“Cocoa?” echoed Mrs. Gainsborough. “Brandy, more like.”
“Ashes? Well, I had a fox-terrier once that died in convulsions from eating coke, so perhaps it is ashes.”
“We must meet him again,” said Sylvia. “These queer people outside ordinary life interest me.”
“Well, it’s interesting to visit a hospital,” Mrs. Gainsborough agreed. “But that doesn’t say you want to go twice. Once is enough for that fellow, to my thinking. He’s interesting, but uncomfortable, like the top of a ’bus.”
Sylvia, however, was determined to pursue her acquaintance with the outcast Englishman. She soon discovered that for years he had been taking drugs and that nothing but drugs had brought him to his present state of abject buffoonery. Shortly before he became friends with Sylvia he had been taken up as a week’s amusement by some young men who were under the impression that they were seeing Parisian life in his company. They had been generous to him, and latterly he had been able to drug himself as much as he wanted. The result had been to hasten his supreme collapse. Even in his last illness he would not talk to Sylvia about his youth before he came to Paris, and in the end she was inclined to accept him at his own estimate, a pose that was become a reality.
One evening he seemed more haggard than usual and talked much less; by the twitching of his nostrils, he had been dosing himself hard with cocaine. Suddenly, he stretched his thin hand across the marble table and seized hers feverishly:
“Tell me,” he asked. “Are you sorry for me?”
“I think it’s an impertinence to be sorry for anybody,” she answered. “But if you mean do I wish you well, why, yes, old son, I wish you very well.”
“What I told you once about my coming to Paris to work at art was all lies. I came here because I had to leave nothing else behind, not even a name. You said, one evening when we were arguing about ambition, that if you could only find your line you might do something on the stage. Why don’t you recite my poems? Read them through. One or two are in English, but most of them are in French. They are really more sighs than poems. They require no acting. They want just a voice.”