Phil looked at the guitar with respect; and Socrate had an idea.
“Tiens!” he said with a noble air; “take my guitar. It has sounded the ‘Mona Lisa’—it has played Rubens and Raphael! It has thrilled with beauty; it contains the Louvre! My soul has vibrated within it! Do a masterpiece with it! Show on your canvas all that it holds! Take it! Carry it away with you!”
And Phil had taken away the guitar.
“All right,” he said the next day, “I will do a masterpiece. They shall see if I am an artist or a pork-packer.”
He resolved to “hatch a masterpiece” from this guitar which had thrilled with the soul of Socrate. From that time he went out no longer. He passed whole days in his room, distracted only by the cackling of the chicken in its corner, that brought him back to the realities of life.
“Ah, ha! You’re hungry, are you?” he said, as he threw the chicken some crumbs. Then he looked at the guitar as if he would say: “We’ll have it out together!”
Phil struggled. He dreamed and pondered, and hunted all sorts of material for his sketches. He went to the Louvre to study pictures that had guitars in them.
“The old masters knew nothing about guitars,” Phil said one evening at the café. Even the comrades laughed at this.
“How’s the guitar? Does it go?” they asked him.
They spoke only of guitars—guitar this and guitar that—as if all the estudiantinas of all the Spains had met together at the Deux Magots.