“Really? What for?” Felix asked.
“Coming down to the office crazy drunk,” said Eddie Silver proudly. “Sit down.”
Felix had heard of Eddie Silver’s epic drunkennesses. Another thing he had heard was that Eddie Silver wrote poetry.... This was not so rare a thing among Chicago reporters as Felix would have supposed. Two in every dozen young reporters, as Clive had said, were poets of a sort. But, as Clive had added, it was always of a tame and colourless sort. Eddie Silver was not tame and colourless, whatever his poetry might be. Or rather there was nothing tame about the Eddie Silver legend—though its hero had appeared to Felix, whenever they met, to be the gentlest soul alive.
Eddie Silver was having a dinner which consisted mostly of cocktails; but he showed no signs of any of the alcoholic belligerency for which he was famed; he seemed, on the contrary, likely to burst into tears at any moment. He was in a soft poetic mood. He talked about poetry. He tried to recite it. But the lines kept getting mixed up.
“Come on over my place,” he said, “we’ll read some Swinburne.”
He took Felix to a large furnished room a little to the north of the loop, and propping himself on a couch with pillows, read “Poems and Ballads” in a sonorous and unintelligible manner until midnight. He invited Felix to come back the next evening for more Swinburne, and Felix went away feeling that the legend had rather over-emphasized the belligerent side of Eddie Silver’s character.... He came the next evening, which was spent in precisely the same manner, ending with an invitation to come in tomorrow evening for still more Swinburne.
Felix wondered if Eddie Silver read Swinburne every night.
Coming the third time, he found Eddie Silver’s room occupied by half a dozen young men all more or less drunk.
“C’m’ on in!” Eddie Silver called from the couch, where he sat propped with pillows as before, with a book in one hand and a glass in the other. “On’y two bo’l’s o’ Swinburne left!”
He rose, and poured a glassful of whiskey for Felix.