The Black Book Read Online Free PDF

the sooty lashes. At such memories he becomes pure emotional idealism. Like the Virgin Mary. He will cut himself one of these days for lerv, he says. I confess I did not know what this phrase meant until the night of the festival, when we returned at three to drink a final nightcap in his room. He was pretty drunk.
    â€œKnow what I do when a man make me angry?” he asked. He explored the washstand drawer and appeared before me with a knife in his right hand. He was so gentle and friendly that for a second I was afraid. “See this,” he said, and handed it to me as simply as a girl. It was an enormous folding knife, sharpened to great keenness.
    â€œI cut him,” said Lobo unsteadily.
    Taking it from me he divided the air which separated us neatly into four portions, grinned beatifically, and replaced the weapon in its secret hiding place. When he talks like this, then, it is an enraged hara-kiri that he plans—or a murder.
    But confidence for confidence Lobo finds me a very unsatisfactory person. My humility devastates him. Particularly my complete ignorance on the subject of women. He says in tones of gravity and wonder: “You? A man of forty, an Englishman?” Really, to be frank, if one must be frank, I have had few and unsatisfactory experiences in this direction. Literary affairs with aging Bohemians, in which my ability to compare the style of Huxley to that of Flaubert was considered more important, even in bed, than physical gifts; a stockbroker’s widow; an experimental affair with an experimental painter, in which, again, our mutual respect for the volumetric proportions of Cézanne’s canvases was almost our only bond. Affinities, you might say. I suppose in this direction I must be rather a dead battery until I meet Grace. Lobo is bored. An Englishman of forty? Well it must have been forty years in the wilderness for all the adventures I can recount. Never mind. I comfort myself with Pascal’s remark about the thinking reed.
    Chamberlain is not less scathing. This canary-haired zealot, living in one of the flats nearby with a young wife and three dogs, spends his moments happily lecturing us one such esoteric subjects. “Sex, sex, sex,” he exclaims roundly, his manner closely modelled on the style of Lawrence’s letters. “When will we get the bastards to realize?” Fraternizing in the bar-room among the blue spittoons. He is powerful and convincing, standing over his bitter, and appealing to his wife for support, “Glory be to hip, buttock, loin, more ferarum, bestiarum, uterine toboggan, and the whole gamut of physical fun. Don’t you think? What about more bowels of compassion, tenderness, and the real warmth of the guts, eh?”
    Really I am scalded by this curious Salvation Army line of talk. Bad taste. Bad taste. Tarquin winces and bleats whenever Chamberlain gets started.
    â€œLet us invent a new order of marriage to revive the dead. Have another beer. Let us start a new theory of connubial copulation which will get the world properly fucked for a change. Tarquin, you’re not listening to me, damn you.”
    Tarquin bleats: “Oh, do stop forcing these silly ideas on one, Chamberlain. You simply won’t admit other people’s temperamental differences. Shut up.”
    He is mopping the froth off his beer with a discoloured tongue. Chamberlain turns to his wife, who is standing, breathing quietly, like a big retriever: “What do you think? Tell me.” She prefers to smile and ponder rather than think. “There,” says Chamberlain in triumph, “she agrees.”
    â€œAll this damned sexual theorizing,” moans Tarquin. “Don’t you think, Gregory? I mean damn it!”
    â€œDon’t you agree with him,” says Chamberlain. “Now, Gregory, you’re quite a good little fellow on your own.”
    â€œYoung man,” I say weakly.
    â€œOh, I know you’re a patriarch in