Josiah Flynt not only greatly admired Arthur Symons, the distinguished Englishman, as poet, master of prose, and critic, but had an affectionate regard for him, one expression of which was his use of the nickname, "Symonsky." While Flynt's guest in Berlin, Symons had some difficulty in persuading a letter-carrier that a communication from London was for Arthur _Symons, Esq._, and not for some _Herr Symonsky_! The Slavic twist to the name amused Flynt, who seized upon it. His shy, affectionate nature found an outlet in renaming close friends.
After one of his visits to London, I asked Flynt if he had seen much of Symons.
"Symonsky put me up, you know," he replied; then with a quick, side glance and a smile, as he lighted a cigarette, "but, to be perfectly frank, when _I_ went to bed, _he_ was getting up!"
Here we have defined in a sentence the difference between the two men. Their natures, like their lives, were never parallel; they only just touched one another's imaginations in passing!
Flynt was then studying London's _Under World_--the great city's blackest corners and darkest ways; while Symons, as it chanced, was seldom out of the lime-light circle of London concert halls, preparatory to writing his "London Nights."
Both men were the sons of clergymen, and launched in life's calmest, safest waters, at about the same time, though on opposite sides of the Atlantic. It was their own volition which led them to take to life's high seas. Symons went from his small town to London, which, in spite of continental sojourns, has remained his permanent mooring. Flynt took to the "open" at an early age, and tied up in whatever harbor the storm drove him. American by blood and birth, he felt at home in Russia, Germany, France, or the British Isles, if given the _Mask of No Identity_.
One of the swiftest currents of London life flows down the Strand. There, Josiah Flynt, in what disguise he chose, could do his "work," and, when he would, step over the sill of the old Temple and find a welcome from his friend, who had chambers in Fountain Court, that silent square of green, which slopes to the Thames, and is kept fresh and cool by its jets of water and great shade trees. Symons lived in the building to the right, after entering the Court, and up a winding flight of old stone steps.