The odor of tobacco and garlic reeked in the air, and an orchestra of a half-dozen pieces was crashing out a medley of operatic selections. Olive-skinned venders of fruit, stoop-shouldered ragpickers, hard-handed organ-grinders, all sat and looked with rapt faces toward the diminutive proscenium-arch at the end of the hall, beyond which was a lurid painting of the Bay of Naples. When Signorina Elisa Venezia came to the footlights and sang a Venetian boat-song--it took Hartley back to the night of Repellier's birthday party--a low-browed Neapolitan sitting next to him pounded on the table with his beer-glass, and the sudden applause and shouting was deafening, volcanic. He wondered at the fire of their Latin enthusiasm. An ape-like old man tottered and mumbled through the gesticulating crowd, selling meal-cakes. When a corpulent woman in a tawdry yellow costume, swaying her huge body to the throb of the music, sang an Italian love-song that seemed familiar to the crowd, the ape-like old man crouched down on the edge of his blackened basket and listened to the end, with fixed, filmy, eager eyes.
The scene of a sordid and toil-hardened people finding solace in music brought home to Hartley how much he himself had been missing from life; how narrow, of late, his days had grown to be. The chance to wring out of existence its richest wine was before him, had been thrust upon him, and he had neglected it.
As he walked wearily home through the cold night air he determined, with a sudden passionate clutching of his hands, to take what was his due, to grasp at what lay before him in life. He was tired of all empty and enslaving work; the tide had met its turn. A Nietzsche-like madness to throw open his man's arsenal of instinct, a longing to fling his weight against every iron law that seemed, at the moment, to choke and overrun and stultify life, filled him with a sense of tingling opposition. To battle Byronic-like against convention, to ride the whirlwind like the old gods of life, but to fight always, and for all things--that seemed to him life, and the best of life.
And in something that was almost delirium, in one white flash of inspirational, subliminal clearness, came to him the first ideas of his poem on War--a poem which he worked out feverishly, yet not unhappily, during the next few days of culminating weariness and illness, little dreaming of the part it was soon to play in lives other than his own.