CHAPTER VI

Anastasya and he were dining that night in Montmartre as usual. His piece of news hovered over their conversation like a bird hesitating as to the right spot at which to establish its nest.

“I saw Bertha to-day,” he said, forcing the opening at last.

“You still see her then.”

“Yes. I married her this afternoon.”

“You _what_? What do you mean?”

“What I say, my dear. I married her.”

“You mean you⸺?” She put an imaginary ring on her finger.

“Yes. I married her at the Mairie.”

Anastasya looked blankly into him, as though he contained cheerless stretches where no living thing could grow.

“You mean to say you’ve done that!”

“Yes; I have.”

“Why?”

Tarr stopped a moment.

“Well, the alleged reason was that she is enceinte.”

“But—whose is the child?”

“Kreisler’s, she says.”

The statement, she saw, was genuine. He was telling her what he had been doing. They both immediately retired into themselves, she to distance and stow away their former dialogue and consider the meaning of this new fact; he to wait, his hand near his mouth holding a pipe, until she should have collected herself. But he began speaking first:

“Things are exactly the same as before. I was bound to do that. I had allowed her to consider herself engaged a year ago, and had to keep to that. I have merely gone back a year into the past and fulfilled a pledge, and now return to you. All is in perfect order.”

“All is _not_ in perfect order. It is Kreisler’s child to begin with, you say⸺”

“Yes, but it would be very mean to use that fact to justify one in escaping from an obligation.”

“That is sentimentality.”

“Sentimentality! Sentimentality! Cannot _we_, you and I, afford to give Bertha _that_? Sentimentality! What an absurd word that is with its fierce use in our poor modern hands! What does it mean? Has life become such an affair of economic calculation that men are too timid to allow themselves any complicated pleasures? Where there is abundance you can afford waste. Sentimentality is a cry on a level with the Simple Life! The ideal of perfect success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of Man and Perfectibility. Sentimentality is a _privilege_. It is a luxury that the crowd does not feel itself equal to, once it begins to think about it. Besides, it is different in different hands.”

“That may be true as regards sentimentality in general. But in this case you have been guilty of a popular softness⸺”

“No. Listen. I will explain something to you You said a moment ago that it was _Kreisler’s_ child. Well, that is my security! That _enables_ me to commit this folly, without too great danger. It is an earnest of the altruistic origin of the action not being forgotten!”

“But _that_—to return to _your_ words—is surely a very mean calculation?”

“Therefore it takes the softness out of the generous action it is allied to⸺”

“No. It takes its _raison d’être_ away altogether. It leaves it merely a stupid and unnecessary fact. It cancels the generosity, but leaves the fact—your marriage.”

“But the _fact itself_ is altered by that!”

“In what way? You are now married to Bertha⸺”

“Yes, but what does that mean? I married Bertha this afternoon, and here I am punctually and as usual with you this evening⸺”

“But the fact of your having married Bertha this afternoon will prevent your making any one else your wife in the future. Supposing I had a child by _you_—not by Kreisler—it would be impossible to legitimatize him. 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. They gave a party to which Fräulein Lipmann and a good many other people came. He maintained the rule of four to seven, roughly, for Bertha, with the utmost punctiliousness. Anastasya and Bertha did not meet.

Bertha’s child came, and absorbed her energies for upwards of a year. It bore some resemblance to Tarr. Tarr’s afternoon visits became less frequent. He lived now publicly with his illicit and splendid bride.

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. The cheerless and stodgy absurdity of Rose Fawcett required the painted, fine and inquiring face of Prism Dirkes.

THE END

EPILOGUE

The artists of this country make the following plain and pressing appeal to their fellow-citizens. I have heard them in the places where they meet.

(1) That in these tragic days when the forces of the nation, of intellect, of character, are being tested, they should grant more freedom to the artists and thinkers to develop their visions and ideas. That they should make an effort of sympathy. That the maudlin and the self-defensive Grin should be dropped.

(2) That the Englishman should become ashamed of his Grin as he is at present ashamed of solemnity. That he should cease to be ashamed of his “feelings”: then he would automatically become less proud of his Grin.

(3) That he should remember that seriousness and unsentimentality are quite compatible. Whereas a Grin usually accompanies loose emotionality.

(4) That in “facing the facts of existence” as he is at present compelled to do, he should allow artists to economize time in not having to circumvent and get round those facts, but to use them simply and directly.

(5) That he should restrain his vanity, and not always imagine that his leg is being pulled. A symbolism is of the nature of all human effort. There is no necessity to be literal to be in earnest. Humour, even, may be a symbol. The recognizing of a few simple facts of that sort would help much.

* * * * *

In these onslaughts on Humour I am not suggesting that anybody should laugh less over his beer or wine or forgo the consolation of the ridiculous. There are circumstances when it is a blessing. But the _worship of the ridiculous_ is the thing that should be forgone. The worship (or craze, we call it) of Charlie Chaplin is a mad substitution of a chaotic tickling for all the other more organically important ticklings of life.

Nor do I mean here that you or I, if we are above suspicion in the matter of those other fundamentals, should not allow ourselves the little scurvy totem of Charlie on the mantlepiece. It is not a grinning face we object to but a face that is mean when it is serious and that takes to its grin as a duck takes to water. We must stop grinning. You will say that I do not practise what I preach. I do: for if you look closely at my grin you will perceive that it is a very logical and deliberate grimace.

P. WYNDHAM LEWIS

1915

PRINTED AT THE COMPLETE PRESS, WEST NORWOOD, LONDON

Transcriber’s Note

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. By comparison with a later version of the book, the following changes to the text were made:

Page 33, changed “cold” to “hot” (hot if you are cold)

Page 43, “à” added (Vous êtes à mon goût)

Page 145, changed “Schensal” to “Scheusal” twice, and again on page 180.