Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) by Wyndham Lewis Read Free Book Online Page B

where the Boulevard du Paradis and the Boulevard Kreutzberg * cross with their electric trams: in the middle is a pavement island, like vestige of submerged masonry. Italian models festoon it in symmetrical human groups; it is also their club.
    The Café Berne, at one side, is the club of the ‘grands messieurs du Berne.’ So you have the clap-trap Campagnia * tribe outside, in the Café twenty sluggish commonsense Germans, a Middle West group or two, drinking and playing billiards. These are the most permanent tableaux of this place, disheartening and admonitory as a Tussaud’s of the Flood. *
    Hobson and Tarr met in the Boulevard du Paradis.—They met in a gingerly, shuffling fashion: they had so many good reasons for not slowing down when they met, numbers of antecedent meetings when it would have been better if they had kept on, all pointing to
why
they
should
crush their hats over their eyes and hurry forward, so that it was a defeat and insanitary to have their bodies shuffling and gesticulating there. (‘Why cannot most people, having talked and annoyed each other once or twice, rebecome strangers simply? Oh for multitudes of divorces in our
mœurs
, more than the old vexed sex ones! Ah yes, ah yes—!’ had not Tarr once put forward, and Hobson agreed?)
    ‘Have you been back long?’ Tarr asked with despondent slowness.
    ‘No. I got back yesterday’ said Hobson, with pleasantly twisted scowl.
    (‘Heavens! one day here only, and lo I meet him.’)
    ‘How is London looking, then?’
    ‘Very much as usual.—I wasn’t there the whole time; I was in Cambridge * last week.’
    (‘I wish you’d go to hell from time to time instead of Cambridge, as it always is, you grim grim dog!’ Tarr wished behind the veil.)
    They went to the Berne to have their drink.
    They sat for some minutes with a stately discomfort of self-consciousness, staring in front of them. It was really only a dreary boiling anger with themselves and against the contradictions of civilized life; the hatred that personal diversities engender was fermenting under the camouflage of intricate accommodations and in each other’s company they were conscious of this stir. ‘Phew, phew!’—a tenuous howl, like a subterranean wind, rose from the borderland of their consciousness. There they were on the point of opening, with tired ashamed fingers, well-worn pages of their souls, soon to be muttering between their teeth the hackneyed pages to each other: in different degrees and disproportionate ways they were resentful.
    So they sat with this absurd travesty of a Quaker’s Meeting, * shyness appearing to emanate masterfully from Tarr. And in another case, with almost any one but Hobson, it might have been shyness: for Tarr had a gauche puritanical ritual of self, the result of solitary habits. Certain observances were demanded of those approaching him, and were quite gratuitously observed in return. The fetish * within—soul-dweller that is strikingly like a wood-dweller, and who was not often enough disturbed to have had the sylvan shynessmitigated—would still cling to these forms. Sometimes Tarr’s crafty daimon, * aghast at its nakedness, would manage to borrow or purloin some shape of covering from elegantly draped visitor.
    But for Hobson’s outfit Tarr had the most elaborate contempt. This was Alan Hobson’s outfit: a Cambridge cut disfigured his originally manly and melodramatic form. His father was said to be a wealthy merchant somewhere in Egypt. Very athletic, his dark and cavernous features had been constructed by nature as a lurking-place for villainies and passions: but Hobson had double-crossed his rascally sinuous body. He slouched and ambled along, neglecting his muscles: and his full-blooded blackguard’s countenance attempted to portray delicacies of common sense and gossamer-like backslidings into the inane that would have puzzled any analyst unacquainted with his peculiar training. Occasionally he would exploit his