Dearborn, when he could be forced out of the house, put on the shoes with reluctance; he was greatly annoyed by the clatter of the big boot. The shoes didn't fit him in the least. He would shuffle into the nearest café, if his credit was good enough to permit it, and there, under the small table on which he wrote page after page over his cigarette and cup of black coffee, he hid the big awkward shoe for as long as he could endure exile from the studio. Then he came home.
Fairfax swung the boot down the stairs, he swung it along the pavements of Paris! What distance he took it! It seemed to have a wing at the heel. It tramped through the quarters of the city from the quays to fine
old streets, to forgotten alleys, to the Cité on the Ile, then again by the fresh gay avenues of the Champs Elysées to the Bois, again to the quays, and, when well up the river, he would sometimes board the boat and come back down the Seine, dreaming, musing, creating, and, floating home, would take the big boot upstairs.
"By Jove, Tony!" Dearborn remarked, examining the boots closely, "it's not fair! One of us will have to drive if you don't let up, old man!"
Dearborn, when he did not haunt his café and when inspiration failed, would haunt the Bibliothèque Nationale, and amongst the "Rats de littérature"—savant, actor, poet, amongst the cold and weary who lounge in the chairs of the library to dream, to get warm, and to imagine real firesides with one's own books and one's own walls around them—Dearborn would sit for hours poring over old manuscripts from which he had hoped to extract inspiration, listening, as do his sort, for "the voices."
CHAPTER VII
It was a year of privation, but there were moments spent on the threshold of Paradise.
His materials, barrels of clay and plaster, were costly. Dearborn said that he thanked God he had a "métier" requiring no further expenditure than a pot of ink and a lot of paper.