Slouching round the grim square, shuffling up the street,
Slinking down the by-way, all my graces hawking,
Offering my body to each man I meet.
Peering in the gin-shop where the lads are drinking,
Trying to look gay-like, crazy with the blues;
Halting in a doorway, shuddering and shrinking
(Oh, my draggled feather and my thin, wet shoes).
Here’s a drunken drover: “Hullo, there, old dearie!”
No, he only curses, can’t be got to talk.…
On and on till daylight, famished, wet and weary,
God in Heaven help me as I walk, walk, walk!
III
The Café de la Source,
Late in July 1914.
The other evening MacBean was in a pessimistic mood.
“Why do you write?” he asked me gloomily.
“Obviously,” I said, “to avoid starving. To produce something that will buy me food, shelter, raiment.”
“If you were a millionaire, would you still write?”
“Yes,” I said, after a moment’s thought. “You get an idea. It haunts you. It seems to clamor for expression. It begins to obsess you. At last in desperation you embody it in a poem, an essay, a story. There! It is disposed of. You are at rest. It troubles you no more. Yes; if I were a millionaire I should write, if it were only to escape from my ideas.”
“You have given two reasons why men write,” said MacBean: “for gain, for self-expression. Then, again, some
