Memoirs of the Foreign Legion ( with a long introduction by D H lawrence)

On a dark, wet, wintry evening in November, 1919, I arrived in
Florence, having just got back to Italy for the first time since 1914.
My wife was in Germany, gone to see her mother, also for the first
time since that fatal year 1914. We were poor; who was going to
bother to publish me and to pay for my writings, in 1918 and 1919? I
landed in Italy with nine pounds in my pocket and about twelve pounds
lying in the bank in London. Nothing more. My wife, I hoped, would
arrive in Florence with two or three pounds remaining. We should have
to go very softly, if we were to house ourselves in Italy for the
winter. But after the desperate weariness of the war, one could not
bother.

So I had written to N----D---- [Norman Douglas]; to get me a cheap
room somewhere in Florence, and to leave a note at Cook's. I deposited
my bit of luggage at the station, and walked to Cook's in the Via
Tornabuoni. Florence was strange to me: seemed grim and dark and
rather awful on the cold November evening. There was a note from
D----, who has never left me in the lurch. I went down the Lung' Arno
to the address he gave.

I had just passed the end of the Ponte Vecchio, and was watching the
first lights of evening and the last light of day on the swollen river
as I walked, when I heard D----'s voice:

"Isn't that Lawrence? Why of course it is, of course it is, beard and
all! Well, how are you, eh? You got my note? Well now, my dear boy,
you just go on to the Cavelotti--straight ahead, straight
ahead--you've got the number. There's a room for you there. We shall
be there in half an hour. Oh, let me introduce you to M----"

I had unconsciously seen the two men approaching, D-----tall and
portly, the other man rather short and strutting. They were both
buttoned up in their overcoats, and both had rather curly little hats.
But D----was decidedly shabby and a gentleman, with his wicked red
face and tufted eyebrows. The other man was almost smart, all in grey,
and he looked at first sight like an actor-manager, common. There was
a touch of down-on-his-luck about him too. He looked at me, buttoned
up in my old thick overcoat, and with my beard bushy and raggy because
of my horror of entering a strange barber's shop, and he greeted me in
a rather fastidious voice, and a little patronizingly. I forgot to say
I was carrying a small hand-bag. But I realized at once that I ought,
in this little grey-sparrow man's eyes--he stuck his front out
tubbily, like a bird, and his legs seemed to perch behind him, as a
bird's do--I ought to be in a cab. But I wasn't. He eyed me in that
shrewd and rather impertinent way of the world of actor-managers:
cosmopolitan, knocking shabbily round the world.