Tarr (Musaicum Rediscovered Classics). Wyndham Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ Hobson must pay as well for the intimacy. He must pay Bertha Lunken afterwards.

      He felt like insisting that he should come round and apologize to her.

      “A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them. The function of a friend is to be a substitute for this defective self, to be the World and the Real without the disastrous consequences of reality.—Yet punishment is one of his chief offices.—The friend enlarges also substantially the boundaries of our solitude.”

      This was written in Tarr’s diary. He was now chastising this self he wrote of for not listening, by telling the first stranger met.—Had a friend been there he could have interceded for his ego.

      “You have followed so far?” Tarr looked with slow disdainful suspicion at Hobson’s face staring at the ground. “You have understood the nature of my secret?—Half of myself I have to hide. I am bitterly ashamed of a slovenly, common portion of my life that has been isolated and repudiated by the energies I am so proud of. ‘I am ashamed of the number of Germans I know,’ as you put it.—I have in that rôle to cower and slink away even from an old fruit-tin like you. It is useless heroically to protect that section of my life. It’s no good sticking up for it. It is not worth protecting. It is not even up to your standards. I have, therefore, to deliver it over to your eyes, and eyes of the likes of you, in the end—if you will deign to use them!—I even have to beg you to use your eyes; to hold you by the sleeve and crave a glance for an object belonging to me!

      “In this compartment of my life I have not a vestige of passion.—That is the root reason for its meanness and absurdity.—The best friend of my Dr. Jekyll would not know my Mr. Hyde, and vice versa. This rudimentary self is more starved and stupid than any other man’s. Or to put it less or more humbly, I am of that company who are reduced to looking to Socrates for a consoling lead.

      “Think of all the collages, marriages, and liaisons that you know, in which some frowsy or foolish or doll-like or log-like bitch accompanies the form of an otherwise sensible man: a dumbfounding, disgusting, and septic ghost!

      “How foul and wrong this haunting of women is!—They are everywhere!—Confusing, blurring, libelling, with their half-baked, gushing, tawdry presences! It is like a slop of children and the bawling machinery of the inside of life, always and all over our palaces. Their silly food of cheap illusion comes in between friendships, stagnates complacently around a softened mind.

      “I might almost take some credit to myself for at least having the grace to keep this bear-garden in the background.”

      Hobson had brightened up while this was proceeding.—He now said:

      “You might almost.—Why don’t you? I admire what you tell me. But you appear to take your German foibles too much to heart.”

      “Just at present I am engaged in a gala of the heart. You may have noticed that.—I am not a strict landlord with the various personalities gathered beneath my roof.—In the present case I am really blessed. But you should see the sluts that get in sometimes! They all become steadily my fiancée too.—Fiancée! Observe how one apes the forms of conventional life. It does not mean anything, so one lets it stop. Its the same with the café fools I have for friends—there’s a Greek fool, a German fool, a Russian fool—an English fool!—There are no ‘friends’ in this life any more than there are ‘fiancées.’ So it doesn’t matter. You drift on side by side with this live stock—friends, fiancées, ‘colleagues,’ and what not.”

      Hobson sat staring with a bemused seriousness at the ground.

      “Why should I not speak plainly and cruelly of my poor, ridiculous fiancée to you or any one?—After all, it is chiefly myself I am castigating.—But you, too, must be of the party! The right to see implies the right to be seen. As an offset for your prying, scurvy way of peeping into my affairs you must offer your own guts, such as they are⸺!”

      “How have I pried into your affairs?” Hobson asked with a circumspect surprise.

      “Any one who stands outside, who hides himself in a deliquescent aloofness, is a sneak and a spy⸺”

      “That seems to me to be a case of smut calling the kettle black. I should not have said that you were conspicuous⸺”

      “No.—You know you have joined yourself to those who hush their voices to hear what other people are saying!—Every one who does not fight openly and bear his share of the common burden of ignominy in life, is a sneak, unless it is for a solid motive.—The quiet you claim is not to work in.—What have you exchanged your temper, your freedom, and your fine voice against? You have exchanged them for an old hat that does not belong to you, and a shabbiness you have not merited by suffering neediness.—Your pseudo-neediness is a sentimental indulgence.—Every man should be forced to dress up to his income, and make a smart, fresh appearance.—Patching the seat of your trousers, instead⸺!”

      “Wait a minute,” Hobson said, with a laugh. “You accuse me of sentimentality in my choice of costume. I wonder if you are as free from sentimentality.”

      “I don’t care a tinker’s blue curse about that.—I am talking about you.—Let me proceed.—With your training, you are decked in the plumes of very fine birds indeed. But your plumes are not meant to fly with, but merely to slouch and skip along the surface of the earth.—You wear the livery of a ridiculous set, you are a cunning and sleek domestic. No thought can come out of your head before it has slipped on its uniform. All your instincts are drugged with a malicious languor, an arm, a respectability, invented by a set of old women and mean, cadaverous little boys.”

      Hobson opened his mouth, had a movement of the body to speak. But he relapsed.

      “You reply, ‘What is all this fuss about? I have done the best for myself.—I was not suited for any heroic station, like yours. I live sensibly and quietly, cultivating my vegetable ideas, and also my roses and Victorian lilies.—I do no harm to anybody.’ ”

      “That is not quite the case. That is a little inexact. Your proceedings possess a herdesque astuteness; in the scale against the individual weighing less than the Yellow Press, yet being a closer and meaner attack. Also you are essentially spies, in a scurvy, safe and well-paid service, as I told you before. You are disguised to look like the thing it is your function to betray—What is your position?—You have bought for eight hundred pounds at an aristocratic educational establishment a complete mental outfit, a programme of manners. For four years you trained with other recruits. You are now a perfectly disciplined social unit, with a profound esprit de corps. The Cambridge set that you represent is as observed in an average specimen, a cross between a Quaker, a Pederast, and a Chelsea artist.—Your Oxford brothers, dating from the Wilde decade, are a stronger body. The Chelsea artists are much less flimsy. The Quakers are powerful rascals. You represent, my Hobson, the dregs of Anglo-Saxon civilization!—There is nothing softer on earth.—Your flabby potion is a mixture of the lees of Liberalism, the poor froth blown off the decadent nineties, the wardrobe—leavings of a vulgar Bohemianism with its head-quarters in Chelsea!

      “You are concentrated, systematic slop.—There is nothing in the universe to be said for you.—Any efficient State would confiscate your property, burn your wardrobe, that old hat, and the rest, as infecte and insanitary, and prohibit you from propagating.”

      Tarr’s white collar shone dazzlingly in the sun.—His bowler hat bobbed and out clean lines as he spoke.

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