Luckily it was a country girl who timidly took their order for beer and sandwiches.  And they drank eagerly, gobbling the food as soon as it came, ordering more so noisily that they attracted attention.  The beer made them brave.  As they poured down glass after glass, reckless of the reckoning, insolent to the servant, they began wrangling over the subject that had possessed their waking hours.

“Look here, Quell!” Arved exclaimed crustily, “you said I had crazy blue eyes.  What about your own red ones?  Crazy!  Why, they glow now like a rat’s.  Poets may be music-mad, drunk with tone—­”

“And other things,” sneered the painter.

“—­but at least their work is great when it endures; it does not fade away on rotten canvas.”

“Now, I know you ought to be in the Brain-College, Arved, where your friends could take the little green car that goes by the grounds and see you on Sunday afternoons if weather permits.”

His accent seemed deliberately insulting to Arved, who, however, let it pass because of their mutual plight.  If they fell to fighting, detection would ensue.  So he answered in placatory phrases:—­

“Yes, my friend, we both belong to the same establishment, for we are men of genius.  As the cat said to Alice, ’We must be mad or else we shouldn’t be here.’  I started to tell you why my people thought I had better take the cure.  I loved the moon too much and loathed sunlight.  If I had never tried to write lunar poetry—­the tone quality of music combined with the pictorial evocation of painting—­I might be in the bosom of my family now instead of—­”

“Drinking with a crazy painter, eh?” Quell was very angry.  He shouted for drinks so rapidly that he alarmed the more prudent Arved; and as they were now the last guests, the head waiter approached and curtly bade them leave.  In an instant he was dripping with beer thrown at him—­glass and all—­by the irate Quell.  A whistle sounded, two other waiters rushed out, and the battle began.  Arved, aroused by the sight of his friend on the ground with three men hammering his head, gave a roar like the trumpeting of an elephant.  A chair was smashed over a table, and, swinging one-half of it, he made a formidable onslaught.  Two of the waiters were knocked senseless and the leader’s nose and teeth crushed in by the rude cudgel.  The morose moon started up, a tragic hieroglyph in the passionless sky.  Quell, seeing its hated disk, howled, his face aflame with exaltation.  Then he leaped like a hoarsely panting animal upon the poet; a moment and they were in the grass clawing each other.  And the moon foamed down upon them its magnetic beams until darkness, caused by a coarse blanket, enveloped, pinioned, smothered them.  When the light shone again, they were sitting in a wagon, their legs tightly bound....

They began singing.  The attendant interrupted:—­

“Will you fellows keep quiet?  How can a man drive straight, listening to your cackle?”