If Voltaire had been there he would have come back and described that peasant boy he'd seen in a way that would have gripped men's souls and sent a great shudder over the world at war and what it meant to mankind—while Joe was simply slapping it down like some hustling, keen reporter.
"Look here, Joe; you make me sick!" I exploded at last. "You ought to stick right here for months and work on this wonderful stuff you've got till there's nothing left you can possibly do!"
"Be an artist, eh, a poet, a great writer." He gave me one of those fatherly smiles. "I've got some things to say to you, Kid. I don't like the life you're leading."
"Don't you? Why don't you?" I rejoined. And so began a fight that lasted as long as he was in Paris.
Nothing that I had been doing here made any appeal whatever to Joe. I showed him my sketch of Notre Dame from under that old bridge at night.
"Yes," he said, "this is fine writing, awful fine. But it has about as much meaning to me as a woman's left ear. What's the use of sitting down under a bridge and looking up at an ancient church and trying to feel like a two-spot? For God's sake, Bill, get it out of your system, quit getting reverent over the past. You're sitting here at the feet of the Masters, fellahs who were all right in their day, but are now every one of 'em out of date. And you're so infernally busy copying their technique and style and trying to learn just how to write, that you're getting nothing to write about. Why can't you go to life for your stuff?"
"Go to life?" I said indignantly. "I've done nothing else for over a year!"
"Show me."
"Here!"
He read more of my sketches.