t the Georgians bitterly complained of the
absurdity of London having a closing time. The heat and the noise
seemed to swell with the passing of the hours, and a curious and anemic
brutality dawned with the midnight upon many of the faces around the
narrow tables. They looked at the same time bloodless and hard. Eyes
full of languor, or feverish with apparent expectation of some impending
adventure, stared fixedly through the smoke wreaths at other eyes in the
distance. Loud voices hammered through the murk. Foreheads beaded with
perspiration began to look painfully expressive. It was as if all faces
were undressed.

Dick Garstin, the famous painter, a small, slight, clean-shaven man, who
looked like an intellectual jockey with his powerful curved nose, thin,
close-set lips, blue cheeks and prominent, bony chin, and who fostered
the illusion deliberately by dressing in large-checked suits of a
sporting cut, with big buttons and mighty pockets, kept on steadily
drinking green chartreuse and smoking small, almost black, cigars. He
was said to be made of iron, and certainly managed to combine perpetual
dissipation with an astonishing amount of hard and admirable work. His
models he usually found--or so he said--at the Cafe Royal, and he made
a speciality of painting the portraits of women of the demi-monde,
of women who drank, or took drugs, who were morphia maniacs, or were
victims of other unhealthy and objectionable crazes. Nothing wholly
sane, nothing entirely normal, nothing that suggested cold water, fresh
air or sunshine, made any appeal to him. A daisy in the grass bored him;
a gardenia emitting its strangely unreal perfume on a dung heap brought
all his powers into play. He was an eccentric of genius, and in his
strangeness was really true to himself, although normal people were apt
to assert that his unlikeness to them was a pose. Simplicity, healthy
goodness, the radiance of unsmirched youth seemed to his eyes wholly
inexpressive. He loved the rotten as a dog loves garbage, and he raised
it by his art to fascination. Even admirable people, walking through his
occasional one-man exhibitions, felt a lure in his presentations of sin,
of warped womanhood, and, gazing at the blurred faces, the dilated eyes,
the haggard mouths, the vicious hands of his portraits, were shiveringly
conscious of missed experiences, and for the moment felt ill at ease
with what seemed just there, and just then, the dullness of virtue. The