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

Butcher was a bloody wastrel enamoured of gold and liberty.—He was a romantic, educating his schoolboyish sense of adventure up to the pitch of drama. He had been induced by Tarr to develop an interest in commerce. He had started a motor business in Paris, and through circularizing the Americans resident there and using his English connexions, he was succeeding on the lines suggested.

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[20] 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?”

[21]

“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[22] 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.”

[23]

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 state as sex. So they had perhaps better keep together? I only allow myself to philander with little things. I have succeeded in shunting our noxious illusionism away from the great spaces and ambitions. I have billeted it with a bourgeoise in a villa. These things are all arranged above our heads. They are no doubt self-protective. The whole of a man’s ninety-nine per cent. of obscurer mechanism is daily engaged in[24] organizing his life in accordance with his deepest necessity. Each person boasts some notable invention of personal application only.

“So there I am fixed with my bourgeoise in my skin, dans ma peau. What is the next step?—The body is the main thing.—But I think I have made a discovery. In sex I am romantic and arriéré. It would be healthier for all sex to be so. But that is another matter. Well, I cannot see myself attracted by an exceptional woman—‘spiritual’ woman—‘noble soul,’ or even a particularly refined and witty animal.—I do not understand attraction for such beings.—Their existence appears to me quite natural and proper, but, not being as fine as men; not being as fine as pictures or poems; not being as fine as housewives or classical Mothers of Men; they appear to me to occupy an unfortunate position on this earth. No man properly demarcated as I am will have much to do with them. They are very beautiful to look at. But they are unfortunately alive, and usually cats. If you married one of them, out of pity, you would have to support the eternal grin of a Gioconda fixed complacently on you at all hours of the day, the pretensions of a piece of canvas that had sold for thirty thousand pounds. You could not put your foot through the canvas without being hanged. You would not be able to sell it yourself for that figure, and so get some little compensation. Tout au plus, if the sentimental grin would not otherwise come off, you could break its jaw, perhaps.”

Butcher flung his head up, and laughed affectedly.

“Ha ha!”—he went again.

“Very good!—Very good!—I know who you’re thinking of,” he said.

“Do you? Oh, the ‘Gioconda smile,’ you mean?—Yes.—In that instance, the man had only his silly sentimental self to blame. He has paid the biggest price given in our time for a living masterpiece. Sentimentalizing about masterpieces and sentimental prices will soon have seen their day, I expect. New masterpieces in painting will then[25] appear again, perhaps, where the live ones leagued with the old dead ones disappear.—Really, the more one considers it, the more creditable and excellent my self-organization appears. I have a great deal to congratulate myself upon.”

Butcher blinked and pulled himself together with a grave dissatisfied expression.

“But will you carry it into effect to the extent?—Will you?—Would marriage be the ideal termination?”—Butcher had a way of tearing up and beginning all over again on a new breath.

“That is what Hobson asked.—No, I don’t think marriage has anything to do with it. That is another question altogether.”

“I thought your remarks about the housewife suggested?”

“No.—My relation to the idea of the housewife is platonic. I am attracted to the housewife as I might be attracted to the milliner. But just as I should not necessarily employ the latter to make hats—I should have some other use for her—so my connexion with the other need not imply a ménage. But my present difficulty centres round that question:

“What am I to do with Fr?ulein Lunken?”

Butcher drew himself up, and hiccuped solemnly and slowly.

He did not reply.

“Once again, is marriage out of the question?” Tarr asked.

“You know yourself best. I don’t think you ought to marry.”

“Why, am I??”

“No. You wouldn’t stop with her. So why marry?”

He hiccuped again, and blinked.

Tarr gazed at his oracle with curiosity.—With eyes glassily bloodshot, it discharged its wisdom on gusts of air. Butcher was always surly about women, or rather men’s tenderness for them. He was a vindictive enemy of the sex. He stood, a patient constable, forbidding Tarr respectfully a certain road. He[26] spoke with authority and shortness, and hiccuped to convey the absolute and assured quality of his refusal.

“Well, in that case,” Tarr said, “I must make a move. I have treated Bertha very badly.”

Butcher smothered a hiccup.—He ordered another drink.

“Yes, I owe my girl anything I can give her. It is hardly my fault. With the training you get in England, how can you be expected to realize anything? The University of Humour that prevails everywhere in England as the national institution for developing youth, provides you with nothing but a first-rate means of evading reality. The whole of English training—the great fundamental spirit of the country—is a system of deadening feeling, a prescription for Stoicism. Many of the results are excellent. It saves us from gush in many cases; it is an excellent armour in times of crisis or misfortune. The English soldier gets his special cachet from it. But for the sake of this wonderful panacea—English humour—we sacrifice much. It would be better to face our Imagination and our nerves without this soporific. Once this armature breaks down, the man underneath is found in many cases to have become softened by it. He is subject to shock, oversensitiveness, and many ailments not met with in the more frank and direct races. Their superficial sensitiveness allows of a harder core.—To set against this, of course, you have the immense reserves of delicacy, touchiness, sympathy, that this envelope of cynicism has accumulated. It has served English art marvellously. But it is probably more useful for art than for practical affairs. And the artist could always look after himself. Anyhow, the time seems to have arrived in my life, as I consider it has arrived in the life of the country, to discard this husk and armour. Life must be met on other terms than those of fun and sport.”

Butcher guffawed provocatively. Tarr joined him. They both quaffed their beer.

[27]

“You’re a terrible fellow,” said Butcher. “If you had your way, you’d leave us stark naked. We should all be standing on our little island in the savage state of the Ancient Britons—figuratively.” He hiccuped.

“Yes, figuratively. But in reality the country would be armed better than it ever had been before. And by the sacrifice of these famous ‘national characteristics’ we cling to sentimentally, and which are merely the accident of a time, we should lay a soil and foundation of unspecific force, on which new and realler ‘national flavours’ would very soon sprout.”

“I quite agree,” Butcher jerked out energetically.

He ordered another lager.

“I agree with what you say. If we don’t give up dreaming, we shall get spanked. I have given up my gypsies. That was very public-spirited of me?” He looked coaxingly.

“If every one would give up their gypsies, their jokes, and their gentlemen—‘Gentlemen’ are worse than gypsies. It would do perhaps if they reduced them considerably, as you have your Gitanos.—I’m going to swear off humour for a year. I am going to gaze on even you inhumanly. All my mock matrimonial difficulties come from humour. I am going to gaze on Bertha inhumanly, and not humorously. Humour paralyses the sense for reality and wraps people in a phlegmatic and hysterical dream-world, full of the delicious swirls of the switchback, the drunkenness of the merry-go-round—screaming leaps from idea to idea. My little weapon for bringing my man to earth—shot-gun or what not—gave me good sport, too, and was of the best workmanship. I carried it slung jauntily for some time at my side—you may have noticed it. But I am in the tedious position of the man who hits the bull’s-eye every time. Had I not been disproportionately occupied with her absurdities, I should not have allowed this charming girl to engage herself to me.

“My first practical step now will be to take this[28] question of ‘engaging’ myself or not into my own hands. I shall disengage myself on the spot.”

“So long as you don’t engage yourself again next minute, and so on. If I felt that the time was not quite ripe, I’d leave it in Fr?ulein Lunken’s hands a little longer. I expect she does it better than you would.”

Butcher filled his pipe, then he began laughing. He laughed theatrically until Tarr stopped him.

“What are you laughing at?”

“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 calinerie 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.

[29]

“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.