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 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.