Hobohemians

24It had gone with the cruelty of pious relatives from the cell of a to be hung criminal, faultlessly, remorselessly. Willy, weak in belly, head and knees, followed the lake road till tearful conviction shrugged its naked white shoulders of roads. He stopped where the high dining saloons pass along the hazy lines to Domodossola. The letters of the word slowly gliding on the sides of saloons daily seen brought him to a stop. The fear of the great imprisoning hills took him. All freedom vanished with the sudden motor car. His future life had run away from him.

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25By a burnt-out watermill on the steps of which hip-swinging girls deposit baskets of linen and where sun-tawny old women beat out sheets in lake water, loose paths scuttle like lizards between lizard-hiding walls. Among the open glades of the delta rich cows in the evening loiter homeward. Face downward in the long grass exiled Willy wept, picked out by one misfortune, many chances, to lonely unexampled misery in strangely hilled and browbeaten plains. The choicest liqueurs of idleness, which he had thought distilled purely from the present, took over into this retort of failure the vapours of to-morrow. Face downwards three inches from cowdung he saw himself happily estimating to a millionth part some tender substance in a less tender.—Might now be chief research chemist in romantic Chilean nitrate laboratories on three-year contract. Now for ever cut off from my native land, out of sight out of mind, left with a lunatic, myself at forty. Forty-five. Waiting till it was dark to creep in.

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26On the terrace of the Madonna del Sasso exiled poverty catching changing colours on the lake, half sitting on funicular high balustrade, bought up the monastery, lined it with books, brothered it with figureheads of Berlin cafés, admitted sympathetic school friends to rear rooms, negotiated a harem of black-faced beautiful figures. The glow Willy felt after half an hour of this he took to be an omen of departure. Wayward across Ascona he grew certain. On the two beds he and Viktor lying, awaited. Advent of landlord aroused from slumber, postman below passport demanding. Before the unctuously astonished eyes of grocer-landlord, with hauteur aristocratic English as noted with satisfaction Viktor, Willy received money, notes, coins, telegrams of wishes. Viktor counted ten, twenty, thirty. Fourteen pounds, said the telegram. Did the world hold so much money? What it is to be married in England, as Berthe said.

27At six o’clock, Willy, having left a third of his money with Viktor and let him pay for the meal, their second in Switzerland, shook hands in Locarno station. His ticket was for Milan. His destination was Trieste. He finally arrived in Paris.