“‘You damned spy’--I told him I’d kill him--‘you dirty spy,’ he says.
“‘I’m just as clean as you are,’ I told him. ‘I buy a shirt when I need it. I reckon I’m as clean as you, and I’ll kill you!’
“He jumped at me and beat me with his fists. ‘I’ll kill you! Some day I’ll kill you,’ I says. They wouldn’t let me sleep; hectored me for two nights, but ‘I’ll kill you,’ I says to him. ‘I’ll----’”
He rose to his feet and faced me, then his knees sagged, and slowly, very slowly, he fell over in a dead faint.
There is little to add to this strange tale. The wilder wanderings of a sick mind followed the wild wanderings of his broken body. He was lodged in a private house where he had good care, but his case was hopeless from the start. About a month before his death I received a note written in his own hand. It read:
“They says I am vury sick but I doo not beleeve them in a few days moor I am gooen back to Mawbooj. I beleeve my sister is there still goodbie.
The poet finished his recitation and resumed his cigarette, waiting for our applause.
“It is a man absolutely extraordinary,” murmured the dancing-master across the table at my left, under cover of the hand-clapping. “He is the greatest poet of Belgium, monsieur. Verhaeren, Cammaerts, Maeterlinck--they are nothing. If you bring him an album--presto! he writes you an ode in it.”
In the tight little supper-room over the Café de la Toison d’Or we were sweltering and dining at the expense of McTeague. It was a night in August, and the heat of noon had not yet died out of the boulevards and streets of Brussels, _ville basse_. The cheap cotton curtains at the two windows fronting on the avenue waved languidly to and fro, and the air of the room reeked with cigarette smoke and the odours of Belgian cooking.
McTeague sat at the table’s head--a huge, lonely, unsophisticated American, with a mop of gray hair topping a face like a child’s, tired eyes, slightly Roman nose, and what once was a rose-bud mouth. At his right was Yvette, the dancer of the Scala; pretty, of course, the big, muscular, operatic-soprano type of beauty rather than the petite beings we usually think of in the dance; sleek, serpentine, appraising the world about her. Next her was I; then Yvette’s husband, the poet; then Guilbert, her dancing-master.