrayal, etc. etc. The mutterings of reason continued.

That evening he met Anastasya. The moment he saw her he realized the abysses of indignity and poorness he was flinging himself into with Bertha Lunken. A sudden humbleness entered him and put him out of conceit with his judgment, formed away from bright objects like Anastasya. The selfishness that caused his sentimentality when alone with Bertha was dissipated or not used in presence of more or less successful objects and people. None of his ego was required by his new woman. She possessed plenty of her own. This, he realized later, was the cause of his lack of attachment. He needed an empty vessel to flood with his vitality, and not an equal and foreign vitality to exist side by side with coldly. He had taken into sex the procÉdÉs and selfish arrangements of life in general. He had humanized sex too much. He frequently admitted this, but with his defence lost sight of the flagrancy of the permanent fact.

He felt in Anastasya for the first time now an element of protection and safety. She was a touchwood and harbour from his perplexed interior life. She had a sort of ovation from him. All his obstinacy in favour of his fiancÉe had vanished. With Anastasya’s appearance an entirely different world was revealed that demanded completely new arguments.

They went to the same restaurant as the night before. He talked quietly, until they had drunk too much, and Bertha was not mentioned.

“And what of Bertha?” she asked finally.

“Never mind about Bertha.”

“Is she extinct?”

“No. She threatens an entirely new sort of eruption.”

“Oh. In what way new??”

“It doesn’t matter. It won’t come our way.”

“Are you going there to-morrow?”

“I suppose I must. But I shall not make many more visits of?”

“What’s that?”

“I shall give up going, I say.” He shifted restlessly in his chair.

After breakfast next morning they parted, Tarr going back to work. Butcher, whom he had not seen for some days, came in. He agreed to go down into town and have lunch with him. Tarr put on a clean shirt. Talking to Butcher while he was changing, he stood behind his bedroom door. Men of ambitious physique, like himself, he had always noticed, were inclined to puff themselves out or let their arms hang in a position favourable to their muscles while changing before another man. To avoid this embarrassment or absurdity, he made a point of never exhibiting himself unclothed.

His conversation with Butcher did not fall on matters in hand. As with Anastasya, he was unusually reticent. He had turned over a new leaf. He became rather alarmed at this himself when he realized it. After lunch he left Butcher and went to the Mairie of the Quartier du Paradis and made inquiries about civil marriages. He did it like a sleep-walker.

He was particularly amiable with Bertha that day, and told her of his activities at the Mairie and made an appointment with her there for the next day.

Daily, then, he proceeded with his marriage arrangements in the afternoons, saw Bertha regularly, but without modifying the changed “correctness” of his attitude. The evenings he spent with Anastasya.

By the time the marriage preliminaries had been gone through, and Bertha and he could finally be united, his relations with Anastasya had become as close as formerly his friendship with Bertha had been. With the exception of the time from three in the afternoon to seven in the evening that he took off every day to see his fiancÉe, he was with her.

On September 29. three weeks after Bertha had told him that she was pregnant, he married her—in the time between three in the afternoon and seven in the evening set aside for her. Anastasya knew nothing about these things. Neither Bertha nor she were seeing their German women friends for the moment.

After the marriage at the Mairie Bertha and Tarr walked back to the Luxembourg Gardens and sat down. She had not during the three intervening weeks mentioned Anastasya. It was no time for generosity; she had done too much of that. FrÄulein Vasek was the last person for whom she felt inclined to revive chivalry. She let Tarr marry her out of pity, and never referred to his confidence about his other love.

They sat for some time without speaking, as though they had quarrelled. She said, then:

“I am afraid, Sorbert, I have been selfish?”

“You—selfish? How’s that? Don’t talk nonsense.” He had turned at once to her with a hurried fondness genuinely assumed.

She looked at him with her wistful, democratic face, full of effort and sentiment.

“You are very unhappy, Sorbert?”

He laughed convincingly.

“No, I’m all right. Don’t worry about me. I’m a little meditative. That is only natural on such a solemn occasion. I was thinking, Bertha, we must set up house somewhere, and announce our marriage. We must do this for appearance’ sake. You will soon be incapacitated?”

“Oh, I shan’t be just yet.”

“In any case, we have gone through this form because?We must make this move efficacious. What are your ideas as to an establishment? Let us take a flat together somewhere round here. The Rue Servandoni is a nice street. Do you know it?”

“No.” She put her head on one side and puckered up her forehead.

“Near the Luxembourg Museum.”

They discussed a possible domicile.

He got up.

“It’s rather chilly. Let’s get back.”

They walked for some time without speaking. So much unsaid had to be got rid of, without necessarily being said. Bertha did not know at all where she was. Their “establishment,” as discussed by Tarr, appeared very unreal, and also, what there was of it, disagreeable. She wondered what he was going to do with her.

“You remember what I said to you some weeks ago—about Anastasya Vasek. I am afraid there has been no change in that. You do not mind that?”

“No, Sorbert. You are perfectly free.”

“I am afraid I shall seem unkind. This is not a nice marriage for you. Perhaps I was wrong to suggest it?”

“How, wrong? I have not been complaining.”

They arrived at the iron gate.

“Well, I’d better not come up now. I will come along to-morrow—at the usual time.”

“Good-bye, Sorbert. A demain!”

“A demain!”

CHAPTER VI

Anastasya and he were dining that night in Montmartre as usual. His piece of news hovered over their conversation like a bird hesitating as to the right spot at which to establish its nest.

“I saw Bertha to-day,” he said, forcing the opening at last.

“You still see her then.”

“Yes. I married her this afternoon.”

“You what? What do you mean?”

“What I say, my dear. I married her.”

“You mean you??” She put an imaginary ring on her finger.

“Yes. I married her at the Mairie.”

Anastasya looked blankly into him, as though he contained cheerless stretches where no living thing could grow.

“You mean to say you’ve done that!”

“Yes; I have.”

“Why?”

Tarr stopped a moment.

“Well, the alleged reason was that she is enceinte.”

“But—whose is the child?”

“Kreisler’s, she says.”

The statement, she saw, was genuine. He was telling her what he had been doing. They both immediately retired into themselves, she to distance and stow away their former dialogue and consider the meaning of this new fact; he to wait, his hand near his mouth holding a pipe, until she should have collected herself. But he began speaking first:

“Things are exactly the same as before. I was bound to do that. I had allowed her to consider herself engaged a year ago, and had to keep to that. I have merely gone back a year into the past and fulfilled a pledge, and now return to you. All is in perfect order.”

“All is not in perfect order. It is Kreisler’s child to begin with, you say?”

“Yes, but it would be very mean to use that fact to justify one in escaping from an obligation.”

“That is sentimentality.”

“Sentimentality! Sentimentality! Cannot we, you and I, afford to give Bertha that? Sentimentality! What an absurd word that is with its fierce use in our poor modern hands! What does it mean? Has life become such an affair of economic calculation that men are too timid to allow themselves any complicated pleasures? Where there is abundance you can afford waste. Sentimentality is a cry on a level with the Simple Life! The ideal of perfect success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of Man and Perfectibility. Sentimentality is a privilege. It is a luxury that the crowd does not feel itself equal to, once it begins to think about it. Besides, it is different in different hands.”

“That may be true as regards sentimentality in general. But in this case you have been guilty of a popular softness?”

“No. Listen. I will explain something to you You said a moment ago that it was Kreisler’s child. Well, that is my security! That enables me to commit this folly, without too great danger. It is an earnest of the altruistic origin of the action not being forgotten!”

“But that—to return to your words—is surely a very mean calculation?”

“Therefore it takes the softness out of the generous action it is allied to?”

“No. It takes its raison d’Être away altogether. It leaves it merely a stupid and unnecessary fact. It cancels the generosity, but leaves the fact—your marriage.”

“But the fact itself is altered by that!”

“In what way? You are now married to Bertha?”

“Yes, but what does that mean? I married Bertha this afternoon, and here I am punctually and as usual with you this evening?”

“But the fact of your having married Bertha this afternoon will prevent your making any one else your wife in the future. Supposing I had a child by you—not by Kreisler—it would be impossible to legitimatize him. The thing is of no importance in itself. But you have given Kreisler’s child what you should have kept for your own! What’s the good of giving your sex over into the hands of a swanky expert, as you describe it, if you continue to act on your own initiative? I throw up my job. GarÇon, l’addition!”

But a move to the cafÉ opposite satisfied her as a demonstration. Tarr was sure of her, and remained passive. She extorted a promise from him: to conduct no more obscure diplomacies in the future.

Bertha and Tarr took a flat in the Boulevard Port Royal, not far from the Jardin des Plantes. They gave a party to which FrÄulein Lipmann and a good many other people came. He maintained the rule of four to seven, roughly, for Bertha, with the utmost punctiliousness. Anastasya and Bertha did not meet.

Bertha’s child came, and absorbed her energies for upwards of a year. It bore some resemblance to Tarr. Tarr’s afternoon visits became less frequent. He lived now publicly with his illicit and splendid bride.

Two years after the birth of the child, Bertha divorced Tarr. She then married an eye-doctor, and lived with a brooding severity in his company and that of her only child.

Tarr and Anastasya did not marry. They had no children. Tarr, however, had three children by a lady of the name of Rose Fawcett, who consoled him eventually for the splendours of his “perfect woman.” But yet beyond the dim though solid figure of Rose Fawcett, another rises. This one represents the swing-back of the pendulum once more to the swagger side. The cheerless and stodgy absurdity of Rose Fawcett required the painted, fine and inquiring face of Prism Dirkes.

THE END