Hobohemians

9Round the fat Fritz the regular octahedron of women crystallised themselves on axes of contemptuous chatter.

10—I am the speck of dust waiting to solidify the supersaturated intellectual. It is time Ali showed up.—

11“Nine o’clock,” said the waiter.

12—All the hours slouch in like tramps through the café. Hour ten not able to move round the place, so chockablock it is with drinkers of coffee. Only at midnight the tired sweaty evening hours make a mob of it, rush the door and hustle themselves out of it. Seven and eight o’clock not out of the chess room yet. But my afternoon fumes of brandy are crawling down. Call for the cheesecake.—

13The white aproned waiter laid a single cheesecake on the table.

14—I am at the bottom of a hot green and gold cavern. If you ask me where, it is centred in the cold Prussian plains. Here in the centre of the cold Prussian plains I am slaughtering subsidiary tribes of cheesecakes. Somewhere outside this empire of Käsekuchen [cheesecake] are other rooms with far different wallpapers.

15I am the man who in the dark scaled the walls of Regent’s Park.

16Out on the early unruffled river morning near Henley in racing skiffs with the backward pupil from Columbia. The sculls drew soapy railway lines on the thick singing water and the muscled legs open to the breeze pushed hard against the thwarts. No one was abreast of the water for miles and we raced ahead singing the limericks that by now are anthologised in the monasteries of Columbia.

17Watching the foggy sun like peculiar cheese behind St. Paul’s. In the laboratory coughing nitrous fumes and spilt acids were the conceivable basis to research work momentous to the learned. The delicate weighing out of unimportant things for important purposes. In college rooms electrical appliances and examination papers.

18On dusty roads of Berkshire the Khaki puttees of school section of cadets with egg and tomato sandwiches. I was the last to get a drink of water on that contemptible field day, but indomitably held up the whole homeward march till I got it—extra-special, with the headmaster near his little pukka sahib [proper colonial gentleman].

19Under the white lily dome of the national library in Unter den Linden from nine in the morning till the bell at night trod down the turf of green lamps with severity.

20Diving into sea water near Rye.—

21Through the swing doors the straight eyes of Lotte.

22Lotte bounced in through the swing door faster than she had intended. The scoundrelly porter played that joke with every girl entering alone. Some day she would vamp a prizefighter and let him settle that matter.

23The man with the blue beard from Munich raised a hand: “Lotte, when are you coming to pose for me?”

24“I will come some time; I am busy at present. I must go.”—They will not catch me standing for hours in cold studios when I have found a nice young publisher with money.