Tarr (Musaicum Rediscovered Classics). Wyndham Lewis
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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. It was natural to wonder where his senses had gone in looking at these decorous photographs. This exhibition appeared to be her explanation of the matter. The face was not very original. But a thigh cannot be stupid to the same degree.
He gazed surlily. Her musing expression at this moment was supremely absurd. He smiled and turned his face to the window. She pretended to become conscious suddenly of something amiss. She drew the dressing-gown round her.
“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 Goenthner to-morrow.”
They sat without saying anything.
He examined the room as you do a doctor’s waiting-room.
He had just come there to see if he could turn his back on it. That appeared at first sight a very easy matter. That is why he so far 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 the purest distillation of the commonplace. He had become bewitched by its strangeness. It was the height of the unreal. Bertha was like a fairy that he visited, and “became engaged” to in another world, not the real one. It was so much 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 buffonic illusion. Something had filled up a blank and become saturated with the blankness.
How much would Bertha mind a separation? Tarr saw in her one of those clear, humorous, superficial natures, a Venetian or a Viennese, the easy product of a cynical and abundant life. He under-rated the potency of his fascination. Secondly, he miscalculated the depths of obedient attachment he had wakened.
They sat impatiently waiting. A certain formality had to be observed. Then the business of the day could be proceeded with. They were both bored 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 done.
“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 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 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 female,” as Tarr described her, had arrived, with him, at the full and headlong condition we agree to name “love.” The image, or type, was thrown away. The individual took its place.
Bertha had had several sweethearts 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 resembling Tarr. But he had never got quite near enough to do that. Tarr had characteristically supposed this image to have little sharpness of outline left. He thought it would not be a very difficult matter for any one to extort its recognitions.
“Vous êtes à mon goût, Sorbet. Du bist mein gesmack,” she would say.
Tarr was not demonstrative when she said this. He could not reciprocate. And he could not help reflecting whether to be “her taste” was very flattering. There must be something the matter with him.
All her hope centred in his laziness. She watched his weaknesses with a loving eye. He had much to say about his under-nature. 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. It is like a great caravanserai in which scores of people congregate. It is a disguise in which such a one, otherwise Pasha, circulates among unembarrassed men. He brings away stores of wisdom, with much diversion by the way.” He saw, however, the danger of these facilities. The Pasha had been given a magic mask of humbleness. But the inner nature seemed flowing equally to the mask and the unmasked magnificence. He was as yet unformed, but wished to form wholly Pasha. This under-nature’s chief use was as a precious villégiature for his energy. Bertha was the country wench the more exalted incarnation had met while on its holidays, or, wandering idle Khalife, in some concourse of his surreptitious life.
His three days’ unannounced and uncommented “leave” had made Bertha very nervous. She suffered from the incomplete, unsymmetrical appearance her life now presented. Everything spread out palpably before her, that she could arrange like a roomful of furniture, 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 dwelling in the last few days had 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 homelike and permanent. People would leave her there for the rest of her natural life unless she were a little brutal and got herself out somehow. No shadow of un-nice feeling ever tainted her abject genuineness. Cunning efforts to retain him abounded. But she never blamed or turned on him. She had given herself long ago, at once, without ceremony. She awaited his thanks or no thanks simply.
But the itch of action was on her.
Tarr’s absences were like light. His presence was a shadow. They were both stormy. The last absence had illuminated the undiscipline of her life. During the revealing luridness, she got to work. Reconstruction was begun. She had trusted too much in Fate and obedient waiting Hymen.
So Bertha had a similar ferment to Tarr’s.
Anger with herself, dreary appetite for action, would help her over farewells. She was familiar enough with them, too, in thought. She would not stir a hand to change things. He must do that. She would only facilitate things in all directions for him. The new energy delivered attack after attack upon her hope. She saw nothing beyond Tarr but measures of utility. The “heart” had always been her most cherished ornament. That Tarr would take 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. She did not want it! 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.
Tarr 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. So with reluctance he got up, and went over to her.
“You haven’t kissed me yet,” he said, in imitation of her.
“Why kiss you, Sorbet?” she managed to say before her lips were closed. He drew her ungraciously and roughly into his arms, and started kissing her on the mouth. She covered him, docilely, 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