A man in artist's velveteens, minus a haircut, with a large, fat, pasty face, sat at an adjoining table and discoursed to his friends. Presently, during an intermission of the music, he rose and took the rest of those present into his confidence. With rapt eyes on the faraway space of distant planets he chanted his apologia.
"I believe in the Cosmic Urge, in the Sublimity of my Ego. I follow my Lawless Impulse where the Gods of Desire shall drive. I am what I Am, Son of the Stars, Lord of my Life. With Unleashed Love I answer the psychic beat of Pulse to Pulse, Laughter, Tears and Woe, the keen edge of Passion, the Languor of Satiety: all these are life. Open-armed, I embrace them. I drink and assuage my thirst. For Youth is here to-day. To-morrow, alas, it has gone. Now I am. In the Then I shall not be. Kismet!"
The poet's fine frenzy faded. He sank back into his chair, apparently worn out by his vast mental effort.
Clay gave a deep chuckle of delight. This was good.
"Heap much oration," he murmured. "Go to it, old-timer. Steam off again. Git down in yore collar to it."
To miss none of the fun he hitched a little closer on the bench. But the man without the haircut was through effervescing. He began to talk in a lower voice on world politics to admiring friends who were basking in his reflected glory.
"Bourgeois to the core," he announced with finality, speaking of the United States, in answer to a question. "What are the idols we worship? Law, the chain which binds an enslaved people; thrift, born of childish fear; love of country, which is another name for crass provincialism. I—I am a Cosmopolite, not an American. Bohemia is my land, and all free souls are my brothers. Why should I get wrinkles because Germany sunk the Lusitania a month or two ago? That's her business, not mine."
Clay leaned forward on a search for information. "Excuse me for buttin' in, and me a stranger. But isn't it yore business when she murders American women and children?"
The pasty-faced man looked at him with thinly disguised contempt. "You wouldn't understand if I explained."
"Mebbeso I wouldn't, but you take a whirl at it and I'll listen high, wide, and handsome."