Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) by Lewis Wyndham & Scott W. Klein

Author:Lewis, Wyndham & Scott W. Klein [Lewis, Wyndham]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

PEOPLE appear with a startling suddenness sometimes out of the fog of Time and Space: so Kreisler appeared—such an apparition! Bertha did not visualize her countryman very readily: and the next day she was surprised when she saw him below her windows. He stared up at the house with eager speculation: he examined the house and studio opposite. Behind the curtains Bertha stood with the emotions of an ambushed sharp-shooter; she felt on her face the blankness of the house wall, all her body was as unresponsive as a brick: the visitor beneath appeared almost to be looking at her face, magnified and exposed instead of at the walls of the house and its windows.

Then it appeared to her that it was he, the enemy, getting in: she wished to stop him there, before he came any farther: he was a bandit, a house-breaker, after all a dangerous violent person.

Yet in the processes of his uncertainty he looked so innocuous and distant, for the moment. His first visit: there he was, so far, a stranger. Why should these little obstacles of strangeness—which gate to enter, which bell to ring—be taken away from this particular individual? He should remain ‘stranger’ for her, where he came from: she did not want him any nearer to her. But he had burrowed his way through, was at the bell already, and would soon be at herself: he would be at her! He would be breaking into her: she did not wish him inside, he was well enough where he was. She found here, in her room, was very different from she found outside, in restaurant or street: the clothing of this décor was a nakedness: she revolted immobile and alarmed.

For a moment she struggled up from the obstinate dream, made of artificial but tenacious sentiments, shaped by ‘contretemps’* of all sorts which had been accumulating like a snow-ball ever since her last interview with Tarr. Still somewhat rapt in this interview she rolled in its nightmarish, continually metamorphosed substance, through Space: where would it land her—this electric, directionless, vital affair? The ‘Indifference’ and the ‘Difference,’ they had floated her, successfully, away in some direction. Again the bell rang: then the knocker, the little copper gargoyle, began to thunder. She could see him, almost, through the wall, standing phlegmatic and erect. They had not spoken yet: but they had been some minutes ‘in touch.’

Perhaps this visitor was after all mad? Elsa, with her warnings for her, came into her mind: however much she resisted the facts, there was very little reason for this meeting. It was now unnecessary. It had been exploded actually by Anastasya. She was going through with something that no longer meant anything at all.

As the bell rang a third time she walked to the door. Kreisler was a little haggard, different from the day before. He had expected to be asked in: instead, hardly saying anything, she came out on the narrow landing and closed the door behind her with a bang.

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