Tarr. Wyndham Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ that then! Leave these calculations! All that means so little to me! I feel at the end of my strength—au bout de force!” She always heaved this out with much energy. “If you’ve made up your mind to go—do so, Sorbet. I release you! You owe me nothing. It was all my fault. But spare me a reckoning. I can’t stand any more⸺”

      “No, I insist on being responsible. We can’t leave things upside down—our books in an endless muddle, our desks open, and just walk away for ever—and perhaps set up shop somewhere else?”

      “I do not feel in any mood to ‘set up shop somewhere else,’ I can assure you!”

      The unbusinesslike element in the situation she had allowed to develop for obvious reasons. She now resisted his dishonest attempt to set this right, and benefit first, as he had done, by disorder, and lastly by order.

      “We can’t, in any case, improve matters by talking. I—I, you needn’t fear for me, Sorbet. I can look after myself, only don’t let us wrangle,” with appealing gesture and saintlily smiling face, “let us part friends. Let us be worthy of each other.”

      Bertha always opposed to Tarr’s images her Teutonic lyricism, usually repeating the same phrases several times.

      This was degenerating into their routine of wrangle. Always confronted by this imperturbable, deaf and blind “generosity,” the day would end in the usual senseless “draw.” His words still remained unsaid.

      “Bertha, listen. Let us, just for fun, throw all this overboard. I mean the cargo of inflated soul-stuff that makes us go statelily, no doubt, but—Haven’t we quarrelled enough, and said these things often enough? Our quarrels have been our undoing. A long chain of little quarrels has bound us down. We should neither of us be here if it hadn’t been for them.”

      Bertha gazed at Tarr half wonderingly. She realized that something out of the ordinary was on foot.

      Tarr proceeded.

      “I have accepted from you a queer sentimental dialect of life, I should have insisted on your expressing yourself in a more logical and metropolitan speech. Let us drop it. There is no need to talk negro, baby-talk, or hybrid drivel from no-man’s-land. I don’t think we should lead a very pleasant married life—naturally. In the second place, you are not a girl who wants an intrigue, but to marry. I have been playing at fiancé with a certain pleasure in the novelty, but I experience a genuine horror at the possible consequences. I have been playing with you!”

      He said this eagerly, as though it were a point in his argument—as it was. He paused, for effect apparently.

      “You, for your part, Bertha, don’t do yourself justice when you are acting. I am in the same position. I feel this. My ill-humour occasionally falls in your direction—yours, for its part, falling in mine when I criticize your acting. We don’t act well together, and that’s a fact; though I’m sure we should be smooth enough allies off the boards of love. Your heart, Bertha, is in the right place; ah, ça⸺”

      “You are too kind!”

      “But—but I will go further! At the risk of appearing outrageously paradoxical. This heart in question is so much part of your intelligence, too⸺”

      “Thanks! Thanks!”

      “—despite your execrable fatuity as an actress! Your shrewdness and goodness give each other the hand.—But to return to my point. I had always till I met you regarded marriage as a thing beyond all argument not for me. I was unusually isolated from this idea, anyway; I had never even reflected what marriage was. You introduced me to marriage! In so doing you are responsible for all our troubles. The approach of this horrible thing, so surprisingly pleasant and friendly at nearer sight, caused revulsion of feeling beyond my control, resulting in sudden fiançailles. Like a woman luxuriously fingering some merchant’s goods, too dear for her, or not wanted enough for the big price, so I philandered with the idea of marriage.”

      This simplification put things, merely, in a new callous light. Tarr felt that she must naturally be enjoying, too, his points. He forgot to direct his exposition in such a way as to hurt her least. This trivial and tortured landscape had a beauty for him he could have explained, where her less developed sense saw nothing but a harrowing reality.

      The lunch had had the same effect on him that it was intended to have on his victim; not enough to overthrow his resolution, but enough to relax its form.

      As to Bertha, this seemed, in the main, “Sorbet all over.” There was nothing new. There was the “difference.” But it was the familiar process; he was attempting to convince himself, heartlessly, on her. Whether he would ever manage it was problematic. There was no sign of his being likely to do so more to-day than any other day. She listened; sententiously released him from time to time.

      Just as she had seemed strange to him in some way when he came in, seen through his “indifference,” so he had appeared a little odd to her. This had wiped off the dullness of habit for a moment. This husband she obstinately wanted had been recognized. She had seized him round the shoulders and clung to him, as though he had been her child that some senseless force were about to snatch.

      As to his superstition about marriage—was it not merely restlessness of youth, propaganda of Liberty, that a year or so would see in Limbo? For was he not a “marrying man”? She was sure of it! She had tried not to frighten him, and to keep “Marriage” in the background.

      So Tarr’s disquisition had no effect except for one thing. When he spoke of pleasure he derived from idea of marriage, she wearily pricked up her ears. The conviction that Tarr was a domesticated animal was confirmed from his own lips. The only result of his sortie was to stimulate her always vigilant hope and irony, both, just a little. He had intended to prepare the couch for her despair!

      His last words, affirming Marriage to be a game not worth the candle, brought a faint and “weary” smile to her face. She was once more, obviously, au bout de force.

      “Sorbert; I understand you. Do realize that. There is no necessity for all this rigmarole With me. If you think you shouldn’t marry—why, it’s quite simple! Don’t think that I would force you to marry! Oh, no!” (The training guttural unctuous accent she had in speaking English filled her discourse with natural emphasis.) “I always said that you were too young. You need a wife. You’ve just said yourself about your feeling for marriage. But you are so young!” She gazed at him with compassionate, half-smiling moistened look, as though there were something deformed about being so young. A way she had was to treat anything that obviously pointed to her as the object of pity, as though it manifestly indicated, on the contrary, him. “Yes, Sorbet, you are right,” she finished briskly. “I think it would be madness for us to marry!”

      A suggestion that their leisurely journey towards marriage was perhaps a mistake was at once seriously, and with conviction far surpassing that he had ventured on, taken up by her. She would immediately call a halt, pitch tents preliminary to turning back. A pause was necessary before beginning the return journey. Next day they would be jogging on again in the same disputed direction.

      Tarr now saw at once what had happened. His good words had been lost, all except his confession to a weakness for the matronly blandishments of Matrimony. He had an access of stupid, brief, and blatant laughter.

      As people have wondered what was at the core of the world, basing their speculations on what deepest things occasionally emerge, with violence, at its holes, so Bertha often conjectured СКАЧАТЬ