Tarr. Wyndham Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ Quarter is given up to Art.—Letters and other things are round the corner.—Its rent is half paid by America. Germany occupies a sensible apartment on the second floor. A hundred square yards at its centre is a convenient space, where the Boulevard du Paradis and Boulevard Pfeifer cross with their electric trams.—In the middle is a pavement island, like vestige of submerged masonry.—Italian models festoon it in symmetrical human groups; it is also their club.—The Café Berne, at one side, is the club of the “Grands messieurs Du Berne.” So you have the clap-trap and amorphous Campagnia tribe outside, in the café twenty sluggish common-sense Germans, a Vitagraph group or two, drinking and playing billiards. These are the most permanent tableaux of this place, disheartening and admonitory as a Tussaud’s of The Flood.

      Hobson and Tarr met in the Boulevard du Paradis.—They met in a gingerly, shuffling fashion. They had so many good reasons for not slowing down when they met: crowds of little antecedent meetings all revivifying like the bacilli of a harmless fever at the sight of each other: pointing to why they should crush their hats over their eyes and hurry on, so that it was a defeat and insanitary to have their bodies shuffling and gesticulating there. “Why cannot most people, having talked and annoyed each other once or twice, rebecome strangers simply? Oh, for multitudes of divorces in our mœurs, more than the old vexed sex ones! Ah, yes: ah, yes—!” had not Tarr once put forward, and Hobson agreed?

      “Have you been back long?” Tarr asked with despondent slowness.

      “No. I got back yesterday,” said Hobson, with pleasantly twisted scowl.

      (“Heavens: One day here only, and lo! I meet him.”)

      “How is London looking, then?”

      “Very much as usual.—I wasn’t there the whole time.—I was in Cambridge last week.”

      (“I wish you’d go to perdition from time to time, instead of Cambridge, as it always is, you grim, grim dog!” Tarr wished behind the veil.)

      They went to the Berne to have a drink.

      They sat for some minutes with what appeared a stately discomfort of self-consciousness, staring in front of them.—It was really only a dreary, boiling anger with themselves, with the contradictions of civilized life, the immense and intricate camouflage over the hatred that personal diversities engender. “Phew, phew!” A tenuous howl, like a subterranean wind, rose from the borderland of their consciousness. They were there on the point of opening with tired, ashamed fingers, well-worn pages of their souls, soon to be muttering between their teeth the hackneyed pages to each other: resentful in different degrees and disproportionate ways.

      And so they sat with this absurd travesty of a Quaker’s meeting: shyness appearing to emanate masterfully from Tarr. And in another case, with almost any one but Hobson, it might have been shyness. For Tarr had a gauche, Puritanical ritual of self, the result of solitary habits. Certain observances were demanded of those approaching, and quite gratuitously observed in return. The fetish within—soul-dweller that is strikingly like wood-dweller, and who was not often enough disturbed to have had sylvan shyness mitigated—would still cling to these forms. Sometimes Tarr’s cunning idol, aghast at its nakedness, would manage to borrow or purloin some shape of covering from elegantly draped visitor.

      But for Hobson’s outfit he had the greatest contempt.

      This was Alan Hobson’s outfit.—A Cambridge cut disfigured his originally manly and melodramatic form. His father was a wealthy merchant somewhere in Egypt. He was very athletic, and his dark and cavernous features had been constructed by Nature as a lurking-place for villainies and passions. He was untrue to his rascally, sinuous body. He slouched and ambled along, neglecting his muscles: and his dastardly face attempted to portray delicacies of common sense, and gossamer-like backslidings into the Inane that would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would occasionally exploit his blackguardly appearance and blacksmith’s muscles for a short time, however. And his strong, piercing laugh threw A B C waitresses into confusion.

      The Art-touch, the Bloomsbury stain, was very observable. Hobson’s Harris tweeds were shabby. A hat suggesting that his ancestors had been Plainsmen or some rough sunny folk, shaded unnecessarily his countenance, already far from open.

      The material for conversation afforded by a short sea voyage, an absence, a panama hat on his companion’s head, had been exhausted.—Tarr possessed no deft hand or economy of force. His muscles rose unnecessarily on his arm to lift a wine-glass to his lips. He had no social machinery, but the cumbrous one of the intellect. He danced about with this, it is true. But it was full of sinister piston-rods, organ-like shapes, heavy drills.—When he tried to be amiable, he usually only succeeded in being ominous.

      It was an effort to talk to Hobson. For this effort a great bulk of nervous force was awoken. It got to work and wove its large anomalous patterns. It took the subject that was foremost in his existence and imposed it on their talk.

      Tarr turned to Hobson, and seized him, conversationally, by the hair.

      “Well, Walt Whitman, when are you going to get your hair cut?”

      “Why do you call me Walt Whitman?”

      “Would you prefer Buffalo Bill? Or is it Shakespeare?”

      “It is not Shakespeare⸺”

      “ ‘Roi je ne suis: prince je ne daigne.’—That’s Hobson’s choice.—But why so much hair? I don’t wear my hair long. If you had as many reasons for wearing it long as I have, we should see it flowing round your ankles!”

      “I might ask you under those circumstances why you wear it short. But I expect you have good reasons for that, too. I can’t see why you should resent my innocent device. However long I wore it I should not damage you by my competition⸺”

      Tarr rattled the cement match-stand on the table, and the garçon sang “Toute suite, toute suite!”

      “Hobson, you were telling me about a studio to let before you left.—I forget the details⸺”

      “Was it one behind the Panthéon?”

      “That’s it.—Was there electric light?”

      “No, I don’t think there was electric light. But I can find out for you.”

      “How did you come to hear of it?”

      “Through a German I know—Salle, Salla, or something.”

      “What was the street?”

      “The Rue Lhomond. I forget the number.”

      “I’ll go and have a look at it after lunch.—What on earth possesses you to know so many Germans?” Tarr asked, sighing.

      “Don’t you like Germans?—You’ve just been too intimate with one; that’s what it is.”

      “Perhaps I have.”

      “A female German.”

      “The sex weakens the ‘German,’ surely.”

      “Does it in Fräulein Lunken’s case?”

      “Oh, you know her, do you?—Of course, you would know her, as she’s a German.”

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