“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. They were opposites with some grave essential in common.
His usual lunch time an hour away, his so far unrevised programme was to go to the Rue Lhomond and search for Hobson’s studio. For the length of a street it was equally the road to the studio and to Bertha’s rooms. He knew to which he was going.
But a sensation of peculiar freedom and leisure possessed him. There was no hurry. Was there any hurry to go where he was going? With a smile in his mind, his face irresponsible and solemn, he turned sharply into a narrow street, rendered dangerous by motor-buses, and asked at a loge if Monsieur Lowndes were in.
“Monsieur Lounes? Je pense que oui. Je ne l’ai pas vu sortir.”
He ascended to the fourth floor and rang a bell.
Lowndes was in. He heard him coming on tiptoe to the door, and felt him gazing at him through an invisible crack. He placed himself in a favourable position.
CHAPTER III
Tarr’s idea of leisure recognized no departure from the tragic theme of existence. Pleasure could take no form that did not include Death and corruption—at present Bertha and humour. Only he wished to play a little longer. It was the last chance he might have. Work was in front of him with Bertha.
He was giving up play. But the giving up of play, even, had to take the form of play. He had seen in terms of sport so long that he had no other machinery to work with. Sport might perhaps, for the fun of the thing, be induced to cast out sport.
As Lowndes crept towards the door, Tarr said to himself, with ironic self-restraint, “Bloody fool, bloody fool!”
Lowndes was a brother artist, who was not very active, but had just enough money to be a Cubist. He was extremely proud of being interrupted in his work. His “work” was a serious matter. He found “great difficulty” in working. He always implied that you did not. He had a form of persecution mania as regards his “mornings.” From his discourse you gathered that he was, first of all, very much sought after. People, seemingly, were always attempting to get into his room. You imagined an immense queue of unwelcome visitors (how or why he had gathered or originally, it was to be supposed, encouraged, such, you did not inquire). You never saw this queue. The only person you definitely knew had been guilty of interrupting his “work” was Thornton. This man, because of his admiration for Lowndes’ intelligence and moth-like attraction for his Cubism, and respect for his small income, had to suffer much humiliation. He was to be found (even in the morning, strange to say) in Lowndes’ studio, rapidly sucking a pipe, blinking, flushing, stammering with second-rate Public School mannerisms, retailing scandal and sensational news, which he had acquired from a woman who had sat next him at the invariable dinner-party of the night before.
When you entered, he looked timidly and quickly at the inexorable Lowndes, and began gathering up his hat and books. Lowndes’ manner became withering. You felt that before your arrival, his master had been less severe; that life might have been almost bearable for Thornton. When he at last had taken himself off, Lowndes would hasten to exculpate himself. “Thornton was a fool, but he could not always keep Thornton out,” etc. Lowndes, with his Thornton, displayed the characteristics of the self-made man. He had risen ambitiously in the sphere of the Intelligence. Thornton sat like an inhabitant of the nether world of gossip, pettiness, and squalor from which his friend had lately issued. He entertained an immense respect for that friend. This one of his own kind in a position of respect and security was what he could best understand, and would have most desired to be.
“Oh! Come in, Tarr,” Lowndes said, looking at the floor of the passage, “I didn’t know who it was.” The atmosphere became thick with ghostlike intruders. The wretched Thornton seemed to hover timidly in the background.
“Am I interrupting you?” Tarr asked politely.
“No-o-o!” a long, reassuring, musical negative.
His face was very dark and slick, bald on top, pettily bearded, rather unnecessarily handsome. Tarr always felt a tinge of indecency in his good looks. His Celtic head was allied to a stocky commercial figure. Behind his spectacles his black eyes had a way of scouring and scurrying over the floor. They were often dreamy and burning. He waddled slightly, or rather confided himself first to one muscular little calf, then to the other.
Tarr had come to talk to him about Bertha.
“I’m afraid I must have interrupted your work?” Tarr said with mock ceremony.
“No, it’s all right. I was just going to have a rest. I’m rather off colour.”
Tarr misunderstood him.
“Off colour? What is the matter with colour now?”
“No, I mean I’m seedy.”
“Oh, ah. Yes.”
His eyes still fixed on the ground, Lowndes pottered about, like a dog.
As with most educated people who “do” anything, and foresee analysis and fame, he was biographically minded. A poor man, he did his Boswelling himself. His self-characterization, proceeding whenever he was not alone, was as follows: “A fussy and exacting man, slightly avuncular, strangely, despite the fineness and amplitude of his character, minute, precious, and tidy.” (In this way he made a virtue of his fuss.) To show how the general illusion worked in a particular case: “He had been disturbed in his ‘work’ by Tarr, or had just emerged from that state of wonderful concentration he called ‘work.’ He could not at once bend himself to more general things. His nerves drove him from object to object. But he would soon be quiet.”
Tarr looked on with an ugly patience.
“Lowndes, I have come to ask you for a little piece of advice.”
Lowndes was flattered