Tarr (Musaicum Rediscovered Classics). Wyndham Lewis

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      Tarr had drawn up short, turned squarely on Hobson; in an abrupt and disconnected voice he asked his question.

      Hobson stirred resentfully in his chair. He yawned a little. He replied:

      “Am I idle, did you say? Yes, I suppose I am not particularly industrious. But how does that affect you? You know you don’t mean all that nonsense. Vous vous moquez de moi! Where are you coming to?”

      “I have explained already where I come in. It is stupid to be idle. You go to seed.—The only justification for your slovenly appearance, it is true, is that it is ideally emblematic.”

      “My dear Tarr, you’re a strange fellow. I can’t see why these things should occupy you.—You have just told me a lot of things that may be true or may not. But at the end of them all—? Et alors?—alors?—quoi? one asks. You contradict yourself. You know you don’t think what you talk. You deafen me with your upside-downness.”

      He gesticulated, got the French guttural r with satisfaction, and said the quoi rather briskly.

      “In any case my hat is my business!” he concluded quickly, after a moment, getting up with a curling, luscious laugh.

      The garçon hurried up and they paid.

      “No, I am responsible for you.—I am one of the only people who see. That is a responsibility.”—Tarr walked down the boulevard with him, speaking in his ear almost, and treading on his toes.

      “You know Baudelaire’s fable of the obsequious vagabond, cringing for alms? For all reply, the poet seizes a heavy stick and belabours the beggar with it. The beggar then, when he is almost beaten to a pulp, suddenly straightens out beneath the blows; expands, stretches; his eyes dart fire! He rises up and falls on the poet tooth and nail. In a few seconds he has laid him out flat, and is just going to finish him off, when an agent arrives.—The poet is enchanted. He has accomplished something!

      “Would it be possible to achieve a work of that description with you? No. You are meaner-spirited than the most abject tramp. I would seize you by the throat at once if I thought you would black my eye. But I feel it my duty at least to do this for your hat. Your hat, at least, will have had its little drama to-day.”

      Tarr knocked his hat off into the road.—Without troubling to wait for the results of this action, he hurried away down the Boulevard du Paradis.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      A great many of Frederick Tarr’s resolutions came from his conversation. It was a tribunal to which he brought his hesitations. An active and hustling spirit presided over this section of his life.

      Civilized men have for conversation something of the superstitious feeling that ignorant men have for the written or the printed word.

      Hobson had attracted a great deal of steam to himself. Tarr was unsatisfied.—He rushed away from the Café Berne still strong and with much more to say. He rushed towards Bertha to say it.

      A third of the way he came on a friend who should have been met before Hobson. Then Bertha and he could have been spared.

      Butcher was a bloody wastrel enamoured of gold and liberty.—He was a romantic, educating his schoolboyish sense of adventure up to the pitch of drama. He had been induced by Tarr to develop an interest in commerce. He had started a motor business in Paris, and through circularizing the Americans resident there and using his English connexions, he was succeeding on the lines suggested.

      Tarr had argued that an interest of this sort would prevent him from becoming arty and silly.—Tarr would have driven his entire circle of acquaintances into commerce if he could. He had at first cherished the ambition of getting Hobson into a bank in South Africa.

      As he rushed along then a gaunt car met him, rushing in the opposite direction. Butcher’s large red nose stood under a check cap phenomenally peaked. A sweater and Yankee jacket exaggerated his breadth. He was sunk in horizontal massiveness in the car—almost in the road. A quizzing, heavy smile broke his face open in an indifferent businesslike way. It was a sour smile, as though half his face were frozen with cocaine.—He pulled up with the air of an Iron-Age mechanic, born among beds of embryonic machinery.

      “Ah, I thought I might see you.”—He rolled over the edge and stood grinning and stretching in front of his friend.

      “Where are you off to?” Tarr asked.

      “I heard there were some gypsies encamped over by Charenton.”—He smiled and waited, his entire face breaking up expectantly into cunning pits and traps.—Mention of “gypsies” usually drew Tarr. They were a survival of Butcher’s pre-motor days.

      “Neglecting business?” was all Tarr said however. “Have you time for a drink?”

      “Yes!” Butcher turned with an airy jerk to his car. “Shall we go to the Panthéon?”

      “How about the Univers? Would that take long?”

      “The Univers? Four or five minutes.—Jump in.”

      When they had got to the Univers and ordered their drink, Tarr said:

      “I’ve just been talking to Alan Hobson. I’ve been telling him off.”

      “That’s right.—How had he deserved it?”

      “Oh, he happened to drop on me when I was thinking about my girl. He began congratulating me on my engagement. So I gave him my views on marriage, and then wound up with a little improvisation about himself.”

      Butcher maintained a decorous silence, drinking his beer.

      “You’re not engaged to be married, are you?” he asked.

      “Well, that’s a difficult question.”—Tarr laughed with circumspection and softness. “I don’t know whether I am or whether I’m not.”

      “Would it be the German girl, if you were?”

      “Yes, she’d be the one.”

      There was a careful absence of comment in Butcher’s face.

      “Ought I to marry the Lunken?”

      “No,” Butcher said with measure.

      “In that case I ought to tell her at once.”

      “That is so.”

      Tarr had a dark morning coat, whose tails flowed behind him as he walked strongly and quickly along, and curled on either side of his hips as he sat. It was buttoned half-way down the body.—He was taller than Butcher, wore glasses, СКАЧАТЬ