were wide apart and black with the blackness that is barbaric, while before
them was perpetually falling down a great black mop of hair through which
he gazed like a roguish satyr from a thicket. He invariably wore a soft
flannel shirt under his velvet-corduroy jacket, and his necktie was red.
This latter stood for the red flag (he had once lived with the socialists
of Paris), and it symbolized the blood and brotherhood of man. Also, he
had never been known to wear anything on his head save a leather-banded
sombrero. It was even rumoured that he had been born with this particular
piece of headgear. And in my experience it was provocative of nothing
short of sheer delight to see that Mexican sombrero hailing a cab in
Piccadilly or storm-tossed in the crush for the New York Elevated.

As I have said, Carquinez was made quick by wine--"as the clay was made
quick when God breathed the breath of life into it," was his way of saying
it. I confess that he was blasphemously intimate with God; and I must add
that there was no blasphemy in him. He was at all times honest, and,
because he was compounded of paradoxes, greatly misunderstood by those who
did not know him. He could be as elementally raw at times as a screaming
savage; and at other times as delicate as a maid, as subtle as a Spaniard.
And--well, was he not Aztec? Inca? Spaniard?

And now I must ask pardon for the space I have given him. (He is my
friend, and I love him.) The house was shaking to the storm, as he drew
closer to the fire and laughed at it through his wine. He looked at me,
and by the added lustre of his eye, and by the alertness of it, I knew that
at last he was pitched in his proper key.

"And so you think you've won out against the gods?" he demanded.

"Why the gods?"