Tarr. Wyndham Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ appeared. She had often heard grondements, grumblings, quite literally, and seen unpleasant lights, belonging, she knew, to other categories of matter. But they never broke cover.

      At present this gaiety was interpreted as proof that she had been right. There was nothing in what he had said. It had been only one of his bad fits of rebellion.

      But laughter Tarr felt was retrogression. Laughter must be given up. He must in some way, for both their sakes, lay at once the foundations of an ending.

      For a few minutes he played with the idea of affecting her weapons. Perhaps it was not only impossible to overcome, but even to approach, or to be said to be on the same field with, this peculiar amazon, without such uniformity of engines of attack or defence. Should not he get himself a mask like hers at once, and follow suit with some emphatic sentence? He stared uncertainly at her. Then he sprang to his feet. He intended, as far as he could see beyond this passionate movement (for he must give himself up to the mood, of course) to pace the room. But his violence jerked out of him a shout of laughter. He went stamping about the floor roaring with reluctant mirth. It would not come out properly, too, except the first outburst.

      “Ay. That’s right! Go on! Go on!” Bertha’s patient irony seemed to gibe.

      This laughter left him vexed with himself, like a fit of tears. “Humour and pathos are such near twins, that Humour may be exactly described as the most feminine attribute of man, and the only one of which women show hardly any trace! Jokes are like snuff, a slatternly habit,” said Tarr to Butcher once, “whereas tragedy (and tears) is like tobacco, much drier and cleaner. Comedy being always the embryo of Tragedy, the directer nature weeps. Women are of course directer than men. But they have not the same resources.”

      Butcher blinked. He thought of his resources, and remembered his inclination to tears.

      Tarr’s disgust at this electric rush of sound made him turn it on her. He was now put at a fresh disadvantage. How could he ever succeed in making Bertha believe that a person who laughed immoderately meant what he said? Under the shadow of this laugh all his ensuing acts or words must toil, discredited in advance.

      Desperately ignoring accidents, he went back beyond his first explosion, and attacked its cause—indicting Bertha, more or less, as responsible for the disturbance.

      He sat down squarely in front of her, hardly breathed from his paroxysm, getting launched without transition. He hoped, by rapid plunging from one state to another, to take the wind out of the laugh’s sails. It should be left towering, spectral, but becalmed, behind.

      “I don’t know from which side to approach you, Bertha. You frequently complain of my being thoughtless and spoilt. But your uncorked solemnity is far more frivolous than anything I can manage.—Excuse me, of course, for speaking in this way!—Won’t you come down from your pedestal just for a few minutes?” And he “sketched,” in French idiom, a gesture, as though offering her his hand.

      “My dear Sorbert, I feel far from being on any pedestal! There’s too little of the pedestal, if anything, about me. Really, Sorbet,” (she leant towards him with an abortive movement as though to take his hand) “I am your friend; believe me!” (Last words very quick, with nod of head and blink of eyes.) “You worry yourself far too much. Don’t do so. You are in no way bound to me. If you think we should part—let us part!”

      The “let us part!” was precipitate, strenuous Prussian, almost truculent.

      Tarr thought: “Is it cunning, stupidity, disease or what?”

      She continued of a sudden, shunting on to another track of generosity:

      “But I agree. Let us be franker. We waste too much time talking, talking. You are different to-day, Sorbet. What is it? If you have met somebody else⸺”

      “If I had I’d tell you. There is besides nobody else to meet. You are unique!”

      “Some one’s been saying something to you⸺”

      “No. I’ve been saying something to somebody else. But it’s the same thing.”

      With half-incredulous, musing, glimmering stare she drew in her horns.

      Tarr meditated. “I should have known that. I am asking her for something that she sees no reason to give up. Next her goût for me, it is the most valuable thing she possesses. It is indissolubly mixed up with the goût. The poor heightened self she laces herself into is the only consolation for me and all the troubles I spring on her. And I ask her brutally to ‘come down from her pedestal.’ I owe even a good deal to that pedestal, I expect, as regards her goût. This blessed protection Nature has given her, I, a minute or two before leaving her, make a last inept attempt to capture or destroy. Her good sense is contemptuous and indignant. It is only in defence of this ridiculous sentimentality that she has ever shown her teeth. This illusion has enabled her to bear things so long. It now stands ready with Indian impassibility to manœuvre her over the falls or rapids of Parting. The scientific thing to do, I suppose, my intention being generous, would be to flatter and increase in some way this idea of herself. I should give her some final and extraordinary opportunity of being ‘noble.’ ”

      He looked at her a moment, in search of inspiration.

      “I must not be too vain. I exaggerate the gravity of the hit. As to my attempted rape—see how I square up when she shows signs of annexing my illusion. We are really the whole time playing a game of grabs and dashes at each other’s fairy vestment of Imagination. Only hers makes her very fond of me, whereas mine makes me see any one but her. Perhaps this is why I have not been more energetic in my prosecution of the game, and have allowed her to remain in her savage semi-naked state of pristine balderdash. Why has she never tried to modify herself in direction of my ‘taste’? From not daring to leave this protective fanciful self, while I still kept all my weapons? Then her initiative. She does nothing it is the man’s place to do. She remains ‘woman’ as she would say. Only she is so intensely alive in her passivity, so maelstromlike in her surrender, so cataclysmic in her sacrifice, that very little remains to be done. The man’s position is a mere sinecure. Her charm for me.”

      To cover reflection, he set himself to finish lunch. The strawberries were devoured mechanically, with unhungry itch to clear the plate. He had become just a devouring-machine, restless if any of the little red balls still remained in front of it.

      Bertha’s eyes sought to carry her out of this Present. But they had broken down, depositing her, so to speak, somewhere half-way down the avenue.

      Tarr got up, a released automaton, and walked to the cloth-covered box where he had left his hat and stick. Then he returned in some way dutifully and obediently to the same seat, sat there for a minute, hat on knee. He had gone over and taken it up without thinking. He only realized, once back, what it meant. Nothing was settled, he had so far done more harm than good. The presence of the hat and stick on his knees, however, was like the holding open of the front door already. Anything said with them there could only be like words said as an afterthought, on the threshold. It was as though, hat on head, he were standing with his hand on the door-knob, about to add some trifle to a thing already fixed. He got up, walked back to where he had picked up the hat and stick, placed them as they were before, then returned to the window.

      What should be done now? He seemed to have played all his fifty-two cards. Everything to “be done” looked behind him, not awaiting him at all. That passive pose of Bertha’s was not encouraging. It had lately withstood stoically a good deal, was quite ready to absorb СКАЧАТЬ