This with immovable gravity and deep, sweet earnestness of tone.
“Well,” said Leslie when she had withdrawn, “of all the people I have struck yet, give me the Japanese.”
“Wait till you’ve had beesiness transactions with them,” said Mac darkly. “I am no so unfreenly to the Japs in or’nary life, but in beesiness the Jap’s a wrugglin’ sairpent—all but one—Danjuro—the man we’re going to join in partnership; he’s as straight as a Chinee.”
“He must be damn crooked then!”
“Cruik’d enough to make his way in Japan, but straight enough to a freend; but you’re a poet, man, Leslie, and no beesiness man. I kent y’ for a poet when you sang that bit song on the road—the song aboot the camellia trees.”
Leslie laughed.
“That rubbish! It’s not mine; I read it in the Sydney Bulletin. Funny enough, too, it was the first thing that made me think of coming to Japan! Poetry! Good God! Put a man through the remittance mill in Sydney and see all the poetry that will be left in him! Put a butterfly through a sausage machine and then see how beautifully it will fly! Yes, I was once a poet; years and years ago I was a poet—a poet who never wrote anything, but a poet for all that. I could see the beauty of the world; and then they blinded me. Who? I don’t know—the world. Maybe it was myself, maybe not. Maybe it was my father, maybe not. I only state the fact that something in me is dead—the something that took joy in life and found beauty in innocence—or was dead till I came to Japan. Oh, M’Gourley, man, the years I’ve spent in Sydney under a cloud, mixing with bar loafers, cursing my father and myself; the years I’ve spent in Sydney have broken my soul in me!”
“Why did ye not waurk?”
“Work! I had just enough money to keep me from starvation and decently dressed. I might have got a clerkship; for what good? To make another hundred a year. To spend on what? Can you not understand, man, that my mainspring was gone, that I was put out of the world I knew, tied by the leg to Sydney, bound to appear every quarter-day at the double-damned lawyer’s office, or starve? Two things only kept me alive—tobacco and books—saved me from myself and from drink.”
“What sort of a mon was your faither?”