Free Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) by Wyndham Lewis Page A

and prohibit you from propagating.’
    Tarr’s white collar shone dazzlingly in the sun. His bowler hat bobbed, striking out clean lines in space as he spoke.
    ‘A breed of mild pervasive cabbages has set up a wide and creeping rot in the West: it is the lost generations described in Chekov * over again, that any resolute power will be able to wipe up over-night, with its eyes shut. Your kind meantime make it indirectly a peril and tribulation for live things to remain in your neighbourhood. You are systematizing and vulgarizing the individual: you are the advance-copy of communism, a false millennial middle-class communism. * You are not an individual: you have, I repeat, no right to that hair and to that hat: you are trying to have the apple and eat it too. You should be in uniform and at work,
not
uniformly
out of uniform
and libelling the Artist by your idleness. Are you idle?’
    Tarr had drawn up short, turned squarely upon Hobson, in an abrupt and disconnected voice screeching his question.
    Hobson stirred resentfully in his chair: he yawned a little.
    ‘Am I idle, did you say?’ he asked. ‘Yes, yes, I’m not particularly industrious. But how does that affect you? You know you don’t mean all that farrago. But where are you coming to?’
    ‘I have explained already where I come in. It is stupid to be idle: it is the most stupid thing. The only justification for your slovenly appearance it is true is that it is perfectly emblematic.’
    ‘My dear Tarr, you’re a very odd stick and if you’ll allow me to say so you should take water with it. * But I can’t follow you at all: why should these things occupy you? You have just told me a lot of thingsthat may be true or may not: but at the end of them all—? Et alors?—alors?—
quoi?
one asks.’
    He gesticulated, got the French guttural
r
with satisfaction, and said the
quoi
rather briskly.
    ‘You deafen me with your upside-downness. In any case my hat is my business!’ he concluded quickly, after a moment, getting up with a curling luscious laugh.
    The waiter hastened towards them and they paid him.
    ‘No I am responsible for you.—I am one of the only people who
see
: that is a responsibility.’ Tarr walked down the boulevard with him, speaking in his ear almost and treading on his toes.
    ‘You know Baudelaire’s fable * of the obsequious vagabond, cringing for alms? For all reply the poet seizes a heavy stick and lays about the beggar with it. When he is almost battered to pieces the man suddenly straightens out under the blows, expands, stretches; his eyes dart fire! He rises up and falls upon the poet tooth and nail: in a few seconds he has laid him out flat and is just going to finish him off, when a cop arrives. The poet is enchanted: he has accomplished something! Would it be possible I wonder to accomplish something of that sort with you? No. You are meaner-spirited than the most currish hobo. I would seize you by the throat at once if I thought you would black my eye. But I feel it my duty at least to do this for your hat: your misnamed wideawake, * at least, will have had its little drama to-day.’
    Tarr knocked his hat off into the road, and stepping after it propelled it some yards farther with a running kick. Without troubling to wait for the possible upshot of this action he hurried away down the Boulevard Kreutzberg.
CHAPTER 2
    A GREAT many of Frederick Tarr’s resolutions came from his conversation. It was a tribunal to which he brought his hesitations. An active up-and-coming spirit presided over this department 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 encountered a friend who should have been met before Hobson. Then