Tarr

“ On the other hand, was he being approached by Tarr in the capacity of an old friend of Bertha’s, or in her interests or at her instigation?
With frowning impatience he bent forward quickly once or twice, asking Tarr to repeat some remark. Tarr’s German was not good.
Several glasses of beer, and Kreisler became engagingly expansive.
“Have you ever been to England?” Tarr asked him.
“England?—No—I should like to go there! I like Englishmen! I feel I should get on better with them than with these French. I hate the French! They are all actors.” ”

“ So Tarr had evolved a plan. At first sight it was wicked. It was no blacker than most of his ingenuities. Bertha, as he had suggested to Butcher, he had in some lymphatic way, dans la peau. It appeared a matter of physical discomfort to leave her altogether. It must be done gradually. So he had thought that, instead of going away to England, where the separation might cause him restlessness, he had perhaps better settle down in her neighbourhood. ”

“ Tarr was saturated with morbid English shyness, that cannot tolerate passion and its nakedness. This shyness, as he contended, in its need to show its heart, discovers subtleties and refinements of expression, opposites and between shades, unknown to less gauche and delicate people. But if he were hustled out of his shell the anger that co-existed with his modesty was the most spontaneous thing he possessed. Bertha had always left him alone. ”

“ Butcher nodded in bright, clever silence. He shuffled into his car again, working his shoulders like a verminous tramp. He rushed away, piercing blasts from his horn rapidly softening as he became smaller. Tarr was glad he had brought the car and Butcher together. They were opposites with some grave essential in common.
His usual lunch time an hour away, his so far unrevised programme was to go to the Rue Lhomond and search for Hobson’s studio. For the length of a street it was equally the road to the studio and to Bertha’s rooms. He knew to which he was going. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tarr again raised his glass expectantly and coaxingly, peering steadily at the German. He said, “Prosit” as he would have said, “Peep-oh!”
“Pros’t!” Kreisler answered with alarming suddenness, and an alarming diabolical smile. “Prosit!” with finality. He put his glass down. “That is all right. I have no desire,” he wiped and struck up his moustaches, “to quarrel with anybody. I wish to be left alone. That is all.”
“To be left alone to enjoy your friendship with Bertha—that is your meaning? Am I not right? I see.” ”

“ Tarr gazed at his oracle with curiosity.—With eyes glassily bloodshot, it discharged its wisdom on gusts of air. Butcher was always surly about women, or rather men’s tenderness for them. He was a vindictive enemy of the sex. He stood, a patient constable, forbidding Tarr respectfully a certain road. He [26] spoke with authority and shortness, and hiccuped to convey the absolute and assured quality of his refusal.
“Well, in that case,” Tarr said, “I must make a move. I have treated Bertha very badly.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nature, who never forgives an artist, would never allow her to forgive. With any “superior” woman he had ever met, this feeling of being with a parvenu never left him. Anastasya was not an exception.
On leaving, Tarr no longer felt that he would come back to enjoy a diffused form of Bertha there. The prolongations of his Bertha period had passed a climax.
On leaving Renée Lipmann’s, nevertheless, Tarr went to the Café de l’Aigle, some distance away, but with an object. To make his present frequentation quite complete, it only needed Kreisler. ”

“ A great many of Frederick Tarr’s resolutions came from his conversation. It was a tribunal to which he brought his hesitations. An active and hustling spirit presided over this section of his life.
Civilized men have for conversation something of the superstitious feeling that ignorant men have for the written or the printed word.
Hobson had attracted a great deal of steam to himself. Tarr was unsatisfied.—He rushed away from the Café Berne still strong and with much more to say. He rushed towards Bertha to say it. ”

“ By his gestures (one of which was the taking an imaginary card between his thumb and forefinger and tearing it) Tarr could follow a little what he was saying.
“That, sir,” he seemed to assert, “is not the way to treat a gentleman. That, too, is an insult no gentleman will support.” He pointed towards the door. “Herr Kreisler, as you know, cannot enter the café; he is waiting there for your reply. He has been turned out like a drunken workman.” ”

“ Tarr’s white collar shone dazzlingly in the sun.—His bowler hat bobbed and out clean lines as he spoke.
“A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West of Europe.—They make it indirectly a peril and tribulation for live things to remain in the neighbourhood. You are systematizing and vulgarizing the individual.—You are not an individual. You have, I repeat, no right to that hair and that hat. You are trying to have the apple and eat it too.—You should be in uniform, and at work, not uniformly out of uniform, and libelling the Artist by your idleness. ”

“ No. You are meaner-spirited than the most abject tramp. I would seize you by the throat at once if I thought you would black my eye. But I feel it my duty at least to do this for your hat. Your hat, at least, will have had its little drama to-day.”
Tarr knocked his hat off into the road.—Without troubling to wait for the results of this action, he hurried away down the Boulevard du Paradis. ”

“ We’re very well together, [304] 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. ”

“ 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.” Then his brutality stung her offended spirit, that had been pursing itself up for so many hours. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He was treating them like part and parcel of Bertha. They were not ready to accept this valuation, that of chattels of her world.
The two Kinderbachs came over and made an affectionate demonstration around and upon Anastasya. She got up, scattering them abruptly and went over to the piano.
“What a big brute!” Tarr thought. “She would be just as good as Bertha to kiss. And you get a respectable human being into the bargain!” He was not intimately convinced that she would be as satisfactory. Let us see how it would be; he considered. This larger machine of repressed, moping senses did attract. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Tarr was extremely dissatisfied with the part he had played in this scene. First of all he felt he had withdrawn [235] too quickly at the appearance of the whip, although he had in fact got under way before it had appeared. Then, he argued, he should have stopped at the appearance of this instrument of disgrace. To stop and fight with Kreisler, what objection was there to that, he asked himself? A taking Kreisler too seriously? But what less serious than fighting? ”

“ Tarr’s idea of leisure recognized no departure from the tragic theme of existence. Pleasure could take no form that did not include Death and corruption—at present Bertha and humour. Only he wished to play a little longer. ”

“ It was now four days after the dance, and since she had last seen Tarr. She had “felt” he would come on that particular morning. The belief in woman’s intuition is not confined, of course, to men. “Could he have heard anything of the Kreisler incident?” she had asked herself. ”

“ So Nature agrees to force his sensibility and intelligence, on the one hand, to the utmost pitch, leaving him, on the other, an uncultivated and ungregarious tract where he can run wild and renew his forces and remain unspoilt.
Tarr, in his analysis of the anomalies of taste, gives the key to a crowd of other variants and twists to which most of the misunderstandings and stupidities in the deciphering of men are due. ”

“ 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 [313] 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. ”

“ Likewise, when the author comments upon Tarr, he has the gift of phrase, vivid, biting, pregnant, full of suggestion.
The engaging if unpleasant character, Tarr, is placed in an unpleasant milieu, a milieu very vividly "done." The reader retains no doubts concerning the verity and existence of this milieu (Paris or London is no matter, though the scene is, nominally, in Paris) . It is the existence where:
"Art is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger's Vie de Bohême, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model ... quarter given up to Art.—Letters and other things are round the corner. ”

“ There he stood and faced them; and though the arrows showered upon him, and blood was flowing fast down the flanks of Tarrad, he spoke and moved not, but sat still, like a horseman carved in stone in the gap. ”

“ Then Anastasya’s name was mentioned. Tarr found new interest in the scene.
“You and Herr Kreisler,” the Russian was saying patiently and distinctly, “exchanged blows, I understand, this afternoon, before this lady. This was as a result of my friend Herr Kreisler demanding certain explanations from you which you refused to give. These explanations had reference to certain stories you are supposed to have circulated as regards him.”
“Circulated—as regards—that chimpanzee you are conducting about?
“If you please! By being abusive you cannot escape. ”

“ At Tarrare, I am sorry to say, we found a want of almost every comfort. It is a pretty large town, neater in exterior appearance than any we have seen, but very dirty within; it is famous for its muslins and calicoes.——All this day we have had nothing but constant ascending and descending; the country occasionally very fine, and always well cultivated. The ploughs here are very small and ill made; they have no wheels, and are drawn by oxen. ”

“ Art is the refuge of the shy.”
“Are you shy?”
“Yes.”
“You need not be.”
Her revolving hips and thudding skirts carried her forward with the orchestral majesty of a simple ship. He suddenly became conscious of the monotonous racket.
At that moment the drums beat to close the gardens. They had dinner in a Bouillon near the Seine. They parted about ten o’clock.
CHAPTER VIII
For the first time since his “return” Tarr found no Kreisler at the café. “I wonder what that animal’s up to,” he thought. The garçon told him that Kreisler had not been there at all that evening. ”