"Look here, Cintras, you're prose-mad and you've landed nowhere." Berkeley lighted one of Hodson's cigarettes. "When a new, big fellow comes along you follow him until you find out how he does the trick and then you get bored. Don't you remember the day you rushed into my studio and yelled, 'Newman is the only man who wrote prose in the nineteenth century,' and then persisted in spouting long sentences from the 'Apologia'? First it was Arnold, then it was Edmund Burke." "It will always be Burke," interrupted Cintras. "Then it was Maurice de Guérin, and I suppose it will be Flaubert forever and ever." They all laughed.
"Yes, Billy, it will always be Gustave Flaubert, and I worship him more and more every day. It took him forty years to write four books and three stories, and, as Henry James says, he deliberately planned masterpieces."
Hodson broke in: "You literary men make me tired. Why, if I turned out copy at the rate of Slobsbert—what's his name?—I'd starve. What's all the fuss about, anyhow? Write natural English and any one will understand you"—"Ah, natural English, that's what one man writes in a generation," sighed Cintras. "And when you want something great," continued the young man, "why, read a good 'thriller' about the great Cemetery Syndicate, and how it robbed the dead for gold fillings in teeth. The author just slings it out—and such words!"
"Yes, with a whitewash brush." Berkeley scowled.
"Why," pursued Hodson, unmoved, "why don't you get married, Cintras, and work for your living? Then you'll have to write syndicate stuff and that will knock the nonsense out of you. Or, fall in love and be miserable like me." Hodson paused to drink.
"O triste, triste était mon âme,
À cause, à cause d'une femme."
"That's Verlaine; Hoddy, my boy, when you grow up, quit newspapering and become cultured, you may appreciate its meaning and beauty."
"When I am cultured I'll be a night city editor; that's my ideal," said the youth, stoutly.
"Let's go over to Merville's room and make him play Chopin," suggested Pauch, the sculptor, who seldom spoke, but could eat more than four men.... They drank their coffee and went across into Twelfth street, and at the top of the house they found the musician's room. It was large, but poorly fitted out. An old square-piano, a stove, a bed, three chairs, a big lounge and a washstand completed the catalogue. Merville made them comfortable and sat down to the piano. Its tone, as his fingers crept over the keys, was of faded richness and there were reverberations of lost splendors in the bass. Merville started with a Chopin nocturne, but Hodson hurt the cat as it brushed against him, and the noise displeased the pianist. He stopped.
"I don't feel like Chopin, it's too early in the day. Chopin should be heard only in the early evening or after midnight. I'll give you some Brahms instead. Brahms suits the afternoon, this gray, dull day." All were too lazy to reply and the pianist began, with hesitating touch, an Intermezzo in A minor. It sounded like music heard in a dream, a dream anterior to this existence. It seemed as if life, tired of the external blaze of the sun, sought for the secret of hidden spaces; searched for the message in the sinuous murmuring shell. It was an art of an art, the penumbra of an art. Its faint outlines melted into one's soul and refused to be turned away. The recollection of other music seemed gross after this curiously introspective, this almost whorl-like, music. It was the return to the invertebrate, the shadow of a shadow, and the hearts of Merville's guests were downcast and purified....