On August the tenth Tarr had an appointment with Anastasya at his studio in Montmartre. They had arranged to dine in Montmartre. It was their seventh meeting. He had just done his daily cure. He hurried back and found her lounging against the door, reading the newspaper.

“Ah, there you are! You’re late, Mr. Tarr.”

“Am I? I’m sorry. Have you been waiting long?”

“Not very. Fr?ulein Lunken?”

“She—I couldn’t get away.”

“No, it is difficult to get away, apparently.”

He let her in. He was annoyed at the backwardness of his senses. His mind stepped in, determined to do their business for them. He put his arm round[289] her waist, and planting his lips fully on hers, began kissing her. He slipped his hands sideways beneath her coat, and pressed an athletic, sinuous hulk against him. The various bulging and retreating contact of her body brought monotonous German reminders.

It was the first time he had kissed her. She showed no bashfulness or disinclination, but no return. Was she in the unfortunate position of an unawakened mass; and had she so rationalized her intimate possessions that there was no precocious fancy left until mature animal ardour was set up? He felt as though he were embracing a tiger, who was not unsympathetic, but rather surprised. Perhaps he had been too sudden. He ran his hand upwards along her body. All was statuesquely genuine. She took his hand away.

“We haven’t come to that yet,” she said.

“Haven’t we!”

“I didn’t think we had.”

Smiling at each other, they separated.

“Let me take your coat off. You’ll be hot in here.”

Her coat was all in florid redundancies of heavy cloth, like a Tintoretto dress. Underneath she was wearing a very plain dark blouse and skirt, like a working girl, which exaggerated the breadth and straightness of her shoulders. Not to sentimentalize it, she had open-work stockings on underneath, such as the genuine girl would have worn on her night out, at one and eleven-three the pair.

“You look very well,” Tarr said.

“I put these on for you.”

Tarr had, while he was kissing her, found his senses again. They had flared up in such a way that the reason had been offended, and resisted. Hence some little conflict. They were not going to have the credit?!

He became shy. He was ashamed of his sudden interest, which had been so long in coming, and instinctively hid it. He was committed to the r?le of a reasonable man.

[290]

“I am very flattered at your thinking of me in that way. I am afraid I do not deserve?”

“I want you to deserve, though. You are absurd about women. You are like a schoolboy!”

“Oh, you’ve noticed that?”

“It doesn’t require much?”

She lay staring at him in a serious way. Squashed up as she was lying, a very respectable bulk of hip filled the space between the two arms of the chair, not enough to completely satisfy a Dago, but too’ much to please a dandy of the west. He compared this opulence with Bertha’s and admitted that it outdid his fiancée’s. He did this childish measuring in the belief that he was not observed.

“You are extremely recalcitrant to intelligence, aren’t you?” she said.

“In women, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I am. My tastes are simple.”

“I don’t know anything about your tastes, of course. I’m guessing.”

“You can take it that you are right.”

He began to feel extremely attracted to this intelligent head. He had been living for the last week or so in the steady conviction that he should never get the right sensual angle with this girl. It was a queer feeling, after all, to see his sensuality speaking sense. He would marry her.

“Well,” she said, with pleasant American accent in speaking English, “I feel you see some disability in sensible women that does not exist. It doesn’t irritate you too much to hear a woman talking about it?”

“Of course not—you. You are so handsome. I shouldn’t like it if you were less so. Such good looks” (he rolled his eyes appreciatively) “get us out of arty coldness. You are all right. The worst of looks like yours is that sense has about the same effect as nonsense. Sense is a delightful anomaly just as rot would be! You don’t require words or philosophy. But they give one a pleasant tickling all the same.”

[291]

“I am glad you are learning. However, don’t praise me like that. It makes me a little shy. I know how you feel about women. You feel that good sense gets in the way.”

“It interferes with the senses, you mean? I don’t think I feel that altogether?”

“You feel I’m not a woman, don’t you? Not properly a woman, like your Bertha. There’s no mistake about her!”

“One requires something unconscious, perhaps. I’ve never met any woman who interested me but was ten times more stupid than I. I want to be alone in those things. I like it to be subterranean as well.”

“Well, I have a cave! I’ve got all that, too. I promise you.”

Her promise was slow and lisping. Tarr once more had to deal with himself.

“I—am—a woman; not a man. That is the fact.” (“Fact” was long and American.) “You don’t realize that—I assure you I am!” She looked at him with a soft, steady smile, that drew his gaze and will into her, rather than imposed itself on him.

“I know.” He felt that there was not much to say.

“No, you know far less than you think. See here; I set out thinking of you in this way—‘Nothing but a female booby will please that man!’ I wanted to please you, but I couldn’t do it on those lines. I’m going to make an effort along my own lines. You are like a youngster who hasn’t got used to the taste of liquor; you don’t like it. You haven’t grown up yet. I want to make you drunk and see what happens!”

She had her legs crossed. Extremely white flesh showed above the black Lisle silk, amidst linen as expensive as the outer cloth was plain. This clever alternating of the humble and gorgeous! Would the body be plain? The provocation was merely a further argument. It said, “Young man, what is there you find in your Bertha that cannot be provided along with superior sense?” His Mohammedan eye[292] did not refuse the conventional bait. His butcher’s sensibility pressed his fancy into professional details. What with her words and her acts he was in a state of strong confusion.

She jumped up and put on her coat, like a ponderous curtain showering down to her heels. Peep-shows were ended!

“Come, let’s have some dinner. I’m hungry. We can discuss this problem better after a beefsteak!” A Porterhouse would have fitted, Tarr thought.

He followed obediently and silently. He was glad that Anastasya had taken things into her hands. The positions that these fundamental matters got him into! Should he allow himself to be overhauled and reformed by this abnormal beauty? He was not altogether enjoying himself. He felt a ridiculous amateur. He was a butcher in his spare moments. This immensely intellectual ox, covered with prizes and pedigrees, overwhelmed him. You required not a butcher, but an artist, for that! He was not an artist in anything but oil-paint. Oil-paint and meat were singularly alike. They had reciprocal potentialities. But he was afraid of being definitely distracted.

The earlier coldness all appeared cunning; his own former coldness was the cunning of destiny.

He felt immensely pleased with himself as he walked down the Boulevard Clichy with this perfect article rolling and sweeping beside him. No bourgeoise this time! He could be proud of this anywhere! Absolute perfection! Highest quality obtainable. “The face that launched a thousand ships.” A thousand ships crowded in her gait. There was nothing highfalutin about her, Burne-Jonesque, Grail-lady, or Irish-romantic. Perfect meat, perfect sense, accent of Minnesota, music of the Steppes! And all that was included under the one inadequate but pleasantly familiar heading, German. He became more and more impressed with what was German about her.

He took her to a large, expensive, and quiet[293] restaurant. They began with oysters. He had never eaten oysters before. Prudence had prevented him. She laughed very much at this.

“You are a savage, Tarr!” The use of his surname was a tremendous caress. “You are afraid of typhoid, and your palate is as conservative as an ox’s. Give me a kiss!”

She put her lips out; he kissed them with solemnity and concentration, adjusting his glasses afterwards.

They discussed eating for some time. He discovered he knew nothing about it.

“Why, man, you never think!”

Tarr considered. “No, I’m not very observant in many things. But I have a defence. All that part of me is rudimentary. But that is as it should be.”

“How—as it should be?”

“I don’t disperse myself. I specialize on necessities.”

“Don’t you call food??”

“Not in the way you’ve been considering it. Listen. Life is art’s rival and vice versa.”

“I don’t see the opposition.”

“No, because you mix them up. You are the archenemy of any picture.”

“I? Nonsense! But art comes out of life, in any case. What is art?”

“My dear girl—life with all the nonsense taken out of it. Will that do?”

“Yes. But what is art—especially?” She insisted with her hands on a plastic answer. “Are we in life, now? What is art?”

“Life is anything that could live and die. Art is peculiar; it is anything that lives and that yet you cannot imagine as dying.”

“Why cannot art die? If you smash up a statue, it is as dead as a dead man.”

“No, it is not. That is the difference. It is the God, or soul, we say, of the man. It always has existed, if it is a true statue.”

“But cannot you say of some life that it could not die?”

[294]

“No, because in that case it is the real coming through. Death is the one attribute that is peculiar to life. It is the something that it is impossible to imagine in connexion with art. Reality is entirely founded on this fact, that of Death. All action revolves round that, and has it for motif. The purest thought is totally ignorant of death. Death means the perpetual extinction of impertinent sparks. But it is the key of life.”

“But what is art? You are talking about it as though I knew what it was!”

“What is life, do you know? Well, I know what art is in the same way.”

“Yes, but I ask you as a favour to define it for me. A picture is art, a living person is life. We sitting here are life; if we were talking on a stage we should be art. How would you define art?”

“Well, let’s take your example. But a picture, and also the actors on a stage, are pure life. Art is merely what the picture and the stage-scene represent, and what we now, and any living person as such, only, do not. That is why you can say that the true statue can be smashed, and yet not die.”

“Still, what is it? What is art?”

“It is ourselves disentangled from death and accident.”

“How do you know?”

“I feel that is so, because I notice that that is the essential point to grasp. Death is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person.”

Both their faces lost some of their colour, hers her white, his his yellow. They flung themselves upon each other like waves. The fuller stream came from him.

“You say that the actors on the stage are pure life, yet they represent something that we do not. But ‘all the world’s a stage,’ isn’t it? So how do we not also stand for that something?”

[295]

“Yes, life does generally stand for that something too; but it only emerges and is visible in art.”

“Still I don’t know what art is!”

“You ought to by this time. However, we can go further. Consider the content of what we call art. A statue is art, as you said; you are life. There is bad art and bad life. We will only consider the good. A statue, then, is a dead thing; a lump of wood or stone. Its hues and masses are its soul. Anything living, quick and changing, is bad art, always; naked men and women are the worst art of all, because there are fewer semi-dead things about them. The shell of the tortoise, the plumage of a bird, makes these animals approach nearer to art. Soft, quivering and quick flesh is as far from art as an object can be.”

“Art is merely the dead, then?”

“No, but deadness is the first condition of art. A hippopotamus’s armoured hide, a turtle’s shell, feathers or machinery on the one hand; that opposed to naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life, along with infinite elasticity and consciousness of movement, on the other.

“Deadness, then,” Tarr went on, “in the limited sense in which we use that word is the first condition of art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental............