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Books and papers lay about everywhere, heaped together in hopeless confusion. A wave of paper-covered books seemed to have broken over the table and spent itself on the floor. More piles of books stood in all the corners and on the chimney-piece; the bookcases overflowed. Pictures were stacked against the skirting-board or lay face downwards on the carpet. A typewriter somewhere disentangled itself from amidst piles of manuscript. And jumbled up with French, Spanish, or Italian novels, foreign illustrated papers, and sumptuous editions of the Greek and Latin poets, were liqueur bottles, glasses, copies of L'Assiette au Beurre, packets of caporal cigarettes. A withering glare of unshaded incandescent gas poured down on this confusion, in the midst of which—tall and lean, with black hair and heavy eyebrows—stalked the unforgettable figure.

The details of what took place that evening remain with peculiar distinctiveness in my memory, though it was not, of course, my first meeting with Flecker. This must have been in a drawing-room in Chelsea, for I did not know him at Oxford except by repute. His fame at Oxford for the kind of brilliance then in vogue was astonishing. His "japes" were repeated everywhere; and long before I met him I had heard so much about his genius that I was filled with suspicions, determined at all costs not to be unduly impressed! (In those days I had my own gods and was prepared to find other people's inferior.)

Any prejudices with which I may have arrived at Flecker's rooms were however very soon dispersed. Never shall I forget the way he talked! The window of the room was wide open at the bottom, framing a square of dark blue night; and through it, as an undertone to his conversation, came the faint, thrilling roar of London. He was tremendously excited, in an extraordinary mood of elation. He was excited about his first book of poems which was shortly to be published by Mr. Elkin Mathews, excited about his novel The King of Alsander, of which the opening chapters had just been typed; and, above all, excited (so it seemed) by the sheer joy of being alive, of having the world in front of him. I remember that he read me the two poems Ideal and The Town without a Market, which I fancy he had just completed; and I can hear him now repeating the lines—