Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [108]
“Not Walter Pater,” murmured Philip.
Lawson stared at him for a moment with his green eyes and then nodded.
“You’re quite right, Walter Pater is the only justification for Mona Lisa. D’you know Cronshaw? He used to know Pater.”
“Who’s Cronshaw?” asked Philip.
“Cronshaw’s a poet. He lives here. Let’s go to the Lilas.”
La Closerie des Lilas was a café to which they often went in the evening after dinner, and here Cronshaw was invariably to be found between the hours of nine at night and two in the morning. But Flanagan had had enough of intellectual conversation for one evening, and when Lawson made his suggestion, turned to Philip.
“Oh gee, let’s go where there are girls,” he said. “Come to the Gaîté Montparnasse, and we’ll get ginny.”
“I’d rather go and see Cronshaw and keep sober,” laughed Philip.
XLII
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 Gaîté 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 theaters. 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 practiced 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 in the café 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 Mallarmé and all those fellows.”
The object of their search sat in the most sheltered corner of the café, with his coat on and the collar turned up. He wore his hat pressed well down on his forehead so that he should avoid cold air. He was a big man, stout but not obese, with a round face, a small mustache, and little, rather stupid eyes.