“Up? The hell’s up. O Jesu!” And he grinned....
“Yes, but besides that—anything?” Not, you know, that I thought for one moment that anything really was “up.” It was merely that I misliked that grinning.
I can see him this moment so clearly, the way he suddenly threw back his head and stared from under the brim of that hat as though into the heart of the heavens: the dark, defiant, hungry silhouette searching the heart of the above.
We were at the corner of East Chapel Street, where the great American pile of Sunderland House debases itself before the puny roofs of Mayfair: it loitered clumsily against the soft evening light, reluctant to yield to the grey embrace of London....
“God!” sighed Gerald. Like a child, like a child ... and like a fiend he suddenly laughed up at the veiled heavens. “Imagine, you fool, just imagine the bloody degradation of being alive!”
But I will leave out Gerald’s “bloody’s.” One is tired of saying, hearing, reading that silly word. It is only chickenfood, after all, and does very well on the lips of the young ladies of the day, but there is no reason why grown-up people should use it.
“I like you,” he said, as only that devilish child could say it. “You sit on your imagination as though it was an egg, and a nice little chicken comes out. God, I wouldn’t be you! Look at all the pretty eggs you’ll hatch and not one have a chance to grow up into a splendid, lovely old hen that’ll peck at the dung you call life. Why don’t you write about fallen archangels? They’re the only things worth writing about, fallen archangels. Phut to you, that’s what I say....”
I managed then, for the first time in our friendship, to suggest that if perhaps he was hard-up, well, phut to him....
“Look here, that’s not fair,” stammered Gerald. Shy himself, he made one want to sink into the ground with shyness. “I mean, that’s putting friendship to music, isn’t it? What?”
“Oh, nonsense, Gerald! There’s nothing so silly and mean as this reticence about money....”