There was a general disturbance. Flanagan and
two or three more went on to the music-hall, while
Philip walked slowly with Clutton and Lawson to the
Closerie des Lilas.
“You must go to the Gaite Montparnasse,”
said Lawson to him. “It’s one of
the loveliest things in Paris. I’m going
to paint it one of these days.”
Philip, influenced by Hayward, looked upon music-halls
with scornful eyes, but he had reached Paris at a
time when their artistic possibilities were just discovered.
The peculiarities of lighting, the masses of dingy
red and tarnished gold, the heaviness of the shadows
and the decorative lines, offered a new theme; and
half the studios in the Quarter contained sketches
made in one or other of the local theatres. Men
of letters, following in the painters’ wake,
conspired suddenly to find artistic value in the turns;
and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for
their sense of character; fat female singers, who
had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered
to possess inimitable drollery; there were those who
found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while
others exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction
of conjurers and trick-cyclists. The crowd too,
under another influence, was become an object of sympathetic
interest. With Hayward, Philip had disdained
humanity in the mass; he adopted the attitude of one
who wraps himself in solitariness and watches with
disgust the antics of the vulgar; but Clutton and
Lawson talked of the multitude with enthusiasm.
They described the seething throng that filled the
various fairs of Paris, the sea of faces, half seen
in the glare of acetylene, half hidden in the darkness,
and the blare of trumpets, the hooting of whistles,
the hum of voices. What they said was new and
strange to Philip. They told him about Cronshaw.
“Have you ever read any of his work?”
“No,” said Philip.
“It came out in The Yellow Book.”
They looked upon him, as painters often do writers,
with contempt because he was a layman, with tolerance
because he practised an art, and with awe because
he used a medium in which themselves felt ill-at-ease.
“He’s an extraordinary fellow. You’ll
find him a bit disappointing at first, he only comes
out at his best when he’s drunk.”
“And the nuisance is,” added Clutton,
“that it takes him a devil of a time to get
drunk.”
When they arrived at the cafe Lawson told Philip that
they would have to go in. There was hardly a
bite in the autumn air, but Cronshaw had a morbid
fear of draughts and even in the warmest weather sat
inside.
“He knows everyone worth knowing,” Lawson
explained. “He knew Pater and Oscar Wilde,
and he knows Mallarme and all those fellows.”
