Hobohemians

2

1Willy lying on his dewdamp raincoat closed his eyes and shivered. His neck ached from the solid rücksack [backpack] and his nose ran. He could hear Viktor stamping around in the grass singing tuneless mad hymns to the fireflies.

2Meteors of fireflies in the misty air played at harmless lightning. They made him aware that his eyes were unable to stay shut. They opened wilfully with the silent slam of pushed-in café doorways. He was a fool ever to have left the cheap anchorage of café tables. Fireflies as quick as bilious spots in the eyes distracted him.

3He would have to get up. No one could sleep with a madman stamping around frog-noisy meadows. Cheerful stamping, happy stamping. The madman was happy. He and the brood of frogs were more disturbing than an anarchist-meeting discovering spies. To be mad was to undergo not normal reactions. No one could be happy starving in wet night fields miles from warmth. Yet the same lunatic had depressed him to death during the sunny side, sunny walk, sunny evening, through Tessine.

4Six hours back they had swung penniless out of the railroad station of Bellinzona. Willy shouldering a heavy rücksack carefree and devil-may-come strode out in the early sunny evening on the road to Locarno. Talk and women and café tables in the rich colour of Bellinzona. Afoot for Rome via Monte Verita, the summer village of Berlin Bloomsbury.

5Cheerfully over a bridge between gossiping houses and pubs with unknown wines into the hot lands of adventure. In Italy one would write, one would paint, spend days in warm sleeping squares feeding on bunches of presented grapes. Live in Rome on three pounds a month, playing at Goethe.

6Big hills put up umbrellas of shadow because of the sun. Discouraged sun fell on them in last showers. Not even gas lights to turn two medieval minstrels from the middle ages to modernity.

7“Tramps,” muttered Viktor. “We shall be arrested as tramps.”

8He started, stopped.

9“Only a cow. Don’t let anyone see us. We haven’t a penny. They are severe with tramps in this country. We shall be put back to Germany, perhaps in prison.”

10Willy laughed. Gloomier and deathlier Viktor. “For you it’s all right. This is your idea of romance. I am an old man. I look like a tramp. I had enough of gendarmes when I was a boy, following me all the way from Lyons to Paris. As soon as I entered a village up got a gendarme shadowing me out of the place. ‘On you tramp, this is a respectable village.’ I’ve had all that, sleeping in hayricks. I don’t want to be treated like a tramp at my age. I can’t bear heavy footed yokels speaking roughly to me. It’s different for you, you’re young. You’re English. You have an aristocratic father with thin fingers and a sister who will marry into five o’clock circles. But I shall be sent back to Germany, a laughing stock. They all said we were mad to go, those hounds at Konstanz. They’re all looking forward to seeing us brought back like criminals. There are no tramps in Switzerland.”