So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared on
the Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account.
"I hope you are not so insular," he said, "that you will not respect
the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an English gardener.
By Mr. Inglewood's favour we will hear the French innkeeper."
Before the company had decided the delicate point Inglewood was already
reading the account in question. It was in French. It seemed to them
to run something like this:--
"Sir,--Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin's Cafe on the sea-front at Gras,
rather north of Dunquerque. I am willing to write all I know
of the stranger out of the sea.
"I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets. A man of sense
looks for beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful,
such as a trim flower-bed or an ivory statuette. One does not permit
beauty to pervade one's whole life, just as one does not pave
all the roads with ivory or cover all the fields with geraniums.
My faith, but we should miss the onions!
"But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether there
are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science cannot
as yet pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that particular evening
I felt like a poet--like any little rascal of a poet who drinks absinthe
in the mad Montmartre.
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