Tarr (Modern Classics)

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1918. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER 1 From his window in the neighbouring Boulevard, Kreisler's eye was fixed blankly on a spot thirty feet above the scene of the Hobson-Tarr dialogue. He was shaving himself, one eye fixed on Paris. It beat on this wall of Paris drearily. Had it been endowed with properties of illumination and been directed there earlier in the day, it would have served as a desolate halo for Tarr's ratiocination. For several days Kreisler's watch had been in the Mont de Piete. Until some clock struck he was in total ignorance of the time of day. The late spring sunshine flooded, like a bursted tepid star, the pink boulevard. The people beneath crawled like wounded insects of cloth. A two-storey house terminating the Boulevard Pfifer, covered the lower part of the Cafe de Berne. Kreisler's room looked like some funeral vault. Shallow, ill-lighted and extensive, it was placarded with nude and archaic images, painted on strips of canvas fixed to the wall with drawing pins. Imagining yourself in some Asiatic dwelling of the dead, with the portraits of the deceased covering the holes in which they had respectively been thrust, you would, following your fancy, have turned to Kreisler seeking to see in him some devout recluse who had taken up his quarters there. Kreisler was in a sense a recluse (although almost certainly the fancy would have gasped and fallen at his contact). But cafes were the luminous caverns where he could be said, most generally, to dwell; with, nevertheless, very little opening of the lips and much "recueillement" or meditation; therefore not unworthy of some rank among the inferior and less fervent solitudes. A bed like an overturned cupboard, dark, and with red billow of cloth and feathers covering it entirely; a tessellated floor of dark red tile; a little ...