Tarr. Wyndham Lewis

any given time whether I am engaged or not. I leave all that sort of thing entirely in her hands. After a severe quarrel I am pretty certain that I am temporarily unattached, the link publicly severed somewhere or other.”

      “Possibly that is what is meant by ‘official fiancé’?”

      “Very likely.”

      He had been hustled—through his vanity, the Cairo Cantabian thought—somewhere where the time could be passed. He did not hesitate to handle Tarr’s curiosities.—It is a graceful compliment to offer the nectar of some ulcer to your neighbour. The modern man understands his udders and taps.—With an obscene heroism Tarr displayed his. His companion wrenched at it with malice. Tarr pulled a wry face once or twice at the other’s sans gêne. But he was proud of what he could stand. He had a hazy image of a shrewd old countryman in contact with the sharpness of the town. He would not shrink. He would roughly outstrip his visitor.—“Ay, I have this the matter with me—a funny complaint?—and that, and that, too.—What then?—Do you want me to race you to that hill?”

      He obtruded complacently all he had most to be ashamed of, conscious of the power of an obsessing weakness.

      “Will you go so far in this clandestine life of yours as to marry anybody?” Hobson proceeded.

      “No.”

      Hobson stared with bright meditative sweetness down the boulevard.

      “I think there must be a great difference between your way of approaching Germans and mine,” he said.

      “Ay: it is different things that takes us respectively amongst them.”

      “You like the national flavour, all the same.”

      “I like the national flavour!”—Tarr had a way of beginning a reply with a parrot-like echo of the words of the other party to the dialogue; also of repeating sotto voce one of his own sentences, a mechanical rattle following on without stop. “Sex is nationalized more than any other essential of life. In this it is just the opposite to art.—There is much pork and philosophy in German sex.—But then if it is the sex you are after, it does not say you want to identify your being with your appetite. Quite the opposite. The condition of continued enjoyment is to resist assimilation.—A man is the opposite of his appetite.”

      “Surely, a man is his appetite.”

      “No, a man is always his last appetite, or his appetite before last; and that is no longer an appetite.—But nobody is anything, or life would be intolerable, the human race collapse.—You are me, I am you.—The Present is the furthest projection of our steady appetite. Imagination, like a general, keeps behind. Imagination is the man.”

      “What is the Present?” Hobson asked politely, with much aspirating, sitting up a little and slightly offering his ear.

      But Tarr only repeated things arbitrarily. He proceeded:

      “Sex is a monstrosity. It is the arch abortion of this filthy universe.—How ‘old-fashioned!’—eh, my fashionable friend?—We are all optimists to-day, aren’t we? God’s in his Heaven, all’s well with the world! I am a pessimist, Hobson. But I’m a new sort of pessimist.—I think I am the sort that will please!—I am the Panurgic-Pessimist, drunken with the laughing-gas of the Abyss. I gaze on squalor and idiocy, and the more I see it, the more I like it.—Flaubert built up his Bouvard et Pécuchet with maniacal and tireless hands. It took him ten years. That was a long draught of stodgy laughter from the gases that rise from the dung-heap? He had an appetite like an elephant for this form of mirth. But he grumbled and sighed over his food.—I take it in my arms and bury my face in it!”

      As Tarr’s temperament spread its wings, whirling him menacingly and mockingly above Hobson’s head, the Cantab philosopher did not think it necessary to reply.—He was not winged himself.—He watched Tarr looping the loop above him. He was a drole bird! He wondered, as he watched him, if he was a sound bird, or homme-oiseau. People believed in him. His Exhibition flights attracted attention. What sort of prizes could he expect to win by his professional talents? Would this notable ambitieux be satisfied?

      The childish sport proceeded, with serious intervals.

      “I bury my face in it!”—(He buried his face in it!!)—“I laugh hoarsely through its thickness, choking and spitting; coughing, sneezing, blowing.—People will begin to think I am an alligator if they see me always swimming in their daily ooze. As far as sex is concerned, I am that. Sex, Hobson, is a German study. A German study.” He shook his head in a dejected, drunken way, protruding his lips. He seemed to find analogies for his repeating habits, with the digestion.—“All the same, you must take my word for much in that connexion.—The choice of a wife is not practical in the way that the securing of a good bicycle, hygiene, or advertisement is. You must think more of the dishes of the table. Rembrandt paints decrepit old Jews, the most decayed specimens of the lowest race on earth, that is. Shakespeare deals in human tubs of grease—Falstaff; Christ in sinners. Now as to sex; Socrates married a shrew; most of the wisest men marry fools, picture post cards, cows, or strumpets.”

      “I don’t think that is quite true.” Hobson resurrected himself dutifully. “The more sensible people I can think of off-hand have more sensible, and on the whole prettier, wives than other people.”

      “Prettier wives?—You are describing a meaningless average.—The most suspicious fact about a distinguished man is the possession of a distinguished wife. But you might just as well say in answer to my Art statement that Sir Edward Leighton did not paint the decayed meat of humanity.”

      Hobson surged up a little in his chair and collapsed.—He had to appeal to his body to sustain the argument.

      “Neither did Raphael—I don’t see why you should drag Rembrandt in—Rembrandt⸺”

      “You’re going to sniff at Rembrandt!—You accuse me of following the fashions in my liking for Cubism. You are much more fashionable yourself. Would you mind my ‘dragging in’ cheese, high game⸺?”

      Hobson allowed cheeses with a rather drawn expression. But he did not see what that had to do with it, either.

      “It is not purely a question of appetite,” he said.

      “Sex, sir, is purely a question of appetite!” Tarr replied.

      Hobson inclined himself mincingly, with a sweet chuckle.

      “If it is pure sex, that is,” Tarr added.

      “Oh, if it is pure sex—that, naturally⸺” Hobson convulsed himself and crowed thrice.

      “Listen, Hobson!—You mustn’t make that noise. It’s very clever of you to be able to. But you will not succeed in rattling me by making me feel I am addressing a rooster⸺”

      Hobson let himself go in whoops and caws, as though Tarr had been pressing him to perform.

      When he had finished, Tarr said:

      “Are you willing to consider sex seriously, or not?”

      “Yes, I don’t mind.”—Hobson settled down, his face flushed from his late display.—“But I shall begin to believe before very long that your intentions are honourable as regards the fair Fräulein.—What exactly is your discourse intended to prove?”

      “Not the desirability of the marriage tie, any more than a propaganda for representation and anecdote in art. But if a man marries, or a great painter represents (and the claims and seductions of life are very urgent), he will not be governed in his choice by the same laws that regulate the life of an efficient citizen, a successful merchant, or the ideals of a health expert.”

      “I should have said that the considerations that precede a proposition of marriage had many analogies with the health expert’s outlook, the good citizen’s⸺”

      “Was