Tarr (Musaicum Rediscovered Classics). Wyndham Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ relation to the idea of the housewife is platonic. I am attracted to the housewife as I might be attracted to the milliner. But just as I should not necessarily employ the latter to make hats—I should have some other use for her—so my connexion with the other need not imply a ménage. But my present difficulty centres round that question:

      “What am I to do with Fräulein Lunken?”

      Butcher drew himself up, and hiccuped solemnly and slowly.

      He did not reply.

      “Once again, is marriage out of the question?” Tarr asked.

      “You know yourself best. I don’t think you ought to marry.”

      “Why, am I⸺?”

      “No. You wouldn’t stop with her. So why marry?”

      He hiccuped again, and blinked.

      Tarr gazed at his oracle with curiosity.—With eyes glassily bloodshot, it discharged its wisdom on gusts of air. Butcher was always surly about women, or rather men’s tenderness for them. He was a vindictive enemy of the sex. He stood, a patient constable, forbidding Tarr respectfully a certain road. He spoke with authority and shortness, and hiccuped to convey the absolute and assured quality of his refusal.

      “Well, in that case,” Tarr said, “I must make a move. I have treated Bertha very badly.”

      Butcher smothered a hiccup.—He ordered another drink.

      “Yes, I owe my girl anything I can give her. It is hardly my fault. With the training you get in England, how can you be expected to realize anything? The University of Humour that prevails everywhere in England as the national institution for developing youth, provides you with nothing but a first-rate means of evading reality. The whole of English training—the great fundamental spirit of the country—is a system of deadening feeling, a prescription for Stoicism. Many of the results are excellent. It saves us from gush in many cases; it is an excellent armour in times of crisis or misfortune. The English soldier gets his special cachet from it. But for the sake of this wonderful panacea—English humour—we sacrifice much. It would be better to face our Imagination and our nerves without this soporific. Once this armature breaks down, the man underneath is found in many cases to have become softened by it. He is subject to shock, oversensitiveness, and many ailments not met with in the more frank and direct races. Their superficial sensitiveness allows of a harder core.—To set against this, of course, you have the immense reserves of delicacy, touchiness, sympathy, that this envelope of cynicism has accumulated. It has served English art marvellously. But it is probably more useful for art than for practical affairs. And the artist could always look after himself. Anyhow, the time seems to have arrived in my life, as I consider it has arrived in the life of the country, to discard this husk and armour. Life must be met on other terms than those of fun and sport.”

      Butcher guffawed provocatively. Tarr joined him. They both quaffed their beer.

      “You’re a terrible fellow,” said Butcher. “If you had your way, you’d leave us stark naked. We should all be standing on our little island in the savage state of the Ancient Britons—figuratively.” He hiccuped.

      “Yes, figuratively. But in reality the country would be armed better than it ever had been before. And by the sacrifice of these famous ‘national characteristics’ we cling to sentimentally, and which are merely the accident of a time, we should lay a soil and foundation of unspecific force, on which new and realler ‘national flavours’ would very soon sprout.”

      “I quite agree,” Butcher jerked out energetically.

      He ordered another lager.

      “I agree with what you say. If we don’t give up dreaming, we shall get spanked. I have given up my gypsies. That was very public-spirited of me?” He looked coaxingly.

      “If every one would give up their gypsies, their jokes, and their gentlemen—‘Gentlemen’ are worse than gypsies. It would do perhaps if they reduced them considerably, as you have your Gitanos.—I’m going to swear off humour for a year. I am going to gaze on even you inhumanly. All my mock matrimonial difficulties come from humour. I am going to gaze on Bertha inhumanly, and not humorously. Humour paralyses the sense for reality and wraps people in a phlegmatic and hysterical dream-world, full of the delicious swirls of the switchback, the drunkenness of the merry-go-round—screaming leaps from idea to idea. My little weapon for bringing my man to earth—shot-gun or what not—gave me good sport, too, and was of the best workmanship. I carried it slung jauntily for some time at my side—you may have noticed it. But I am in the tedious position of the man who hits the bull’s-eye every time. Had I not been disproportionately occupied with her absurdities, I should not have allowed this charming girl to engage herself to me.

      “My first practical step now will be to take this question of ‘engaging’ myself or not into my own hands. I shall disengage myself on the spot.”

      “So long as you don’t engage yourself again next minute, and so on. If I felt that the time was not quite ripe, I’d leave it in Fräulein Lunken’s hands a little longer. I expect she does it better than you would.”

      Butcher filled his pipe, then he began laughing. He laughed theatrically until Tarr stopped him.

      “What are you laughing at?”

      “You are a nut! Ha! ha! ha!”

      “How am I a nut? You must be thinking about your old machine out there.”

      Butcher composed himself—theatrically.

      “I was laughing at you. You repent of your thoughtlessness, and all that. Your next step is to put it right. I was laughing at the way you go about it. You now proceed kindly but firmly to break off your engagement and discard the girl. That is very neat.”

      “Do you think so? Well, perhaps it is a trifle over-tidy. I hadn’t looked at it in that way.”

      “You can’t be too tidy,” Butcher said dogmatically. He talked to Tarr, when a little worked up, as Tarr talked to him. He didn’t notice that he did. It was partly câlinerie and flattery.

      Tarr pulled out a very heavy and determined-looking watch. He would have suffered had he been compelled to use a small watch. For the time to be microscopic and noiseless would be unbearable. The time must be human. That he insisted on. And it must not be pretty or neat.

      “It is late. I must go. Must you get back to Passy or can you stop?”

      “Do you know, I’m afraid I must get back. I have to lunch with a fellow at one, who is putting me on to a good thing. But can I take you anywhere? Or are you lunching here?”

      “No.—Take me as far as the Samaritaine, will you?”

      Butcher took him along two sides of the Louvre, to the river.

      “Good-bye, then. Don’t forget Saturday, six o’clock.”

      Butcher nodded in bright, clever silence. He shuffled into his car again, working his shoulders like a verminous tramp. He rushed away, piercing blasts from his horn rapidly softening as he became smaller. Tarr was glad he had brought the car and Butcher together. СКАЧАТЬ