In the tight little supper-room over the Café de la Toison d’Or we were sweltering and dining at the expense of McTeague. It was a night in August, and the heat of noon had not yet died out of the boulevards and streets of Brussels, ville basse. The cheap cotton curtains at the two windows fronting on the avenue waved languidly to and fro, and the air of the room reeked with cigarette smoke and the odours of Belgian cooking.
McTeague sat at the table’s head—a huge, lonely, unsophisticated American, with a mop of gray hair topping a face like a child’s, tired eyes, slightly Roman nose, and what once was a rose-bud mouth. At his right was Yvette, the dancer of the Scala; pretty, of course, the big, muscular, operatic-soprano type of beauty rather than the petite beings we usually think of in the dance; sleek, serpentine, appraising the world about her. Next her was I; then Yvette’s husband, the poet; then Guilbert, her dancing-master.
“Thanks! thanks! I thank you infinitely, monsieur. Bravo! Bis, bis!” said McTeague, in his heavy Scotian French.
“No, no, monsieur,” the poet answered gloomily, shaking his head. “I demand pardon, but no.”
“Ah, it is the war, then! You feel such a sadness that you cannot be gay, monsieur?”
“No, it is not the war. What is the war? It is of nations. For me nations are nothing: men, men—Pushkin, Byron, Whitman, Schiller, Napoleon, Goethe, Victor Hugo—those for me are worth while. The rest? Pah!”
“Oh, la, la, la, la!”
“Do not mind, monsieur,” the dancing-master whispered ecstatically, as if he feared such sentiments might offend me, “it is a poet, n’est-ce pas? Art—art—that is a world of itself.” He mopped his forehead, beaded with drops of perspiration, his little black eyes rolled in his head, and he drummed on the tablecloth as if his fingertips would do the office of his toes. The man was a genuine enthusiast. To dance and to teach others to dance—that was life!
“Yvette, you have brought your ballet costume so you can dance for messieurs the Americans?” he asked.
“Yes, my old Guilbert,” she answered languidly.