To shut him up I told him that he would find cigarettes and tobacco on the table.

“’Scherzos in Silver and Grey’!” he chuckled again as he took a cigarette....

All this, perhaps, needs some explanation.  It had been the usual thing, usual in those days, twenty years ago—­smarming about Art and the Arts and so forth.  They—­“we,” as apparently Andriaovsky had lingered behind for the purpose of reminding me—­had perhaps talked a little more soaringly than the ordinary, that was all.  There had been Jamison in the wicker chair, full to the lips and running over with the Colour Suggestions of the late Edward Calvert; Gibbs, in a pulpy state of adoration of the less legitimate side of the painting of Watts; and Magnani, who had advanced that an Essential Oneness underlies all the Arts, and had triumphantly proved his thesis by analogy with the Law of the Co-relation of Forces.  A book called Music and Morals had appeared about that time, and on it they—­we—­had risen to regions of kite-high lunacy about Colour Symphonies, orgies of formless colour thrown on a magic-lantern screen—­vieux jeu enough at this time of day.  A young newspaper man, too, had made mental notes of our adjectives, for use in his weekly (I nearly spelt it “weakly”) half-column of Art Criticism; and—­and here was Andriaovsky, grinning at the chairs, and mimicking it all with diabolical glee.

“‘Scherzos in Silver and Grey’—­’Word Pastels’—­’ Lyrics in Stone!’” he chuckled.  “And what was it the fat fellow said?’ A Siren Song in Marble!’ Phew!...  Well, I’ll get along.  I shall just be in time to get a pint of bitter to wash it all down if I’m quick...  Bah!” he broke out suddenly.  “Good men build up Form and Forms—­keep the Arts each after its kind—­raise up the dikes so that we shan’t all be swept away by night and nothingness—­and these rats come nosing and burrowing and undermining it all!... Et tu, Brute!”

“Well, when you’ve finished rubbing it in—­” I grunted.

“As if you didn’t know better!...  Is that your way of getting back on ’em, now that you’ve chucked drawing and gone in for writing books?  Phew I...  Well, I’ll go and get my pint of beer—­”

But he didn’t go for his pint of beer.  Instead, he began to prowl about my room, pryingly, nosingly, touching things here and there.  I watched him as he passed from one thing to another.  He was very little, and very, very shabby.  His trousers were frayed, and the sole of one of his boots flapped distressingly.  His old bowler hat—­he had not thought it necessary to wait until he got outside before thrusting it on the back of his head—­was so limp in substance that I verily believed that had he run incautiously downstairs he would have found when he got to the bottom that its crown had sunk in of its own weight.  In spite of his remark about the pint of beer, I doubt if he had the price of one in his pocket.

“What’s this, Brutus—­a concertina?” he suddenly asked, stopping before the collapsible case in which I kept my rather old dress suit.