Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/228

Rh too, our arguments left us both precisely where we started. But they helped the evenings, often hungry evenings, to pass without monotony; and when, as sometimes though but rarely happened, Louis had come by a drop of absinthe, monotony was entirely forgotten. He would sit crossed-legged on his mattress, his brown eyes sparkling in the round little face, his thick curly black hair looking like stiff wire, his podgy hands gesticulating, his language voluble in French and English mixed, his infectious laughter ringing and bubbling out from time to time--and the evening would pass like magic. He was charged with poetry and music too. On absinthe evenings, indeed, it was difficult to get any sleep at all ... and the first thing in the morning he would be hunting for "snipe" on all fours, cursing life and fate, in a black depression which made him think of suicide, and looking like a yellow Chinese God of Luck that had come to life.

Hunger was agony to him, but, oddly enough, he never grew less rotund. He particularly enjoyed singing what he called la messe noire with astonishing variations in his high falsetto. This "mass" was performed by all three of us to a plaster-cast faun an artist had given me in Toronto. It had come in the packing-case with our other things, this Donatello, and we set it on the mantelpiece, filled a saucer with melted candle stolen from a boarder's room, lit the piece of string which served for wick, and turned the gas out. In the darkened room the faunish face leered and moved, as the flickering light from below set the shadows shifting about its features; the fiddle, Louis's thin falsetto, Kay's bass, badly out of tune, and my own voice thrown in as well, produced a volume of sound the other boarders strongly objected to--at one o'clock in the morning. Yet the only time Mrs. Bernstein came to complain, she got no farther than the door: Louis had a blanket over his head and shoulders, Kay was in his night-shirt, which was a day-shirt really, the old Irving wig lying crooked on his head, and I was but half dressed, fiddling for all I was worth. The darkened room, Rh