Hobohemians

1EVENING in the café was announced by the four o’clock change of waiters. It signified to the poor who had been there since mid-day that entrance to the evening’s warm idleness was conditional upon ordering fresh coffee. The young man writing leisurely beckoned another cup. Voluntarily he avoided the shouldertap of necessity. Few were brave enough to outsit otherwise their customary familiar waiter. He turned his sheet to re-read.

2“Caravanserai of Chatter. By William Burton. The grey mass of the Gedächtnis Kirche segregates the Romanisches Café from its brighter brethren of the Kurfürstendamm. The ostracised café therefore not ungratefully harmonises its architecture with that of the jailor church. There is, however, more than a church between this one and the rest of Berlin Westend cafés. Barrier serving is the spontaneous bohemianism of the Jewish nations. When the old Café des Westens went the way of all the cafés of Bohemia and became smart, the ejected ‘temperamentvoll [high-spirited] German Jews’ who had drunk around Rupert Brooke were houseless. The managers of the respectable konditoreis [pastry shops] of the Kurfürstendamm showed plainly disinclination to admit shabby bohemia. Then the painter Viktor adventured further behind the grey church than any bohemian had ever been, and discovered a moribund and therefore welcoming coffee house. Three hundred newspapers were on the file and Berlin Bohemia avidly settled there. That is the origin of the present café.”

3Mr. William Burton destroyed this third product of a young life of dreams and rested against the green plush cushions.

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4He caught the approaching waiter’s eye.

5—Strange myself in a noose of coffee cups curtailing the liberty of my heart beats. Coffees black and white, warp and weft of the caffein shroud, enveloping the last of my young Englishman’s life. I am to be seen in here opening my mouth to the hardened clay of a double coffee cup and slipping within myself heated liquids.—

6Herrober laid down a filament of hangman coffee. “Your little friend has not come in to-day. You look lonely for her.”—The way those two sit in a corner kissing hours away behind American papers. He is her latest....

7—Let plump little Lotte from the reformatory home go hang herself before I sit looking lonely for her. Let her slip from the plush-cushioned banks into deep pools of café hours. No wind from the hills moves their waters sideways. So dead are they with the washed down salts of ambition she will float desperately trying to drown herself. All the stagnant eternity of day and night seeps in through the swing doors swung by the porter, and bears lotus blossoms of coffee cups past floating speakers. Let her drown.—

8Swing door of the café turned its four compartments irritably on themselves. Through those sudden right angles spectacled habitués were precipitated flocculent in unsymmetric tables.