PART I
BERTHA
CHAPTER I
Paris hints of sacrifice.—But here we deal with that large dusty facet known to indulgent and congruous kind. It is in its capacity of delicious inn and majestic Baedeker, where western Venuses twang its responsive streets and hush to soft growl before its statues, that it is seen. It is not across its Thébaïde that the unscrupulous heroes chase each other’s shadows. They are largely ignorant of all but their restless personal lives.
Inconceivably generous and naïve faces haunt the Knackfus Quarter.—We are not, however, in a Selim or Vitagraph camp (though “guns” tap rhythmically the buttocks).—Art is being studied.—Art is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Bohème, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model. But the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.
The Knackfus Quarter is given up to Art.—Letters and other things are round the corner.—Its rent is half paid by America. Germany occupies a sensible apartment on the second floor. A hundred square yards at its centre is a convenient space, where the Boulevard du Paradis and Boulevard Pfeifer cross with their electric trams.—In the middle is a pavement island, like vestige of submerged masonry.—Italian models festoon it in symmetrical human groups; it is also their club.—The Café Berne, at one side, is the club of the “Grands messieurs Du Berne.” So you have the clap-trap and amorphous Campagnia tribe outside, in the café twenty sluggish common-sense Germans, a Vitagraph group or two, drinking and playing billiards. These are the most permanent tableaux of this place, disheartening and admonitory as a Tussaud’s of The Flood.
Hobson and Tarr met in the Boulevard du Paradis.—They met in a gingerly, shuffling fashion. They had so many good reasons for not slowing down when they met: crowds of little antecedent meetings all revivifying like the bacilli of a harmless fever at the sight of each other: pointing to why they should crush their hats over their eyes and hurry on, so that it was a defeat and insanitary to have their bodies shuffling and gesticulating there. “Why cannot most people, having talked and annoyed each other once or twice, rebecome strangers simply? Oh, for multitudes of divorces in our mœurs, more than the old vexed sex ones! Ah, yes: ah, yes—!” had not Tarr once put forward, and Hobson agreed?
“Have you been back long?” Tarr asked with despondent slowness.
“No. I got back yesterday,” said Hobson, with pleasantly twisted scowl.
(“Heavens: One day here only, and lo! I meet him.”)