Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (26 page)

They had stopped at a spot where the Boulevard approached a more populous and lighted avenue. As they now stood a distinct, yet strangely pausing, female voice struck their ears:

‘Fräulein Lunken!’

Some twenty yards away stood several of her companions, who, with fussy german sociableness, had returned to carry her forward with them, as they were approaching the Bonnington Club. Finding her not with them, and remembering she had lagged behind, they had walked back to the head of the Boulevard speculating as to what could have detained her. They now saw quite plainly what was before them, but were in that state in which a person will not believe his eyes, and lets them bulge until they nearly drop out, to correct their scandalous vision. Kreisler and Bertha were some distance from the nearest lamp and in the shade of the trees. But each of the spectators would have sworn to the identity and attitude of their two persons.

Bertha nearly jumped out of her skin, broke away from Kreisler, and staggered several steps. He, with great presence of mind, caught her again, and induced her to lean against a tree, saying curtly:

‘You’re not quite well, Fräulein. Lean—so. Your friends will be here in a moment.’

Bertha accepted this way out. She turned, indeed, rather white and sick, and even succeeded so far as half to believe her pretence, while the women came up. Kreisler called out to the petrified and quite silent group at the end of the avenue; soon they were surrounded by big-eyed faces. Hypocritical concern soon superseded the masks of scandal.

‘She was taken suddenly ill.’ Kreisler coughed conventionally as he said this, and flicked his trousers as though he had been scuffling on the ground. Then he coughed again.

Indignant glances were cast at him. Whatever attitude they might decide to adopt as regards their friend, there was no doubt as to their feeling towards
him
: he was to blame from whichever way you looked at it. Eventually, with one or two curious german glances into her eyes, slow, dubious, incredulous questions (with a drawing back of the head and dying away of voice) they determined temporarily to accept the explanation and to say that she had been indisposed. To one of them, very much in the know with regard to her relations with Tarr, vistas of possible ruptures opened: but here was a funny affair all were agreed. With Kreisler, of all people! Tarr was bad enough!

Bertha would at once have returned home, and confirmed the story of a sudden megrim.
*
But she felt the best thing was to go through with it. To absent herself at once would be a mistake. The affair would be less conspicuous with her not away: her friends must at once ratify their normal view of this little occurrence. The only thing she thought of for the moment was to hush up and wipe out what had just happened: her heroics disappeared in the need for action. So they all walked on together, a scandalized silence subsisting in honour chiefly of Kreisler.

Again he was safe, he thought with a chuckle. His position was precarious, only he held Fräulein Lunken as hostage! Exception could not
openly
be taken to him, without reflecting on their friend! He walked along with perfect composure, mischievously detached and innocent.

Fräulein Liepmann and the rest had already gone inside the club building, which was brightly illuminated. Several people were arriving in taxis and on foot. Kreisler got in without difficulty. He was it turned out the only man present not in evening dress.

O
NE
certain thing (amongst many uncertainties) about the english club, the Bonnington Club, was that it could not be said as yet to have found itself quite. Its central room (and that was almost all there was of it) reminded you of a Public Swimming Bath when it was used as a Ball-room, and when used as a studio, you thought of a Concert Hall. But it had cost a good deal to build. It made a cheerful show, with pink, red and pale blue paper chains and Chinese Lanterns, one week, for some festivity, and the next, sparely robed in dark red curtains, would settle its walls gravely to receive some houseless quartet. In this manner it paid its way. Some phlegmatic divinity seemed to have brought it into existence—‘Found a club, found a club!’ it had reiterated in the depths of certain minds probably with sleepy tenacity.—Someone sighed, got up and went round to another individual of the same sort, and said perhaps a club had better be founded. The second assented and subscribed something, to get rid of the other. In the course of time, a young french architect had been entrusted with the job. A club. Yes. What sort of a club? The architect could not find out. Something to be used for drawing-classes, social functions, a reading-room, he knew the sort of thing! He saw he was on the wrong tack. He went away and made his arrangements accordingly. He had produced a design of an impressive and to all appearance finished house: it was a sincerely ironic masterpiece, but with a perfect gravity, and even stateliness of appearance. It was the most non-committing façade, the most absolutely unfinal interior, the most tentative set of doors, ever seen: a monster of reservations.

Not only had the building been put to every conceivable use itself, but it dragged the Club with it. The members of the Bonnington Club changed and metamorphosed themselves with
its
changes. They became athletic or sedentary according to the shifts and exigencies of this building’s existence. They turned out in dress clothes or gymnasium get-ups as its destiny prompted, to back it up: one month they would have to prove that it
was
a gymnasium, the next that it
was
a drawing-school, so they stippled and vaulted, played table-tennis and listened to debates.

The inviting of the german contingent was a business move: they might be enticed into membership and would in any event spread the
fame of the Club, getting and subsequently giving some conception of the resources of the club-house building. The hall had been very prettily arranged: the adjoining rooms were hung with the drawings and paintings of the club members.

Kreisler, ever since the occurrence on the Boulevard, had felt a reckless irresponsibility, which he did not care to conceal. His assurance even came to smack of braggadocio.

With his abashed english hostess he carried on a strange conversation full of indirect references to that ‘stately edifice in the Rue de Rennes’
*
of which he had spoken to Bertha. ‘That stately edifice in the Rue de Rennes—but of course you don’t know it—!’

With smiling german ceremoniousness, with heavy circumlocutions, he bent down to her nervously smiling face, and poured into her startled ear symbols and images of pawn-shops, usury, three gold balls, ‘pious mountains,’
*
‘Smokkin’ or ‘Frac’ complets,
*
which he seemed a little to confuse, overwhelmed her with a serious terminology, all in a dialect calculated to bewilder the most acute philologist.

‘Yes it
is
interesting’ she said with strained conviction.

‘Isn’t it?’ Kreisler replied. A comparative estimate of the facilities for the disposing of a watch in Germany and France had been the subject of his last remarks.

‘I’m going to introduce you, Herr Kreisler, to a friend of mine—Mrs. Bevelage.’

She wanted to give the german guests a particularly cordial reception. Kreisler did not seem, superficially, a great acquisition to any club, but he was with the others. As a means of concluding this very painful interview—he was getting nearer every minute to the word that he yet solemnly forbade himself the use of—she led him up to a self-possessed exemplar of mid-victorian lovely womanhood, whose attitude suggested that she might even yet stoop to Folly
*
if the occasion arose. Mrs. Bevelage could listen to all this, and would be able to cope with a certain disquieting element she recognized in this young German.

He saw the motive of her move: and, looking with ostentatious regret at a long-legged flapper
*
seated next to them, cast a reproachful glance at his hostess.

Left alone with the widow, he surveyed her prosperous, velvet and cuirassed form.

‘Get thee to a nunnery!’
*
he said dejectedly.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Yes. You have omitted “My Lord”!’

Mrs. Bevelage looked pleased and puzzled. Possibly he was a count or baron, being german.

‘Do you know that stingy but magnificent edifice—.’

‘Yes—?’

‘That sumptuous home of precarious “Fracs,” situated Rue de Rennes—?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand—.’ The widow had not got used to his composite tongue. She liked Kreisler, however.

The music burst forth, and the club members leapt to their feet to affirm with fire their festive intentions.

‘Shall we dance?’ he said, getting up quickly.

He clasped her firmly in the small of the back and they got ponderously in motion, he stamping a little bit, as though he mistook the waltz for a more primitive music.

He took her twice, with ever-increasing velocity, round the large hall, and at the third round, at breakneck speed, spun with her in the direction of the front door. The impetus was so great that she, although seeing her peril, could not act sufficiently as a brake on her impetuous companion to avert the disaster. Another moment and they would have been in the street, amongst the traffic, a disturbing meteor, whizzing out of sight, had not they met the alarmed resistance of a considerable british family entering the front door as Kreisler bore down upon it. It was one of those large featureless human groups built up by a frigid and melancholy pair, uncannily fecund, during an interminable intercourse. They received this violent couple in their midst. The rush took Kreisler and his partner half-way through, and there they stood embedded and unconscious for many seconds. The british family then, with great dignity, disgorged them, and moved on.

The widow had come somewhat under the sudden fascination of Kreisler’s mood: she was really his woman, the goods, had he known it: she felt deliciously rapt in the midst of a simoom
*
—she had not two connected thoughts. All her worldly Victorian grace and good management of her fat had vanished: her face had become coarsened in those few breathless minutes. But she buzzed back again into the dance, and began a second mad, but this time merely circular, career.

Kreisler took care to provide his actions with some plausible air of purpose: thus: he was abominably short-sighted; he had mistaken
the front door for one leading into the third room, merely! His burden, not in the best condition, was becoming more and more puffed and heavier-footed at every step. When satisfied with this part of his work, he led Mrs. Bevelage into a sort of improvised conservatory
*
and talked about pawn-shops for ten minutes or so—in a mixture of french english and german. He then reconducted her, more dead than alive, to her seat, where he left her with great sweeps of his tall figure.

He had during this incident regained his former impassivity. He stalked away now to the conservatory once more, which he regarded as a suitable headquarters.

Bertha had soon been called on to dance vigorously, without much intermission. In the convolutions of the dance, however, she matured a bold and new plan. She whirled and trotted with a preoccupied air.

Would Tarr hear of all this? Now it was done she was alarmed. Also the Liepmann, the van Bencke’s attitude towards the Kreisler kissing was a prospect that cowed her as she got used to it. Undoubtedly she must secure herself. The plan she hit on offered a ‘noble’ rôle that she would, in any circumstances, have found irresistible.

Her scheme was plain and clever: she would simply ‘tell the truth.’ This is how the account would go.

‘She had recognized something distracting in Kreisler’s life, in short the presence of crisis.
On an impulse
, she had offered him her sympathy. He had taken up her offer immediately but in the brutal manner already seen. (One against him: two for her!) Such lurid sympathy he claimed. She was sorry for him still, but he was very brutal.’

So she jogged out her strategies with theatrically abstracted face and rolling eyes.

At this point of her story she would hint, by an ambiguous hesitation, that she, in truth, had been ready even for this sacrifice: had made it, if her hearers wished! She would imply rather that from modesty—not wanting to appear
too
‘noble’—she refrained from telling them the whole truth.

For such a confession it is true she had many precedents. Only a week ago Fräulein van Bencke herself, inflating her stout handsome person, had told them that while in Berlin she had allowed a young painter to ‘kiss’ her: she believed ‘that the caresses of a pure woman would be helpful to him at that juncture of his life.’ But this had not
been, it was to be supposed, in the middle of the street: no one had ever seen, or ever would see, the young painter in question, or the kiss.

Busy with these plans, Bertha had not much time to notice Kreisler’s further deportment. She came across him occasionally, and keyed her solid face into an intimate flush and such mask as results from any sickly physical straining. ‘
Poor
Mensch! Poor luckless Mensch!’ was the idea.

Soltyk surprised one anglo-saxon partner after another with his wonderful english—unnecessarily like the real thing. He exhibited no signs of pleasure (except as much as was testified to by his action, merely) at this sort of astonishment.

Only twice did Kreisler observe him with Anastasya. On those occasions he could not, on the strength of what he saw, pin him down as a rival. Yet he was thirsting for conventional figures. His melancholy could only be satisfied by
active
things, unlike itself. Soltyk’s self-possession, his ready social accomplishment, depressed Kreisler: for it was not in his nature to respect those qualities, yet he felt they were what he had always lacked. The Russian was, more distantly, an attribute of Vokt. How it would satisfy him to dig his fingers into that flesh, and tear it like thick cloth! He Otto Kreisler was ‘for it’:
*
he was down and out (revolutionary motif): he was being assisted off the stage by this and by that. Why did he not
shout
? He longed to act: the rusty machine had a thirst for action.