Felix flushed slowly, a painful flush of anger and shame that seemed to spread all through his body. Anger and shame at his own credulity. Arabian Nights, indeed! He laughed, loudly—at himself.
A picture came into his mind, compounded of things he had read, and the brief glimpses of actuality with which his curiosity had been satisfied and sickened back in Port Royal on the Mississippi—of the tawdry, dirty, dull, the incredibly dull, the joyless, loveless, hard, empty life of—as it was sometimes called—joy.... The stupid women, the foolish men, the mechanical noise and laughter, the boozy humour, the touch of stale, jaded, weary flesh.... And this was what Victor Budge was talking about—this was the subject upon which he had expended so much vulgar eloquence!... This, then, was Victor Budge’s realism. This was what he called a real party; and those were what he called “real girls”.... That was what he meant by taking things as one found them, and not bawling for the moon.
Victor Budge was staring at him. “What’s eating you?” he asked.
Felix laughed again. “Well,” he said, “I’ve some aesthetic theories of my own which make it impossible for me to accept your invitation. What’s good enough for other people isn’t good enough for me. I don’t want to take life simply and realistically. I’m going off to starve in my garret and write poems to Helen of Troy and the Blessed Damozel!”
XII. Bachelor’s Hall
1
HE had decided to write—what, he did not know yet: and it did not matter: something, anything, a play, a poem, a story—whatever came into his head, good or bad. It would occupy his time.
He spent a happy evening buying the materials of writing at a stationery store. He bought a dozen penholders, a quantity of his favourite stub pens, two bottles of a thick black indelible ink, half a ream of good thin bond paper, a great blotting-pad and a whole stack of small blotters. That afternoon he had bought a copy of Roget’s “Thesaurus,” without which the literary life is mere vexation; and a good, fat, reliable little dictionary with “derivations.” Going to his room, he lighted the gas, arranged these materials on his little table, gazed at them with pleasure—and realized that he had forgotten to buy an eyeshade. He went back to the stationery store, and returned with a half-dozen eyeshades of the best pattern, the kind that do not saw the ears or get tangled in the hair. It appeared to him also that the gas-light really would not do; he must get a kerosene student’s lamp; it would be a nuisance to keep it filled and trimmed, and the chimney clean—but the literary life has its inevitable penalties.... He would get a student’s lamp and a gallon can of kerosene tomorrow.
He sat down again at the little table, fitted a stub pen into his penholder, lighted a match, and held the steel point in the blaze, to burn off the oil and take out the temper, making it soft and flexible and easy to write with. He uncorked the ink, wiped out the neck of the bottle with a blotter, and dipped his pen in. Yes, the pen held a full sentence’s-worth of ink, as it should. There was nothing the matter with the pen. He took a sheaf of paper from the great pile on the back of the desk, laid it at the proper angle, adjusted his chair, dipped the pen again, poised it above the virgin paper—and remembered that he had only two cigarettes left in the box. One cannot do a good night’s writing without plenty of cigarettes. He went down to the cigar store and returned with five boxes.