Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (9 page)

Hobson had brightened up while this was proceeding. He now cried out:

‘You might almost. Why don’t you? I am astonished at what you tell me: but you appear to take your german foibles too much to heart.’

‘Just at present I am in the midst of a gala of the heart: you may have noticed. I’m an indifferent landlord, I haven’t the knack of handling the various personalities gathered beneath my roof. In the present instance I am really blessed: but you ought to see the sluts that get in sometimes! They all become steadily my fiancée too. Fiancée!—observe how we ape the forms of conventional life in our emancipated Bohemia:
*
it does not mean anything so one lets it stop. It’s 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 authentic “fiancées”: so it’s of no importance what we choose to call each other: one drifts along side by side with this live stock—friends, fiancées, “colleagues” and what not in our unreal gimcrack artist-society.’

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 to anyone? After all it is chiefly myself I am castigating. But you, as well, must be of the party! Yes: the right to
see
implies the right to be
seen
. As an off set for your prying scurvy way of poking your nose 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.

‘Anyone 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 pot 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! Everyone who does not contend openly and take his share of the common burden of ignominy of life is a sneak, unless it is for a solid motive. The exemption you claim is not to work in, there is no personal rationale for your privileges, you make no claim to deserve your state, only to be lucky. But against what have you exchanged your temper, your freedom, and
your fine baritone voice? 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 untidiness is a sentimental indulgence: we should insist upon every man dressing up to his income, it should be understood that he make willy-nilly a smart
fresh
appearance. Patching the seat of your trousers, instead of—!’

‘Wait a minute’ Hobson said, with a cracked laugh. ‘I don’t admit I am shabby, of course, but when you say I am sentimental because I am not fashionably dressed, I wonder if you mean that you are peculiarly free of sentimentality—?’

‘As to that I don’t care a fig, perbacco, put that away, I’m talking about
you
: let me proceed. With your training you are decked in the plumes of very fine birds indeed: but what does it amount to, 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 group of giggling invert-spinsters
*
who supply you with a fraudulent patent of superiority.’

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

‘You reply “What are the grounds of all this censure? I know I am not morally defensible, I am lazy and second-rate, that’s not my fault, 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.” ’

Hobson had a vague gesture of assent and puzzled enquiry.

‘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 lousy 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 have you not 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 hybrid of the Quaker, the homosexual and the Chelsea artist.
*
Your Oxford brothers, dating from the Wilde
*
decade, are a more muscular body: the Chelsea artists have at least no pretensions to be anything but philistine: the Quakers are powerful ruffians. You represent, my good Hobson, the
dregs
of anglo-saxon civilization: there is absolutely nothing softer upon the 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 headquarters in the suburb of Carlyle and Whistler.
*
You are concentrated, highly-organized barley-water:
*
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 infectious and prohibit you from propagating.’

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

‘A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West: it is the lost generations described in Chekov
*
over again, that any resolute power will be able to wipe up over-night, with its eyes shut. Your kind meantime make it indirectly a peril and tribulation for live things to remain in your neighbourhood. You are systematizing and vulgarizing the individual: you are the advance-copy of communism, a false millennial middle-class communism.
*
You are not an individual: you have, I repeat, no right to that hair and to that hat: you are trying to have the apple and eat it too. You should be in uniform and at work,
not
uniformly
out of uniform
and libelling the Artist by your idleness. Are you idle?’

Tarr had drawn up short, turned squarely upon Hobson, in an abrupt and disconnected voice screeching his question.

Hobson stirred resentfully in his chair: he yawned a little.

‘Am I idle, did you say?’ he asked. ‘Yes, yes, I’m not particularly industrious. But how does that affect you? You know you don’t mean all that farrago. But where are you coming to?’

‘I have explained already where I come in. It is stupid to be idle: it is the most stupid thing. The only justification for your slovenly appearance it is true is that it is perfectly emblematic.’

‘My dear Tarr, you’re a very odd stick and if you’ll allow me to say so you should take water with it.
*
But I can’t follow you at all: why should these things 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.’

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

‘You deafen me with your upside-downness. In any case my hat is my business!’ he concluded quickly, after a moment, getting up with a curling luscious laugh.

The waiter hastened towards them and they paid him.

‘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 lays about the beggar with it. When he is almost battered to pieces the man suddenly straightens out under the blows, expands, stretches; his eyes dart fire! He rises up and falls upon the poet tooth and nail: in a few seconds he has laid him out flat and is just going to finish him off, when a cop arrives. The poet is enchanted: he has accomplished something! Would it be possible I wonder to accomplish something of that sort with you? No. You are meaner-spirited than the most currish hobo. 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 misnamed wideawake,
*
at least, will have had its little drama to-day.’

Tarr knocked his hat off into the road, and stepping after it propelled it some yards farther with a running kick. Without troubling to wait for the possible upshot of this action he hurried away down the Boulevard Kreutzberg.

A
GREAT
many of Frederick Tarr’s resolutions came from his conversation. It was a tribunal to which he brought his hesitations. An active up-and-coming spirit presided over this department 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 encountered a friend who should have been met before Hobson. Then Bertha and he could have been spared.

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 stiff-shouldered jacket, of gangster cut,
*
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 business-like way. It was a sour smile, as though half his face were frozen with cocaine.
*

Butcher was the sweetest old kitten, the sham
tough guy
in excelsis.
*
He might have been described as a romantic educating his english schoolboyish sense of adventure up to the pitch of drama. He had been induced by Tarr to develop an interest in commerce: had started a motor business in Paris, and through circularizing the Americans resident there and using his english connections, he was succeeding on the lines suggested.

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

Guy Butcher 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 archly and stretching in front of his friend.

‘Where are you off to?’ Tarr asked.

‘Oh, there’s a rumour that some roumanian gypsies are encamped over by Charenton—.’
*
He smiled and waited, his entire face breaking up expectantly into arch-cunning pits and traps. Mention of ‘gypsies’ generally succeeded in drawing Tarr—Guy’s Romanys
*
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 Pernot.
*

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

‘Engaged to be married? 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?’

Tarr chewed and spat out a skein of pale tobacco, eyeing Butcher.

‘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 measured abruptness, flat but soft.

‘In that case I ought to tell her at once.’

‘That is so.’

Tarr had wings to his hips. He wore a dark morning-coat whose tails flowed behind him as he walked strongly and quickly along, and curled on either side of his lap as he sat. It was buttoned halfway down the body. He was taller than Butcher, wore glasses, had a dark skin and a steady, unamiable, impatient expression. He was clean-shaven with a shallow square jaw and straight thick mouth. His hands were square and usually hot—all these characteristics he inherited from his mother, except his height. That he seemed to have caused himself.

He impressed the stranger as having inherited himself last week, and as under a great press of business to grasp the details and resources of the concern. Not very much satisfaction at his inheritance was manifest and no arrogance. Great capacity was written all over him. As yet he did not appear to have been modified by any sedentary, sentimental or other discipline or habit: he was at his first push in an ardent and exotic world, with a good fund of passion from a somewhat frigid climate of his own. His mistakes he talked over without embarrassment—he felt them deeply. He was experimental and modest.

A rude and hard infancy, if Balzac is to be believed, is quite the best thing for development of character.
*
Thereby a child learns duplicity and hardens in defence.