Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/341



December, 1923

AN I write a Paris Letter here in this commandeered hotel, this interallied mausoleum?

We are never closer to what we love than when we are far away. And besides I am not going to write about Paris, for to-night I am at Düsseldorf, in the Rhineland. Passing before me are stenographers whose eyes are invitations to a dance, French soldiers, Rhinelanders with their delicate faces; women look at sausages in the shopwindows as their sisters in the rue de la Paix look at Cartier; swans are asleep in the canal. Triumphant autumn reigns here and a sort of modest voluptuousness, quite in keeping with the country's flavour. I recognize a crystalline noise, the prettiest in the world, heard before in Barcelona and Dublin: it is the big shopwindows being shattered in the food-riots of the unemployed.

To-night I am to meet my friend the Rhenish painter, Hugo von R. He has arranged to meet me at the railway station. Perhaps he is taking a train? I wait for him, the moon comes up, the streets grow empty. It is the curfew hour. He comes wearing his summer overcoat, with a violet comforter, under an 1840 sky.

"I am meeting you here," he says, "because the station-buffet is the swellest night restaurant in Düsseldorf. It is the poor man's Abbaye. You can try their quite possible French pinard, tax free at two francs a litre."

We step over the sleeping blue forms of soldiers on leave. Hugo raises his glass and invokes Rimbaud:

"Les Bacchantes des banlieues sanglotent et lalune brûle et hurle."

"I can't work any more," he tells me. "My mornings go in standing in line at the bank to buy some money; then a fresh struggle to buy something to eat. When that's over night has come and I haven't a cent for light. So I roll myself up in old newspapers and stay in my studio, without sleeping. There's nothing to buy here now except liquor. (You'll always find that.) I feel that I am going mad, like everyone else, like our government with four or five wars on its hands. Your mistake is in treating us as if we were