“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 perdition 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 a drink.
They sat for some minutes with what appeared a stately discomfort of self-consciousness, staring in front of them.—It was really only a dreary, boiling anger with themselves, with the contradictions of civilized life, the immense and intricate camouflage over the hatred that personal diversities engender. “Phew, phew!” A tenuous howl, like a subterranean wind, rose from the borderland of their consciousness. They were there 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: resentful in different degrees and disproportionate ways.
And 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, and quite gratuitously observed in return. The fetish within—soul-dweller that is strikingly like wood-dweller, and who was not often enough disturbed to have had sylvan shyness mitigated—would still cling to these forms. Sometimes Tarr’s cunning idol, aghast at its nakedness, would manage to borrow or purloin some shape of covering from elegantly draped visitor.
But for Hobson’s outfit he had the greatest contempt.
This was Alan Hobson’s outfit.—A Cambridge cut disfigured his originally manly and melodramatic form. His father was a wealthy merchant somewhere in Egypt. He was very athletic, and his dark and cavernous features had been constructed by Nature as a lurking-place for villainies and passions. He was untrue to his rascally, sinuous body. He slouched and ambled along, neglecting his muscles: and his dastardly face attempted to portray delicacies of common sense, and gossamer-like backslidings into the Inane that would have puzzled a bile-specialist. He would occasionally exploit his blackguardly appearance and blacksmith’s muscles for a short time, however. And his strong, piercing laugh threw A B C waitresses into confusion.
The Art-touch, the Bloomsbury stain, was very observable. Hobson’s Harris tweeds were shabby. A hat suggesting that his ancestors had been Plainsmen or some rough sunny folk, shaded unnecessarily his countenance, already far from open.
The material for conversation afforded by a short sea voyage, an absence, a panama hat on his companion’s head, had been exhausted.—Tarr possessed no deft hand or economy of force. His muscles rose unnecessarily on his arm to lift a wine-glass to his lips. He had no social machinery, but the cumbrous one of the intellect. He danced about with this, it is true. But it was full of sinister piston-rods, organ-like shapes, heavy drills.—When he tried to be amiable, he usually only succeeded in being ominous.
It was an effort to talk to Hobson. For this effort a great bulk of nervous force was awoken. It got to work and wove its large anomalous patterns. It took the subject that was foremost in his existence and imposed it on their talk.
Tarr turned to Hobson, and seized him, conversationally, by the hair.
“Well, Walt Whitman, when are you going to get your hair cut?”
“Why do you call me Walt Whitman?”
“Would you prefer Buffalo Bill? Or is it Shakespeare?”
“It is not Shakespeare⸺”
“ ‘Roi je ne suis: prince je ne daigne.’—That’s Hobson’s choice.—But why so much hair? I don’t wear my hair long. If you had as many reasons for wearing it long as I have, we should see it flowing round your ankles!”
“I might ask you under those circumstances why you wear it short. But I expect you have good reasons for that, too. I can’t see why you should resent my innocent device. However long I wore it I should not damage you by my competition⸺”
Tarr rattled the cement match-stand on the table, and the garçon sang “Toute suite, toute suite!”
“Hobson, you were telling me about a studio to let before you left.—I forget the details⸺”
“Was it one behind the Panthéon?”
“That’s it.—Was there electric light?”
“No, I don’t think there was electric light. But I can find out for you.”
“How did you come to hear of it?”
“Through a German I know—Salle, Salla, or something.”
“What was the street?”
“The Rue Lhomond. I forget the number.”
“I’ll go and have a look at it after lunch.—What on earth possesses you to know so many Germans?” Tarr asked, sighing.
“Don’t you like Germans?—You’ve just been too intimate with one; that’s what it is.”
“Perhaps I have.”
“A female German.”
“The sex weakens the ‘German,’ surely.”
“Does it in Fräulein Lunken’s case?”
“Oh, you know her, do you?—Of course, you would know her, as she’s a German.”
Alan Hobson cackled morosely, like a very sad top-dog trying to imitate a rooster.
Tarr’s unwieldy playfulness, might in the chequered northern shade, in conjunction with nut-brown ale, gazed at by some Rowlandson—he on the ultimate borders of the epoch—have pleased by its à propos. But when the last Rowlandson dies, the life, too, that he saw should vanish. Anything that survives the artist’s death is not life, but play-acting. This homely, thick-waisted affectation!—Hobson yawned and yawned as though he wished to swallow Tarr and have done with him. Tarr yawned more noisily, rattled his chair, sat up, haggard and stiff, as though he wished to frighten this crow away. “Carrion-Crow” was Tarr’s name for Hobson: “The olde Crow of Cairo,” rather longer.
Why was he talking to this man? However, he shortly began to lay bare the secrets of his soul. Hobson opened:
“It seems to me, Tarr, that you know more Germans than I do. But you’re ashamed of it. Hence your attack. I met a Fräulein Fierspitz the other day, a German, who claimed to know you. I am always meeting Germans who know you. She also referred to you as the ‘official fiancé’ of Fräulein Lunken.—Are you an ‘official fiancé’? And if so, what is that, may I ask?”
Tarr was taken aback, it was evident. Hobson laughed stridently. The real man emerging, he came over quickly on another wave.
“You not only get to know Germans, crowds of them, on the sly; you make your bosom friend of them, engage yourself to them in marriage and make Heaven knows how many more solemn pacts, covenants, and agreements.—It’s bound all to come out some day. What will you do then?”
Tarr was recovering gracefully from his relapse into discomfort. If ever taken off his guard, he made a clever use immediately afterwards of his naïveté. He beamed on his slip. He would swallow it tranquilly, assimilating it, with ostentation, to himself. When some personal weakness slipped out he would pick it up unabashed, look at it smilingly, and put it back in his pocket.
“As you know,” he soon replied, “ ‘engagement’ is an euphemism. And, as a matter of fact, my girl publicly announced the breaking off of our engagement yesterday.”
He looked a complete child, head thrown up as though proclaiming something he had reason to be particularly proud of.—Hobson laughed