For all this the traveller, looking round and searching in the rich vocabulary of British youth for a term at once fit and comprehensive, found the choice phrase, "Rotten hole, this."
He stopped at a corner house abutting on a tree-shadowed square, with a loggia ending in a sort of roof-garden; and, stumbling through a dark archway, and falling over several garden and household tools on to a steep stairway, drew further upon his vocabulary for the epithet, "Beastly rotten hole." By this time the rumble tumble of his wild scramble up the stairs had brought out a stalwart form, a few rays of light and words of welcome, from the door of a room opening on the loggia.
"Here at last, young un? How many more of you? Row enough for ten."
It was a shaggy-bearded, brown-faced man, with deep-set eyes of piercing lustre and a forehead like a cliff-wall, roughly dressed, but clean-looking as an Englishman, though his name ended in ski; he had risen from a table covered with papers of various script, newspaper cuttings and journals in many tongues, and furnished with a type-writing machine. A bed, a chest of drawers topped by a milk-jug in a slop-basin, a small, square looking-glass, a clothes-press, two chairs, an easel, a bag of golf-clubs, some walking-sticks and mineral-water bottles, several pairs of boots, a wood basket and books of all sizes, falling out of packing-cases and strewn over bed, chairs, floor and every available ledge, completed the furniture of a fair-sized sunny room with an open hearth, on which some wood ashes gave token of a former fire.
"Snug," the host said, indicating the surroundings with a sweep of the hand, and tipping a pile of books off a chair.
"Topping," replied the guest, stepping gingerly through the archipelago of books, and surveying the scene with ill-dissembled disgust.
"You seem jolly chippy this morning. What's the row?" continued the host, handing a cigarette-box.
"Nothing much. Only stone-broke."
"What, again? I say, young un, you'll do this once too often."
"I jolly well have."