brilliant green of spring foliage hung above him, ticketing innumerably the trees. In the distance, volume behind volume, the vegetation was massed, poising sultry smoke blocks from factories in Fairyland. Its novelty, fresh yet dead, had the effectiveness of an unnecessary mirage. The charm of habit and monotony he had come to affront seemed to have coloured, chemically, these approaches to its home.
He found Bertha’s eye fixed upon him with a sort of humorous indifferent query from the window. He smiled, thinking what would be the veritable answer! On finding himself in the presence of the object of his erudite discussion, he felt he had got the focus wrong after all: this familiar life, with its ironical eye, mocked at him, too. It was aware of the subject of his late conversation. Some kind of twin of the shrewd feeling embodied in the observation ‘one can never escape from oneself’ appeared.
But that ironical unsurprised eye at the window, so vaguely à propos, offended him. It had the air of scoffing (with its quizzing downward cock, and puzzled frowning eyebrow on one side only) or ofironically welcoming the swaggering indifference he was bringing to bask in the presence of its object. He retaliated with a certain truculence he had not at all intended to display.
‘Have you had lunch yet my dear?’ he asked, as she opened the door to him—‘I’ve brought you some strawberries.’
‘I didn’t expect
you
, Sorbet. No, I have not had lunch. I was just going to get it.’ (Sorbet, or in english, Sherbet, was his love-name, a perversion of his strange second name, Sorbert.)
Bertha’s was the intellectually-fostered hellenic type of german handsomeness. It would make you think that german mothers must have replicas and photographs of the Venus of Milo * in their rooms during the first three months of their pregnancy. Of course they in fact have. Also this arid, empty intellectualist beauty is met with in german art periodicals.
Bertha had been a heavy blond westphalian * baby: her body now, a self-indulgent athlete’s, was strung to heavy motherhood. Another baby could not be long delayed. To look at a man should be almost enough to effect it.
A great believer in tepid ‘air-baths,’ * she would remain, for hours together, in a state of nudity about her rooms. At present she was wearing a pale green striped affair, tight at the waist. It looked as though meant for a smaller woman. It may have belonged to her sister. As a result, her ample form had left the fulness of a score of attitudes all over it, in flat creasings and pencillings—like the sanguine of an Italian master * in which the leg is drawn in several positions, one on top of the other.
‘What have you come for, Sorbert?’
‘To see you. What did you suppose?’
‘Oh, you
have
come to see me?’
‘I brought these things. I thought you might be hungry.’
‘Yes, I am rather.’ She stopped in the passage, Dryad-like on one foot, * and stared into the kitchen. Tarr did not kiss her. He put his hand on her hip—a way out of it—which rolled elastically beneath his fingers: with a little superficial massage he propelled her into the room. His hand remarked that she was underneath in her favourite state of nakedness. He frowned as he reflected that this might subsequently cause a hitch.
Bertha went into the kitchen with the provisions. She lived in two rooms on one side of the front door. Her friend, Fräulein Lederer, towhom she sub-let, lived on the other side of it, the kitchen promiscuously existing between, and immediately facing the entrance.
Tarr was in the studio or salon. It was a complete bourgeois-bohemian * interior. Green silk cloth and cushions of various vegetable and mineral shades covered everything, in mildewy blight. The cold repulsive shades of Islands of the Dead, * gigantic cypresses, grottoes of teutonic nymphs, had installed themselves massively in this french flat. Purple metal and leather steadily dispensed
He found Bertha’s eye fixed upon him with a sort of humorous indifferent query from the window. He smiled, thinking what would be the veritable answer! On finding himself in the presence of the object of his erudite discussion, he felt he had got the focus wrong after all: this familiar life, with its ironical eye, mocked at him, too. It was aware of the subject of his late conversation. Some kind of twin of the shrewd feeling embodied in the observation ‘one can never escape from oneself’ appeared.
But that ironical unsurprised eye at the window, so vaguely à propos, offended him. It had the air of scoffing (with its quizzing downward cock, and puzzled frowning eyebrow on one side only) or ofironically welcoming the swaggering indifference he was bringing to bask in the presence of its object. He retaliated with a certain truculence he had not at all intended to display.
‘Have you had lunch yet my dear?’ he asked, as she opened the door to him—‘I’ve brought you some strawberries.’
‘I didn’t expect
you
, Sorbet. No, I have not had lunch. I was just going to get it.’ (Sorbet, or in english, Sherbet, was his love-name, a perversion of his strange second name, Sorbert.)
Bertha’s was the intellectually-fostered hellenic type of german handsomeness. It would make you think that german mothers must have replicas and photographs of the Venus of Milo * in their rooms during the first three months of their pregnancy. Of course they in fact have. Also this arid, empty intellectualist beauty is met with in german art periodicals.
Bertha had been a heavy blond westphalian * baby: her body now, a self-indulgent athlete’s, was strung to heavy motherhood. Another baby could not be long delayed. To look at a man should be almost enough to effect it.
A great believer in tepid ‘air-baths,’ * she would remain, for hours together, in a state of nudity about her rooms. At present she was wearing a pale green striped affair, tight at the waist. It looked as though meant for a smaller woman. It may have belonged to her sister. As a result, her ample form had left the fulness of a score of attitudes all over it, in flat creasings and pencillings—like the sanguine of an Italian master * in which the leg is drawn in several positions, one on top of the other.
‘What have you come for, Sorbert?’
‘To see you. What did you suppose?’
‘Oh, you
have
come to see me?’
‘I brought these things. I thought you might be hungry.’
‘Yes, I am rather.’ She stopped in the passage, Dryad-like on one foot, * and stared into the kitchen. Tarr did not kiss her. He put his hand on her hip—a way out of it—which rolled elastically beneath his fingers: with a little superficial massage he propelled her into the room. His hand remarked that she was underneath in her favourite state of nakedness. He frowned as he reflected that this might subsequently cause a hitch.
Bertha went into the kitchen with the provisions. She lived in two rooms on one side of the front door. Her friend, Fräulein Lederer, towhom she sub-let, lived on the other side of it, the kitchen promiscuously existing between, and immediately facing the entrance.
Tarr was in the studio or salon. It was a complete bourgeois-bohemian * interior. Green silk cloth and cushions of various vegetable and mineral shades covered everything, in mildewy blight. The cold repulsive shades of Islands of the Dead, * gigantic cypresses, grottoes of teutonic nymphs, had installed themselves massively in this french flat. Purple metal and leather steadily dispensed
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