Hobohemians

3

1Across the delta land of the river Maggia a brooding figure in one tight and one trailing khaki puttee tramped to Locarno. Blue green lizards sizzled swiftly off boiling stones. A small steamer from Italy crossed the oily waters with a dull well-fed purring. Viktor was empty. He chewed luscious stems of grasses.

2At Locarno he passed through the market into the square near the post office. It was time Berliners started coming here.—June. Where was all the German colony on Monte Verita skulking? Not a soul with money had appeared yet. Round and round the square, one loose puttee trailing in the dust.—If I meet the Baroness or the Herr Doktor [Doctor] I will pretend I am staying in that big English hotel. That will impress them. They will rush around. How does Viktor sell his paintings? Who buys them? He’s living at the Victoria. If you could oblige me with ten marks till to-morrow.—

3Dizzy he became thinking how insecurely fortressed by German artists Locarno, Ascona were. Dizzy. Towards the end of the afternoon rewinding his steps through the deserted markets Viktor picked up hurriedly, criminally, pieces of orange peel. Back in the grocer’s upper room in Ascona extended on the bed reading the Arabian Nights Willy lay. He watched Viktor put orange peel in the washbasin, pour on water, some permanganate solution and scrub, scrub. Then Viktor tore up a useless water-colour that caught his eye and walked with stockinged feet on the balcony.

4“Will you have a bit of orange peel?” he offered. “It is quite clean. I dried it on the towel.”

5Willy looked at the towel. “The peel was clean,” he said. “I think I’ll walk into Locarno.”

6“It is warm out. Be careful of your head. If you come across an Englishman, tell him you are living with a great German artist. I know what. Fetch him along. We will sell him something. Which one? That one? Fifty pounds. He will be accustomed to paying much more. Two hundred. You ask him for two hundred.”

7Willy looked in the mirror. He could feel the blunt razor of the lake wind shaving a beard on him. Obscurely he felt miserably proud that he could grow a beard on nothing at all. So could dead men though. One and a half rolls a day, half an inch of hair. Two hundred pounds would be shaving for ten years in swell saloons, a year for him, nine for Viktor.

8Willy slunk out of Locarno post office. He eyed square and building with eyes that seemed detached from his body. He could feel queer lights lit in them by the oils of hunger. There was a letter for him a foot behind the counter, the other side, but the clerk demanded excess postage. It was a foreign letter. No, he couldn’t see it. It was such a little to pay.

9“But I haven’t got it,” said Willy. “Let me open the letter. There will be money inside. Then I will pay you.”

10“No, no.”