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The Hotel Years Joseph Roth Edited, translated and introduced by Michael Hofmann
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The Dapper Traveller (1924)
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he dapper traveller enters the compartment carrying in his hand a small case of soft leather, accompanied by a porter who hoists a suitcase of tough leather into the luggage net. The dapper traveller pays him quietly without looking and without responding to his goodbye. Straightaway he drops into the seat and bounces up once before his body comes to rest. He peels off his grey leather gloves and lays them in the soft little case, from which he takes out a pair of grey thread gloves. These he puts on, stroking each finger straight. Thereupon he looks in a mirror with leather backing, runs his right hand lightly through his hair, and looks out of the window without fixing any particular object or person. The traveller is clad in a discreet grey, set off by an exquisite iridescent purple tie. With complacent attention he examines his feet, his leather shoes, and the fine knots in the broad laces. He stretches out his legs in the compartment, both arms are casually on the arm rests to either side. Before long the grey traveller pulls out his mirror again, and brushes his dense, black parted hair with his fingers, in the way one might apply a feather duster to a kickshaw. Then he burrows in his case, and various useful items come to light: a leather key-holder, a pair of nail scissors, a packet of cigarettes, a little silk handkerchief and a bottle of eau de cologne. Then the traveller pushes a cigarette between his lips and pats
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his pockets for matches. Now, where are his matches? Yes, where are they, the elegant, flat matches for his waistcoat pocket, with their little yellow youthful phosphorus heads? They are forgotten, lost, stolen, spoiled, disappeared, they are not there. The dapper traveller no longer dominates the compartment. Yes, he even feels a little trivial, with his impeccable outfit and no matches. His distinguished, sensual, olive-yellow face takes on a pale brown coloration. With his soft little leather case in his hand, he marches off in the direction of the dining car. When he returns, fed, a little grease at the corners of his lips, he pulls a leather-bound volume from the pocket of his travelling cloak. He writes with a silver pencil, engrossed, dreamy. He is surely a poet. Yes, clearly, a popular poet. He invents female characters so ethereal, so morphinistically thin that one may not see that they are spun from nothing at all. He is a poet on laid paper, his hand signs three hundred and fifty-one book jackets a year. But as he leans forward and puts his book down on his knee, I see that what he was writing and totting up were columns of figures. The beautiful book contains profane calculations. Then he puts a cigarette between his lips and his olive yellow face turns brown, and because I am getting off soon, I offer him my matches. But he refuses them. Because mine is a common or garden matchbox, bulky, just the thing to spoil the line of a waistcoat pocket, and full of common or garden red-tipped matches, not to be carried in a leather case without compromising oneself. Frankfurter Zeitung, 8 August 1924