Bakkus took a sip of beer, and regarded him with his mocking eyes.
"And you'd sooner keep on throwing up three balls in the air for the rest of your natural life than just be comfortably dead? I should like to know your ideas on the point. What's the good of it all? Supposing you're the most wonderful expert that ever lived--supposing you could keep up fifty balls in the air at the same time, and could balance fifty billiard cues, one on top of another, on your nose--what's the good of it?"
Andrew rubbed his head. Such problems had never occurred to him. Old Ben Flint's philosophy pounded into him, at times literally with a solid and well-deserved paternal cuff, could be summed up in the eternal dictum: "That which thou hast to do, do it with all thy might." It was the beginning and end of his rule of life. He looked not, nor thought of looking, further. And now came this Schopenhaurian with his question. "What's the good of it?"
"I suppose I'm an artist, in my way," he replied, modestly.
"Artist?" Bakkus laughed derisively. "Pardon me, but you don't know what the word means. An artist interprets nature in concrete terms of emotion, in words, in colour, in sound, in stone--I don't say that he deserves to live. I could prove to you, if I had time, that Michael Angelo and Dante and Beethoven were the curses of humanity. Much better dead. But, anyhow, they were artists. Even I with my tinpot voice singing 'Annie Laurie' and 'The Sands of Dee' and such-like clap-trap which brings a lump in the throat of the grocer and his wife, am an artist. But you, my dear fellow--with your fifty billiard cues on top of your nose? There's a devil of a lot of skill about it of course--but nothing artistic. It means nothing."
"Yet if I could perform the feat," said Andrew, "thousands and thousands of people would come to see me; more likely a million."
"No doubt. But what would be the good of it, when you had done it and they had seen it? Sheer waste of half your lifetime and a million hours on the part of the public, which is over forty thousand days, which is over a hundred years. Fancy a century of the world's energy wasted in seeing you balance billiard cues on the end of your nose!"
Andrew reflected for a long time, his elbow on the cafe table, his hand covering his eyes. There must surely be some fallacy in this remorseless argument which reduced his life's work to almost criminal futility. At last light reached him. He held out his other hand and raised his head.
"Attendez. I must say in French what has come into my mind. Surely I am an artist according to your definition. I interpret nature, the marvellous human mechanism in terms of emotion--the emotion of wonder. The balance of fifty billiard cues gives the million people the same catch at the throat as the song or the picture, and they lose themselves for an hour in a new revelation of the possibilities of existence, and so I save the world a hundred years of the sorrow and care of life."
Bakkus looked at him approvingly. "Good," said he. "Very good. Thank God, I've at last come across a man with a brain that isn't atrophied for want of use. I love talking for talking's sake--good talk--don't you?"