Tarr (Musaicum Rediscovered Classics). Wyndham Lewis
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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, 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.
He impressed you 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, and no swank. Great capacity was printed all over him.—He did not appear to have been modified as yet 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 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, according to Balzac, is best for development of character. A child learns duplicity, and hardens in defence.—An enervating childhood of molly-coddling, on the other hand, such as Tarr’s, has its advantages.—He was an only child of a selfish, vigorous mother. The long foundation of delicate trustfulness and childishness makes for a store of illusion to prolong youth and health beyond the usual term. Tarr, with the Balzac upbringing, would have had a little too much character, like a rather too muscular man. As it was, he was a shade too nervous. But his confidence in the backing of character was unparalleled. You would have thought he had an iron-field behind him.
When he solicited advice, it was transparently a matter of form. But he appeared to need his own advice to come from himself in public.—Did he feel himself of more importance in public?—His relation to the world was definite and complementary. He preferred his own word to come out of the air; when, that is, issuing from his mouth, it entered either ear as an independent vibration. He was the kind of man who, if he ever should wish to influence the world, would do it so that he might touch himself more plastically through others. He would paint his picture for himself. He was capable of respect for his self-projection. It had the authority of a stranger for him.
Butcher knew that his advice was not really solicited.—This he found rather annoying, as he wanted to meddle. But his opportunity would come.—Tarr’s affairs with Bertha Lunken were very exasperating. Of all the drab, dull, and disproportionately long liaisons, that one was unique! He had accepted it as an incomprehensible and silly joke.
“She’s a very good sort. You know, she is phenomenally kind. It’s not quite so absurd as you think, my question as to whether I should marry her. Her love is quite beyond question.”
Butcher listened with a slight rolling of the eyes, which was a soft equivalent for grinding his teeth.
Tarr proceeded:
“She has a nice healthy penchant for self-immolation; not, unfortunately, directed by any considerable tact or discretion. She is apt to lie down on the altar at the wrong moment—even to mistake all sorts of unrelated things for altars. She once lay down on the pavement of the Boulevard Sebastopol, and continued to lie there heroically till, with the help of an agent, I bundled her into a cab. She is genial and fond of a gross pleasantry, very near to ‘the people’—le peuple, as she says, purringly and pityingly. All individuals who have class marked on them strongly resemble each other. A typical duchess is much more like a typical nurserymaid than she is like anybody not standardized to the same extent. So is Bertha, a bourgeoise, or rather bourgeois-Bohemian, reminiscent of the popular maiden.”
Tarr relighted his cigarette.
“She is full of good sense.—She is a high standard Aryan female, in good condition, superbly made; of the succulent, obedient, clear, peasant type. It is natural that in my healthy youth, living in these Bohemian wastes, I should catch fire. But that is not the whole of the picture. She is unfortunately not a peasant. She has German culture, and a florid philosophy of love.—She is an art-student.—She is absurd.”
Tarr struck a match for his cigarette.
“You would ask then how it is that I am still there? The peasant-girl—if such it were—would not hold you for ever; even less so the spoiled peasant.—But that’s where the mischief lies.—That bourgeois, spoiled, ridiculous element was the trap. I was innocently depraved enough to find it irresistible. It had the charm of a vulgar wall-paper, a gimcrack ornament. A cosy banality set in the midst of a rough life. Youthful exoticism has done it, the something different from oneself.”
Butcher did not roll his eyes any more. They looked rather moist. He was thinking of love and absurdities that had checkered his own past, and was regretting a downy doll. He was won over besides by Tarr’s plaidoirie, as he always was. His friend could have convinced him of anything on earth within ten minutes.
Tarr, noticing the effect of his words, laughed. Butcher was like a dog, with his rheumy eyes.
“My romance, you see, is exactly inverse to yours,” Tarr proceeded. “But pure unadulterated romanticism with me is in about the same rudimentary