One who would wear things like this must be different.
I should never comprehend it, never.
I gave her the things.
She put her arm around my neck and kissed me. I held her tightly to me. "Pat," said I.
Then took her home.
We did not talk much more. We walked side by side through the silvery dawn.
Milk carts rattled over the cobbles and newspapers were being delivered.
An old fellow was sitting asleep in front of a house.
His jaw was chattering as if it would never stop.
Cyclists rode past with baskets of bread.
The smell of warm new bread filled the street.
High above us an aeroplane moved across the blue sky. "To-day?" I asked Pat outside the house door.
She smiled.
"About seven?" I asked.
She did not look the least tired. She was as fresh as if she had had a long sleep.
She kissed me good-bye.
I remained standing outside the house until I saw the light come on in her room.
Then I went back.
On the way many things occurred to me that I should like to have said to her, many pretty words.
I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.
Then I went to the market.
The wagons with vegetables, meat and flowers were already there.
I knew that I could get three times as many flowers for the same money as in the shops.
All the money I had on me I invested in tulips.
They looked wonderful, perfectly fresh with drops of water still in their cups.
I received a great armful.
The seller promised to send them to Pat about eleven o'clock.
She laughed at me as she promised it, and put in a fat bunch of violets as well.
"Now the lady will have her friend at least a fortnight," said she. "She has only to put an aspirin in the water now and then."
I gave her the money.
Then I walked slowly home.
Chapter X
The Ford was standing finished in the workshop, and no new work had come in.
We should have to get busy with something.
Koster and I had gone to an auction to buy a taxi that was being sold.
Taxis could always be sold again.
The place was a mews in the north of the city.
Besides the taxi there was a lot of other stuff to be sold, some of which was standing in the yard: beds, rickety tables, a gilded cage with a parrot that said
"Hallo, dearie!", a grandfather clock, some books, cupboards, an old dress suit, kitchen chairs, cooking utensils—all the pitiful equipment of a crumbling, broken life.
We arrived too early; the auctioneer was not there yet.
I was rooting about among the things for sale when I came on some old books—cheap, well-thumbed copies of the Greek and Latin classics with numerous manuscript notes in the margins.
In the discoloured, battered pages were to be read no more the verses of Horace, the songs of Anacreon—only the cry of distress and despair of a life that was lost.
To their owner, whoever he was, these books had been a haven of refuge; he had kept them to the last— and if he sent them here, it meant his life was finished.
Koster looked over my shoulder.
"Pathetic, eh?"
I nodded. "These too, Otto," said I, pointing to the other things.
"Kitchen chairs and wardrobes aren't sent here for fun."
We went to the car which was standing in a corner of the yard.
The paint was chipped and worn in places, but the car was clean, even under the mudguards.
A stocky little man with big, dangling hands was standing near by; he looked at us dully.