All in the black sea would I spew
If I could win an hour of you.
These verses (though you would hardly think so) cost me infinite trouble, and when I had finished them I looked up from my scrawl and saw that the room was half-empty.
“Is it so late then?” I asked a man sitting next to me. I saw it was Aleister Crowley, and he looked at me rather balefully.
“No: so early. Six o’clock, to be precise.”
And he turned his back on me and gazed at a wall on which no pictures hung.
So I picked up my straw hat and tried to find my Scots friend. He was sitting behind the piano, talking very earnestly to a man I did not know.
“Oh, Nicol Bain,” said I, “I am so hungry.”
The streets were strewn with sunshine, and Bain took off his hat and looked long and long at the blue sky.
“How damned fine to be alive!” he exclaimed.