When that face
faded from him, he saw all the other faces, and he saw no more difference
than between sheep and sheep. Indeed, that curious love of the sordid, so
common an affectation of the modern decadent, and with him so genuine, grew
upon him, and dragged him into more and more sorry corners of a life which
was never exactly "gay" to him. His father, when he died, left him in
possession of an old dock, where for a time he lived in a mouldering house,
in that squalid part of the East End which he came to know so well, and
to feel so strangely at home in. He drank the poisonous liquors of those
pot-houses which swarm about the docks; he drifted about in whatever
company came in his way; he let heedlessness develop into a curious
disregard of personal tidiness. In Paris, Les Halles took the place of the
docks. At Dieppe, where I saw so much, of him one summer, he discovered
strange, squalid haunts about the harbour, where he made friends with
amazing innkeepers, and got into rows with the fishermen who came in to
drink after midnight. At Brussels, where I was with him at the time of the
Kermesse, he flung himself into all that riotous Flemish life, with a zest
for what was most sordidly riotous in it.
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