“There’s a futurist poet,” said Lorrimer, pointing to a man in a corner who had evidently let his comb fall behind the bureau and been too lazy to go after it. He had a peaked face overwhelmed by stringy hair, with which his beard and whiskers made such an intimate connection that all you could see was a wedge of nose and two pale-blue eyes gleaming through the tangle.
“See that man to the right,” went on my informer; “that’s the cubist sculptor, a Russian Jew.”
The sculptor looked indeed like a mujic, with coarse, spiky hair growing down over his forehead, eyebrows that made one arch over his fierce little eyes, up-turned nose, a beard and moustache, which, divided by his mouth, looked exactly like a scrubbing-brush the centre of which has been rubbed away by long usage.
“Look! There’s an Imagist releasing some of his inspirations.”
This was a meagre little man in evening dress, with a bony skull concealed by the usual mop of hair. He had a curiously elongated face, something like a horse, the eyes of a seraph, the shell-like colour of a consumptive, large, vividly-red lips, and an ineffable smile which exposed a small cemetery of decayed teeth.
“Ah!” said Lorrimer suddenly; “see that chap sitting lonely in the corner with his arms folded and a sort of Strindberg-Nietzsche-Ibsen expression? Well, that’s Helstern.”
I saw a tall, youngish-oldish sort of man with a face of distinguished taciturnity. His mouth was grimly clinched; two vertical lines were written between his eyebrows, and a very high forehead was further heightened by upstanding iron-grey hair. On the other hand his brown eyes were soft, velvety and shy. He was dressed in dead black, with a contrast of very white linen. Close to his elbow stood a great stein of beer, while he puffed slowly from a big wooden pipe carved into a fantastic Turk’s head.
“Poor old Helstern!” said Lorrimer; “he takes life so seriously. Take life seriously and you’re going to get it in the neck: laugh at it and it can never hurt you.”
This was his gay philosophy, as indeed it was of the careless and merry Quarter he seemed to epitomise. Treat everything in a cynical and mocking spirit, and you yourself are beyond the reach of irony. It is so much easier to destroy than to build up. Yet there was something tart and stimulating in his scorn of things as they are.
“Too bad to drag him from sublime heights of abstraction down to our common level. Doesn’t he look like a seer trying to discern through the anarchy of the present some hope for the future? Well, I’ll go over and see if he’ll join us. He’s shy with women.”