Word: vagabondism
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...tower is the scene of great activity on this morning. Motes dance in the sunbeams, and the Vagabond dances behind a screen as he dons his trousers. Water tinkles against the sides of the basin as he sluices his gnarled face in the limpid pool. He dashes through the room, adding touch after touch to his creation of sartorial ineffability. His cutaway in place, he adds a final caressing stroke to his ascot, bathes its center in the refulgent aura of a heavy gold pin, and descends the innumerable stairs...
...Vagabond arises; he leaps out of the four-poster in the tower, his face merry in the light of the noon sun. As his feet touch the floor, and his knees buckle under him, his joyous expression contracts to a snarl. He wabbles to the fixtures, where he pours himself a goblet of cold water. It runs down his throat, and into his stomach, every inch of its course distinctly felt. A sensation of feeble exhilaration comes over him, and he puts on his raiment, slowly, with hands that will not quite close. The prospect of a meal seems strangely...
...clamor of the House dining hall, where he is eating with a friend whose conversation satisfies, pounds in his cars. As the decaying pork is placed on the table, the Vagabond leaves, looking straight before him, intently and desperate. He proceeds, with irregular stops, to a class. His legs are shot through with stabbing pains, and twist them as he may, he cannot soothe them. The lecture speaks more and more slowly, his words finally arriving in a heaving rhythm which leaves the Vagabond with faint shudders. The class closes, and he wanders forth, counting the brown boards...
...Vagabond, swirling in the haze which fills his tower, finds himself possessed of the gift of clairvoyance. Before his glassy eyes, a vision swims. . . a vision of himself, a graduate and fifteen years out of college. He is sitting in a room whose floors are a hell of rubbish, and whose walls are decorated with photographs in execrable taste. Two small children are at his feet, scrawling on the floor with large blue pencils, and giving vent, periodically, to low, retching noises. From some far place, the howling of another child penetrates. The Vagabond is disconsolate, and does not realize...
...room is still, except for the steady, monotonous pounding of the hammer in the hand of one of the children, who is attempting to nail the spatulate toes of the Vagabond to the floor. He persuades the little creature to desist by a smart cuff to the side of the head; it rambles off across the floor, wriggling like an inebriated grub; it reaches the side of its confrere, and regards him with a vacuous, faintly irritating expression. Finally, flushing to the roots of its hair, it strikes the other, who succumbs with a pitiful rattle in its throat...