Down and Out in Paris and London (2024)

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O scathful harm, condition of poverte!

CHAUCER

Contents

Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8.
Chapter 9.
Chapter 10.
Chapter 11.
Chapter 12.
Chapter 13.
Chapter 14.
Chapter 15.
Chapter 16.
Chapter 17.
Chapter 18.
Chapter 19.
Chapter 20.
Chapter 21.
Chapter 22.
Chapter 23.
Chapter 24.
Chapter 25.
Chapter 26.
Chapter 27.
Chapter 28.
Chapter 29.
Chapter 30.
Chapter 31.
Chapter 32.
Chapter 33.
Chapter 34.
Chapter 35.
Chapter 36.
Chapter 37.
Chapter 38.

I

THE rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A successionof furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who keptthe little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement toaddress a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck intosabots and her grey hair was streaming down.

MADAME MONCE: 'Salope! Salope! How many times have I toldyou not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've boughtthe hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out of the window likeeveryone else? Putain! Salope!'

THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: 'Vache!'

Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows wereflung open on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel.They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of cavalryrode past and people stopped shouting to look at them.

I sketch this scene, just to convey something of the spirit ofthe rue du Coq d'Or. Not that quarrels were the only thing thathappened there—but still, we seldom got through the morningwithout at least one outburst of this description. Quarrels, andthe desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of childrenchasing orange-peel over the cobbles, and at night loud singing andthe sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of thestreet.

It was a very narrow street—a ravine of tall, leproushouses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as thoughthey had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houseswere hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles,Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tinybistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of ashilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male populationof the quarter was drunk. There was fighting over women, and theArab navvies who lived in the cheapest hotels used to conductmysterious feuds, and fight them out with chairs and occasionallyrevolvers. At night the policemen would only come through thestreet two together. It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amidthe noise and dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers,bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves tothemselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite arepresentative Paris slum.

My hotel was called the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. It was adark, rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitionsinto forty rooms. The rooms were small arid inveterately dirty, forthere was no maid, and Madame F., the patronne, had no timeto do any sweeping. The walls were as thin as matchwood, and tohide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer ofpink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. Nearthe ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns ofsoldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one hadto get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs. Sometimeswhen the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive theminto the next room; whereupon the lodger next door would retort byhaving his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was adirty place, but homelike, for Madame F. and her husband were goodsorts. The rent of the rooms varied between thirty and fifty francsa week.

The lodgers were a floating population, largely foreigners, whoused to turn up without luggage, stay a week and then disappearagain. They were of every trade—cobblers, bricklayers,stonemasons, navvies, students, prostitutes, rag-pickers. Some ofthem were fantastically poor. In one of the attics there was aBulgarian student who made fancy shoes for the American market.From six to twelve he sat on his bed, making a dozen pairs of shoesand earning thirty-five francs; the rest of the day he attendedlectures at the Sorbonne. He was studying for the Church, and booksof theology lay face-down on his leather-strewn floor. In anotherroom lived a Russian woman and her son, who called himself anartist. The mother worked sixteen hours a day, darning socks attwenty-five centimes a sock, while the son, decently dressed,loafed in the Montparnasse cafés. One room was let to twodifferent lodgers, one a day worker and the other a night worker.In another room a widower shared the same bed with his two grown-updaughters, both consumptive.

There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slumsare a gathering-place for eccentric people—people who havefallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up tryingto be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standardsof behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of thelodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyondwords.

There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfishcouple who plied an extraordinary trade. They used to sellpostcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious thing was thatthe postcards were sold in sealed packets as p*rnographic ones, butwere actually photographs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers didnot discover this till too late, and of course never complained.The Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a week, and by stricteconomy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. The filthof their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below.According to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had taken off theirclothes for four years.

Or there was Henri, who worked in the sewers. He was a tall,melancholy man with curly hair, rather romantic-looking in hislong, sewer-man's boots. Henri's peculiarity was that he did notspeak, except for the purposes of work, literally for daystogether. Only a year before he had been a chauffeur in good employand saving money. One day he fell in love, and when the girlrefused him he lost his temper and kicked her. On being kicked thegirl fell desperately in love with Henri, and for a fortnight theylived together and spent a thousand francs of Henri's money. Thenthe girl was unfaithful; Henri planted a knife in her upper arm andwas sent to prison for six months. As soon as she had been stabbedthe girl fell more in love with Henri than ever, and the two madeup their quarrel and agreed that when Henri came out of jail heshould buy a taxi and they would marry and settle down. But afortnight later the girl was unfaithful again, and when Henri cameout she was with child, Henri did not stab her again. He drew outall his savings and went on a drinking-bout that ended in anothermonth's imprisonment; after that he went to work in the sewers.Nothing would induce Henri to talk. If you asked him why he workedin the sewers he never answered, but simply crossed his wrists tosignify handcuffs, and jerked his head southward, towards theprison. Bad luck seemed to have turned him half-witted in a singleday.

Or there was R., an Englishman, who lived six months of the yearin Putney with his parents and six months in France. During histime in France he drank four litres of wine a day, and six litreson Saturdays; he had once travelled as far as the Azores, becausethe wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Europe. He was a gentle,domesticated creature, never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober.He would lie in bed till midday, and from then till midnight he wasin his comer of the bistro, quietly and methodicallysoaking. While he soaked he talked, in a refined, womanish voice,about antique furniture. Except myself, R. was the only Englishmanin the quarter.

There were plenty of other people who lived lives just aseccentric as these: Monsieur Jules, the Roumanian, who had a glasseye and would not admit it, Furex the Limousin stonemason, Roucollethe miser—he died before my time, though—old Laurentthe rag-merchant, who used to copy his signature from a slip ofpaper he carried in his pocket. It would be fun to write some oftheir biographies, if one had time. I am trying to describe thepeople in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because theyare all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, andI had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, withits dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson inpoverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is forthat reason that I try to give some idea of what life was likethere.

II

LIFE in the quarter. Our bistro, for instance, at thefoot of the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux. A tiny brick-flooredroom, half underground, with wine-sodden tables, and a photographof a funeral inscribed 'Crédit est mort'; andred-sashed workmen carving sausage with big jack-knives; and MadameF., a splendid Auvergnat peasant woman with the face of astrong-minded cow, drinking Malaga all day 'for her stomach'; andgames of dice for apéritifs; and songs about 'LesFraises et Les Framboises', and about Madelon, who said,'Comment épouser un soldat, moi qui aime tout lerégiment?'; and extraordinarily public love-making. Halfthe hotel used to meet in the bistro in the evenings. I wishone could find a pub in London a quarter as cheery.

One heard queer conversations in the bistro. As a sampleI give you Charlie, one of the local curiosities, talking.

Charlie was a youth of family and education who had run awayfrom home and lived on occasional remittances. Picture him verypink and young, with the fresh cheeks and soft brown hair of a nicelittle boy, and lips excessively red and wet, like cherries. Hisfeet are tiny, his arms abnormally short, his hands dimpled like ababy's. He has a way of dancing and capering while he talks, asthough he were too happy and too full of life to keep still for aninstant. It is three in the afternoon, and there is no one in thebistro except Madame F. and one or two men who are out ofwork; but it is all the same to Charlie whom he talks to, so longas he can talk about himself. He declaims like an orator on abarricade, rolling the words on his tongue and gesticulating withhis short arms. His small, rather piggy eyes glitter withenthusiasm. He is, somehow, profoundly disgusting to see.

He is talking of love, his favourite subject.

'Ah, l'amour, l'amour! Ah, que les femmes m'onttué! Alas, messieurs et dames, women have been myruin, beyond all hope my ruin. At twenty-two I am utterly worn outand finished. But what things I have learned, what abysses ofwisdom have I not plumbed! How great a thing it is to have acquiredthe true wisdom, to have become in the highest sense of the word acivilized man, to have become raffiné, vicieux,' etc.etc.

'Messieurs et dames, I perceive that you are sad. Ah,mais la vie est belle—you must not be sad. Be more gay, Ibeseech you!

'Fill high ze bowl vid Samian vine,
Ve vill not sink of semes like zese!

'Ah, que la vie est belle! Listen, messieurs etdames, out of the fullness of my experience I will discourse toyou of love. I will explain to you what is the true meaning oflove—what is the true sensibility, the higher, more refinedpleasure which is known to civilized men alone. I will tell you ofthe happiest day of my life. Alas, but I am past the time when Icould know such happiness as that. It is gone for ever—thevery possibility, even the desire for it, are gone.

'Listen, then. It was two years ago; my brother was inParis—he is a lawyer—and my parents had told him tofind me and take me out to dinner. We hate each other, my brotherand I, but we preferred not to disobey my parents. We dined, and atdinner he grew very drunk upon three bottles of Bordeaux. I tookhim back to his hotel, and on the way I bought a bottle of brandy,and when we had arrived I made my brother drink a tumblerful ofit—I told him it was something to make him sober. He drankit, and immediately he fell down like somebody in a fit, deaddrunk. I lifted him up and propped his back against the bed; then Iwent through his pockets. I found eleven hundred francs, and withthat I hurried down the stairs, jumped into a taxi, and escaped. Mybrother did not know my address—I was safe.

'Where does a man go when he has money? To the bordels,naturally. But you do not suppose that I was going to waste my timeon some vulgar debauchery fit only for navvies? Confound it, one isa civilized man! I was fastidious, exigeant, you understand, with athousand francs in my pocket. It was midnight before I found what Iwas looking for. I had fallen in with a very smart youth ofeighteen, dressed en smoking and with his hair cutà l'américaine, and we were talking in a quietbistro away from the boulevards. We understood one anotherwell, that youth and I. We talked of this and that, and discussedways of diverting oneself. Presently we took a taxi together andwere driven away.

'The taxi stopped in a narrow, solitary street with a singlegas-lamp flaring at the end. There were dark puddles among thestones. Down one side ran the high, blank wall of a convent. Myguide led me to a tall, ruinous house with shuttered windows, andknocked several times at the door. Presently there was a sound offootsteps and a shooting of bolts, and the door opened a little. Ahand came round the edge of it; it was a large, crooked hand, thatheld itself palm upwards under our noses, demanding money.

'My guide put his foot between the door and the step. "How muchdo you want?" he said.

'"A thousand francs," said a woman's voice. "Pay up at once oryou don't come in."

'I put a thousand francs into the hand and gave the remaininghundred to my guide: he said good night and left me. I could hearthe voice inside counting the notes, and then a thin old crow of awoman in a black dress put her nose out and regarded mesuspiciously before letting me in. It was very dark inside: I couldsee nothing except a flaring gas-jet that illuminated a patch ofplaster wall, throwing everything else into deeper shadow. Therewas a smell of rats and dust. Without speaking, the old womanlighted a candle at the gas-jet, then hobbled in front of me down astone passage to the top of a flight of stone steps.

'"Voilà!" she said; "go down into the cellar thereand do what you like. I shall see nothing, hear nothing, knownothing. You are free, you understand—perfectly free."

'Ha, messieurs, need I describe toyou—forcément, you know ityourselves—that shiver, half of terror and half of joy, thatgoes through one at these moments? I crept down, feeling my way; Icould hear my breathing and the scraping of my shoes on the stones,otherwise all was silence. At the bottom of the stairs my hand metan electric switch. I turned it, and a great electrolier of twelvered globes flooded the cellar with a red light. And behold, I wasnot in a cellar, but in a bedroom, a great, rich, garish bedroom,coloured blood red from top to bottom. Figure it to yourselves,messieurs et dames! Red carpet on the floor, red paper onthe walls, red plush on the chairs, even the ceiling red;everywhere red, burning into the eyes. It was a heavy, stiflingred, as though the light were shining through bowls of blood. Atthe far end stood a huge, square bed, with quilts red like therest, and on it a girl was lying, dressed in a frock of red velvet.At the sight of me she shrank away and tried to hide her kneesunder the short dress.

'I had halted by the door. "Come here, my chicken," I called toher.

'She gave a whimper of fright. With a bound I was beside thebed; she tried to elude me, but I seized her by thethroat—like this, do you see?—tight! She struggled, shebegan to cry out for mercy, but I held her fast, forcing back herhead and staring down into her face. She was twenty years old,perhaps; her face was the broad, dull face of a stupid child, butit was coated with paint and powder, and her blue, stupid eyes,shining in the red light, wore that shocked, distorted look thatone sees nowhere save in the eyes of these women. She was somepeasant girl, doubtless, whom her parents had sold intoslavery.

'Without another word I pulled her off the bed and threw her onto the floor. And then I fell upon her like a tiger! Ah, the joy,the incomparable rapture of that time! There, messieurs etdames, is what I would expound to you; Voilàl'amour! There is the true love, there is the only thing in theworld worth striving for; there is the thing beside which all yourarts and ideals, all your philosophies and creeds, all your finewords and high attitudes, are as pale and profitless as ashes. Whenone has experienced love—the true love—what is there inthe world that seems more than a mere ghost of joy?

'More and more savagely I renewed the attack. Again and againthe girl tried to escape; she cried out for mercy anew, but Ilaughed at her.

'"Mercy!" I said, "do you suppose I have come here to showmercy? Do you suppose I have paid a thousand francs for that?" Iswear to you, messieurs et dames, that if it were not forthat accursed law that robs us of our liberty, I would havemurdered her at that moment.

'Ah, how she screamed, with what bitter cries of agony. Butthere was no one to hear them; down there under the streets ofParis we were as secure as at the heart of a pyramid. Tearsstreamed down the girl's face, washing away the powder in long,dirty smears. Ah, that irrecoverable time! You, messieurs etdames, you who have not cultivated the finer sensibilities oflove, for you such pleasure is almost beyond conception. And I too,now that my youth is gone—ah, youth!—shall never againsee life so beautiful as that. It is finished.

'Ah yes, it is gone—gone for ever. Ah, the poverty, theshortness, the disappointment of human joy! For inreality—car en realité, what is the duration ofthe supreme moment of love. It is nothing, an instant, a secondperhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after that—dust, ashes,nothingness.

'And so, just for one instant, I captured the supreme happiness,the highest and most refined emotion to which human beings canattain. And in the same moment it was finished, and I wasleft—to what? All my savagery, my passion, were scatteredlike the petals of a rose. I was left cold and languid, full ofvain regrets; in my revulsion I even felt a kind of pity for theweeping girl on the floor. Is it not nauseous, that we should bethe prey of such mean emotions? I did not look at the girl again;my sole thought was to get away. I hastened up the steps of thevault and out into the street. It was dark and bitterly cold, thestreets were empty, the stones echoed under my heels with a hollow,lonely ring. All my money was gone, I had not even the price of ataxi fare. I walked back alone to my cold, solitary room.

'But there, messieurs et dames, that is what I promisedto expound to you. That is Love. That was the happiest day of mylife.'

He was a curious specimen, Charlie. I describe him, just to showwhat diverse characters could be found flourishing in the Coq d'Orquarter.

III

I LIVED in the Coq d'Or quarter for about a year and a half. Oneday, in summer, I found that I had just four hundred and fiftyfrancs left, and beyond this nothing but thirty-six francs a week,which I earned by giving English lessons. Hitherto I had notthought about the future, but I now realized that I must dosomething at once. I decided to start looking for a job,and—very luckily, as it turned out—I took theprecaution of paying two hundred francs for a month's rent inadvance. With the other two hundred and fifty francs, besides theEnglish lessons, I could live a month, and in a month I shouldprobably find work. I aimed at becoming a guide to one of thetourist companies, or perhaps an interpreter. However, a piece ofbad luck prevented this.

One day there turned up at the hotel a young Italian who calledhimself a compositor. He was rather an ambiguous person, for hewore side whiskers, which are the mark either of an apache or anintellectual, and nobody was quite certain in which class to puthim. Madame F. did not like the look of him, and made him pay aweek's rent in advance. The Italian paid the rent and stayed sixnights at the hotel. During this time he managed to prepare someduplicate keys, and on the last night he robbed a dozen rooms,including mine. Luckily, he did not find the money that was in mypockets, so I was not left penniless. I was left with justforty-seven francs—that is, seven and tenpence.

This put an end to my plans of looking for work. I had now gotto live at the rate of about six francs a day, and from the startit was too difficult to leave much thought for anything else. Itwas now that my experiences of poverty began—for six francs aday, if not actual poverty, is on the fringe of it. Six francs is ashilling, and you can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you knowhow. But it is a complicated business.

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. Youhave thought so much about poverty—it is the thing you havefeared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooneror later; and it, is all so utterly and prosaically different. Youthought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarilycomplicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalidand boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that youdiscover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicatedmeanness, the crust-wiping.

You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. Ata sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs aday. But of course you dare not admit it—you have got topretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start ittangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can hardlymanage it. You stop sending clothes to the laundry, and thelaundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumblesomething, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere,is your enemy for life. The tobacconist keeps asking why you havecut down your smoking. There are letters you want to answer, andcannot, because stamps are too expensive. And then there are yourmeals—meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day atmeal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, and loaf an hourin the Luxembourg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards yousmuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bread andmargarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food isgoverned by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead of householdbread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and can besmuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes,to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on adrink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your linen getsfilthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades. Your hair wantscutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful resultsthat you have to go to the barber after all, and spend theequivalent of a day's food. All day you are telling lies, andexpensive lies.

You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs aday. Mean disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spent yourlast eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling itover the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm;you give the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop!straight into the milk. There is nothing for it but to throw themilk away and go foodless.

You go to the baker's to buy a pound of bread, and you waitwhile the girl cuts a pound for another customer. She is clumsy,and cuts more than a pound. 'Pardon, monsieur,' she says, 'Isuppose you don't mind paying two sous extra?' Bread is a franc apound, and you have exactly a franc. When you think that you toomight be asked to pay two sous extra, and would have to confessthat you could not, you bolt in panic. It is hours before you dareventure into a baker's shop again.

You go to the greengrocer's to spend a franc on a kilogram ofpotatoes. But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Belgianpiece, and the shopman refuses it. You slink out of the shop, andcan never go there again.

You have strayed into a respectable quarter, and you see aprosperous friend coming. To avoid him you dodge into the nearestcafé. Once in the café you must buy something, so youspend your last fifty centimes on a glass of black coffee with adead fly in it. Once could multiply these disasters by the hundred.They are part of the process of being hard up.

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread andmargarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows.Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles;whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks ofbutter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vastGruyère cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pitycomes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab aloaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain,from pure funk.

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; thetimes when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interestyourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed,feeling like the jeune squelette in Baudelaire's poem. Onlyfood could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even aweek on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a bellywith a few accessory organs.

This—one could describe it further, but it is all in thesame style —is life on six francs a day. Thousands of peoplein Paris live it— struggling artists and students,prostitutes when their luck is out, out-of-work people of allkinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of poverty.

I continued in this style for about three weeks. The forty-sevenfrancs were soon gone, and I had to do what I could on thirty-sixfrancs a week from the English lessons. Being inexperienced, Ihandled the money badly, and sometimes I was a day without food.When this happened I used to sell a few of my clothes, smugglingthem out of the hotel in small packets and taking them to asecondhand shop in the rue de la Montagne St Geneviève. Theshopman was a red-haired Jew, an extraordinary disagreeable man,who used to fall into furious rages at the sight of a client. Fromhis manner one would have supposed that we had done him some injuryby coming to him. 'Merde!' he used to shout, 'youhere again? What do you think this is? A soup kitchen?' And he paidincredibly low prices. For a hat which I had bought for twenty-fiveshillings and scarcely worn he gave five francs; for a good pair ofshoes, five francs; for shirts, a franc each. He always preferredto exchange rather than buy, and he had a trick of thrusting someuseless article into one's hand and then pretending that one hadaccepted it. Once I saw him take a good overcoat from an old woman,put two white billiard-balls into her hand, and then push herrapidly out of the shop before she could protest. It would havebeen a pleasure to flatten the Jew's nose, if only one could haveafforded it.

These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable, and evidentlythere was worse coming, for my rent would be due before long.Nevertheless, things were not a quarter as bad as I had expected.For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery whichoutweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and meancomplications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discoverthe great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that itannihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually truethat the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have ahundred francs in the world you are liable to the most cravenpanics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent;for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot thinkfurther than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You thinkvaguely, 'I shall be starving in a day or two—shocking, isn'tit?' And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread andmargarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation inpoverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experiencedit. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowingyourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so oftenof going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and youhave reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot ofanxiety,

IV

ONE day my English lessons ceased abruptly. The weather wasgetting hot and one of my pupils, feeling too lazy to go on withhis lessons, dismissed me. The other disappeared from his lodgingswithout notice, owing me twelve francs. I was left with only thirtycentimes and no tobacco. For a day and a half I had nothing to cator smoke, and then, too hungry to put it off any longer, I packedmy remaining clothes into my suitcase and took them to thepawnshop. This put an end to all pretence of being in funds, for Icould not take my clothes out of the hotel without asking MadameF.'s leave. I remember, however, how surprised she was at my askingher instead of removing the clothes on the sly, shooting the moonbeing a common trick in our quarter.

It was the first time that I had been in a French pawnshop. Onewent through grandiose stone portals (marked, of course,'Liberté, Egalité,Fraternité'—they write that even over the policestations in France) into a large, bare room like a schoolclassroom, with a counter and rows of benches. Forty or fiftypeople were waiting. One handed one's pledge over the counter andsat down. Presently, when the clerk had assessed its value he wouldcall out, 'Numéro such and such, will you take fiftyfrancs?' Sometimes it was only fifteen francs, or ten, orfive—whatever it was, the whole room knew it. As I Came inthe clerk called with an air of offence, 'Numéro83—here!' and gave a little whistle and a beckon, as thoughcalling a dog. Numéro 83 stepped to the counter; hewas an old bearded man, with an overcoat buttoned up at the neckand frayed trouser-ends. Without a word the clerk shot the bundleacross the counter—evidently it was worth nothing. It fell tothe ground and came open, displaying four pairs of men's woollenpants. No one could help laughing. Poor Numéro 83gathered up his pants and shambled out, muttering to himself.

The clothes I was pawning, together with the suitcase, had costover twenty pounds, and were in good condition. I thought they mustbe worth ten pounds, and a quarter of this (one expects quartervalue at a pawnshop) was two hundred and fifty or three hundredfrancs. I waited without anxiety, expecting two hundred francs atthe worst.

At last the clerk called my number: 'Numéro97!'

'Yes,' I said, standing up.

'Seventy francs?'

Seventy francs for ten pounds' worth of clothes! But it was nouse arguing; I had seen someone else attempt to argue, and theclerk had instantly refused the pledge. I took the money and thepawnticket and walked out. I had now no clothes except what I stoodup in—the coat badly out at the elbow—an overcoat,moderately pawnable, and one spare shirt. Afterwards, when it wastoo late, I learned that it was wiser to go to a pawnshop in theafternoon. The clerks are French, and, like most French people, arein a bad temper till they have eaten their lunch.

When I got home, Madame F. was sweeping the bistro floor.She came up the steps to meet me. I could see in her eye that shewas uneasy about my rent.

'Well,' she said, 'what did you get for your clothes? Not much,eh?'

'Two hundred francs,' I said promptly.

'Tiens!' she said, surprised; 'well, that's notbad. How expensive those English clothes must be!'

The lie saved a lot of trouble, and, strangely enough, it cametrue. A few days later I did receive exactly two hundred francs dueto me for a newspaper article, and, though it hurt to do it, I atonce paid every penny of it in rent. So, though I came near tostarving in the following weeks, I was hardly ever without aroof.

It was now absolutely necessary to find work, and I remembered afriend of mine, a Russian waiter named Boris, who might be able tohelp me. I had first met him in the public ward of a hospital,where he was being treated for arthritis in the left leg. He hadtold me to come to him if I were ever in difficulties.

I must say something about Boris, for he was a curious characterand my close friend for a long time. He was a big, soldierly man ofabout thirty-five, and had been good looking, but since his illnesshe had grown immensely fat from lying in bed. Like most Russianrefugees, he had had an adventurous life. His parents, killed inthe Revolution, had been rich people, and he had served through thewar in the Second Siberian Rifles, which, according to him, was thebest regiment in the Russian Army. After the war he had firstworked in a brush factory, then as a porter at Les Halles, then hadbecome a dishwasher, and had finally worked his way up to be awaiter. When he fell ill he was at the Hôtel Scribe, andtaking a hundred francs a day in tips. His ambition was to become amaître d'hôtel, save fifty thousand francs, andset up a small, select restaurant on the Right Bank.

Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time of his life.War and soldiering were his passion; he had read innumerable booksof strategy and military history, and could tell you all about thetheories of Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch.Anything to do with soldiers pleased him. His favourite caféwas the Gloserie des Lilas in Montparnasse, simply because thestatue of Marshal Ney stands outside it. Later on, Boris and Isometimes went to the rue du Commerce together. If we went byMétro, Boris always got out at Cambronne station instead ofCommerce, though Commerce was nearer; he liked the association withGeneral Cambronne, who was called on to surrender at Waterloo, andanswered simply, 'Merde!'

The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his medalsand some photographs of his old regiment; he had kept these wheneverything else went to the pawnshop. Almost every day he wouldspread the photographs out on the bed and talk about them:

'Voilà, mon ami. There you see me at the head ofmy company. Fine big men, eh? Not like these little rats ofFrenchmen. A captain at twenty—not bad, eh? Yes, a captain inthe Second Siberian Rifles; and my father was a colonel.

'Ah, mais, mon ami, the ups and downs of life! A captainin the Russian Army, and then, piff! the Revolution—everypenny gone. In 1916 I stayed a week at the HôtelÉdouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as nightwatchman there. I have been night watchman, cellarman, floorscrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant. I have tippedwaiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.

'Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman,mon ami. I do not say it to boast, but the other day I wastrying to compute how many mistresses I have had in my life, and Imade it out to be over two hundred. Yes, at least two hundred...Ah, well, ça reviendra. Victory is to him who fightsthe longest. Courage!' etc. etc.

Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always wished himselfback in the army, but he had also been a waiter long enough toacquire the waiter's outlook. Though he had never saved more than afew thousand francs, he took it for granted that in the end hewould be able to set up his own restaurant and grow rich. Allwaiters, I afterwards found, talk and think of this; it is whatreconciles them to being waiters. Boris used to talk interestinglyabout Hotel life:

'Waiting is a gamble,' he used to say; 'you may die poor, youmay make your fortune in a year. You are not paid wages, you dependon tips—ten per cent of the bill, and a commission from thewine companies on champagne corks. Sometimes the tips are enormous.The barman at Maxim's, for instance, makes five hundred francs aday. More than five hundred, in the season... I have made twohundred francs a day myself. It was at a Hotel in Biarritz, in theseason. The whole staff, from the manager down to theplongeurs, was working twenty-one hours a day. Twenty-onehours' work and two and a half hours in bed, for a month on end.Still, it was worth it, at two hundred francs a day.

'You never know when a stroke of luck is coming. Once when I wasat the Hôtel Royal an American customer sent for me beforedinner and ordered twenty-four brandy co*cktails. I brought them alltogether on a tray, in twenty-four glasses. "Now,garçon," said the customer (he was drunk), "I'lldrink twelve and you'll drink twelve, and if you can walk to thedoor afterwards you get a hundred francs." I walked to the door,and he gave me a hundred francs. And every night for six days hedid the same thing; twelve brandy co*cktails, then a hundred francs.A few months later I heard he had been extradited by the AmericanGovernment—embezzlement. There is something fine, do you notthink, about these Americans?'

I liked Boris, and we had interesting times together, playingchess and talking about war and hotels. Boris used often to suggestthat I should become a waiter. 'The life would suit you,' he usedto say; 'when you are in work, with a hundred francs a day and anice mistress, it's not bad. You say you go in for writing. Writingis bosh. There is only one way to make money at writing, and thatis to marry a publisher's daughter. But you would make a goodwaiter if you shaved that moustache off. You are tall and you speakEnglish—those are the chief things a waiter needs. Wait tillI can bend this accursed leg, mon ami. And then, if you areever out of a job, come to me.'

Now that I was short of my rent, and getting hungry, Iremembered Boris's promise, and decided to look him up at once. Idid not hope to become a waiter so easily as he had promised, butof course I knew how to scrub dishes, and no doubt he could get mea job in the kitchen. He had said that dishwashing jobs were to behad for the asking during the summer. It was a great relief toremember that I had after all one influential friend to fall backon.

V

A SHORT time before, Boris had given me an address in the rue duMarché des Blancs Manteaux. All he had said in his letterwas that 'things were not marching too badly', and I assumed thathe was back at the Hôtel Scribe, touching his hundred francsa day. I was full of hope, and wondered why I had been fool enoughnot to go to Boris before. I saw myself in a cosy restaurant, withjolly cooks singing love-songs as they broke eggs into the pan, andfive solid meals a day. I even squandered two francs fifty on apacket of Gaulois Bleu, in anticipation of my wages.

In the morning I walked down to the rue du Marché desBlancs Manteaux; with a shock, I found it a shimmy back street-asbad as my own. Boris's hotel was the dirtiest hotel in the street.From its dark doorway there came out a vile, sour odour, a mixtureof slops and synthetic soup—it was Bouillon Zip, twenty-fivecentimes a packet. A misgiving came over me. People who drinkBouillon Zip are starving, or near it. Could Boris possibly beearning a hundred francs a day? A surly patron, sitting inthe office, said to me. Yes, the Russian was at home—in theattic. I went up six nights of narrow, winding stairs, the BouillonZip growing stronger as one got higher. Boris did not answer when Iknocked at his door, so I opened it and went in.

The room was an attic, ten feet square, lighted only by askylight, its sole furniture a narrow iron bedstead, a chair, and awashhand-stand with one game leg. A long S-shaped chain of bugsmarched slowly across the wall above the bed. Boris was lyingasleep, naked, his large belly making a mound under the grimysheet. His chest was spotted with insect bites. As I came in hewoke up, rubbed his eyes, and groaned deeply.

'Name of Jesus Christ!' he exclaimed, 'oh, name of Jesus Christ,my back! Curse it, I believe my back is broken!'

'What's the matter?' I exclaimed.

'My back is broken, that is all. I have spent the night on thefloor. Oh, name of Jesus Christ! If you knew what my back feelslike!'

'My dear Boris, are you ill?'

'Not ill, only starving—yes, starving to death if thisgoes on much longer. Besides sleeping on the floor, I have lived ontwo francs a day for weeks past. It is fearful. You have come at abad moment, mon ami.'

It did not seem much use to ask whether Boris still had his jobat the Hôtel Scribe. I hurried downstairs and bought a loafof bread. Boris threw himself on the bread and ate half of it,after which he felt better, sat up in bed, and told me what was thematter with him. He had failed to get a job after leaving thehospital, because he was still very lame, and he had spent all hismoney and pawned everything, and finally starved for several days.He had slept a week on the quay under the Font d'Austerlitz, amongsome empty wine barrels. For the past fortnight he had been livingin this room, together with a Jew, a mechanic. It appeared (therewas some complicated explanation.) that the Jew owed Boris threehundred francs, and was repaying this by letting him sleep on thefloor and allowing him two francs a day for food. Two francs wouldbuy a bowl of coffee and three rolls. The Jew went to work at sevenin the mornings, and after that Boris would leave hissleeping-place (it was beneath the skylight, which let in the rain)and get into the bed. He could not sleep much even there owing tothe bugs, but it rested his back after the floor.

It was a great disappointment, when I had come to Boris forhelp, to find him even worse off than myself. I explained that Ihad only about sixty francs left and must get a job immediately. Bythis time, however, Boris had eaten the rest of the bread and wasfeeling cheerful and talkative. He said carelessly:

'Good heavens, what are you worrying about? Sixtyfrancs—why, it's a fortune! Please hand me that shoe, monami. I'm going to smash some of those bugs if they come withinreach.'

'But do you think there's any chance of getting a job?'

'Chance? It's a certainty. In fact, I have got somethingalready. There is a new Russian restaurant which is to open in afew days in the rue du Commerce. It is une chose entenduethat I am to be maître d'hôtel. I can easily getyou a job in the kitchen. Five hundred francs a month and yourfood—tips, too, if you are lucky.'

'But in the meantime? I've got to pay my rent before long.'

'Oh, we shall find something. I have got a few cards-up mysleeve. There are people who owe me money, for instance—Parisis full of them. One of them is bound to pay up before long. Thenthink of all the women who have been my mistress! A woman neverforgets, you know—I have only to ask and they will help me.Besides, the Jew tells me he is going to steal some magnetos fromthe garage where he works, and he will pay us five francs a day toclean them before he sells them. That alone would keep us. Neverworry, mon ami. Nothing is easier to get than money.'

'Well, let's go out now and look for a job.'

'Presently, mon ami. We shan't starve, don't you fear.This is only the fortune of war—I've been in a worse holescores of times. It's only a question of persisting. RememberFoch's maxim: "Attaquez! Attaquez! Attaquez!"'

It was midday before Boris decided to get up. All the clothes henow had left were one suit, with one shirt, collar and tie, a pairof shoes almost worn out, and a pair of socks all holes. He hadalso an overcoat which was to be pawned in the last extremity. Hehad a suitcase, a wretched twenty-franc cardboard thing, but veryimportant, because the patron of the hotel believed that itwas full of clothes—without that, he would probably haveturned Boris out of doors. What it actually contained were themedals and photographs, various odds and ends, and huge bundles oflove-letters. In spite of all this Boris managed to keep a fairlysmart appearance. He shaved without soap and with a razor-blade twomonths old, tied his tie so that the holes did not show, andcarefully stuffed the soles of his shoes with newspaper. Finally,when he was dressed, he produced an ink-bottle and inked the skinof his ankles where it showed through his socks. You would neverhave thought, when it was finished, that he had recently beensleeping under the Seine bridges.

We went to a small café off the rue de Rivoli, awell-known rendezvous of hotel managers and employees. At the backwas a dark, cave-like room where all kinds of hotel workers weresitting—smart young waiters, others not so smart and clearlyhungry, fat pink cooks, greasy dish-washers, battered oldscrubbing-women. Everyone had an untouched glass of black coffee infront of him. The place was, in effect, an employment bureau, andthe money spent on drinks was the patron's commission.Sometimes a stout, important-looking man, obviously a restaurateur,would come in and speak to the barman, and the barman would call toone of the people at the back of the café. But he nevercalled to Boris or me, and we left after two hours, as theetiquette was that you could only stay two hours for one drink. Welearned afterwards, when it was too late, that the dodge was tobribe the barman; if you could afford twenty francs he wouldgenerally get you a job.

We went to the Hôtel Scribe and waited an hour on thepavement, hoping that the manager would come out, but he never did.Then we dragged ourselves down to the rue du Commerce, only to findthat the new restaurant, which was being redecorated, was shut upand the patron away. It was now night. We had walkedfourteen kilometres over pavement, and we were so tired that we hadto waste one franc fifty on going home by Métro. Walking wasagony to Boris with his game leg, and his optimism wore thinner andthinner as the day went on. When he got out of the Métro atthe Place d'Italie he was in despair. He began to say that it wasno use looking for work—there was nothing for it but to trycrime.

'Sooner rob than starve, mon ami. I have often plannedit. A fat, rich American—some dark corner down Montparnasseway—a cobblestone in a stocking—bang! And then gothrough his pockets and bolt. It is feasible, do you not think? Iwould not flinch—I have been a soldier, remember.'

He decided against the plan in the end, because we were bothforeigners and easily recognized.

When we had got back to my room we spent another one franc fiftyon bread and chocolate. Boris devoured his share, and at oncecheered up like magic; food seemed to act on his system as rapidlyas a co*cktail. He took out a pencil and began making a list of thepeople who would probably give us jobs. There were dozens of them,he said.

'Tomorrow we shall find something, mon ami, I know it inmy bones. The luck always changes. Besides, we both havebrains—a man with brains can't starve.

'What things a man can do with brains! Brains will make moneyout of anything. I had a friend once, a Pole, a real man of genius;and what do you think he used to do? He would buy a gold ring andpawn it for fifteen francs. Then—you know how carelessly theclerks fill up the tickets—where the clerk had written "enor" he would add "et diamants" and he would change"fifteen francs" to "fifteen thousand". Neat, eh? Then, you see, hecould borrow a thousand francs on the security of the ticket. Thatis what I mean by brains...'

For the rest of the evening Boris was in a hopeful mood, talkingof the times we should have together when we were waiters togetherat Nice or Biarritz, with smart rooms and enough money to set upmistresses. He was too tired to walk the three kilometres back tohis hotel, and slept the night on the floor of my room, with hiscoat rolled round his shoes for a pillow.

VI

WE again failed to find work the next day, and it was threeweeks before the luck changed. My two hundred francs saved me fromtrouble about the rent, but everything else went as badly aspossible. Day after day Boris and I went up and down Paris,drifting at two miles an hour through the crowds, bored and hungry,and finding nothing. One day, I remember, we crossed the Seineeleven times. We loitered for hours outside service doorways, andwhen the manager came out we would go up to him ingratiatingly, capin hand. We always got the same answer: they did not want a lameman, nor a man without experience. Once we were very nearlyengaged. While we spoke to the manager Boris stood straightupright, not supporting himself with his stick, and the .managerdid not see that he was lame. 'Yes,' he said, 'we want two men inthe cellars. Perhaps you would do. Come inside.' Then Boris moved,the game was up. 'Ah,' said the manager, 'you limp.Malheureusem*nt—'

We enrolled our names at agencies and answered advertisem*nts,but walking everywhere made us slow, and we seemed to miss everyjob by half an hour. Once we very nearly got a job swabbing outrailway trucks, but at the last moment they rejected us in favourof Frenchmen. Once we answered an advertisem*nt calling for handsat a circus. You had to shift benches and clean up litter, and,during the performance, stand on two tubs and let a lion jumpthrough your legs. When we got to the place, an hour before thetime named, we found a queue of fifty men already waiting. There issome attraction in lions, evidently.

Once an agency to which I had applied months earlier sent me apetit bleu, telling me of an Italian gentleman who wantedEnglish lessons. The petit bleu said 'Come at once' andpromised twenty francs an hour. Boris and I were in despair. Herewas a splendid chance, and I could not take it, for it wasimpossible to go to the agency with my coat out at the elbow. Thenit occurred to us that I could wear Boris's coat—it did notmatch my trousers, but the trousers were grey and might pass forflannel at a short distance. The coat was so much too big for methat I had to wear it unbuttoned and keep one hand in my pocket. Ihurried out, and wasted seventy-five centimes on a bus fare to getto the agency. When I got there I found that the Italian hadchanged his mind and left Paris.

Once Boris suggested that I should go to Les Halles and try fora job as a porter. I arrived at half-past four in the morning, whenthe work was getting into its swing. Seeing a short, fat man in abowler hat directing some porters, I went up to him and asked forwork. Before answering he seized my right hand and felt thepalm.

'You are strong, eh?' he said.

'Very strong,' I said untruly.

'Bien. Let me see you lift that crate.'

It was a huge wicker basket full of potatoes. I took hold of it,and found that, so far from lifting it, I could not even move it.The man in the bowler hat watched me, then shrugged his shouldersand turned away. I made off. When I had gone some distance I lookedback and saw four men lifting the basket on to a cart. Itweighed three hundredweight, possibly. The man had seen that I wasno use, and taken this way of getting rid of me.

Sometimes in his hopeful moments Boris spent fifty centimes on astamp and wrote to one of his ex-mistresses, asking for money. Onlyone of them ever replied. It was a woman who, besides having beenhis mistress, owed him two hundred francs. When Boris saw theletter waiting and recognized the handwriting, he was wild withhope. We seized the letter and rushed up to Boris's room to readit, like a child with stolen sweets. Boris read the letter, thenhanded it silently to me. It ran:

My Little Cherished Wolf,

With what delight did I open thy charming letter, reminding me ofthe days of our perfect love, and of the so dear kisses which Ihave received from thy lips. Such memories linger for ever in theheart, like the perfume of a flower that is dead.

As to thy request for two hundred francs, alas! it is impossible.Thou dost not know, my dear one, how I am desolated to hear of thyembarrassments. But what wouldst thou? In this life which is sosad, trouble conies to everyone. I too have had my share. My littlesister has been ill (ah, the poor little one, how she suffered!)and we are obliged to pay I know not what to the doctor. All ourmoney is gone and we are passing, I assure thee, very difficultdays.

Courage, my little wolf, always the courage! Remember that the baddays are not for ever, and the trouble which seems so terrible willdisappear at last.

Rest assured, my dear one, that I will remember thee always. Andreceive the most sincere embraces of her who has never ceased tolove thee, thy

Yvonne

This letter disappointed Boris so much that he went straight tobed and would not look for work again that day. My sixty francslasted about a fortnight. I had given up the pretence of going outto restaurants, and we used to eat in my room, one of us sitting onthe bed and the other on the chair. Boris would contribute his twofrancs and I three or four francs, and we would buy bread,potatoes, milk and cheese, and make soup over my spirit lamp. Wehad a saucepan and a coffee-bowl and one spoon; every day there wasa polite squabble as to who should eat out of the saucepan and whoout of the coffee-bowl (the saucepan held more), and every day, tomy secret anger, Boris gave in first and had the saucepan.Sometimes we had more bread in the evening, sometimes not. Ourlinen was getting filthy, and it was three weeks since I had had abath; Boris, so he said, had not had a bath for months. It wastobacco that made everything tolerable. We had plenty of tobacco,for some time before Boris had met a soldier (the soldiers aregiven their tobacco free) and bought twenty or thirty packets atfifty centimes each.

All this was far worse for Boris than for me. The walking andsleeping on the floor kept his leg and back in constant pain, andwith his vast Russian appetite he suffered torments of hunger,though he never seemed to grow thinner. On the whole he wassurprisingly gay, and he had vast capacities for hope. He used tosay seriously that he had a patron saint who watched over him, andwhen things were very bad he would search the gutter for money,saying that the saint often dropped a two-franc piece there. Oneday we were waiting in the rue Royale; there was a Russianrestaurant near by, and we were going to ask for a job there.Suddenly, Boris made up his mind to go into the Madeleine and bum afifty-centime candle to his patron saint. Then, coming out, he saidthat he would be on the safe side, and solemnly put a match to afifty-centime stamp, as a sacrifice to the immortal gods. Perhapsthe gods and the saints did not get on together; at any rate, wemissed the job.

On some mornings Boris collapsed in the most utter despair. Hewould lie in bed almost weeping, cursing the Jew with whom helived. Of late the Jew had become restive about paying the dailytwo francs, and, what was worse, had begun putting on intolerableairs of patronage. Boris said that I, as an Englishman, could notconceive what torture it was to a Russian of family to be at themercy of a Jew.

'A Jew, mon ami, a veritable Jew! And he hasn't even thedecency to be ashamed of it. To think that I, a captain in theRussian Army—have I ever told you, mon ami, that I wasa captain in the Second Siberian Rifles? Yes, a captain, and myfather was a colonel. And here I am, eating the bread of a Jew. AJew...

'I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early monthsof the war, we were on the march, and we had halted at a villagefor the night. A horrible old Jew, with a red beard like JudasIscariot, came sneaking up to my billet. I asked him what hewanted. "Your honour," he said, "I have brought a girl for you, abeautiful young girl only seventeen. It will only be fifty francs.""Thank you," I said, "you can take her away again. I don't want tocatch any diseases." "Diseases!" cried the Jew, "mais, monsieurle capitaine, there's no fear of that. It's my own daughter!"That is the Jewish national character for you.

'Have I ever told you, mon ami, that in the old RussianArmy it was considered bad form to spit on a Jew? Yes, we thought aRussian officer's spittle was too precious to be wasted on Jews...'etc. etc.

On these days Boris usually declared himself too ill to go outand look for work. He would lie till evening in the greyish,verminous sheets, smoking and reading old newspapers. Sometimes weplayed chess. We had no board, but we wrote down the moves on apiece of paper, and afterwards we made a board from the side of apacking—case, and a set of men from buttons, Belgian coinsand the like. Boris, like many Russians, had a passion for chess.It was a saying of his that the rules of chess are the same as therules of love and war, and that if you can win at one you can winat the others. But he also said that if you have a chessboard youdo not mind being hungry, which was certainly not true in mycase.

VII

MY money oozed away—to eight francs, to four francs, toone franc, to twenty-five centimes; and twenty-five centimes isuseless, for it will buy nothing except a newspaper. We wentseveral days on dry bread, and then I was two and a half days withnothing to eat whatever. This was an ugly experience. There arepeople who do fasting cures of three weeks or more, and they saythat fasting is quite pleasant after the fourth day; I do not know,never having gone beyond the third day. Probably it seems differentwhen one is doing it voluntarily and is not underfed at thestart.

The first day, too inert to look for work, I borrowed a rod andwent fishing in the Seine, baiting with bluebottles. I hoped tocatch enough for a meal, but of course I did not. The Seine is fullof dace, but they grew cunning during the siege of Paris, and noneof them has been caught since, except in nets. On the second day Ithought of pawning my overcoat, but it seemed too far to walk tothe pawnshop, and I spent the day in bed, reading the Memoirs OfSherlock Holmes. It was all that I felt equal to, without food.Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition,more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It isas though one had been turned into a jellyfish, or as though allone's blood had been pumped out and luke-warm water substituted.Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger; that, and beingobliged to spit very frequently, and the spittle being curiouslywhite and flocculent, like cuckoo-spit. I do not know the reasonfor this, but everyone who has gone hungry several days has noticedit.

On the third morning I felt very much better. I realized that Imust do something at once, and I decided to go and ask Boris to letme share his two francs, at any rate for a day or two. When Iarrived I found Boris in bed, and furiously angry. As soon as Icame in he burst out, almost choking:

'He has taken it back, the dirty thief! He has taken itback!'

'Who's taken what?' I said.

'The Jew! Taken my two francs, the dog, the thief! He robbed mein my sleep!'

It appeared that on the previous night the Jew had flatlyrefused to pay the daily two francs. They had argued and argued,and at last the Jew had consented to hand over the money; he haddone it, Boris said, in the most offensive manner, making a littlespeech about how kind he was, and extorting abject gratitude. Andthen in the morning he had stolen the money back before Boris wasawake.

This was a blow. I was horribly disappointed, for I had allowedmy belly to expect food, a great mistake when one is hungry.However, rather to my surprise, Boris was far from despairing. Hesat up in bed, lighted his pipe and reviewed the situation.

'Now listen, mon ami, this is a tight comer. We have onlytwenty-five centimes between us, and I don't suppose the Jew willever pay my two francs again. In any case his behaviour is becomingintolerable. Will you believe it, the other night he had theindecency to bring a woman in here, while I was there on the floor.The low animal! And I have a worse thing to tell you. The Jewintends clearing out of here. He owes a week's rent, and his ideais to avoid paying that and give me the slip at the same time. Ifthe Jew shoots the moon I shall be left without a roof, and thepatron will take my suitcase in lieu of rent, curse him! Wehave got to make a vigorous move.'

'All right. But what can we do? It seems to me that the onlything is to pawn our overcoats and get some food.'

'We'll do that, of course, but I must get my possessions out ofthis house first. To think of my photographs being seized! Well, myplan is ready. I'm going to forestall the Jew and shoot the moonmyself. F——le camp—retreat, youunderstand. I think that is the correct move, eh?'

'But, my dear Boris, how can you, in daytime? You're bound to becaught.'

'Ah well, it will need strategy, of course. Our patron ison the watch for people slipping out without paying their rent;he's been had that way before. He and his wife take it in turns allday to sit in the office— what misers, these Frenchmen! But Ihave thought of a way to do it, if you will help.'

I did not feel in a very helpful mood, but I asked Boris whathis plan was. He explained it carefully.

'Now listen. We must start by pawning our overcoats. First goback to your room and fetch your overcoat, then come back here andfetch mine, and smuggle it out under cover of yours. Take them tothe pawnshop in the rue des Francs Bourgeois. You ought to gettwenty francs for the two, with luck. Then go down to the Seinebank and fill your pockets with stones, and bring them back and putthem in my suitcase. You see the idea? I shall wrap as many of mythings as I can carry in a newspaper, and go down and ask thepatron the way to the nearest laundry. I shall be verybrazen and casual, you understand, and of course the patronwill think the bundle is nothing but dirty linen. Or, if he doessuspect anything, he will do what he always does, the mean sneak;he will go up to my room and feel the weight of my suitcase. Andwhen he feels the weight of stones he will think it is still full.Strategy, eh? Then afterwards I can come back and carry my otherthings out in my pockets.'

'But what about the suitcase?'

'Oh, that? We shall have to abandon it. The miserable thing onlycost about twenty francs. Besides, one always abandons something ina retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his wholearmy.'

Boris was so pleased with this scheme (he called it ruse deguerre) that he almost forgot being hungry. Its mainweakness—that he would have nowhere to sleep after shootingthe moon—he ignored.

At first the ruse de guerre worked well. I went home andfetched my overcoat (that made already nine kilometres, on an emptybelly) and smuggled Boris's coat out successfully. Then a hitchoccurred. The receiver at the pawnshop, a nasty, sour-faced,interfering, little man—a typical Frenchofficial—refused the coats on the ground that they were notwrapped up in anything. He said that they must be put either in avalise or a cardboard box. This spoiled everything, for we had nobox of any kind, and with only twenty-five centimes between us wecould not buy one.

I went back and told Boris the bad news. 'Merde!' hesaid, 'that makes it awkward. Well, no matter, there is always away. We'll put the overcoats in my suitcase.'

'But how are we to get the suitcase past the patron? He'ssitting almost in the door of the office. It's impossible!'

'How easily you despair, mon ami! Where is that Englishobstinacy that I have read of? Courage! We'll manage it.'

Boris thought for a little while, and then produced anothercunning plan. The essential difficulty was to hold thepatron's attention for perhaps five seconds, while we couldslip past with the suitcase. But, as it happened, the patronhad just one weak spot—that he was interested in LeSport, and was ready to talk if you approached him on thissubject. Boris read an article about bicycle races in an old copyof the Petit Parisien, and then, when he had reconnoitredthe stairs, went down and managed to set the patron talking.Meanwhile, I waited at the foot of the stairs, with the overcoatsunder one arm and the suitcase under the other. Boris was to give acough when he thought the moment favourable. I waited trembling,for at any moment the patron's wife might come out of thedoor opposite the office, and then the game was up. However,presently Boris coughed. I sneaked rapidly past the office and outinto the street, rejoicing that my shoes did not creak. The planmight have failed if Boris had been thinner, for his big shouldersblocked the doorway of the office. His nerve was splendid, too; hewent on laughing and talking in the most casual way, and so loudthat he quite covered any noise I made. When I was well away hecame and joined me round the corner, and we bolted.

And then, after all our trouble, the receiver at the pawnshopagain refused the overcoats. He told me (one could see his Frenchsoul revelling in the pedantry of it) that I had not sufficientpapers of identification; my carte d'identité was notenough, and I must show a passport or addressed envelopes. Borishad addressed envelopes by the score, but his carted'identité was out of order (he never renewed it, so asto avoid the tax), so we could not pawn the overcoats in his name.All we could do was to trudge up to my room, get the necessarypapers, and take the coats to the pawnshop in the Boulevard PortRoyal.

I left Boris at my room and went down to the pawnshop. When Igot there I found that it was shut and would not open till four inthe afternoon. It was now about half-past one, and I had walkedtwelve kilometres and had no food for sixty hours. Fate seemed tobe playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

Then the luck changed as though by a miracle. I was walking homethrough the Rue Broca when suddenly, glittering on the cobbles, Isaw a five-sou piece. I pounced on it, hurried home, got our otherfive-sou piece and bought a pound of potatoes. There was onlyenough alcohol in the stove to parboil them, and we had no salt,but we wolfed them, skins and all. After that we felt like new men,and sat playing chess till the pawnshop opened.

At four o'clock I went back to the pawnshop. I was not hopeful,for if I had only got seventy francs before, what could I expectfor two shabby overcoats in a cardboard suitcase? Boris had saidtwenty francs, but I thought it would be ten francs, or even five.Worse yet, I might be refused altogether, like poorNuméro 83 on the previous occasion. I sat on thefront bench, so as not to see people laughing when the clerk saidfive francs.

At last the clerk called my number: 'Numéro117!'

'Yes,' I said, standing up.

'Fifty francs?'

It was almost as great a shock as the seventy francs had beenthe time before. I believe now that the clerk had mixed my numberup with someone else's, for one could not have sold the coatsoutright for fifty francs. I hurried home and walked into my roomwith my hands behind my back, saying nothing. Boris was playingwith the chessboard. He looked up eagerly.

'What did you get?' he exclaimed. 'What, not twenty francs?Surely you got ten francs, anyway? Nom de Dieu, fivefrancs—that is a bit too thick. Mon ami, don't say itwas five francs. If you say it was five francs I shall really beginto think of suicide.'

I threw the fifty-franc, note on to the table. Boris turnedwhite as chalk, and then, springing up, seized my hand and gave ita grip that almost broke the bones. We ran out, bought bread andwine, a piece of meat and alcohol for the stove, and gorged.

After eating, Boris became more optimistic than I had ever knownhim. 'What did I tell you?' he said. 'The fortune of war! Thismorning with five sous, and now look at us. I have always said it,there is nothing easier to get than money. And that reminds me, Ihave a friend in the rue Fondary whom we might go and see. He hascheated me of four thousand francs, the thief. He is the greatestthief alive when he is sober, but it is a curious thing, he isquite honest when he is drunk. I should think he would be drunk bysix in the evening. Let's go and find him. Very likely he will payup a hundred on account. Merde! He might pay two hundred.Allons-y!'

We went to the rue Fondary and found the man, and he was drunk,but we did not get our hundred francs. As soon as he and Boris metthere was a terrible altercation on the pavement. The other mandeclared that he did not owe Boris a penny, but that on thecontrary Boris owed him four thousand francs, and both ofthem kept appealing to me for my opinion. I never understood therights of the matter. The two argued and argued, first in thestreet, then in a bistro, then in a prix fixerestaurant where we went for dinner, then in another bistro.Finally, having called one another thieves for two hours, they wentoff together on a drinking bout that finished up the last sou ofBoris's money.

Boris slept the night at the house of a cobbler, another Russianrefugee, in the Commerce quarter. Meanwhile, I had eight francsleft, and plenty of cigarettes, and was stuffed to the eyes withfood and drink. It was a marvellous change for the better after twobad days.

VIII

WE had now twenty-eight francs in hand, and could start lookingfor work once more. Boris was still sleeping, on some mysteriousterms, at the house of the cobbler, and he had managed to borrowanother twenty francs from a Russian friend. He had friends, mostlyex-officers like himself, here and there all over Paris. Some werewaiters or dishwashers, some drove taxis, a few lived on women,some had managed to bring money away from Russia and owned garagesor dancing-halls. In general, the Russian refugees in Paris arehard-working people, and have put up with/their bad luck far betterthan one can imagine Englishmen of the same class doing. There areexceptions, of course. Boris told me of an exiled Russian duke whomhe had once met, who frequented expensive restaurants. The dukewould find out if there was a Russian officer among the waiters,and, after he had dined, call him in a friendly way to histable.

'Ah,' the duke would say, 'so you are an old soldier, likemyself? These are bad days, eh? Well, well, the Russian soldierfears nothing. And what was your regiment?'

'The so-and-so, sir,' the waiter would answer.

'A very gallant regiment! I inspected them in 1912. By the way,I have unfortunately left my notecase at home. A Russian officerwill, I know, oblige me with three hundred francs.'

If the waiter had three hundred francs he would hand it over,and, of course, never see it again. The duke made quite a lot inthis way. Probably the waiters did not mind being swindled. A dukeis a duke, even in exile.

It was through one of these Russian refugees that Boris heard ofsomething which seemed to promise money. Two days after we hadpawned the overcoats, Boris said to me rather mysteriously:

'Tell me, mon ami, have you any political opinions?'

'No,'I said.

'Neither have I. Of course, one is always a patriot; butstill—Did not Moses say something about spoiling theEgyptians? As an Englishman you will have read the Bible. What Imean is, would you object to earning money from Communists?'

'No, of course not.'

'Well, it appears that there is a Russian secret society inParis who might do something for us. They are Communists; in factthey are agents for the Bolsheviks. They act as a friendly society,get in touch with exiled Russians, and try to get them to turnBolshevik. My friend has joined their society, and he thinks theywould help us if we went to them.'

'But what can they do for us? In any case they won't help me, asI'm not a Russian.'

'That is just the point. It seems that they are correspondentsfor a Moscow paper, and they want some articles on Englishpolitics. If we got to them at once they may commission you towrite the articles.'

'Me? But I don't know anything about politics.'

'Merde! Neither do they. Who does know anythingabout politics? It's easy. All you have to do is to copy it out ofthe English papers. Isn't there a Paris Daily Mail? Copy itfrom that.'

'But the Daily Mail is a Conservative paper. They loathethe Communists.'

'Well, say the opposite of what the Daily Mail says, thenyou can't be wrong. We mustn't throw this chance away, monami. It might mean hundreds of francs.'

I did not like the idea, for the Paris police are very hard onCommunists, especially if they are foreigners, and I was alreadyunder suspicion. Some months before, a detective had seen me comeout of the office of a Communist weekly paper, and I had had agreat deal of trouble with the police. If they caught me going tothis secret society, it might mean deportation. However, the chanceseemed too good to be missed. That afternoon Boris's friend,another waiter, came to take us to the rendezvous. I cannotremember the name of the street—it was a shabby streetrunning south from the Seine bank, somewhere near the Chamber ofDeputies. Boris's friend insisted on great caution. We loiteredcasually down the street, marked the doorway we were toenter—it was a laundry—and then strolled back again,keeping an eye on all the windows and cafés. If the placewere known as a haunt of Communists it was probably watched, and weintended to go home if we saw anyone at all like a detective. I wasfrightened, but Boris enjoyed these conspiratorial proceedings, andquite forgot that he was about to trade with the slayers of hisparents.

When we were certain that the coast was clear we dived quicklyinto the doorway. In the laundry was a Frenchwoman ironing clothes,who told us that 'the Russian gentlemen' lived up a staircaseacross the courtyard. We went up several flights of dark stairs andemerged on to a landing. A strong, surly-looking young man, withhair growing low on his head, was standing at the top of thestairs. As I came up he looked at me suspiciously, barred the waywith his arm and said something in Russian.

'Mot d'ordre!' he said sharply when I did not answer.

I stopped, startled. I had not expected passwords.

'Mot d'ordre!' repeated the Russian.

Boris's friend, who was walking behind, now came forward andsaid something in Russian, either the password or an explanation.At this, the surly young man seemed satisfied, and led us into asmall, shabby room with frosted windows. It was like a verypoverty-stricken office, with propaganda posters in Russianlettering and a huge, crude picture of Lenin tacked on the walls.At the table sat an unshaven Russian in shirt sleeves, addressingnewspaper wrappers from a pile in front of him. As I came in hespoke to me in French, with a bad accent.

'This is very careless!' he exclaimed fussily. 'Why have youcome here without a parcel of washing?'

'Washing?'

'Everybody who comes here brings washing. It looks as thoughthey were going to the laundry downstairs. Bring a good, largebundle next time. We don't want the police on our tracks.'

This was even more conspiratorial than I had expected. Boris satdown in the only vacant chair, and there was a great deal oftalking in Russian. Only the unshaven man talked; the surly oneleaned against the wall with his eyes on me, as though he stillsuspected me. It was queer, standing in the little secret room withits revolutionary posters, listening to a conversation of which Idid not understand a word. The Russians talked quickly and eagerly,with smiles and shrugs of the shoulders. I wondered what it was allabout. They would be calling each other 'little father', I thought,and 'little dove', and 'Ivan Alexandrovitch', like the charactersin Russian novels. And the talk would be of revolutions. Theunshaven man would be saying firmly, 'We never argue. Controversyis a bourgeois pastime. Deeds are our arguments.' Then I gatheredthat it was not this exactly. Twenty francs was being demanded, foran entrance fee apparently, and Boris was promising to pay it (wehad just seventeen francs in the world). Finally Boris produced ourprecious store of money and paid five francs on account.

At this the surly man looked less suspicious, and sat down onthe edge of the table. The unshaven one began to question me inFrench, making notes on a slip of paper. Was I a Communist? heasked. By sympathy, I answered; I had never joined anyorganization. Did I understand the political situation in England?Oh, of course, of course. I mentioned the names of variousMinisters, and made some contemptuous remarks about the LabourParty. And what about Le Sport? Could I do articles on LeSport? (Football and Socialism have some mysterious connexionon the Continent.) Oh, of course, again. Both men nodded gravely.The unshaven one said:

'Évidemment, you have a thorough knowledge ofconditions in England. Could you undertake to write a series ofarticles for a Moscow weekly paper? We will give you theparticulars.'

'Certainly.'

'Then, comrade, you will hear from us by the first posttomorrow. Or possibly the second post. Our rate of pay is a hundredand fifty francs an article. Remember to bring a parcel of washingnext time you come. Au revoir, comrade.'

We went downstairs, looked carefully out of the laundry to seeif there was anyone in the street, and slipped out. Boris was wildwith joy. In a sort of sacrificial ecstasy he rushed into thenearest tobacconist's and spent fifty centimes on a cigar. He cameout thumping his stick on the pavement and beaming.

'At last! At last! Now, mon ami, out fortune really ismade. You took them in finely. Did you hear him call you comrade? Ahundred and fifty francs an article—Nom de Dieu, whatluck!'

Next morning when I heard the postman I rushed down to thebistro for my letter; to my disappointment, it had not come.I stayed at home for the second post; still no letter. When threedays had gone by and I had not heard from the secret society, wegave up hope, deciding that they must have found somebody else todo their articles.

Ten days later we made another visit to the office of the secretsociety, taking care to bring a parcel that looked like washing.And the secret society had vanished! The woman in the laundry knewnothing—she simply said that 'ces messieurs' had leftsome days ago, after trouble about the rent. What fools we looked,standing there with our parcel! But it was a consolation that wehad paid only five francs instead of twenty.

And that was the last we ever heard of the secret society. Whoor what they really were, nobody knew. Personally I do not thinkthey had anything to do with the Communist Party; I think they weresimply swindlers, who preyed upon Russian refugees by extractingentrance fees to an imaginary society. It was quite safe, and nodoubt they are still doing it in some other city. They were cleverfellows, and played their part admirably. Their office lookedexactly as a secret Communist office should look, and as for thattouch about bringing a parcel of washing, it was genius.

9

FOR three more days we continued traipsing about looking forwork, coming home for diminishing meals of soup and bread in mybedroom. There were now two gleams of hope. In the first place,Boris had heard of a possible job at the Hôtel X, near thePlace de la Concorde, and in the second, the patron of thenew restaurant in the rue du Commerce had at last come back. Wewent down in the afternoon and saw him. On the way Boris talked ofthe vast fortunes we should make if we got this job, and on theimportance of making a good impression on the patron.

'Appearance—appearance is everything, mon ami. Giveme a new suit and I will borrow a thousand francs by dinner-time.What a pity I did not buy a collar when we had money. I turned mycollar inside out this morning; but what is the use, one side is asdirty as the other. Do you think I look hungry, monami?'

'You look pale.'

'Curse it, what can one do on bread and potatoes? It is fatal tolook hungry. It makes people want to kick you. Wait.'

He stopped at a jeweller's window and smacked his cheeks sharplyto bring the blood into them. Then, before the flush had faded, wehurried into the restaurant and introduced ourselves to thepatron.

The patron was a short, fattish, very dignified man withwavy grey hair, dressed in a smart, double-breasted flannel suitand smelling of scent. Boris told me that he too was an ex-colonelof the Russian Army. His wife was there too, a horrid, fatFrenchwoman with a dead-white face and scarlet lips, reminding meof cold veal and tomatoes. The patron greeted Borisgenially, and they talked together in Russian for a few minutes. Istood in the background, preparing to tell some big lies about myexperience as a dish-washer.

Then the patron came over towards me. I shuffleduneasily, trying to look servile. Boris had rubbed it into me thata plongeur is a slave's slave, and I expected thepatron to treat me like dirt. To my astonishment, he seizedme warmly by the hand.

'So you are an Englishman!' he exclaimed. 'But how charming! Ineed not ask, then, whether you are a golfer?'

'Mais certainement,' I said, seeing that this wasexpected of me.

'All my life I have wanted to play golf. Will you, my dearmonsieur, be so kind as to show me a few of the principalstrokes?'

Apparently this was the Russian way of doing business. Thepatron listened attentively while I explained the differencebetween a driver and an iron, and then suddenly informed me that itwas all entendu; Boris was to be maîtred'hôtel when the restaurant opened, and Iplongeur, with a chance of rising to lavatory attendant iftrade was good. When would the restaurant open? I asked. 'Exactly afortnight from today,' the patron answered grandly (he had amanner of waving his hand and flicking off his cigarette ash at thesame time, which looked very grand), 'exactly a fortnight fromtoday, in time for lunch.' Then, with obvious pride, he showed usover the restaurant.

It was a smallish place, consisting of a bar, a dining-room, anda kitchen no bigger than the average bathroom. The patronwas decorating it in a trumpery 'picturesque' style (he called it'le Normand'; it was a matter of sham beams stuck on theplaster, and the like) and proposed to call it the Auberge de JehanCottard, to give a medieval effect. He had a leaflet printed, fullof lies about the historical associations of the quarter, and thisleaflet actually claimed, among other things, that there had oncebeen an inn on the site of the restaurant which was frequented byCharlemagne. The patron was very pleased with this touch. Hewas also having the bar decorated with indecent pictures by anartist from the Salon. Finally he gave us each an expensivecigarette, and after some more talk he went home.

I felt strongly that we should never get any good from thisrestaurant. The patron had looked to me like a cheat, and,what was worse, an incompetent cheat, and I had seen twounmistakable duns hanging about the back door. But Boris, seeinghimself a maître d'hôtel once more, would not bediscouraged.

'We've brought it off—only a fortnight to hold out. Whatis a fortnight? Je m'en f——. To think that inonly three weeks I shall have my mistress! Will she be dark orfair, I wonder? I don't mind, so long as she is not too thin.'

Two bad days followed. We had only sixty centimes left, and wespent it on half a pound of bread, with a piece of garlic to rub itwith. The point of rubbing garlic on bread is that the tastelingers and gives one the illusion of having fed recently. We satmost of that day in the Jardin des Plantes. Boris had shots withstones at the tame pigeons, but always missed them, and after thatwe wrote dinner menus on the backs of envelopes. We were too hungryeven to try and think of anything except food. I remember thedinner Boris finally selected for himself. It was: a dozen oysters,bortch soup (the red, sweet, beetroot soup with cream on top),crayfishes, a young chicken en casserole, beef with stewedplums, new potatoes, a salad, suet pudding and Roquefort cheese,with a litre of Burgundy and some old brandy. Boris hadinternational tastes in food. Later on, when we were prosperous, Ioccasionally saw him eat meals almost as large withoutdifficulty.

When our money came to an end I stopped looking for work, andwas another day without food. I did not believe that the Auberge deJehan Cottard was really going to open, and I could see no otherprospect, but I was too lazy to do anything but lie in bed. Thenthe luck changed abruptly. At night, at about ten o'clock, I heardan eager shout from the street. I got up and went to the window.Boris was there, waving his stick and beaming. Before speaking hedragged a bent loaf from his pocket and threw it up to me.

'Mon ami, mon cher ami, we're saved! What do youthink?'

'Surely you haven't got a job!'

'At the Hôtel X, near the Place de la Concorde—fivehundred francs a month, and food. I have been working there today.Name of Jesus Christ, how I have eaten!'

After ten or twelve hours' work, and with his game leg, hisfirst thought had been to walk three kilometres to my hotel andtell me the good news! What was more, he told me to meet him in theTuileries the next day during his afternoon interval, in case heshould be able to steal some food for me. At the appointed time Imet Boris on a public bench. He undid his waistcoat and produced alarge, crushed, newspaper packet; in it were some minced veal, awedge of Camembert cheese, bread and an éclair, all jumbledtogether.

'Voilà!' said Boris, 'that's all I could smuggleout for you. The doorkeeper is a cunning swine.'

It is disagreeable to eat out of a newspaper on a public seat,especially in the Tuileries, which are generally full of prettygirls, but I was too hungry to care. While I ate, Boris explainedthat he was working in the cafeterie of the hotel—that is, inEnglish, the stillroom. It appeared that the cafeterie was the verylowest post in the hotel, and a dreadful come-down for a waiter,but it would do until the Auberge de Jehan Cottard opened.Meanwhile I was to meet Boris every day in the Tuileries, and hewould smuggle out as much food as he dared. For three days wecontinued with this arrangement, and I lived entirely on the stolenfood. Then all our troubles came to an end, for one of theplongeurs left the Hôtel X, and on Boris'srecommendation I was given a job there myself.

X

THE Hôtel X was a vast, grandiose place with a classicalfacade, and at one side a little, dark doorway like a rat-hole,which was the service entrance. I arrived at a quarter to seven inthe morning. A stream of men with greasy trousers were hurrying inand being checked by a doorkeeper who sat in a tiny office. Iwaited, and presently the chef du personnel, a sort ofassistant manager, arrived and began to question me. He was anItalian, with a round, pale face, haggard from overwork. He askedwhether I was an experienced dishwasher, and I said that I was; heglanced at my hands and saw that I was lying, but on hearing that Iwas an Englishman he changed his tone and engaged me.

'We have been looking for someone to practise our English on,'he said. 'Our clients are all Americans, and the only English weknow is——' He repeated something that little boys writeon the walls in London. 'You may be useful. Come downstairs.'

He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow passage, deepunderground, and so low that I had to stoop in places. It wasstiflingly hot and very dark, with only dim, yellow bulbs severalyards apart. There seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthinepassages—actually, I suppose, a few hundred yards inall—that reminded one queerly of the lower decks of a liner;there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food,and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces)just like the whir of engines. We passed doorways which let outsometimes a shouting of oaths, sometimes the red glare of a fire,once a shuddering draught from an ice chamber. As we went along,something struck me violently in the back. It was a hundred-poundblock of ice, carried by a blue-aproned porter. After him came aboy with a great slab of veal on his shoulder, his cheek pressedinto the damp, spongy flesh. They shoved me aside with a cry of'Sauve-toi, idiot!' and rushed on. On the wall, under one ofthe lights, someone had written in a very neat hand: 'Sooner willyou find a cloudless sky in winter, than a woman at the HôtelX who has her maidenhead.' It seemed a queer sort of place.

One of the passages branched off into a laundry, where an old,skull-faced woman gave me a blue apron and a pile of dishcloths.Then the chef du personnel took me to a tiny undergroundden—a cellar below a cellar, as it were—where therewere a sink and some gas-ovens. It was too low for me to standquite upright, and the temperature was perhaps 110 degreesFahrenheit. The chef du personnel explained that my job wasto fetch meals for the higher hotel employees, who fed in a smalldining-room above, clean their room and wash their crockery. Whenhe had gone, a waiter, another Italian, thrust a fierce, fuzzy headinto the doorway and looked down at me.

'English, eh?' he said. 'Well, I'm in charge here. If you workwell' —he made the motion of up-ending a bottle and suckednoisily. 'If you don't'—he gave the doorpost several vigorouskicks. 'To me, twisting your neck would be no more than spitting onthe floor. And if there's any trouble, they'll believe me, not you.So be careful.'

After this I set to work rather hurriedly. Except for about anhour, I was at work from seven in the morning till a quarter pastnine at night; first at washing crockery, then at scrubbing thetables and floors of the employees' dining-room, then at polishingglasses and knives, then at fetching meals, then at washingcrockery again, then at fetching more meals and washing morecrockery. It was easy work, and I got on well with it except when Iwent to the kitchen to fetch meals. The kitchen was like nothing Ihad ever seen or imagined—a stifling, low-ceilinged infernoof a cellar, red-lit from the fires, and deafening with oaths andthe clanging of pots and pans. It was so hot that all themetal-work except the stoves had to be covered with cloth. In themiddle were furnaces, where twelve cooks skipped to and fro, theirfaces dripping sweat in spite of their white caps. Round that werecounters where a mob of waiters and plongeurs clamoured withtrays. Scullions, naked to the waist, were stoking the fires andscouring huge copper saucepans with sand. Everyone seemed to be ina hurry and a rage. The head cook, a fine, scarlet man with bigmoustachios, stood in the middle booming continuously,'Ça marche deux oeufs brouillés! Ça marcheun Chateaubriand aux pommes sautées!' except when hebroke off to curse at a plongeur. There were three counters,and the first time I went to the kitchen I took my tray unknowinglyto the wrong one. The head cook walked up to me, twisted hismoustaches, and looked me up and down. Then he beckoned to thebreakfast cook and pointed at me.

'Do you see that? That is the type of plongeurthey send us nowadays. Where do you come from, idiot? FromCharenton, I suppose?' (There is a large lunatic asylum atCharenton.)

'From England,' I said.

'I might have known it. Well, mon cher monsieurl'Anglais, may I inform you that you are the son of a whor*?And now—the camp to the other counter, where you belong.'

I got this kind of reception every time I went to the kitchen,for I always made some mistake; I was expected to know the work,and was cursed accordingly. From curiosity I counted the number oftimes I was called maquereau during the day, and it wasthirty-nine.

At half past four the Italian told me that I could stop working,but that it was not worth going out, as we began at five. I went tothe lavatory for a smoke; smoking was strictly forbidden, and Borishad warned me that the lavatory was the only safe place. After thatI worked again till a quarter past nine, when the waiter put hishead into the doorway and told me to leave the rest of thecrockery. To my astonishment, after calling me pig, mackerel, etc.,all day, he had suddenly grown quite friendly. I realized that thecurses I had met with were only a kind of probation.

'That'll do, mon p'tit,' said the waiter. 'Tu n'es pasdébrouillard, but you work all right. Come up and haveyour dinner. The hotel allows us two litres of wine each, and I'vestolen another bottle. We'll have a fine booze.'

We had an excellent dinner from the leavings of the higheremployees. The waiter, grown mellow, told me stories about hislove-affairs, and about two men whom he had stabbed in Italy, andabout how he had dodged Us military service. He was a good fellowwhen one got to know him; he reminded me of Benvenuto Cellini,somehow. I was tired and drenched with sweat, but I felt a new manafter a day's solid food. The work did not seem difficult, and Ifelt that this job would suit me. It was not certain, however, thatit would continue, for I had been engaged as an 'extra' for the dayonly, at twenty-five francs. The sour-faced doorkeeper counted outthe money, less fifty centimes which he said was for insurance (alie, I discovered afterwards). Then he stepped out into thepassage, made me take off my coat, and carefully prodded me allover, searching for stolen food. After this the chef dupersonnel appeared and spoke to me. Like the waiter, he hadgrown more genial on seeing that I was willing to work.

'We will give you a permanent job if you like,' he said. 'Thehead waiter says he would enjoy calling an Englishman names. Willyou sign on for a month?'

Here was a job at last, and I was ready to jump at it. Then Iremembered the Russian restaurant, due to open in a fortnight. Itseemed hardly fair to promise working a month, and then leave inthe middle. I said that I had other work in prospect—could Ibe engaged for a fortnight? But at that the chef dupersonnel shrugged his shoulders and said that the hotel onlyengaged men by the month. Evidently I had lost my chance of ajob.

Boris, by arrangement, was waiting for me in the Arcade of theRue de Rivoli. When I told him what had happened, he was furious.For the first time since I had known him he forgot his manners andcalled me a fool.

'Idiot! Species of idiot! What's the good of my finding you ajob when you go and chuck it up the next moment? How could you besuch a fool as to mention the other restaurant? You'd only topromise you would work for a month.'

'It seemed more honest to say I might have to leave,' Iobjected.

'Honest! Honest! Who ever heard of a plongeur beinghonest? Mon ami'—suddenly he seized my lapel and spokevery earnestly—'mon ami, you have worked here all day.You see what hotel work is like. Do you think a plongeur canafford a sense of honour?'

'No, perhaps not.'

'Well, then, go back quickly and tell the chef dupersonnel you are quite ready to work for a month. Say you willthrow the other job over. Then, when our restaurant opens, we haveonly to walk out.'

'But what about my wages if I break my contract?

'Boris banged his stick on the pavement and cried out at suchstupidity. 'Ask to be paid by the day, then you won't lose a sou.Do you suppose they would prosecute a plongeur for breakingUs contract? A plongeur is too low to be prosecuted.'

I hurried back, found the chef du personnel, and told himthat I would work for a month, whereat he signed me on. Ibis was myfirst lesson in plongeur morality. Later I realized howfoolish it had been to have any scruples, for the big hotels arequite merciless towards their employees. They engage or dischargemen as the work demands, and they all sack ten per cent or more oftheir staff when the season is over. Nor have they any difficultyin replacing a man who leaves at short notice, for Paris isthronged by hotel employees out of work.

XI

AS it turned out, I did not break my contract, for it was sixweeks before the Auberge de Jehan Cottard even showed signs ofopening. In the meantime I worked at the Hôtel X, four days aweek in the cafeterie, one day helping the waiter on the fourthfloor, and one day replacing the woman who washed up for thedining-room. My day off, luckily, was Sunday, but sometimes anotherman was ill and I had to work that day as well. The hours were fromseven in the morning till two in the afternoon, and from five inthe evening till nine—eleven hours; but it was afourteen-hour day when I washed up for the dining-room. By theordinary standards of a Paris plongeur, these areexceptionally short hours. The only hardship of life was thefearful heat and stuffiness of these labyrinthine cellars. Apartfrom this the hotel, which was large and well organized, wasconsidered a comfortable one.

Our cafeterie was a murky cellar measuring twenty feet by sevenby eight high, and so crowded with coffee-urns, breadcutters andthe like that one could hardly move without banging againstsomething. It was lighted by one dim electric bulb, and four orfive gas-fires that sent out a fierce red breath. There was athermometer there, and the temperature never fell below 110 degreesFahrenheit—it neared 130 at some times of the day. At one endwere five service lifts, and at the other an ice cupboard where westored milk and butter. When you went into the ice cupboard youdropped a hundred degrees of temperature at a single step; it usedto remind me of the hymn about Greenland's icy mountains andIndia's coral strand. Two men worked in the cafeterie besides Borisand myself. One was Mario, a huge, excitable Italian—he waslike a city policeman with operatic gestures—and the other, ahairy, uncouth animal whom we called the Magyar; I think he was aTransylvanian, or something even more remote. Except the Magyar wewere all big men, and at the rush hours we collidedincessantly.

The work in the cafeterie was spasmodic. We were never idle, butthe real work only came in bursts of two hours at a time—wecalled each burst 'un coup de feu'. The first coup defeu came at eight, when the guests upstairs began to wake upand demand breakfast. At eight a sudden banging and yelling wouldbreak out all through the basem*nt; bells rang on all sides,blue-aproned men rushed through the passages, our service liftscame down with a simultaneous crash, and the waiters on all fivefloors began shouting Italian oaths down the shafts. I don'tremember all our duties, but they included making tea, coffee andchocolate, fetching meals from the kitchen, wines from the cellarand fruit and so forth from the dining-room, slicing bread, makingtoast, rolling pats of butter, measuring jam, opening milk-cans,counting lumps of sugar, boiling eggs, cooking porridge, poundingice, grinding coffee—all this for from a hundred to twohundred customers. The kitchen was thirty yards away, and thedining-room sixty or seventy yards. Everything we sent up in theservice lifts had to be covered by a voucher, and the vouchers hadto be carefully filed, and there was trouble if even a lump ofsugar was lost. Besides this, we had to supply the staff with breadand coffee, and fetch the meals for the waiters upstairs. All inall, it was a complicated job.

I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen milesduring the day, and yet the strain of the work was more mental thanphysical. Nothing could be easier, on the face of it, than thisstupid scullion work, but it is astonishingly hard when one is in ahurry. One has to leap to and fro between a multitude ofjobs—it is like sorting a pack of cards against the clock.You are, for example, making toast, when bang! down comes a servicelift with an order for tea, rolls and three different kinds of jam,and simultaneously bang! down comes another demanding scrambledeggs, coffee and grapefruit; you run to the kitchen for the eggsand to the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning so as tobe back before your toast bums, and having to remember about thetea and coffee, besides half a dozen other orders that are stillpending; and at the same time some waiter is following you andmaking trouble about a lost bottle of soda-water, and you arearguing with him. It needs more brains than one might think. Mariosaid, no doubt truly, that it took a year to make a reliablecafetier.

The time between eight and half past ten was a sort of delirium.Sometimes we were going as though we had only five minutes to live;sometimes there were sudden lulls when the orders stopped andeverything seemed quiet for a moment. Then we swept up the litterfrom the floor, threw down fresh sawdust, and swallowed gallipotsof wine or coffee or water—anything, so long as it was wet.Very often we used to break off chunks of ice and suck them whilewe worked. The heat among the gas-fires was nauseating; weswallowed quarts of drink during the day, and after a few hourseven our aprons were drenched with sweat. At times we werehopelessly behind with the work, and some of the customers wouldhave gone without their breakfast, but Mario always pulled usthrough. He had worked fourteen years in the cafeterie, and he hadthe skill that never wastes a second between jobs. The Magyar wasvery stupid and I was inexperienced, and Boris was inclined toshirk, partly because of his lame leg, partly because he wasashamed of working in the cafeterie after being a waiter; but Mariowas wonderful. The way he would stretch his great arms right acrossthe cafeterie to fill a coffee-pot with one hand and boil an eggwith the other, at the same time watching toast and shoutingdirections to the Magyar, and between whiles singing snatches fromRigoletto, was beyond all praise. The patron knew hisvalue, and he was paid a thousand francs a month, instead of fivehundred like the rest of us.

The breakfast pandemonium stopped at half past ten. Then wescrubbed the cafeterie tables, swept the floor and polished thebrasswork, and, on good mornings, went one at a time to thelavatory for a smoke. This was our slack time—only relativelyslack, however, for we had only ten minutes for lunch, and we nevergot through it uninterrupted. The customers' luncheon hour, betweentwelve and two, was another period of turmoil like the breakfasthour. Most of our work was fetching meals from the kitchen, whichmeant constant engueulades from the cooks. By this time thecooks had sweated in front of their furnaces for four or fivehours, and their tempers were all warmed up.

At two we were suddenly free men. We threw off our aprons andput on our coats, hurried out of doors, and, when we had money,dived into the nearest bistro. It was strange, coming upinto the street from those firelit cellars. The air seemedblindingly clear and cold, like arctic summer; and how sweet thepetrol did smell, after the stenches of sweat and food! Sometimeswe met some of our cooks and waiters in the bistros, andthey were friendly and stood us drinks. Indoors we were theirslaves, but it is an etiquette in hotel life that between hourseveryone is equal, and the engueulades do not count.

At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till half-pastsix there were no orders, and we used this time to polish silver,clean out the coffee-urns, and do other odd jobs. Then the grandturmoil of the day started—the dinner hour. I wish I could beZola for a little while, just to describe that dinner hour. Theessence of the situation was that a hundred or two hundred peoplewere demanding individually different meals of five or six courses,and that fifty or sixty people had to cook and serve them and cleanup the mess afterwards; anyone with experience of catering willknow what that means. And at this time when the work was doubled,the whole staff was tired out, and a number of them were drunk. Icould write pages about the scene without giving a true idea of it.The chargings to and fro in the narrow passages, the collisions,the yells, the struggling with crates and trays and blocks of ice,the heat, the darkness, the furious festering quarrels which therewas no time to fight out—they pass description. Anyone cominginto the basem*nt for the first time would have thought himself ina den of maniacs. It was only later, when I understood the workingof a hotel, that I saw order in all this chaos.

At half past eight the work stopped very suddenly. We were notfree till nine, but we used to throw ourselves full length on thefloor, and lie there resting our legs, too lazy even to go to theice cupboard for a drink. Sometimes the chef du personnelwould come in with bottles of beer, for the hotel stood us an extrabeer when we had had a hard day. The food we were given was no morethan eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; heallowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if aplongeur is not given two litres he will steal three. We hadthe heeltaps of bottles as well, so that we often drank toomuch—a good thing, for one seemed to work faster whenpartially drunk.

Four days of the week passed like this; of the other two workingdays, one was better and one worse. After a week of this life Ifelt in need of a holiday. It was Saturday night, so the people inour bistro were busy getting drunk, and with a free dayahead of me I was ready to join them. We all went to bed, drunk, attwo in the morning, meaning to sleep till noon. At half past five Iwas suddenly awakened. A night-watchman, sent from the hotel, wasstanding at my bedside. He stripped the clothes back and shook meroughly.

'Get up!' he said. 'Tu t'es bien saoulé la gueule,eh? Well, never mind that, the hotel's a man short. You've gotto work today.'

'Why should I work?' I protested. 'This is my day off.'

'Day off, nothing! The work's got to be done. Get up!'

I got up and went out, feeling as though my back were broken andmy skull filled with hot cinders. I did not think that I couldpossibly do a day's work. And yet, after only an hour in thebasem*nt, I found that I was perfectly well. It seemed that in theheat of those cellars, as in a turkish bath, one could sweat outalmost any quantity of drink. Plongeurs know this, and counton it. The power of swallowing quarts of wine, and then sweating itout before it can do much damage, is one of the compensations oftheir life.

XII

BY far my best time at the hotel was when I went to help thewaiter on the fourth floor. We worked in a small pantry whichcommunicated with the cafeterie by service lifts. It wasdelightfully cool after the cellars, and the work was chieflypolishing silver and glasses, which is a humane job. Valenti, thewaiter, was a decent sort, and treated me almost as an equal whenwe were alone, though he had to speak roughly when there was anyoneelse present, for it does not do for a waiter to be friendly withplongeurs. He used sometimes to tip me five francs when hehad had a good day. He was a comely youth, aged twenty-four butlooking eighteen, and, like most waiters, he carried himself welland knew how to wear his clothes. With his black tail-coat andwhite tie, fresh face and sleek brown hair, he looked just like anEton boy; yet he had earned his living since he was twelve, andworked his way up literally from the gutter. Grossing the Italianfrontier without a passport, and selling chestnuts from a barrow onthe northern boulevards, and being given fifty days' imprisonmentin London for working without a permit, and being made love to by arich old woman in a hotel, who gave him a diamond ring andafterwards accused him of stealing it, were among his experiences.I used to enjoy talking to him, at slack times when we sat smokingdown the lift shaft.

My bad day was when I washed up for the dining-room. I had notto wash the plates, which were done in the kitchen, but only theother crockery, silver, knives and glasses; yet, even so, it meantthirteen hours' work, and I used between thirty and fortydishcloths during the day. The antiquated methods used in Francedouble the work of washing up. Plate-racks are unheard-of, andthere are no soap-flakes, only the treacly soft soap, which refusesto lather in the hard, Paris water. I worked in a dirty, crowdedlittle den, a pantry and scullery combined, which gave straight onthe dining-room. Besides washing up, I had to fetch the waiters'food and serve them at table; most of them were intolerablyinsolent, and I had to use my fists more than once to get commoncivility. The person who normally washed up was a woman, and theymade her life a misery.

It was amusing to look round the filthy little scullery andthink that only a double door was between us and the dining-room.There sat the customers in all their splendour—spotlesstable-cloths, bowls of flowers, mirrors and gilt cornices andpainted cherubim; and here, just a few feet away, we in ourdisgusting filth. For it really was disgusting filth. There was notime to sweep the floor till evening, and we slithered about in acompound of soapy water, lettuce-leaves, torn paper and trampledfood. A dozen waiters with their coats off, showing their sweatyarmpits, sat at the table mixing salads and sticking their thumbsinto the cream pots. The room had a dirty, mixed smell of food andsweat. Everywhere in the cupboards, behind the piles of crockery,were squalid stores of food that the waiters had stolen. There wereonly two sinks, and no washing basin, and it was nothing unusualfor a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockerywas rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this. There were acoco-nut mat and a mirror outside the dining-room door, and thewaiters used to preen themselves up and go in looking the pictureof cleanliness.

It is an instructive sight to see a waiter going into a hoteldining-room. As he passes the door a sudden change comes over him.The set of his shoulders alters; all the dirt and hurry andirritation have dropped off in an instant. He glides over thecarpet, with a solemn priest-like air. I remember our assistantmaître d'hôtel, a fiery Italian, pausing at thedining-room door to address an apprentice who had broken a bottleof wine. Shaking his fist above his head he yelled (luckily thedoor was more or less soundproof):

'Tu me fais—Do you call yourself a waiter, you youngbastard? You a waiter! You're not fit to scrub floors in thebrothel your mother came from. Maquereau!'

Words failing him, he turned to the door; and as he opened it hedelivered a final insult in the same manner as Squire Western inTom Jones.

Then he entered the dining-room and sailed across it dish inhand, graceful as a swan. Ten seconds later he was bowingreverently to a customer. And you could not help thinking, as yousaw him bow and smile, with that benign smile of the trainedwaiter, that the customer was put to shame by having such anaristocrat to serve him.

This washing up was a thoroughly odious job—not hard, butboring and silly beyond words. It is dreadful to think that somepeople spend their whole decades at such occupations. The womanwhom I replaced was quite sixty years old, and she stood at thesink thirteen hours a day, six days a week, the year round; shewas, in addition, horribly bullied by the waiters. She gave outthat she had once been an actress—actually, I imagine, aprostitute; most prostitutes end as charwomen. It was strange tosee that in spite of her age and her life she still wore a brightblonde wig, and darkened her eyes and painted her face like a girlof twenty. So apparently even a seventy-eight-hour week can leaveone with some vitality.

XIII

ON my third day at the hotel the chef du personnel, whohad generally spoken to me in quite a pleasant tone, called me upand said sharply:

'Here, you, shave that moustache off at once! Nom deDieu, who ever heard of a plongeur with amoustache?'

I began to protest, but he cut me short. 'A plongeur witha moustache —nonsense! Take care I don't see you with ittomorrow.'

On the way home I asked Boris what this meant. He shrugged hisshoulders. 'You must do what he says, mon ami. No one in thehotel wears a moustache, except the cooks. I should have thoughtyou would have noticed it. Reason? There is no reason. It is thecustom.'

I saw that it was an etiquette, like not wearing a white tiewith a dinner-jacket, and shaved off my moustache. Afterwards Ifound out the explanation of the custom, which is this: waiters ingood hotels do not wear moustaches, and to show their superioritythey decree that plongeurs shall not wear them either; andthe cooks wear their moustaches to show their contempt for thewaiters.

This gives some idea of the elaborate caste system existing in ahotel. Our staff, amounting to about a hundred and ten, had theirprestige graded as accurately as that of soldiers, and a cook orwaiter was as much above a plongeur as a captain above aprivate. Highest of all came the manager, who could sack anybody,even the cooks. We never saw the patron, and all we knew ofhim was that his meals had to be prepared more carefully than thatof the customers; all the discipline of the hotel depended on themanager. He was a conscientious man, and always on the lookout forslackness, but we were too clever for him. A system of servicebells ran through the hotel, and the whole staff used these forsignalling to one another. A long ring and a short ring, followedby two more long rings, meant that the manager was coming, and whenwe heard it we took care to look busy.

Below the manager came the maître d'hôtel. Hedid not serve at table, unless to a lord or someone of that kind,but directed the other waiters and helped with the catering. Histips, and his bonus from the champagne companies (it was two francsfor each cork he returned to them), came to two hundred francs aday. He was in a position quite apart from the rest of the staff,and took his meals in a private room, with silver on the table andtwo apprentices in clean white jackets to serve him. A little belowthe head waiter came the head cook, drawing about five thousandfrancs a month; he dined in the kitchen, but at a separate table,and one of the apprentice cooks waited on him. Then came thechef du personnel; he drew only fifteen hundred francs amonth, but he wore a black coat and did no manual work, and hecould sack plongeurs and fine waiters. Then came the othercooks, drawing anything between three thousand and seven hundredand fifty francs a month; then the waiters, making about seventyfrancs a day in tips, besides a small retaining fee; then thelaundresses and sewing women; then the apprentice waiters, whor*ceived no tips, but were paid seven hundred and fifty francs amonth; then the plongeurs, also at seven hundred and fiftyfrancs; then the chambermaids, at five or six hundred francs amonth; and lastly the cafetiers, at five hundred a month. We of thecafeterie were the very dregs of the hotel, despised andtutoied by everyone.

There were various others—the office employees, calledgenerally couriers, the storekeeper, the cellarman, some portersand pages, the ice man, the bakers, the night-watchman, thedoorkeeper. Different jobs were done by different races. The officeemployees and the cooks and sewing-women were French, the waitersItalians and Germans (there is hardly such a thing as a Frenchwaiter in Paris), the plongeurs of every race in Europe,beside Arabs and Negroes. French was the lingua franca, even theItalians speaking it to one another.

All the departments had their special perquisites. In all Parishotels it is the custom to sell the broken bread to bakers foreight sous a pound, and the kitchen scraps to pigkeepers for atrifle, and to divide the proceeds of this among theplongeurs. There was much pilfering, too. The waiters allstole food—in fact, I seldom saw a waiter trouble to eat therations provided for him by the hotel—and the cooks did it ona larger scale in the kitchen, and we in the cafeterie swilledillicit tea and coffee. The cellarman stole brandy. By a rule ofthe hotel the waiters were not allowed to keep stores of spirits,but had to go to the cellarman for each drink as it was ordered. Asthe cellarman poured out the drinks he would set aside perhaps ateaspoonful from each glass, and he amassed quantities in this way.He would sell you the stolen brandy for five sous a swig if hethought he could trust you.

There were thieves among the staff, and if you left money inyour coat pockets it was generally taken. The doorkeeper, who paidour wages and searched us for stolen food, was the greatest thiefin the hotel. Out of my five hundred francs a month, this manactually managed to cheat me of a hundred and fourteen francs insix weeks. I had asked to be paid daily, so the doorkeeper paid mesixteen francs each evening, and, by not paying for Sundays (forwhich of course payment was due), pocketed sixty-four francs. Also,I sometimes worked on a Sunday, for which, though I did not knowit, I was entitled to an extra twenty-five francs. The doorkeepernever paid me this either, and so made away with anotherseventy-five francs. I only realized during my last week that I wasbeing cheated, and, as I could prove nothing, only twenty-fivefrancs were refunded. The doorkeeper played similar tricks on anyemployee who was fool enough to be taken in. He called himself aGreek, but in reality he was an Armenian. After knowing him I sawthe force of the proverb 'Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jewbefore a Greek, but don't trust an Armenian.'

There were queer characters among the waiters. One was agentleman—a youth who had been educated at a university, andhad had a well-paid job in a business office. He had caught avenereal disease, lost his job, drifted, and now considered himselflucky to be a waiter. Many of the waiters had slipped into Francewithout passports, and one or two of them were spies—it is acommon profession for a spy to adopt. One day there was a fearfulrow in the waiters' dining-room between Morandi, adangerous-looking man with eyes set too far apart, and anotherItalian. It appeared that Morandi had taken the other man'smistress. The other man, a weakling and obviously frightened ofMorandi, was threatening vaguely.

Morandi jeered at him. 'Well, what are you going to do about it?I've slept with your girl, slept with her three times. It was fine.What can you do, eh?'

'I can denounce you to the secret police. You are an Italianspy.'

Morandi did not deny it. He simply produced a razor from histail pocket and made two swift strokes in the air, as thoughslashing a man's cheeks open. Whereat the other waiter took itback.

The queerest type I ever saw in the hotel was an 'extra'. He hadbeen engaged at twenty-five francs for the day to replace theMagyar, who was ill. He was a Serbian, a thick-set nimble fellow ofabout twenty-five, speaking six languages, including English. Heseemed to know all about hotel work, and up till midday he workedlike a slave. Then, as soon as it had struck twelve, he turnedsulky, shirked Us work, stole wine, and finally crowned all byloafing about openly with a pipe in his mouth. Smoking, of course,was forbidden under severe penalties. The manager himself heard ofit and came down to interview the Serbian, fuming with rage.

'What the devil do you mean by smoking here?' he cried.

'What the devil do you mean by having a face like that?'answered the Serbian, calmly.

I cannot convey the blasphemy of such a remark. The head cook,if a plongeur had spoken to him like that, would have throwna saucepan of hot soup in his face. The manager said instantly,'You're sacked!' and at two o'clock the Serbian was given histwenty-five francs and duly sacked. Before he went out Boris askedhim in Russian what game he was playing. He said the Serbiananswered:

'Look here, mon vieux, they've got to pay me a day'swages if I work up to midday, haven't they? That's the law. Andwhere's the sense of working after I get my wages? So I'll tell youwhat I do. I go to a hotel and get a job as an extra, and up tomidday I work hard. Then, the moment it's struck twelve, I startraising such hell that they've no choice but to sack me. Neat, eh?Most days I'm sacked by half past twelve; today it was two o'clock;but I don't care, I've saved four hours' work. The only trouble is,one can't do it at the same hotel twice.'

It appeared that he had played this game at half the hotels andrestaurants in Paris. It is probably quite an easy game to playduring the summer, though the hotels protect themselves against itas well as they can by means of a black list.

XIV

IN a few days I had grasped the main principles on which thehotel was run. The thing that would astonish anyone coming for thefirst time into the service quarters of a hotel would be thefearful noise and disorder during the rush hours. It is somethingso different from the steady work in a shop or a factory that itlooks at first sight like mere bad management. But it is reallyquite unavoidable, and for this reason. Hotel work is notparticularly hard, but by its nature it comes in rushes and cannotbe economized. You cannot, for instance, grill a steak two hoursbefore it is wanted; you have to wait till the last moment, bywhich time a mass of other work has accumulated, and then do it alltogether, in frantic haste. The result is that at mealtimeseveryone is doing two men's work, which is impossible without noiseand quarrelling. Indeed the quarrels are a necessary part of theprocess, for the pace would never be kept up if everyone did notaccuse everyone else of idling. It was for this reason that duringthe rush hours the whole staff raged and cursed like demons. Atthose times there was scarcely a verb in the hotel exceptfoutre. A girl in the bakery, aged sixteen, used oaths thatwould have defeated a cabman. (Did not Hamlet say 'cursing like ascullion'? No doubt Shakespeare had watched scullions at work.) Butwe are not losing our heads and wasting time; we were juststimulating one another for the effort of packing four hours' workinto two hours.

What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the employees take agenuine pride in their work, beastly and silly though it is. If aman idles, the others soon find him out, and conspire against himto get him sacked. Cooks, waiters and plongeurs differgreatly in outlook, but they are all alike in being proud of theirefficiency.

Undoubtedly the most workmanlike class, and the least servile,are the cooks. They do not earn quite so much as waiters, but theirprestige is higher and their employment steadier. The cook does notlook upon himself as a servant, but as a skilled workman; he isgenerally called 'un ouvrier' which a waiter never is. Heknows his power—knows that he alone makes or mars arestaurant, and that if he is five minutes late everything is outof gear. He despises the whole non-cooking staff, and makes it apoint of honour to insult everyone below the head waiter. And hetakes a genuine artistic pride in his work, which demands verygreat skill. It is not the cooking that is so difficult, but thedoing everything to time. Between breakfast and luncheon the headcook at the Hôtel X would receive orders for several hundreddishes, all to be served at different times; he cooked few of themhimself, but he gave instructions about all of them and inspectedthem before they were sent up. His memory was wonderful. Thevouchers were pinned on a board, but the head cook seldom looked atthem; everything was stored in his mind, and exactly to the minute,as each dish fell due, he would call out, 'Faites marcher unecôtelette de veau' (or whatever it was) unfailingly. Hewas an insufferable bully, but he was also an artist. It is fortheir punctuality, and not for any superiority in technique, thatmen cooks are preferred to women.

The waiter's outlook is quite different. He too is proud in away of his skill, but his skill is chiefly in being servile. Hiswork gives him the mentality, not of a workman, but of a snob. Helives perpetually in sight of rich people, stands at their tables,listens to their conversation, sucks up to them with smiles anddiscreet little jokes. He has the pleasure of spending money byproxy. Moreover, there is always the chance that he may become richhimself, for, though most waiters die poor, they have long runs ofluck occasionally. At some cafés on the Grand Boulevardthere is so much money to be made that the waiters actually pay thepatron for their employment. The result is that betweenconstantly seeing money, and hoping to get it, the waiter comes toidentify himself to some extent with his employers. He will takepains to serve a meal in style, because he feels that he isparticipating in the meal himself.

I remember Valenti telling me of some banquet at Nice at whichhe had once served, and of how it cost two hundred thousand francsand was talked of for months afterwards. 'It was splendid, monp'tit, mais magnifique! Jesus Christ! The champagne, thesilver, the orchids—I have never seen anything like them, andI have seen some things. Ah, it was glorious!'

'But,' I said, 'you were only there to wait?'

'Oh, of course. But still, it was splendid.'

The moral is, never be sorry for a waiter. Sometimes when yousit in a restaurant, still stuffing yourself half an hour afterclosing time, you feel that the tired waiter at your side mustsurely be despising you. But he is not. He is not thinking as helooks at you, 'What an overfed lout'; he is thinking, 'One day,when I have saved enough money, I shall be able to imitate thatman.' He is ministering to a kind of pleasure he thoroughlyunderstands and admires. And that is why waiters are seldomSocialists, have no effective trade union, and will work twelvehours a day—they work fifteen hours, seven days a week, inmany cafés. They are snobs, and they find the servile natureof their work rather congenial.

The plongeurs, again, have a different outlook. Theirs isa job which offers no prospects, is intensely exhausting, and atthe same time has not a trace of skill or interest; the sort of jobthat would always be done by women if women were strong enough. Allthat is required of them is to be constantly on the run, and to putup with long hours and a stuffy atmosphere. They have no way ofescaping from this life, for they cannot save a penny from theirwages, and working from sixty to a hundred hours a week leaves themno time to train for anything else. The best they can hope for isto find a slightly softer job as night-watchman or lavatoryattendant.

And yet the plongeurs, low as they are, also have a kindof pride. It is the pride of the drudge—the man who is equalto no matter what quantity of work. At that level, the mere powerto go on working like an ox is about the only virtue attainable.Débrouillard is what every plongeur wants tobe called. A débrouillard is a man who, even when heis told to do the impossible, will sedébrouiller—get it done somehow. One of thekitchen plongeurs at the Hôtel X, a German, was wellknown as a débrouillard. One night an English lordcame to the hotel, and the waiters were in despair, for the lordhad asked for peaches, and there were none in stock; it was late atnight, and the shops would be shut. 'Leave it to me,' said theGerman. He went out, and in ten minutes he was back with fourpeaches. He had gone into a neighbouring restaurant and stolenthem. That is what is meant by a débrouillard. TheEnglish lord paid for the peaches at twenty francs each.

Mario, who was in charge of the cafeterie, had the typicaldrudge mentality. All he thought of was getting through the'boulot', and he defied you to give him too much of it.Fourteen years underground had left him with about as much naturallaziness as a piston rod. 'Faut être dur,' he used tosay when anyone complained. You will often hear plongeursboast, 'Je suis dur'—as though they were soldiers, notmale charwomen.

Thus everyone in the hotel had his sense of honour, and when thepress of work came we were all ready for a grand concerted effortto get through it. The constant war between the differentdepartments also made for efficiency, for everyone clung to his ownprivileges and tried to stop the others idling and pilfering.

This is the good side of hotel work. In a hotel a huge andcomplicated machine is kept running by an inadequate staff, becauseevery man has a well-defined job and does it scrupulously. Butthere is a weak point, and it is this—that the job the staffare doing is not necessarily what the customer pays for. Thecustomer pays, as he sees it, for good service; the employee ispaid, as he sees it, for the boulot—meaning, as arule, an imitation of good service. The result is that, thoughhotels are miracles of punctuality, they are worse than the worstprivate houses in the things that matter.

Take cleanliness, for example. The dirt in the Hôtel X, assoon as one penetrated into the service quarters, was revolting.Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners, and thebread-bin was infested with co*ckroaches. Once I suggested killingthese beasts to Mario. 'Why kill the poor animals?' he saidreproachfully. The others laughed when I wanted to wash my handsbefore touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we recognizedcleanliness as part of the boulot. We scrubbed the tablesand polished the brasswork regularly, because we had orders to dothat; but we had no orders to be genuinely clean, and in any casewe had no time for it. We were simply carrying out our duties; andas our first duty was punctuality, we saved time by beingdirty.

In the kitchen the dirt was worse. It is not a figure of speech,it is a mere statement of fact to say that a French cook will spitin the soup— that is, if he is not going to drink it himself.He is an artist, but his art is not cleanliness. To a certainextent he is even dirty because he is an artist, for food, to looksmart, needs dirty treatment. When a steak, for instance, isbrought up for the head cook's inspection, he does not handle itwith a fork. He picks it up in his fingers and slaps it down, runshis thumb round the dish and licks it to taste the gravy, runs itround and licks again, then steps back and contemplates the pieceof meat like an artist judging a picture, then presses it lovinglyinto place with his fat, pink fingers, every one of which he haslicked a hundred times that morning. When he is satisfied, he takesa cloth and wipes his fingerprints from the dish, and hands it tothe waiter. And the waiter, of course, dips his fingers intothe gravy—his nasty, greasy fingers which he is for everrunning through his brilliantined hair. Whenever one pays morethan, say, ten francs for a dish of meat in Paris, one may becertain that it has been fingered in this manner. In very cheaprestaurants it is different; there, the same trouble is not takenover the food, and it is just forked out of the pan and flung on toa plate, without handling. Roughly speaking, the more one pays forfood, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.

Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because soundfood is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness. The hotel employeeis too busy getting food ready to remember that it is meant to beeaten. A meal is simply 'une commande' to him, just as a mandying of cancer is simply 'a case' to the doctor. A customerorders, for example, a piece of toast. Somebody, pressed with workin a cellar deep underground, has to prepare it. How can he stopand say to himself, 'This toast is to be eaten—I must make iteatable'? All he knows is that it must look right and must be readyin three minutes. Some large drops of sweat fall from his foreheadon to the toast. Why should he worry? Presently the toast fallsamong the filthy sawdust on the floor. Why trouble to make a newpiece? It is much quicker to wipe the sawdust off. On the wayupstairs the toast falls again, butter side down. Another wipe isall it needs. And so with everything. The only food at theHôtel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff's, andthe patron's. The maxim, repeated by everyone, was: 'Lookout for the patron, and as for the clients, s'enf—pas mal!' Everywhere in the service quarters dirtfestered—a secret vein of dirt, running through the greatgarish hotel like the intestines through a man's body.

Apart from the dirt, the patron swindled the customerswholeheartedly. For the most part the materials of the food werevery bad, though the cooks knew how to serve it up in style. Themeat was at best ordinary, and as to the vegetables, no goodhousekeeper would have looked at them in the market. The cream, bya standing order, was diluted with milk. The tea and coffee were ofinferior sorts, and the jam was synthetic stuff out of vast,unlabelled tins. All the cheaper wines, according to Boris, werecorked vin ordinaire. There was a rule that employees mustpay for anything they spoiled, and in consequence damaged thingswere seldom thrown away. Once the waiter on the third floor droppeda roast chicken down the shaft of our service lift, where it fellinto a litter of broken bread, torn paper and so forth at thebottom. We simply wiped it with a cloth and sent it up again.Upstairs there were dirty tales of once-used sheets not beingwashed, but simply damped, ironed and put back on the beds. Thepatron was as mean to us as to the customers. Throughout thevast hotel there was not, for instance, such a thing as a brush andpan; one had to manage with a broom and a piece of cardboard. Andthe staff lavatory was worthy of Central Asia, and there was noplace to wash one's hands, except the sinks used for washingcrockery.

In spite of all this the Hôtel X was one of the dozen mostexpensive hotels in Paris, and the customers paid startling prices.The ordinary charge for a night's lodging, not including breakfast,was two hundred francs. All wine and tobacco were sold at exactlydouble shop prices, though of course the patron bought atthe wholesale price. If a customer had a title, or was reputed tobe a millionaire, all his charges went up automatically. Onemorning on the fourth floor an American who was on diet wanted onlysalt and hot water for his breakfast. Valenti was furious. 'JesusChrist!' he said, 'what about my ten per cent? Ten per cent of saltand water!' And he charged twenty-five francs for the breakfast.The customer paid without a murmur.

According to Boris, the same kind of thing went on in all Parishotels, or at least in all the big, expensive ones. But I imaginethat the customers at the Hôtel X were especially easy toswindle, for they were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling ofEnglish—no French—and seemed to know nothing whateverabout good food. They would stuff themselves with disgustingAmerican 'cereals', and eat marmalade at tea, and drink vermouthafter dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at ahundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce. One customer,from Pittsburg, dined every night in his bedroom on grape-nuts,scrambled eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether suchpeople are swindled or not.

XV

I HEARD queer tales in the hotel. There were tales of dopefiends, of old debauchees who frequented hotels in search of prettypage boys, of thefts and blackmail. Mario told me of a hotel inwhich he had been, where a chambermaid stole a priceless diamondring from an American lady. For days the staff were searched asthey left work, and two detectives searched the hotel from top tobottom, but the ring was never found. The chambermaid had a loverin the bakery, and he had baked the ring into a roll, where it layunsuspected until the search was over.

Once Valenti, at a slack time, told me a story abouthimself.

'You know, mon p'tit, this hotel life is all very well,but it's the devil when you're out of work. I expect you know whatit is to go without eating, eh? Forcément, otherwiseyou wouldn't be scrubbing dishes. Well, I'm not a poor devil of aplongeur; I'm a waiter, and I went five days without eating,once. Five days without even a crust of bread—JesusChrist!

'I tell you, those five days were the devil. The only good thingwas, I had my rent paid in advance. I was living in a dirty, cheaplittle hotel in the Rue Sainte Éloise up in the Latinquarter. It was called the Hotel Suzanne May, after some famousprostitute of the time of the Empire. I was starving, and there wasnothing I could do; I couldn't even go to the cafés wherethe hotel proprietors come to engage waiters, because I hadn't theprice of a drink. All I could do was to lie in bed getting weakerand weaker, and watching the bugs running about the ceiling. Idon't want to go through that again, I can tell you.

'In the afternoon of the fifth day I went half mad; at least,that's how it seems to me now. There was an old faded print of awoman's head hanging on the wall of my room, and I took towondering who it could be; and after about an hour I realized thatit must be Sainte Éloise, who was the patron saint of thequarter. I had never taken any notice of the thing before, but now,as I lay staring at it, a most extraordinary idea came into myhead.

'"Écoute, mon cher," I said to myself, "you'll bestarving to death if this goes on much longer. You've got to dosomething. Why not try a prayer to Sainte Éloise? Go down onyour knees and ask her to send you some money. After all, it can'tdo any harm. Try it!"

'Mad, eh? Still, a man will do anything when he's hungry.Besides, as I said, it couldn't do any harm. I got out of bed andbegan praying. I said:

'"Dear Sainte Éloise, if you exist, please send me somemoney. I don't ask for much—just enough to buy some bread anda bottle of wine and get my strength back. Three or four francswould do. You don't know how grateful I'll be, SainteÉloise, if you help me this once. And be sure, if you sendme anything, the first thing I'll do will be to go and bum a candlefor you, at your church down the street. Amen."

'I put in that about the candle, because I had heard that saintslike having candles burnt in their honour. I meant to keep mypromise, of course. But I am an atheist and I didn't really believethat anything would come of it.

'Well, I got into bed again, and five minutes later there came abang at the door. It was a girl called Maria, a big fat peasantgirl who lived at our hotel. She was a very stupid girl, but a goodsort, and I didn't much care for her to see me in the state I wasin.

'She cried out at the sight of me. "Nom de Dieu!" shesaid, "what's the matter with you? What are you doing in bed atthis time of day? Quelle mine que tu as! You look more likea corpse than a man."

'Probably I did look a sight. I had been five days without food,most of the time in bed, and it was three days since I had had awash or a shave. The room was a regular pigsty, too.

'"What's the matter?" said Maria again.

'"The matter!" I said; "Jesus Christ! I'm starving. I haven'teaten for five days. That's what's the matter."

'Maria was horrified. "Not eaten for five days?" she said. "Butwhy? Haven't you any money, then?"

'"Money!" I said. "Do you suppose I should be starving if I hadmoney? I've got just five sous in the world, and I've pawnedeverything. Look round the room and see if there's anything more Ican sell or pawn. If you can find anything that will fetch fiftycentimes, you're cleverer than I am."

'Maria began looking round the room. She poked here and thereamong a lot of rubbish that was lying about, and then suddenly shegot quite excited. Her great thick mouth fell open withastonishment.

'"You idiot!" she cried out. "Imbecile! What's this,then?"

'I saw that she had picked up an empty oil bidon that hadbeen lying in the comer. I had bought it weeks before, for an oillamp I had before I sold my things.

"That?" I said. "That's an oil bidon. What about it?"

'"Imbecile! Didn't you pay three francs fifty deposit onit?"

'Now, of course I had paid the three francs fifty. They alwaysmake you pay a deposit on the bidon, and you get it backwhen the bidon is returned. But I'd forgotten all aboutit.

'"Yes—" I began.

'"Idiot!" shouted Maria again. She got so excited that she beganto dance about until I thought her sabots would go through thefloor, "Idiot! T'es fou! T'es fou! What have you got to dobut take it back to the shop and get your deposit back? Starving,with three francs fifty staring you in the face! Imbecile!"

'I can hardly believe now that in all those five days I hadnever once thought of taking the bidon back to the shop. Asgood as three francs fifty in hard cash, and it had never occurredto me! I sat up in bed. "Quick!" I shouted to Maria, "you take itfor me. Take it to the grocer's at the corner—run like thedevil. And bring back food!"

'Maria didn't need to be told. She grabbed the bidon andwent clattering down the stairs like a herd of elephants and inthree minutes she was back with two pounds of bread under one armand a half-litre bottle of wine under the other. I didn't stop tothank her; I just seized the bread and sank my teeth in it. Haveyou noticed how bread tastes when you have been hungry for a longtime? Cold, wet, doughy—like putty almost. But, Jesus Christ,how good it was! As for the wine, I sucked it all down in onedraught, and it seemed to go straight into my veins and flow roundmy body like new blood. Ah, that made a difference!

'I wolfed the whole two pounds of bread without stopping to takebreath. Maria stood with her hands on her hips, watching me eat."Well, you feel better, eh?" she said when I had finished.

'"Better!" I said. "I feel perfect! I'm not the same man as Iwas five minutes ago. There's only one thing in the world I neednow—a cigarette."

'Maria put her hand in her apron pocket. "You can't have it,"she said. "I've no money. This is all I had left out of your threefrancs fifty —seven sous. It's no good; the cheapestcigarettes are twelve sous a packet."

'"Then I can have them!" I said. "Jesus Christ, what a piece ofluck! I've got five sous—it's just enough."

'Maria took the twelve sous and was starting out to thetobacconist's. And then something I had forgotten all this timecame into my head. There was that cursed Sainte Éloise! Ihad promised her a candle if she sent me money; and really, whocould say that the prayer hadn't come true? "Three or four francs,"I had said; and the next moment along came three francs fifty.There was no getting away from it. I should have to spend my twelvesous on a candle.

'I called Maria back. "It's no use," I said; "there is SainteÉloise —I have promised her a candle. The twelve souswill have to go on that. Silly, isn't it? I can't have mycigarettes after all."

'"Sainte Éloise?" said Maria. "What about SainteÉloise?"

'"I prayed to her for money and promised her a candle," I said."She answered the prayer—at any rate, the money turned up. Ishall have to buy that candle. It's a nuisance, but it seems to meI must keep my promise."

'"But what put Sainte Éloise into your head?" saidMaria.

'"It was her picture," I said, and I explained the whole thing."There she is, you see," I said, and I pointed to the picture onthe wall.

'Maria looked at the picture, and then to my surprise she burstinto shouts of laughter. She laughed more and more, stamping aboutthe room and holding her fat sides as though they would burst. Ithought she had gone mad. It was two minutes before she couldspeak.

'"Idiot!" she cried at last. "T'es fou! T'es fou! Do youmean to tell me you really knelt down and prayed to that picture?Who told you it was Sainte Éloise?"

'"But I made sure it was Sainte Éloise!" I said.

'"Imbecile! It isn't Sainte Éloise at all. Who do youthink it is?"

'"Who?" I said.

'"It is Suzanne May, the woman this hotel is called after."

'I had been praying to Suzanne May, the famous prostitute of theEmpire...

'But, after all, I wasn't sorry. Maria and I had a good laugh,and then we talked it over, and we made out that I didn't oweSainte Éloise anything. Clearly it wasn't she who hadanswered the prayer, and there was no need to buy her a candle. SoI had my packet of cigarettes after all.'

XVI

TIME went on and the Auberge de Jehan Cottard showed no signs ofopening. Boris and I went down there one day during our afternooninterval and found that none of the alterations had been done,except the indecent pictures, and there were three duns instead oftwo. The patron greeted us with his usual blandness, and thenext instant turned to me (his prospective dishwasher) and borrowedfive francs. After that I felt certain that the restaurant wouldnever get beyond talk. The patron, however, again named theopening for 'exactly a fortnight from today', and introduced us tothe woman who was to do the cooking, a Baltic Russian five feettall and a yard across the hips. She told us that she had been asinger before she came down to cooking, and that she was veryartistic and adored English literature, especially La Case del'Oncle Tom.

In a fortnight I had got so used to the routine of aplongeur's life that I could hardly imagine anythingdifferent. It was a life without much variation. At a quarter tosix one woke with a sudden start, tumbled into grease-stiffenedclothes, and hurried out with dirty face and protesting muscles. Itwas dawn, and the windows were dark except for the workmen'scafés. The sky was like a vast flat wall of cobalt, withroofs and spires of black paper pasted upon it. Drowsy men weresweeping the pavements with ten-foot besoms, and ragged familiespicking over the dustbins. Workmen, and girls with a piece ofchocolate in one hand and a croissant in the other, werepouring into the Métro stations. Trams, filled with moreworkmen, boomed gloomily past. One hastened down to the station,fought for a place—one does literally have to fight on theParis Métro at six in the morning—and stood jammed inthe swaying mass of passengers, nose to nose with some hideousFrench face, breathing sour wine and garlic. And then one descendedinto the labyrinth of the hotel basem*nt, and forgot daylight tilltwo o'clock, when the sun was hot and the town black with peopleand cars.

After my first week at the hotel I always spent the afternooninterval in sleeping, or, when I had money, in a bistro.Except for a few ambitious waiters who went to English classes, thewhole staff wasted their leisure in this way; one seemed too lazyafter the morning's work to do anything better. Sometimes half adozen plongeurs would make up a party and go to anabominable brothel in the Rue de Sieyes, where the charge was onlyfive francs twenty-five centimes—tenpence half-penny. It wasnicknamed 'le prix fixe', and they used to describe theirexperiences there as a great joke. It was a favourite rendezvous ofhotel workers. The plongeurs' wages did not allow them tomarry, and no doubt work in the basem*nt does not encouragefastidious feelings.

For another four hours one was in the cellars, and then oneemerged, sweating, into the cool street. It waslamplight—that strange purplish gleam of the Parislamps—and beyond the river the Eiffel Tower flashed from topto bottom with zigzag skysigns, like enormous snakes of fire.Streams of cars glided silently to and fro, and women,exquisite-looking in the dim light, strolled up and down thearcade. Sometimes a woman would glance at Boris or me, and then,noticing our greasy clothes, look hastily away again. One foughtanother battle in the Métro and was home by ten. Generallyfrom ten to midnight I went to a little bistro in ourstreet, an underground place frequented by Arab navvies. It was abad place for fights, and I sometimes saw bottles thrown, once withfearful effect, but as a rule the Arabs fought among themselves andlet Christians alone. Raki, the Arab drink, was very cheap, and thebistro was open at all hours, for the Arabs—luckymen—had the power of working all day and drinking allnight.

It was the typical life of a plongeur, and it did notseem a bad life at the time. I had no sensation of poverty, foreven after paying my rent and setting aside enough for tobacco andjourneys and my food on Sundays, I still had four francs a day fordrinks, and four francs was wealth. There was—it is hard toexpress it—a sort of heavy contentment, the contentment awell-fed beast might feel, in a life which had become so simple.For nothing could be simpler than the life of a plongeur. Helives in a rhythm between work and sleep, without time to think,hardly conscious of the exterior world; his Paris has shrunk to thehotel, the Métro, a few bistros and his bed. If hegoes afield, it is only a few streets away, on a trip with someservant-girl who sits on his knee swallowing oysters and beer. Onhis free day he lies in bed till noon, puts on a clean shirt,throws dice for drinks, and after lunch goes back to bed again.Nothing is quite real to him but the boulot, drinks andsleep; and of these sleep is the most important.

One night, in the small hours, there was a murder just beneathmy window. I was woken by a fearful uproar, and, going to thewindow, saw a man lying flat on the stones below; I could see themurderers, three of them, flitting away at the end of the street.Some of us went down and found that the man was quite dead, hisskull cracked with a piece of lead piping. I remember the colour ofhis blood, curiously purple, like wine; it was still on the cobbleswhen I came home that evening, and they said the school-childrenhad come from miles round to see it. But the thing that strikes mein looking back is that I was in bed and asleep within threeminutes of the murder. So were most of the people in the street; wejust made sure that the man was done for, and went straight back tobed. We were working people, and where was the sense of wastingsleep over a murder?

Work in the hotel taught me the true value of sleep, just asbeing hungry had taught me the true value of food. Sleep had ceasedto be a mere physical necessity; it was something voluptuous, adebauch more than a relief. I had no more trouble with the bugs.Mario had told me of a sure remedy for them, namely pepper, strewedthick over the bedclothes. It made me sneeze, but the bugs allhated it, and emigrated to other rooms.

XVII

WITH thirty francs a week to spend on drinks I could take partin the social life of the quarter. We had some jolly evenings, onSaturdays, in the little bistro at the foot of theHôtel des Trois Moineaux.

The brick-floored room, fifteen feet square, was packed withtwenty people, and the air dim with smoke. The noise was deafening,for everyone was either talking at the top of his voice or singing.Sometimes it was just a confused din of voices; sometimes everyonewould burst out together in the same song—the 'Marseillaise',or the 'Internationale', or 'Madelon', or 'Les Fraises et lesFramboises'. Azaya, a great clumping peasant girl who workedfourteen hours a day in a glass factory, sang a song about, 'Ila perdu ses pantalons, tout en dansant le Charleston.' Herfriend Marinette, a thin, dark Corsican girl of obstinate virtue,tied her knees together and danced the danse du ventre. Theold Rougiers wandered in and out, cadging drinks and trying to tella long, involved story about someone who had once cheated them overa bedstead. R., cadaverous and silent, sat in his comer quietlyboozing. Charlie, drunk, half danced, half staggered to and frowith a glass of sham absinthe balanced in one fat hand, pinchingthe women's breasts and declaiming poetry. People played darts anddiced for drinks. Manuel, a Spaniard, dragged the girls to the barand shook the dice-box against their bellies, for luck. Madame F.stood at the bar rapidly pouring chopines of wine throughthe pewter funnel, with a wet dishcloth always handy, because everyman in the room tried to make love to her. Two children, bastardsof big Louis the bricklayer, sat in a comer sharing a glass ofsirop. Everyone was very happy, overwhelmingly certain thatthe world was a good place and we a notable set of people.

For an hour the noise scarcely slackened. Then about midnightthere was a piercing shout of 'Citoyens!' and the sound of achair falling over. A blond, red-faced workman had risen to hisfeet and was banging a bottle on the table. Everyone stoppedsinging; the word went round, 'Sh! Furex is starting!' Furex was astrange creature, a Limousin stonemason who worked steadily all theweek and drank himself into a kind of paroxysm on Saturdays. He hadlost his memory and could not remember anything before the war, andhe would have gone to pieces through drink if Madame F. had nottaken care of him. On Saturday evenings at about five o'clock shewould say to someone, 'Catch Furex before he spends his wages,' andwhen he had been caught she would take away his money, leaving himenough for one good drink. One week he escaped, and, rolling blinddrunk in the Place Monge, was run over by a car and badly hurt.

The queer thing about Furex was that, though he was a Communistwhen sober, he turned violently patriotic when drunk. He startedthe evening with good Communist principles, but after four or fivelitres he was a rampant Chauvinist, denouncing spies, challengingall foreigners to fight, and, if he was not prevented, throwingbottles. It was at this stage that he made his speech—for hemade a patriotic speech every Saturday night. The speech was alwaysthe same, word for word. It ran:

'Citizens of the Republic, are there any Frenchmen here? Ifthere are any Frenchmen here, I rise to remind them—to remindthem in effect, of the glorious days of the war. When one looksback upon that time of comradeship and heroism—one looksback, in effect, upon that time of comradeship and heroism. Whenone remembers the heroes who are dead—one remembers, ineffect, the heroes who are dead. Citizens of the Republic, I waswounded at Verdun—'

Here he partially undressed and showed the wound he had receivedat Verdun. There were shouts of applause. We thought nothing in theworld could be funnier than this speech of Furex's. He was awell-known spectacle in the quarter; people used to come in fromother bistros to watch him when his fit started.

The word was passed round to bait Furex. With a wink to theothers someone called for silence, and asked him to sing the'Marseillaise'. He sang it well, in a fine bass voice, withpatriotic gurgling noises deep down in his chest when he came to'Aux arrmes, citoyens! Forrmez vos bataillons!' Veritabletears rolled down his cheeks; he was too drunk to see that everyonewas laughing at him. Then, before he had finished, two strongworkmen seized him by either arm and held him down, while Azayashouted, 'Vive l'Allemagne!' just out of his reach. Furex'sface went purple at such infamy. Everyone in the bistrobegan shouting together, 'Vive l'Allemagne! À bas laFrance!' while Furex struggled to get at them. But suddenly hespoiled the fun. His face turned pale and doleful, his limbs wentlimp, and before anyone could stop him he was sick on the table.Then Madame F. hoisted him like a sack and carried him up to bed.In the morning he reappeared quiet and civil, and bought a copy ofL'Humanité.

The table was wiped with a cloth, Madame F. brought more litrebottles and loaves of bread, and we Settled down to seriousdrinking. There were more songs. An itinerant singer came in withhis banjo and performed for five-sou pieces. An Arab and a girlfrom the bistro down the street did a dance, the manwielding a painted wooden phallus the size of a rolling-pin. Therewere gaps in the noise now. People had begun to talk about theirlove-affairs, and the war, and the barbel fishing in the Seine, andthe best way to faire la révolution, and to tellstories. Charlie, grown sober again, captured the conversation andtalked about his soul for five minutes. The doors and windows wereopened to cool the room. The street was emptying, and in thedistance one could hear the lonely milk train thundering down theBoulevard St Michel. The air blew cold on our foreheads, and thecoarse African wine still tasted good: we were still happy, butmeditatively, with the shouting and hilarious mood finished.

By one o'clock we were not happy any longer. We felt the joy ofthe evening wearing thin, and called hastily for more bottles, butMadame F. was watering the wine now, and it did not taste the same.Men grew quarrelsome. The girls were violently kissed and handsthrust into their bosoms and they made off lest worse shouldhappen. Big Louis, the bricklayer, was drunk, and crawled about thefloor barking and pretending to be a dog. The others grew tired ofhim and kicked at him as he went past. People seized each other bythe arm and began long rambling confessions, and were angry whenthese were not listened to. The crowd thinned. Manuel and anotherman, both gamblers, went across to the Arab bistro, wherecard-playing went on till daylight. Charlie suddenly borrowedthirty francs from Madame F. and disappeared, probably to abrothel. Men began to empty their glasses, call briefly,''Sieurs, Dames!' and go off to bed.

By half past one the last drop of pleasure had evaporated,leaving nothing but headaches. We perceived that we were notsplendid inhabitants of a splendid world, but a crew of underpaidworkmen grown squalidly and dismally drunk. We went on swallowingthe wine, but it was only from habit, and the stuff seemed suddenlynauseating. One's head had swollen up like a balloon, the floorrocked, one's tongue and lips were stained purple. At last it wasno use keeping it up any longer. Several men went out into the yardbehind the bistro and were sick. We crawled up to bed,tumbled down half dressed, and stayed there ten hours.

Most of my Saturday nights went in this way. On the whole, thetwo hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth thesubsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried andwith no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the onething that made life worth living.

XVIII

CHARLIE told us a good story one Saturday night in thebistro. Try and picture him—drunk, but sober enough totalk consecutively. He bangs on the zinc bar and yells forsilence:

'Silence, messieurs et dames—silence, I imploreyou! Listen to this story, that I am about to tell you. A memorablestory, an instructive story, one of the souvenirs of a refined andcivilized life. Silence, messieurs et dames!

'It happened at a time when I was hard up. You know what that islike —how damnable, that a man of refinement should ever bein such a condition. My money had not come from home; I had pawnedeverything, and there was nothing open to me except to work, whichis a thing I will not do. I was living with a girl at thetime—Yvonne her name was—a great half-witted peasantgirl like Azaya there, with yellow hair and fat legs. The two of ushad eaten nothing in three days. Mon Dieu, what sufferings!The girl used to walk up and down the room with her hands on herbelly, howling like a dog that she was dying of starvation. It wasterrible.

'But to a man of intelligence nothing is impossible. Ipropounded to myself the question, "What is the easiest way to getmoney without working?" And immediately the answer came: "To getmoney easily one must be a woman. Has not every woman something tosell?" And then, as I lay reflecting upon the things I should do ifI were a woman, an idea came into my head. I remembered theGovernment maternity hospitals—you know the Governmentmaternity hospitals? They are places where women who areenceinte are given meals free and no questions are asked. Itis done to encourage childbearing. Any woman can go there anddemand a meal, and she is given it immediately.

'"Mon Dieu!" I thought, "if only I were a woman! I wouldeat at one of those places every day. Who can tell whether a womanis enceinte or not, without an examination?"

'I turned to Yvonne. "Stop that insufferable bawling." I said,"I have thought of a way to get food."

'"How?" she said.

'"It is simple," I said. "Go to the Government maternityhospital. Tell them you are enceinte and ask for food. Theywill give you a good meal and ask no questions."

'Yvonne was appalled. "Mais mon Dieu," she cried, "I amnot enceinte!"

'"Who cares?" I said. "That is easily remedied. What do you needexcept a cushion—two cushions if necessary? It is aninspiration from heaven, ma chère. Don't wasteit."

'Well, in the end I persuaded her, and then we borrowed acushion and I got her ready and took her to the maternity hospital.They received her with open arms. They gave her cabbage soup, aragout of beef, a puree of potatoes, bread and cheese and beer, andall kinds of advice about her baby. Yvonne gorged till she almostburst her skin, and managed to slip some of the bread and cheeseinto her pocket for me. I took her there every day until I hadmoney again. My intelligence had saved us.

'Everything went well until a year later. I was with Yvonneagain, and one day we were walking down the Boulevard Port Royal,near the barracks. Suddenly Yvonne's mouth fell open, and she beganturning red and white, and red again.

'"Mon Dieu!" she cried, "look at that who is coming! Itis the nurse who was in charge at the maternity hospital. I amruined!"

'"Quick!" I said, "run!" But it was too late. The nurse hadrecognized Yvonne, and she came straight up to us, smiling. She wasa big fat woman with a gold pince-nez and red cheeks like thecheeks of an apple. A motherly, interfering kind of woman.

'"I hope you are well, ma petite?" she said kindly. "Andyour baby, is he well too? Was it a boy, as you were hoping?"

'Yvonne had begun trembling so hard that I had to grip her arm."No," she said at last.

'"Ah, then, évidemment, it was a girl?"

'Thereupon Yvonne, the idiot, lost her head completely. "No,"she actually said again!

'The nurse was taken aback. "Comment!" she exclaimed,"neither a boy nor a girl! But how can that be?"

'Figure to yourselves, messieurs et dames, it was adangerous moment. Yvonne had turned the colour of a beetroot andshe looked ready to burst into tears; another second and she wouldhave confessed everything. Heaven knows what might have happened.But as for me, I had kept my head; I stepped in and saved thesituation.

'"It was twins," I said calmly.

'"Twins!" exclaimed the nurse. And she was so pleased that shetook Yvonne by the shoulders and embraced her on both cheeks,publicly.

'Yes, twins...'

XIX

ONE day, when we had been at the Hôtel X five or sixweeks, Boris disappeared without notice. In the evening I found himwaiting for me in the Rue de Rivoli. He slapped me gaily on theshoulder.

'Free at last, mon ami! You can give notice in themorning. The Auberge opens tomorrow.'

'Tomorrow?'

'Well, possibly we shall need a day or two to arrange things.But, at any rate, no more cafeteria! Nous sommes lancés,mon ami! My tail coat is out of pawn already.'

His manner was so hearty that I felt sure there was somethingwrong, and I did not at all want to leave my safe and comfortablejob at the hotel. However, I had promised Boris, so I gave notice,and the next morning at seven went down to the Auberge de JehanCottard. It was locked, and I went in search of Boris, who had oncemore bolted from his lodgings and taken a room in the rue de laCroix Nivert. I found him asleep, together with a girl whom he hadpicked up the night before, and who he told me was 'of a verysympathetic temperament.' As to the restaurant, he said that it wasall arranged; there were only a few little things to be seen tobefore we opened.

At ten I managed to get Boris out of bed, and we unlocked therestaurant. At a glance I saw what the 'few little things' amountedto. It was briefly this: that the alterations had not been touchedsince our last visit. The stoves for the kitchen had not arrived,the water and electricity had not been laid on, and there was allmanner of painting, polishing and carpentering to be done. Nothingshort of a miracle could open the restaurant within ten days, andby the look of things it might collapse without even opening. Itwas obvious what had happened. The patron was short ofmoney, and he had engaged the staff (there were four of us) inorder to use us instead of workmen. He would be getting ourservices almost free, for waiters are paid no wages, and though hewould have to pay me, he would not be feeding me till therestaurant opened. In effect, he had swindled us of several hundredfrancs by sending for us before the restaurant was open. We hadthrown up a good job for nothing.

Boris, however, was full of hope. He had only one idea in hishead, namely, that here at last was a chance of being a waiter andwearing a tail coat once more. For this he was quite willing to doten days' work unpaid, with the chance of being left jobless in theend. 'Patience!' he kept saying. 'That will arrange itself. Waittill the restaurant opens, and we'll get it all back. Patience,mon ami!'

We needed patience, for days passed and the restaurant did noteven progress towards opening. We cleaned out the cellars, fixedthe shelves, distempered the walls, polished the woodwork,whitewashed the ceiling, stained the floor; but the main work, theplumbing and gas-fitting and electricity, was still not done,because the patron could not pay the bills. Evidently he wasalmost penniless, for he refused the smallest charges, and he had atrick of swiftly disappearing when asked for money. His blend ofshiftiness and aristocratic manners made him very hard to dealwith. Melancholy duns came looking for him at all hours, and byinstruction we always told them that he was at Fontainebleau, orSaint Cloud, or some other place that was safely distant.Meanwhile, I was getting hungrier and hungrier. I had left thehotel with thirty francs, and I had to go back immediately to adiet of dry bread. Boris had managed in the beginning to extract anadvance of sixty francs from the patron, but he had spenthalf of it, in redeeming his waiter's clothes, and half on the girlof sympathetic temperament. He borrowed three francs a day fromJules, the second waiter, and spent it on bread. Some days we hadnot even money for tobacco.

Sometimes the cook came to see how things were getting on, andwhen she saw that the kitchen was still bare of pots and pans sheusually wept. Jules, the second waiter, refused steadily to helpwith the work. He was a Magyar, a little dark, sharp-featuredfellow in spectacles, and very talkative; he had been a medicalstudent, but had abandoned his training for lack of money. He had ataste for talking while other people were working, and he told meall about himself and his ideas. It appeared that he was aCommunist, and had various strange theories (he could prove to youby figures that it was wrong to work), and he was also, like mostMagyars, passionately proud. Proud and lazy men do not make goodwaiters. It was Jules's dearest boast that once when a customer ina restaurant had insulted him, he had poured a plate of hot soupdown the customer's neck, and then walked straight out without evenwaiting to be sacked.

As each day went by Jules grew more and more enraged at thetrick the patron had played on us. He had a spluttering,oratorical way of talking. He used to walk up and down shaking hisfist, and trying to incite me not to work:

'Put that brush down, you fool! You and I belong to proud races;we don't work for nothing, like these damned Russian serfs. I tellyou, to be cheated like this is torture to me. There have beentimes in my life, when someone has cheated me even of five sous,when I have vomited—yes, vomited with rage.

'Besides, mon vieux, don't forget that I'm a Communist.À bas la bourgeoisie! Did any man alive ever see meworking when I could avoid it? No. And not only I don't wear myselfout working, like you other fools, but I steal, just to show myindependence. Once I was in a restaurant where the patronthought he could treat me like a dog. Well, in revenge I found outa way to steal milk from the milk-cans and seal them up again sothat no one should know. I tell you I just swilled that milk downnight and morning. Every day I drank four litres of milk, besideshalf a litre of cream. The patron was at his wits' end toknow where the milk was going. It wasn't that I wanted milk, youunderstand, because I hate the stuff; it was principle, justprinciple.

'Well, after three days I began to get dreadful pains in mybelly, and I went to the doctor. "What have you been eating?" hesaid. I said: "I drink four litres of milk a day, and half a litreof cream." "Four litres!" he said. "Then stop it at once. You'llburst if you go on." "What do I care?" I said. "With me principleis everything. I shall go on drinking that milk, even if I doburst."

'Well, the next day the patron caught me stealing milk."You're sacked," he said; "you leave at the end of the week.""Pardon, monsieur," I said, "I shall leave this morning.""No, you won't," he said, "I can't spare you till Saturday." "Verywell, mon patron," I thought to myself, "we'll see who getstired of it first." And then I set to work to smash the crockery. Ibroke nine plates the first day and thirteen the second; after thatthe patron was glad to see the last of me.

'Ah, I'm not one of your Russian moujiks...'

Ten days passed. It was a bad time. I was absolutely at the endof my money, and my rent was several days overdue. We loafed aboutthe dismal empty restaurant, too hungry even to get on with thework that remained. Only Boris now believed that the restaurantwould open. He had set his heart on being maîtred'hôtel, and he invented a theory that thepatron's money was tied up in shares and he was waiting afavourable moment for selling. On the tenth day I had nothing toeat or smoke, and I told the patron that I could notcontinue working without an advance on my wages. As blandly asusual, the patron promised the advance, and then, accordingto his custom, vanished. I walked part of the way home, but I didnot feel equal to a scene with Madame F. over the rent, so I passedthe night on a bench on the boulevard. It was veryuncomfortable—the arm of the seat cuts into yourback—and much colder than I had expected. There was plenty oftime, in the long boring hours between dawn and work, to think whata fool I had been to deliver myself into the hands of theseRussians.

Then, in the morning, the luck changed. Evidently thepatron had come to an understanding with his creditors, forhe arrived with money in his pockets, set the alterations going,and gave me my advance. Boris and I bought macaroni and a piece ofhorse's liver, and had our first hot meal in ten days.

The workmen were brought in and the alterations made, hastilyand with incredible shoddiness. The tables, for instance, were tobe covered with baize, but when the patron found that baizewas expensive he bought instead disused army blankets, smellingincorrigibly of sweat. The table cloths (they were check, to gowith the 'Norman' decorations) would cover them, of course. On thelast night we were at work till two in the morning, getting thingsready. The crockery did not arrive till eight, and, being new, hadall to be washed. The cutlery did not arrive till the next morning,nor the linen either, so that we had to dry the crockery with ashirt of the patron's and an old pillowslip belonging to theconcierge. Boris and I did all the work. Jules was skulking, andthe patron and his wife sat in the bar with a dun and someRussian friends, drinking success to the restaurant. The cook wasin the kitchen with her head on the table, crying, because she wasexpected to cook for fifty people, and there were not pots and pansenough for ten. About midnight there was a fearful interview withsome duns, who came intending to seize eight copper saucepans whichthe patron had obtained on credit. They were bought off withhalf a bottle of brandy.

Jules and I missed the last Métro home and had to sleepon the floor of the restaurant. The first thing we saw in themorning were two large rats sitting on the kitchen table, eatingfrom a ham that stood there. It seemed a bad omen, and I was surerthan ever that the Auberge de Jehan Cottard would turn out afailure.

XX

THE patron had engaged me as kitchen plongeur;that is, my job was to wash up, keep the kitchen clean, preparevegetables, make tea, coffee and sandwiches, do the simplercooking, and run errands. The terms were, as usual, five hundredfrancs a month and food, but I had no free day and no fixed workinghours. At the Hôtel X I had seen catering at its best, withunlimited money and good organization. Now, at the Auberge, Ilearned how things are done in a thoroughly bad restaurant. It isworth describing, for there are hundreds of similar restaurants inParis, and every visitor feeds in one of them occasionally.

I should add, by the way, that the Auberge was not the ordinarycheap eating-house frequented by students and workmen. We did notprovide an adequate meal at less than twenty-five francs, and wewere picturesque and artistic, which sent up our social standing.There were the indecent pictures in the bar, and the Normandecorations—sham beams on the walls, electric lights done upas candlesticks, 'peasant' pottery, even a mounting-block at thedoor—and the patron and the head waiter were Russianofficers, and many of the customers tided Russian refugees. Inshort, we were decidedly chic.

Nevertheless, the conditions behind the kitchen door weresuitable for a pigsty. For this is what our service arrangementswere like.

The kitchen measured fifteen feet long by eight broad, and halfthis space was taken up by the stoves and tables. All the pots hadto be kept on shelves out of reach, and there was only room for onedustbin. This dustbin used to be crammed full by midday, and thefloor was normally an inch deep in a compost of trampled food.

For firing we had nothing but three gas-stoves, without ovens,and all joints had to be sent out to the bakery.

There was no larder. Our substitute for one was a half-roofedshed in the yard, with a tree growing in the middle of it. Themeat, vegetables and so forth lay there on the bare earth, raidedby rats and cats.

There was no hot water laid on. Water for washing up had to beheated in pans, and, as there was no room for these on the stoveswhen meals were cooking, most of the plates had to be washed incold water. This, with soft soap and the hard Paris water, meantscraping the grease off with bits of newspaper.

We were so short of saucepans that I had to wash each one assoon as it was done with, instead of leaving them till the evening.This alone wasted probably an hour a day.

Owing to some scamping of expense in the installation, theelectric light usually fused at eight in the evening. Thepatron would only allow us three candles in the kitchen, andthe cook said three were unlucky, so we had only two.

Our coffee-grinder was borrowed from a bistro near by,and our dustbin and brooms from the concierge. After the first weeka quantity of linen did not come back from the wash, as the billwas not paid. We were in trouble with the inspector of labour, whohad discovered that the staff included no Frenchmen; he had severalprivate interviews with the patron, who, I believe, wasobliged to bribe him. The electric company was still dunning us,and when the duns found that we would buy them off withapéritifs, they came every morning. We were in debtat the grocery, and credit would have been stopped, only thegrocer's wife (a moustachio'd woman of sixty) had taken a fancy toJules, who was sent every morning to cajole her. Similarly I had towaste an hour every day haggling over vegetables in the rue duCommerce, to save a few centimes.

These are the results of starting a restaurant on insufficientcapital. And in these conditions the cook and I were expected toserve thirty or forty meals a day, and would later on be serving ahundred. From the first day it was too much for us. The cook'sworking hours were from eight in the morning till midnight, andmine from seven in the morning till half past twelve the nextmorning—seventeen and a half hours, almost without a break.We never had time to sit down till five in the afternoon, and eventhen there was no seat except the top of the dustbin. Boris, wholived near by and had not to catch the last Métro home,worked from eight in the morning till two the nextmorning—eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. Such hours,though not usual, are nothing extraordinary in Paris.

Life settled at once into a routine that made the Hôtel Xseem like a holiday. Every morning at six I drove myself out ofbed, did not shave, sometimes washed, hurried up to the Placed'ltalie and fought for a place on the Métro. By seven I wasin the desolation of the cold, filthy kitchen, with the potatoskins and bones and fishtails littered on the floor, and a pile ofplates, stuck together in their grease, waiting from overnight. Icould not start on the plates yet, because the water was cold, andI had to fetch milk and make coffee, for the others arrived ateight and expected to find coffee ready. Also, there were alwaysseveral copper saucepans to clean. Those copper saucepans are thebane of a plongeur's life. They have to be scoured with sandand bunches of chain, ten minutes to each one, and then polished onthe outside with Brasso. Fortunately, the art of making them hasbeen lost and they are gradually vanishing from French kitchens,though one can still buy them second-hand.

When I had begun on the plates the cook would take me away fromthe plates to begin skinning onions, and when I had begun on theonions the patron would arrive and send me out to buycabbages. When I came back with the cabbages the patron'swife would tell me to go to some shop half a mile away and buy apot of rouge; by the time I came back there would be morevegetables waiting, and the plates were still not done. In this wayour incompetence piled one job on another throughout the day,everything in arrears.

Till ten, things went comparatively easily, though we wereworking fast, and no one lost his temper. The cook would find timeto talk about her artistic nature, and say did I not think Tolstoywas épatant, and sing in a fine soprano voice as sheminced beef on the board. But at ten the waiters began clamouringfor their lunch, which they had early, and at eleven the firstcustomers would be arriving. Suddenly everything became hurry andbad temper. There was not the same furious rushing and yelling asat the Hôtel X, but an atmosphere of muddle, petty spite andexasperation. Discomfort was at the bottom of it. It was unbearablycramped in the kitchen, and dishes had to be put on the floor, andone had to be thinking constantly about not stepping on them. Thecook's vast buttocks banged against me as she moved to and fro. Aceaseless, nagging chorus of orders streamed from her:

'Unspeakable idiot! How many times have I told you not to bleedthe beetroots? Quick, let me get to the sink! Put those knivesaway; get on with the potatoes. What have you done with mystrainer? Oh, leave those potatoes alone. Didn't I tell you to skimthe bouillon? Take that can of water off the stove. Nevermind the washing up, chop this celery. No, not like that, you fool,like this. There! Look at you letting those peas boil over! Now getto work and scale these herrings. Look, do you call this plateclean? Wipe it on your apron. Put that salad on the floor. That'sright, put it where I'm bound to step in it! Look out, that pot'sboiling over! Get me down that saucepan. No, the other one. Putthis on the grill. Throw those potatoes away. Don't waste time,throw them on the floor. Tread them in. Now throw down somesawdust; this floor's like a skating-rink. Look, you fool, thatsteak's burning! Mon Dieu, why did they send me an idiot fora plongeur? Who are you talking to? Do you realize that myaunt was a Russian countess?' etc. etc. etc.

This went on till three o'clock without much variation, exceptthat about eleven the cook usually had a crise de nerfs anda flood of tears. From three to five was a fairly slack time forthe waiters, but the cook was still busy, and I was working myfastest, for there was a pile of dirty plates waiting, and it was arace to get them done, or partly done, before dinner began. Thewashing up was doubled by the primitive conditions—a crampeddraining-board, tepid water, sodden cloths, and a sink that gotblocked once in an hour. By five the cook and I were feelingunsteady on our feet, not having eaten or sat down since seven. Weused to collapse, she on the dustbin and I on the floor, drink abottle of beer, and apologize for some of the things we had said inthe morning. Tea was what kept us going. We took care to have a potalways stewing, and drank pints during the day.

At half-past five the hurry and quarrelling began again, and nowworse than before, because everyone was tired out. The cook had acrise de nerfs at six and another at nine; they came on soregularly that one could have told the time by them. She would flopdown on the dustbin, begin weeping hysterically, and cry out thatnever, no, never had she thought to come to such a life as this;her nerves would not stand it; she had studied music at Vienna; shehad a bedridden husband to support, etc. etc. At another time onewould have been sorry for her, but, tired as we all were, herwhimpering voice merely infuriated us. Jules used to stand in thedoorway and mimic her weeping. The patron's wife nagged, andBoris and Jules quarrelled all day, because Jules shirked his work,and Boris, as head waiter, claimed the larger share of the tips.Only the second day after the restaurant opened, they came to blowsin the kitchen over a two-franc tip, and the cook and I had toseparate them. The only person who never forgot Us manners was thepatron. He kept the same hours as the rest of us, but he hadno work to do, for it was his wife who really managed things. Hissole job, besides ordering the supplies, was to stand in the barsmoking cigarettes and looking gentlemanly, and he did that toperfection.

The cook and I generally found time to eat our dinner betweenten and eleven o'clock. At midnight the cook would steal a packetof food for her husband, stow it under her clothes, and make off,whimpering that these hours would kill her and she would givenotice in the morning. Jules also left at midnight, usually after adispute with Boris, who had to look after the bar till two. Betweentwelve and half past I did what I could to finish the washing up.There was no time to attempt doing the work properly, and I usedsimply to rub the grease off the plates with table-napkins. As forthe dirt on the floor, I let it lie, or swept the worst of it outof sight under the stoves.

At half past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry out. Thepatron, bland as ever, would stop me as I went down thealley-way past the bar. 'Mais, mon cher monsieur, how tiredyou look! Please do me the favour of accepting this glass ofbrandy.'

He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously as though Ihad been a Russian duke instead of a plongeur. He treatedall of us like this. It was our compensation for working seventeenhours a day.

As a rule the last Métro was almost empty—a greatadvantage, for one could sit down and sleep for a quarter of anhour. Generally I was in bed by half past one. Sometimes I missedthe train and had to sleep on the floor of the restaurant, but ithardly mattered, for I could have slept on cobblestones at thattime.

XXI

THIS life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight increaseof work as more customers came to the restaurant. I could havesaved an hour a day by taking a room near the restaurant, but itseemed impossible to find time to change lodgings—or, forthat matter, to get my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or evenundress completely. After ten days I managed to find a free quarterof an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London asking him if hecould get me a job of some sort—anything, so long as itallowed more than five hours sleep. I was simply not equal to goingon with a seventeen-hour day, though there are plenty of people whothink nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a good cure forself-pity to think of the thousands of people in Paris restaurantswho work such hours, and will go on doing it, not for a few weeks,but for years. There was a girl in a bistro near my hotelwho worked from seven in the morning till midnight for a wholeyear, only sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking her tocome to a dance, and she laughed and said that she had not beenfarther than the street comer for several months. She wasconsumptive, and died about the time I left Paris.

After only a week we were all neurasthenic with fatigue, exceptJules, who skulked persistently. The quarrels, intermittent atfirst, had now become continuous. For hours' one would keep up adrizzle of useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every fewminutes. 'Get me down that saucepan, idiot!' the cook would cry(she was not tall enough to reach the shelves where the saucepanswere kept). 'Get it down yourself, you old whor*,' I would answer.Such remarks seemed to be generated spontaneously from the air ofthe kitchen.

We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness. Thedustbin, for instance, was an unending source ofquarrels—whether it should be put where I wanted it, whichwas in the cook's way, or where she wanted it, which was between meand the sink. Once she nagged and nagged until at last, in purespite, I lifted the dustbin up and put it out in the middle of thefloor, where she was bound to trip over it.

'Now, you cow,' I said, 'move it yourself.'

Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and she satdown, put her head on the table and burst out crying. And I jeeredat her. This is the kind of effect that fatigue has upon one'smanners.

After a few days the cook had ceased talking about Tolstoy andher artistic nature, and she and I were not on speaking terms,except for the purposes of work, and Boris and Jules were not onspeaking terms, and neither of them was on speaking terms with thecook. Even Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had agreedbeforehand that the engueulades of working hours did notcount between times; but we had called each other things too bad tobe forgotten—and besides, there were no between times. Julesgrew lazier and lazier, and he stole food constantly—from asense of duty, he said. He called the rest of usjaune—blackleg—when we would not join with himin stealing. He had a curious, malignant spirit. He told me, as amatter of pride, that he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth intoa customer's soup before taking it in, just to be revenged upon amember of the bourgeoisie.

The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though we trappeda few of them. Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lyingamong refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawlingeverywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used towonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad asours. But the other three all said that they had been in dirtierplaces. Jules took a positive pleasure in seeing things dirty. Inthe afternoon, when he had not much to do, he used to stand in thekitchen doorway jeering at us for working too hard:

'Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trousers. Whocares about the customers? They don't know what's going on.What is restaurant work? You are carving a chicken and it falls onthe floor. You apologize, you bow, you go out; and in five minutesyou come back by another door—with the same chicken. That isrestaurant work,' etc.

And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth andincompetence, the Auberge de Jehan Cottard was actually a success.For the first few days all our customers were Russians, friends ofthe patron, and these were followed by Americans and otherforeigners—no Frenchmen. Then one night there was tremendousexcitement, because our first Frenchman had arrived. For a momentour quarrels were forgotten and we all united in the effort toserve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the kitchen, jerked histhumb over his shoulder and whispered conspiratorially:

'Sh! Attention, un Français!'

A moment later the patron's wife came and whispered:

'Attention, un Français! See that he gets a doubleportion of all vegetables.'

While the Frenchman ate, the patron's wife stood behindthe grille of the kitchen door and watched the expression of hisface. Next night the Frenchman came back with two other Frenchmen.This meant that we were earning a good name; the surest sign of abad restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Probablypart of the reason for our success was that the patron, withthe sole gleam of sense he had shown in fitting out the restaurant,had bought very sharp table-knives. Sharp knives, of course, arethe secret of a successful restaurant. I am glad that thishappened, for it destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the ideathat Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or perhaps wewere a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards; in whichcase the bad ones must be past imagining.

In a very few days after I had written to B he replied to saythat there was a job he could get for me. It was to look after acongenital imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure after theAuberge de Jehan Cottard. I pictured myself loafing in the countrylanes, knocking thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roastlamb and treacle tart, and sleeping ten hours a night in sheetssmelling of lavender. B sent me a fiver to pay my passage and getmy clothes out of the pawn, and as soon as the money arrived I gaveone day's notice and left the restaurant. My leaving so suddenlyembarrassed the patron, for as usual he was penniless, andhe had to pay my wages thirty francs short. However he stood me aglass of Courvoisier '48 brandy, and I think he felt that this madeup the difference. They engaged a Czech, a thoroughly competentplongeur, in my place, and the poor old cook was sacked afew weeks later. Afterwards I heard that, with two first-ratepeople in the kitchen, the plongeur's work had been cut downto fifteen hours a day. Below that no one could have cut it, shortof modernizing the kitchen.

XXII

FOR what they are worth I want to give my opinions about thelife of a Paris plongeur. When one comes to think of it, itis strange that thousands of people in a great modern city shouldspend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground.The question I am raising is why this life goes on—whatpurpose it serves, and who wants it to continue, and why I am nottaking the merely rebellious, fainéant attitude. I amtrying to consider the social significance of a plongeur'slife.

I think one should start by saying that a plongeur is oneof the slaves of the modern world. Not that there is any need towhine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, butstill, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work isservile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive;his only holiday is the sack. He is cut off from marriage, or, ifhe marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky chance, hehas no escape from this life, save into prison. At this momentthere are men with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris forten or fifteen hours a day. One cannot say that it is mere idlenesson their part, for an idle man cannot be a plongeur; theyhave simply been trapped by a routine which makes thoughtimpossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long agohave formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. Butthey do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their lifehas made slaves of them.

The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have away of taking it for granted that all work is done for a soundpurpose. They see somebody else doing a disagreeable job, and thinkthat they have solved things by saying that the job is necessary.Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it isnecessary—we must have coal. Working in the sewers isunpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And similarlywith a plongeur's work. Some people must feed inrestaurants, and so other people must swab dishes for eighty hoursa week. It is the work of civilization, therefore unquestionable.This point is worth considering.

Is a plongeur's work really necessary to civilization? Wehave a feeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hardand disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work.We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he isfilling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it doesnot occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful treeto make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same with aplongeur. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, butit does not follow that he is doing anything useful; he may be onlysupplying a luxury which, very often, is not a luxury.

As an example of what I mean by luxuries which are not luxuries,take an extreme case, such as one hardly sees in Europe. Take anIndian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In any Far Eastern townthere are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighingeight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; someof them are fifty years old. For miles on end they trot in the sunor rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with the sweat drippingfrom their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passengercalls them bahinchut. They earn thirty or forty rupees amonth, and cough their lungs out after a few years. The gharryponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold cheap ashaving a few years' work left in them. Their master looks on thewhip as a substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in asort of equation—whip plus food equals energy; generally itis about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food. Sometimestheir necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag allday on raw flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however;it is just a question of thrashing them so hard that the painbehind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the whiploses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These areinstances of unnecessary work, for there is no real need forgharries and rickshaws; they only exist because Orientals considerit vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has riddenin them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount ofconvenience, which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the menand animals.

Similarly with the plongeur. He is a king compared with arickshaw puller or a gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He isthe slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his slavery is more orless useless. For, after all, where is the real need of bighotels and smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury,but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it.Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better thanothers, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurantas one can get, for the same expense, in a private house. No doubthotels and restaurants must exist, but there is no need that theyshould enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in them isnot the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to representluxury. Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely thatthe staff work more and the customers pay more; no one benefitsexcept the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a stripedvilla at Deauville. Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where ahundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may paythrough the nose for things they do not really want. If thenonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work donewith simple efficiency, plongeurs might work six or eighthours a day instead often or fifteen.

Suppose it is granted that a plongeur's work is more orless useless. Then the question follows, Why does anyone want himto go on working? I am trying to go beyond the immediate economiccause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone to think ofmen swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt thatpeople—comfortably situated people—do find a pleasurein such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working whenhe is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is neededor not, he must work, because work in itself is good—forslaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piledup mountains of useless drudgery.

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, atbottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are suchlow animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it issafer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to beintellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement ofworking conditions, usually says something like this:

'We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is soremote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of itsunpleasantness. But don't expect us to do anything about it. We aresorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a, cat withthe mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement ofyour condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. Thepresent state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take therisk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dearbrothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips toItaly, sweat and be damned to you.'

This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivatedpeople; one can read the substance of it in a hundred essays. Veryfew cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds ayear, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imaginethat any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their ownliberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative,the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly hedoes not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that eventhe vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more hiskind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand bythem. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makesnearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the ideathat there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between richand poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes andwhite men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass ofthe rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes andnothing else, and the average millionaire is only the averagedishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy,which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed onequal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble isthat intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might beexpected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. Forwhat do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In mycopy of Villon's poems the editor has actually thought it necessaryto explain the line 'Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres' bya footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man'sexperience.

From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob resultsquite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen,wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, andset him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory.'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mobloose.' He does not see that since there is no difference betweenthe mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mobloose. The mob is in fact loose now, and—in the shape of richmen—is using its power to set up enormous treadmills ofboredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

To sum up. A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave,doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work,ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerousif he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side,acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him andconsequently are afraid of him. I say this of the plongeurbecause it is his case I have been considering; it would applyequally to numberless other types of worker. These are only my ownideas about the basic facts of a plongeur's life, madewithout reference to immediate economic questions, and no doubtlargely platitudes. I present them as a sample of the thoughts thatare put into one's head by working in an hotel.

XXIII

AS soon as I left the Auberge de Jehan Cottard I went to bed andslept the clock round, all but one hour. Then I washed my teeth forthe first time in a fortnight, bathed and had my hair cut, and gotmy clothes out of pawn. I had two glorious days of loafing. I evenwent in my best suit to the Auberge, leant against the bar andspent five francs on a bottle of English beer. It is a curioussensation, being a customer where you have been a slave's slave.Boris was sorry that I had left the restaurant just at the momentwhen we were lancés and there was a chance of makingmoney. I have heard from him since, and he tells me that he ismaking a hundred francs a day and has set up a girl who istrès serieuse and never smells of garlic.

I spent a day wandering about our quarter, saying good-bye toeveryone. It was on this day that Charlie told me about the deathof old Roucolle the miser, who had once lived in the quarter. Verylikely Charlie was lying as usual, but it was a good story.

Roucolle died, aged seventy-four, a year or two before I went toParis, but the people in the quarter still talked of him while Iwas there. He never equalled Daniel Dancer or anyone of that kind,but he was an interesting character. He went to Les Halles everymorning to pick up damaged vegetables, and ate cat's meat, and worenewspaper instead of underclothes, and used the wainscoting of hisroom for firewood, and made himself a pair of trousers out of asack—all this with half a million francs invested. I shouldlike very much to have known him.

Like many misers, Roucolle came to a bad end through putting hismoney into a wildcat scheme. One day a Jew appeared in the quarter,an alert, business-like young chap who had a first-rate plan forsmuggling cocaine into England. It is easy enough, of course, tobuy cocaine in Paris, and the smuggling would be quite simple initself, only there is always some spy who betrays the plan to thecustoms or the police. It is said that this is often done by thevery people who sell the cocaine, because the smuggling trade is inthe hands of a large combine, who do not want competition. The Jew,however, swore that there was no danger. He knew a way of gettingcocaine direct from Vienna, not through the usual channels, andthere would be no blackmail to pay. He had got into touch withRoucolle through a young Pole, a student at the Sorbonne, who wasgoing to put four thousand francs into the scheme if Roucolle wouldput six thousand. For this they could buy ten pounds of cocaine,which would be worth a small fortune in England.

The Pole and the Jew had a tremendous struggle to get the moneyfrom between old Roucolle's claws. Six thousand francs was notmuch—he had more than that sewn into the mattress in hisroom—but it was agony for him to part with a sou. The Poleand the Jew were at him for weeks on end, explaining, bullying,coaxing, arguing, going down on their knees and imploring him toproduce the money. The old man was half frantic between greed andfear. His bowels yearned at the thought of getting, perhaps, fiftythousand francs' profit, and yet he could not bring himself to riskthe money. He used to sit in a comer with his head in his hands,groaning and sometimes yelling out in agony, and often he wouldkneel down (he was very pious) and pray for strength, but still hecouldn't do it. But at last, more from exhaustion than anythingelse, he gave in quite suddenly; he slit open the mattress wherehis money was concealed and handed over six thousand francs to theJew.

The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and promptlyvanished. And meanwhile, as was not surprising after the fussRoucolle had made, the affair had been noised all over the quarter.The very next morning the hotel was raided and searched by thepolice.

Roucolle and the Pole were in agonies. The police weredownstairs, working their way up and searching every room in turn,and there was the great packet of cocaine on the table, with noplace to hide it and no chance of escaping down the stairs. ThePole was for throwing the stuff out of the window, but Roucollewould not hear of it. Charlie told me that he had been present atthe scene. He said that when they tried to take the packet fromRoucolle he clasped it to his breast and struggled like a madman,although he was seventy-four years old. He was wild with fright,but he would go to prison rather than throw his money away.

At last, when the police were searching only one floor below,somebody had an idea. A man on Roucolle's floor had a dozen tins offace-powder which he was selling on commission; it was suggestedthat the cocaine could be put into the tins and passed off asface-powder. The powder was hastily thrown out of the window andthe cocaine substituted, and the tins were put openly on Roucolle'stable, as though there there were nothing to conceal. A few minuteslater the police came to search Roucolle's room. They tapped thewalls and looked up the chimney and turned out the drawers andexamined the floorboards, and then, just as they were about to giveit up, having found nothing, the inspector noticed the tins on thetable.

'Tiens,' he said, 'have a look at those tins. I hadn'tnoticed them. What's in them, eh?'

'Face-powder,' said the Pole as calmly as he could manage. Butat the same instant Roucolle let out a loud groaning noise, fromalarm, and the police became suspicious immediately. They openedone of the tins and tipped out the contents, and after smelling it,the inspector said that he believed it was cocaine. Roucolle andthe Pole began swearing on the names of the saints that it was onlyface-powder; but it was no use, the more they protested the moresuspicious the police became. The two men were arrested and led offto the police station, followed by half the quarter.

At the station, Roucolle and the Pole were interrogated by theCommissaire while a tin of the cocaine was sent away to beanalysed. Charlie said that the scene Roucolle made was beyonddescription. He wept, prayed, made contradictory statements anddenounced the Pole all at once, so loud that he could be heard halfa street away. The policemen almost burst with laughing at him.

After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of cocaine anda note from the analyst. He was laughing.

'This is not cocaine, monsieur,' he said.

'What, not cocaine?' said the Commissaire. 'Mais,alors—what is it, then?'

'It is face-powder.'

Roucolle and the Pole were released at once, entirely exoneratedbut very angry. The Jew had double-crossed them. Afterwards, whenthe excitement was over, it turned out that he had played the sametrick on two other people in the quarter.

The Pole was glad enough to escape, even though he had lost hisfour thousand francs, but poor old Roucolle was utterly brokendown. He took to his bed at once, and all that day and half thenight they could hear him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimesyelling out at the top of his voice:

'Six thousand francs! Nom de Jésus-Christ! Sixthousand francs!'

Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in a fortnighthe was dead—of a broken heart, Charlie said.

XXIV

I TRAVELLED to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury,which is the cheapest and not the worst way of crossing theChannel. You had to pay extra for a cabin, so I slept in thesaloon, together with most of the third-class passengers. I findthis entry in my diary for that day:

'Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of thewomen, not a single one has washed her face this morning. The menmostly went to the bathroom; the women merely produced vanity casesand covered the dirt with powder. Q. A secondary sexualdifference?'

On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, merechildren, who were going to England on their honeymoon trip. Theyasked innumerable questions about England, and I told them somestartling lies. I was so pleased to be getting home, after beinghard up for months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me asort of Paradise. There are, indeed, many things in England thatmake you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, newpotatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made withveritable hops—they are all splendid, if you can pay forthem. England is a very good country when you are not poor; and, ofcourse, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not going to bepoor. The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. Themore questions the Roumanians asked, the more I praised England;the climate, the scenery, the art, the literature, thelaws—everything in England was perfect.

Was the architecture in England good? the Roumanians asked.'Splendid!' I said. 'And you should just see the London statues!Paris is vulgar—half grandiosity and half slums. ButLondon—'

Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building wesaw on the waterside was one of those huge hotels, all stucco andpinnacles, which stare from the English coast like idiots staringover an asylum wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to sayanything, co*cking their eyes at the hotel. 'Built by Frencharchitects,' I assured them; and even later, when the train wascrawling into London through the eastern slums, I still kept it upabout the beauties of English architecture. Nothing seemed too goodto say about England, now that I was coming home and was not hardup any more.

I went to B.'s office, and his first words knocked everything toruins. 'I'm sorry,' he said; 'your employers have gone abroad,patient and all. However, they'll be back in a month. I suppose youcan hang on till then?'

I was outside in the street before it even occurred to me toborrow some more money. There was a month to wait, and I hadexactly nineteen and sixpence in hand. The news had taken my breathaway. For a long time I could not make up my mind what to do. Iloafed the day in the streets, and at night, not having theslightest notion of how to get a cheap bed in London, I went to a'family' hotel, where the charge was seven and sixpence. Afterpaying the bill I had ten and twopence in hand.

By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later I shouldhave to go to B. for more money, but it seemed hardly decent to doso yet, and in the meantime I must exist in some hole-and-cornerway. Past experience set me against pawning my best suit. I wouldleave all my things at the station cloakroom, except my second-bestsuit, which I could exchange for some cheap clothes and perhaps apound. If I was going to live a month on thirty shillings I musthave bad clothes—indeed, the worse the better. Whether thirtyshillings could be made to last a month I had no idea, not knowingLondon as I knew Paris. Perhaps I could beg, or sell bootlaces, andI remembered articles I had read in the Sunday papers about beggarswho have two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers. It was, atany rate, notoriously impossible to starve in London, so there wasnothing to be anxious about.

To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where the peopleare poor and there are a lot of rag shops. At the first shop Itried the proprietor was polite but unhelpful; at the second he wasrude; at the third he was stone deaf, or pretended to be so. Thefourth shopman was a large blond young man, very pink all over,like a slice of ham. He looked at the clothes I was wearing andfelt them disparagingly between thumb and finger.

'Poor stuff,' he said, 'very poor stuff, that is.' (It was quitea good suit.) 'What yer want for 'em?'

I explained that I wanted some older clothes and as much moneyas he could spare. He thought for a moment, then collected somedirty-looking rags and threw them on to the counter. 'What aboutthe money?' I said, hoping for a pound. He pursed Us lips, thenproduced a shilling and laid it beside the clothes. I didnot argue—I was going to argue, but as I opened my mouth hereached out as though to take up the shilling again; I saw that Iwas helpless. He let me change in a small room behind the shop.

The clothes were a coat, once dark brown, a pair of blackdungaree trousers, a scarf and a cloth cap; I had kept my ownshirt, socks and boots, and I had a comb and razor in my pocket. Itgives one a very strange feeling to be wearing such clothes. I hadworn bad enough things before, but nothing at all like these; theywere not merely dirty and shapeless, they had—how is one toexpress it?—a gracelessness, a patina of antique filth, quitedifferent from mere shabbiness. They were the sort of clothes yousee on a bootlace seller, or a tramp. An hour later, in Lambeth, Isaw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming towards me, and whenI looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window. The dirtwas plastering my face already. Dirt is a great respecter ofpersons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soonas your collar is gone it flies towards you from alldirections.

I stayed in the streets till late at night, keeping on the moveall the time. Dressed as I was, I was half afraid that the policemight arrest me as a vagabond, and I dared not speak to anyone,imagining that they must notice a disparity between my accent andmy clothes. (Later I discovered that this never happened.) My newclothes had put me instantly into a new world. Everyone's demeanourseemed to have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrowthat he had upset. 'Thanks, mate,' he said with a grin. No one hadcalled me mate before in my life—it was the clothes that haddone it. For the first time I noticed, too, how the attitude ofwomen varies with a man's clothes. When a badly dressed man passesthem they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement ofdisgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful things.Dressed in a tramp's clothes it is very difficult, at any rate forthe first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded. Youmight feel the same shame, irrational but very real, your firstnight in prison.

At about eleven I began looking for a bed. I had read aboutdoss-houses (they are never called doss-houses, by the way), and Isupposed that one could get a bed for fourpence or thereabouts.Seeing a man, a navvy or something of the kind, standing on thekerb in the Waterloo Road, I stopped and questioned him. I saidthat I was stony broke and wanted the cheapest bed I could get.

'Oh,' said he, 'you go to that 'ouse across the street there,with the sign "Good Beds for Single Men". That's a good kip[sleeping place], that is. I bin there myself on and off. You'llfind it cheap and clean.'

It was a tall, battered-looking house, with dim lights in allthe windows, some of which were patched with brown paper. I entereda stone passage-way, and a little etiolated boy with sleepy eyesappeared from a door leading to a cellar. Murmurous sounds camefrom the cellar, and a wave of hot air and cheese. The boy yawnedand held out his hand.

'Want a kip? That'll be a 'og, guv'nor.'

I paid the shilling, and the boy led me up a rickety unlightedstaircase to a bedroom. It had a sweetish reek of paregoric andfoul linen; the windows seemed to be tight shut, and the air wasalmost suffocating at first. There was a candle burning, and I sawthat the room measured fifteen feet square by eight high, and hadeight beds in it. Already six lodgers were in bed, queer lumpyshapes with all their own clothes, even their boots, piled on topof them. Someone was coughing in a loathsome manner in onecorner.

When I got into the bed I found that it was as hard as a board,and as for the pillow, it was a mere hard cylinder like a block ofwood. It was rather worse than sleeping on a table, because the bedwas not six feet long, and very narrow, and the mattress wasconvex, so that one had to hold on to avoid falling out. The sheetsstank so horribly of sweat that I could not bear them near my nose.Also, the bedclothes only consisted of the sheets and a cottoncounterpane, so that though stuffy it was none too warm. Severalnoises recurred throughout the night. About once in an hour the manon my left—a sailor, I think—woke up, swore vilely, andlighted a cigarette. Another man, victim of a bladder disease, gotup and noisily used his chamber-pot half a dozen times during thenight. The man in the corner had a coughing fit once in everytwenty minutes, so regularly that one came to listen for it as onelistens for the next yap when a dog is baying the moon. It was anunspeakably repellent sound; a foul bubbling and retching, asthough the man's bowels were being churned up within him. Once whenhe struck a match I saw that he was a very old man, with a grey,sunken face like that of a corpse, and he was wearing his trouserswrapped round his head as a nightcap, a thing which for some reasondisgusted me very much. Every time he coughed or the other manswore, a sleepy voice from one of the other beds cried out:

'Shut up! Oh, for Christ's—sake shut up!'

I had about an hour's sleep in all. In the morning I was wokenby a dim impression of some large brown thing coming towards me. Iopened my eyes and saw that it was one of the sailor's feet,sticking out of bed close to my face. It was dark brown, quite darkbrown like an Indian's, with dirt. The walls were leprous, and thesheets, three weeks from the wash, were almost raw umber colour. Igot up, dressed and went downstairs. In the cellar were a row ofbasins and two slippery roller towels. I had a piece of soap in mypocket, and I was going to wash, when I noticed that every basinwas streaked with grime—solid, sticky filth as black asboot-blacking. I went out unwashed. Altogether, the lodging-househad not come up to its description as cheap and clean. It washowever, as I found later, a fairly representativelodging-house.

I crossed the river and walked a long way eastward, finallygoing into a coffee-shop on Tower Hill. An ordinary Londoncoffee-shop, like a thousand others, it seemed queer and foreignafter Paris. It was a little stuffy room with the high-backed pewsthat were fashionable in the 'forties, the day's menu written on amirror with a piece of soap, and a girl of fourteen handling thedishes. Navvies were eating out of newspaper parcels, and drinkingtea in vast saucerless mugs like china tumblers. In a corner byhimself a Jew, muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfingbacon.

'Could I have some tea and bread and butter?' I said to thegirl.

She stared. 'No butter, only marg,' she said, surprised. And sherepeated the order in the phrase that is to London what the eternalcoup de rouge is to Paris: 'Large tea and two slices!'

On the wall beside my pew there was a notice saying 'Pocketingthe sugar not allowed,' and beneath it some poetic customer hadwritten:

He that takes away the sugar,
Shall be called a dirty——

but someone else had been at pains to scratch out the last word.This was England. The tea-and-two-slices cost threepence halfpenny,leaving me with eight and twopence.

XXV

THE eight shillings lasted three days and four nights. After mybad experience in the Waterloo Road* I moved eastward, and spentthe next night in a lodging-house in Pennyfields. This was atypical lodging-house, like scores of others in London. It hadaccommodation for between fifty and a hundred men, and was managedby a 'deputy'—a deputy for the owner, that is, for theselodging-houses are profitable concerns and are owned by rich men.We slept fifteen or twenty in a dormitory; the beds were again coldand hard, but the sheets were not more than a week from the wash,which was an improvement. The charge was ninepence or a shilling(in the shilling dormitory the beds were six feet apart instead offour) and the terms were cash down by seven in the evening or outyou went.

[*It is a curious but well-known fact that bugs are muchcommoner in south than north London. For some reason they have notyet crossed the river in any great numbers.]

Downstairs there was a kitchen common to all lodgers, with freefiring and a supply of cooking-pots, tea-basins, andtoasting-forks. There were two great clinker fires, which were keptburning day and night the year through. The work of tending thefires, sweeping the kitchen and making the beds was done by thelodgers in rotation. One senior lodger, a fine Norman-lookingstevedore named Steve, was known as 'head of the house', and wasarbiter of disputes and unpaid chucker-out.

I liked the kitchen. It was a low-ceiled cellar deepunderground, very hot and drowsy with co*ke fumes, and lighted onlyby the fires, which cast black velvet shadows in the comers. Raggedwashing hung on strings from the ceiling. Red-lit men, stevedoresmostly, moved about the fires with cooking-pots; some of them werequite naked, for they had been laundering and were waiting fortheir clothes to dry. At night there were games of nap anddraughts, and songs—' I'm a chap what's done wrong by myparents,' was a favourite, and so was another popular song about ashipwreck. Sometimes late at night men would come in with a pail ofwinkles they had bought cheap, and share them out. There was ageneral sharing of food, and it was taken for granted to feed menwho were out of work. A little pale, wizened creature, obviouslydying, referred to as 'pore Brown, bin under the doctor and cutopen three times,' was regularly fed by the others.

Two or three of the lodgers were old-age pensioners. Tillmeeting them I had never realized that there are people in Englandwho live on nothing but the old-age pension often shillings a week.None of these old men had any other resource whatever. One of themwas talkative, and I asked him how he managed to exist. Hesaid:

'Well, there's ninepence a night for yer kip—that's fivean' threepence a week. Then there's threepence on Saturday for ashave— that's five an' six. Then say you 'as a 'aircut once amonth for sixpence —that's another three'apence a week. Soyou 'as about four an' four-pence for food an' bacca.'

He could imagine no other expenses. His food was bread andmargarine and tea—towards the end of the week dry bread andtea without milk—and perhaps he got his clothes from charity.He seemed contented, valuing his bed and fire more than food. But,with an income of ten shillings a week, to spend money on ashave—it is awe-inspiring.

All day I loafed in the streets, east as far as Wapping, west asfar as Whitechapel. It was queer after Paris; everything was somuch cleaner and quieter and drearier. One missed the scream of thetrams, and the noisy, festering life of the back streets, and thearmed men clattering through the squares. The crowds were betterdressed and the faces comelier and milder and more alike, withoutthat fierce individuality and malice of the French. There was lessdrunkenness, and less dirt, and less quarrelling, and more idling.Knots of men stood at all the corners, slightly underfed, but keptgoing by the tea-and-two-slices which the Londoner swallows everytwo hours. One seemed to breathe a less feverish air than in Paris.It was the land of the tea urn and the Labour Exchange, as Paris isthe land of the bistro and the sweatshop.

It was interesting to watch the crowds. The East London womenare pretty (it is the mixture of blood, perhaps), and Limehouse wassprinkled with Orientals—Chinamen, Chittagonian lascars,Dravidians selling silk scarves, even a few Sikhs, come goodnessknows how. Here and there were street meetings. In Whitechapelsomebody called The Singing Evangel undertook to save you from hellfor the charge of sixpence. In the East India Dock Road theSalvation Army were holding a service. They were singing 'Anybodyhere like sneaking Judas?' to the tune of 'What's to be done with adrunken sailor?' On Tower Hill two Mormons were trying to address ameeting. Round their platform struggled a mob of men, shouting andinterrupting. Someone was denouncing them for polygamists. A lame,bearded man, evidently an atheist, had heard the word God and washeckling angrily. There was a confused uproar of voices.

'My dear friends, if you would only let us finish what we weresaying —!—That's right, give 'em a say. Don't get onthe argue!—No, no, you answer me. Can you show me God?You show 'im me, then I'll believe in 'im.—Oh, shutup, don't keep interrupting of 'em!—Interruptyourself!—polygamists!—Well, there's a lot to be saidfor polygamy. Take the—women out of industry,anyway.—My dear friends, if you would just—No, no,don't you slip out of it. 'Ave you seen God? 'Ave youtouched 'im? 'Ave you shook 'ands with 'im?—Oh,don't get on the argue, for Christ's sake don't get on theargue!' etc. etc. I listened for twenty minutes, anxious tolearn something about Mormonism, but the meeting never got beyondshouts. It is the general fate of street meetings.

In Middlesex Street, among the crowds at the market, a draggled,down-at-heel woman was hauling a brat of five by the arm. Shebrandished a tin trumpet in its face. The brat was squalling.

'Enjoy yourself!' yelled the mother. 'What yer think I broughtyer out 'ere for an' bought y' a trumpet an' all? D'ya want to goacross my knee? You little bastard, you shall enjoyyerself!'

Some drops of spittle fell from the trumpet. The mother and thechild disappeared, both bawling. It was all very queer afterParis.

The last night that I was in the Pennyfields lodging-house therewas a quarrel between two of the lodgers, a vile scene. One of theold-age pensioners, a man of about seventy, naked to the waist (hehad been laundering), was violently abusing a short, thicksetstevedore, who stood with his back to the fire. I could see the oldman's face in the light of the fire, and he was almost crying withgrief and rage. Evidently something very serious had happened.

The old-age pensioner: 'You—!'

The stevedore: 'Shut yer mouth, you ole—, afore Iset about yer!'

The old-age pensioner: 'Jest you try it on, you—!I'm thirty year older'n you, but it wouldn't take much to make megive you one as'd knock you into a bucketful of piss!'

The stevedore: 'Ah, an' then p'raps I wouldn't smash youup after, you ole—!'

Thus for five minutes. The lodgers sat round, unhappy, trying todisregard the quarrel. The stevedore looked, sullen, but the oldman was growing more and more furious. He kept making little rushesat the other, sticking out his face and screaming from a few inchesdistant like a cat on a wall, and spitting. He was trying to nervehimself to strike a blow, and not quite succeeding. Finally heburst out:

'A—, that's what you are, a——! Take that inyour dirty gob and suck it, you—! By—, I'll smash youafore I've done with you. A—, that's what you are, a son ofa—whor*. Lick that, you—! That's what I think of you,you—, you—, you—you BLACK BASTARD!'

Whereat he suddenly collapsed on a bench, took his face in hishands, and began crying. The other man seeing that public feelingwas against him, went out.

Afterwards I heard Steve explaining the cause of the quarrel. Itappeared that it was all about a shilling's worth of food. In someway the old man had lost his store of bread and margarine, and sowould have nothing to eat for the next three days, except what theothers gave him in charity. The stevedore, who was in work and wellfed, had taunted him; hence the quarrel.

When my money was down to one and fourpence I went for a nightto a lodging-house in Bow, where the charge was only eightpence.One went down an area and through an alley-way into a deep,stifling cellar, ten feet square. Ten men, navvies mostly, weresitting in the fierce glare of the fire. It was midnight, but thedeputy's son, a pale, sticky child of five, was there playing onthe navvies' knees. An old Irishman was whistling to a blindbullfinch in a tiny cage. There were other songbirdsthere—tiny, faded things, that had lived all their livesunderground. The lodgers habitually made water in the fire, to savegoing across a yard to the lavatory. As I sat at the table I feltsomething stir near my feet, and, looking down, saw a wave of blackthings moving slowly across the floor; they were black-beetles.

There were six beds in the dormitory, and the sheets, marked inhuge letters 'Stolen from No.—Road', smelt loathsome. In thenext bed to me lay a very old man, a pavement artist, with someextraordinary curvature of the spine that made him stick right outof bed, with his back a foot or two from my face. It was bare, andmarked with curious swirls of dirt, like a marble table-top. Duringthe night a man came in drunk and was sick on the floor, close tomy bed. There were bugs too—not so bad as in Paris, butenough to keep one awake. It was a filthy place. Yet the deputy andhis wife were friendly people, and ready to make one a cup of teaat any hour of the day or night.

XXVI

IN the morning after paying for the usual tea-and-two-slices andbuying half an ounce of tobacco, I had a halfpenny left. I did notcare to ask B. for more money yet, so there was nothing for it butto go to a casual ward. I had very little idea how to set aboutthis, but I knew that there was a casual ward at Romton, so Iwalked out there, arriving at three or four in the afternoon.Leaning against the pigpens in Romton market-place was a wizenedold Irishman, obviously a tramp. I went and leaned beside him, andpresently offered him my tobacco-box. He opened the box and lookedat the tobacco in astonishment:

'By God,' he said, 'dere's sixpennorth o' good baccy here! Wherede hell d'you get hold o' dat? You ain't been on de roadlong.'

'What, don't you have tobacco on the road?' I said.

'Oh, we has it. Look.'

He produced a rusty tin which had once held Oxo Cubes. In itwere twenty or thirty cigarette ends, picked up from the pavement.The Irishman said that he rarely got any other tobacco; he addedthat, with care, one could collect two ounces of tobacco a day onthe London pavements.

'D'you come out o' one o' de London spikes [casual wards], eh?'he asked me.

I said yes, thinking this would make him accept me as a fellowtramp, and asked him what the spike at Romton was like. Hesaid:

'Well, 'tis a cocoa spike. Dere's tay spikes, and cocoa spikes,and skilly spikes. Dey don't give you skilly in Romton, t'ankGod—leastways, dey didn't de last time I was here. I been upto York and round Wales since.'

'What is skilly?' I said.

'Skilly? A can o' hot water wid some bloody oatmeal at debottom; dat's skilly. De skilly spikes is always de worst.'

We stayed talking for an hour or two. The Irishman was afriendly old man, but he smelt very unpleasant, which was notsurprising when one learned how many diseases he suffered from. Itappeared (he described his symptoms fully) that taking him from topto bottom he had the following things wrong with him: on his crown,which was bald, he had eczema; he was shortsighted, and had noglasses; he had chronic bronchitis; he had some undiagnosed pain inthe back; he had dyspepsia; he had urethritis; he had varicoseveins, bunions and flat feet. With this assemblage of diseases hehad tramped the roads for fifteen years.

At about five the Irishman said, 'Could you do wid a cup o' tay?De spike don't open till six.'

'I should think I could.'

'Well, dere's a place here where dey gives you a free cup o' tayand a bun. Good tay it is. Dey makes you say a lot o' bloodyprayers after; but hell! It all passes de time away. You come widme.'

He led the way to a small tin-roofed shed in a side-street,rather like a village cricket pavilion. About twenty-five othertramps were waiting. A few of them were dirty old habitualvagabonds, the majority decent-looking lads from the north,probably miners or cotton operatives out of work. Presently thedoor opened and a lady in a blue silk dress, wearing goldspectacles and a crucifix, welcomed us in. Inside were thirty orforty hard chairs, a harmonium, and a very gory lithograph of theCrucifixion.

Uncomfortably we took off our caps and sat down. The lady handedout the tea, and while we ate and drank she moved to and fro,talking benignly. She talked upon religious subjects—aboutJesus Christ always having a soft spot for poor rough men like us,and about how quickly the time passed when you were in church, andwhat a difference it made to a man on the road if he said hisprayers regularly. We hated it. We sat against the wall fingeringour caps (a tramp feels indecently exposed with his cap off), andturning pink and trying to mumble something when the lady addressedus. There was no doubt that she meant it all kindly. As she came upto one of the north country lads with the plate of buns, she saidto him:

'And you, my boy, how long is it since you knelt down and spokewith your Father in Heaven?'

Poor lad, not a word could he utter; but his belly answered forhim, with a disgraceful rumbling which it set up at sight of thefood. Thereafter he was so overcome with shame that he couldscarcely swallow his bun. Only one man managed to answer the ladyin her own style, and he was a spry, red-nosed fellow looking likea corporal who had lost his stripe for drunkenness. He couldpronounce the words 'the dear Lord Jesus' with less shame thananyone I ever saw. No doubt he had learned the knack in prison.

Tea ended, and I saw the tramps looking furtively at oneanother. An unspoken thought was running from man toman—could we possibly make off before the prayers started?Someone stirred in his chair—not getting up actually, butwith just a glance at the door, as though half suggesting the ideaof departure. The lady quelled him with one look. She said in amore benign tone than ever:

'I don't think you need go quite yet. The casual warddoesn't open till six, and we have time to kneel down and say a fewwords to our Father first. I think we should all feel better afterthat, shouldn't we?'

The red-nosed man was very helpful, pulling the harmonium intoplace and handing out the prayerbooks. His back was to the lady ashe did this, and it was his idea of a joke to deal the books like apack of cards, whispering to each man as he did so, 'There y'are,mate, there's a—nap 'and for yer! Four aces and a king!'etc.

Bareheaded, we knelt down among the dirty teacups and began tomumble that we had left undone those things that we ought to havedone, and done those things that we ought not to have done, andthere was no health in us. The lady prayed very fervently, but hereyes roved over us all the time, making sure that we wereattending. When she was not looking we grinned and winked at oneanother, and whispered bawdy jokes, just to show that we did notcare; but it stuck in our throats a little. No one except thered-nosed man was self-possessed enough to speak the responsesabove a whisper. We got on better with the singing, except that oneold tramp knew no tune but 'Onward, Christian soldiers', andreverted to it sometimes, spoiling the harmony.

The prayers lasted half an hour, and then, after a handshake atthe door, we made off. 'Well,' said somebody as soon as we were outof hearing, 'the trouble's over. I thought them—prayers wasnever goin' to end.'

'You 'ad your bun,' said another; 'you got to pay for it.'

'Pray for it, you mean. Ah, you don't get much for nothing. Theycan't even give you a twopenny cup of tea without you go down onyou—knees for it.'

There were murmurs of agreement. Evidently the tramps were notgrateful for their tea. And yet it was excellent tea, as differentfrom coffee-shop tea as good Bordeaux is from the muck calledcolonial claret, and we were all glad of it. I am sure too that itwas given in a good spirit, without any intention of humiliatingus; so in fairness we ought to have been grateful—still, wewere not.

XXVII

AT about a quarter to six the Irishman led me to the spike. Itwas a grim, smoky yellow cube of brick, standing in a corner of theworkhouse grounds. With its rows of tiny, barred windows, and ahigh wall and iron gates separating it from the road, it lookedmuch like a prison. Already a long queue of ragged men had formedup, waiting for the gates to open. They were of all kinds and ages,the youngest a fresh-faced boy of sixteen, the oldest a doubled-up,toothless mummy of seventy-five. Some were hardened tramps,recognizable by their sticks and billies and dust-darkened faces;some were factory hands out of work, some agricultural labourers,one a clerk in collar and tie, two certainly imbeciles. Seen in themass, lounging there, they were a disgusting sight; nothingvillainous or dangerous, but a graceless, mangy crew, nearly allragged and palpably underfed. They were friendly, however, andasked no questions. Many offered me tobacco—cigarette ends,that is.

We leaned against the wall, smoking, and the tramps began totalk about the spikes they had been in recently. It appeared fromwhat they said that all spikes are different, each with itspeculiar merits and demerits, and it is important to know thesewhen you are on the road. An old hand will tell you thepeculiarities of every spike in England, as: at A you are allowedto smoke but there are bugs in the cells; at B the beds arecomfortable but the porter is a bully; at C they let you out earlyin the morning but the tea is undrinkable; at D the officials stealyour money if you have any—and so on interminably. There areregular beaten tracks where the spikes are within a day's march ofone another. I was told that the Barnet-St Albans route is thebest, and they warned me to steer clear of Billericay andChelmsford, also Ide Hill in Kent. Chelsea was said to be the mostluxurious spike in England; someone, praising it, said that theblankets there were more like prison than the spike. Tramps go farafield in summer, and in winter they circle as much as possibleround the large towns, where it is warmer and there is morecharity. But they have to keep moving, for you may not enter anyone spike, or any two London spikes, more than once in a month, onpain of being confined for a week.

Some time after six the gates opened and we began to file in oneat a time. In the yard was an office where an official entered in aledger our names and trades and ages, also the places we werecoming from and going to—this last is intended to keep acheck on the movements of tramps. I gave my trade as 'painter'; Ihad painted water-colours—who has not? The official alsoasked us whether we had any money, and every man said no. It isagainst the law to enter the spike with more than eightpence, andany sum less than this one is supposed to hand over at the gate.But as a rule the tramps prefer to smuggle their money in, tying ittight in a piece of cloth so that it will not chink. Generally theyput it in the bag of tea and sugar that every tramp carries, oramong their 'papers'. The 'papers' are considered sacred and arenever searched.

After registering at the office we were led into the spike by anofficial known as the Tramp Major (his job is to supervise casuals,and he is generally a workhouse pauper) and a great bawling ruffianof a porter in a blue uniform, who treated us like cattle. Thespike consisted simply of a bathroom and lavatory, and, for therest, long double rows of stone cells, perhaps a hundred cells inall. It was a bare, gloomy place of stone and whitewash,unwillingly clean, with a smell which, somehow, I had foreseen fromits appearance; a smell of soft soap, Jeyes' fluid andlatrines—a cold, discouraging, prisonish smell.

The porter herded us all into the passage, and then told us tocome into the bathroom six at a time, to be searched beforebathing. The search was for money and tobacco, Romton being one ofthose spikes where you can smoke once you have smuggled yourtobacco in, but it will be confiscated if it is found on you. Theold hands had told us that the porter never searched below theknee, so before going in we had all hidden our tobacco in theankles of our boots. Afterwards, while undressing, we slipped itinto our coats, which we were allowed to keep, to serve aspillows.

The scene in the bathroom was extraordinarily repulsive. Fiftydirty, stark-naked men elbowing each other in a room twenty feetsquare, with only two bathtubs and two slimy roller towels betweenthem all. I shall never forget the reek of dirty feet. Less thanhalf the tramps actually bathed (I heard them saying that hot wateris 'weakening' to the system), but they all washed their faces andfeet, and the horrid greasy little clouts known as toe-rags whichthey bind round their toes. Fresh water was only allowed for menwho were having a complete bath, so many men had to bathe in waterwhere others had washed their feet. The porter shoved us to andfro, giving the rough side of his tongue when anyone wasted time.When my turn came for the bath, I asked if I might swill out thetub, which was streaked with dirt, before using it. He answeredsimply, 'Shut yer—mouth and get on with yer bath!' That setthe social tone of the place, and I did not speak again.

When we had finished bathing, the porter tied our clothes inbundles and gave us workhouse shirts—grey cotton things ofdoubtful cleanliness, like abbreviated nightgowns. We were sentalong to the cells at once, and presently the porter and the TrampMajor brought our supper across from the workhouse. Each man'sration was a half-pound wedge of bread smeared with margarine, anda pint of bitter sugarless cocoa in a tin billy. Sitting on thefloor we wolfed this in five minutes, and at about seven o'clockthe cell doors were locked on the outside, to remain locked tilleight in the morning.

Each man was allowed to sleep with his mate, the cells beingintended to hold two men apiece. I had no mate, and was put in withanother solitary man, a thin scrubby-faced fellow with a slightsquint. The cell measured eight feet by five by eight high, wasmade of stone, and had a tiny barred window high up in the wall anda spyhole in the door, just like a cell in a prison. In it were sixblankets, a chamber-pot, a hot water pipe, and nothing elsewhatever. I looked round the cell with a vague feeling that therewas something missing. Then, with a shock of surprise, I realizedwhat it was, and exclaimed:

'But I say, damn it, where are the beds?'

'Beds?' said the other man, surprised. 'There aren't nobeds! What yer expect? This is one of them spikes where you sleepson the floor. Christ! Ain't you got used to that yet?'

It appeared that no beds was quite a normal condition in thespike. We rolled up our coats and put them against the hot-waterpipe, and made ourselves as comfortable as we could. It grew foullystuffy, but it was not warm enough to allow of our putting all theblankets underneath, so that we could only use one to soften thefloor. We lay a foot apart, breathing into one another's face, withour naked limbs constantly touching, and rolling against oneanother whenever we fell asleep. One fidgeted from side to side,but it did not do much good; whichever way one turned there wouldbe first a dull numb feeling, then a sharp ache as the hardness ofthe floor wore through the blanket. One could sleep, but not formore than ten minutes on end.

About midnight the other man began making hom*osexual attemptsupon me —a nasty experience in a locked, pitch-dark cell. Hewas a feeble creature and I could manage him easily, but of courseit was impossible to go to sleep again. For the rest of the nightwe stayed awake, smoking and talking. The man told me the story ofhis life—he was a fitter, out of work for three years. Hesaid that his wife had promptly deserted him when he lost his job,and he had been so long away from women that he had almostforgotten what they were like. hom*osexuality is general amongtramps of long standing, he said.

At eight the porter came along the passage unlocking the doorsand shouting 'All out!' The doors opened, letting out a stale,fetid stink. At once the passage was full of squalid, grey-shirtedfigures, each chamber-pot in hand, scrambling for the bathroom. Itappeared that in the morning only one tub of water was allowed forthe lot of us, and when I arrived twenty tramps had already washedtheir faces; I took one glance at the black scum floating on thewater, and went unwashed. After this we were given a breakfastidentical with the previous night's supper, our clothes werereturned to us, and we were ordered out into the yard to work. Thework was peeling potatoes for the pauper's dinner, but it was amere formality, to keep us occupied until the doctor came toinspect us. Most of the tramps frankly idled. The doctor turned upat about ten o'clock and we were told to go back to our cells,strip and wait in the passage for the inspection.

Naked, and shivering, we lined up in the passage. You cannotconceive what ruinous, degenerate curs we looked, standing there inthe merciless morning light. A tramp's clothes are bad, but theyconceal far worse things; to see him as he really is, unmitigated,you must see him naked. Flat feet, pot bellies, hollow chests,sagging muscles—every kind of physical rottenness was there.Nearly everyone was under-nourished, and some clearly diseased; twomen were wearing trusses, and as for the old mummy-like creature ofseventy-five, one wondered how he could possibly make his dailymarch. Looking at our faces, unshaven and creased from thesleepless night, you would have thought that all of us wererecovering from a week on the drink.

The inspection was designed merely to detect smallpox, and tookno notice of our general condition. A young medical student,smoking a cigarette, walked rapidly along the line glancing us upand down, and not inquiring whether any man was well or ill. Whenmy cell companion stripped I saw that his chest was covered with ared rash, and, having spent the night a few inches away from him, Ifell into a panic about smallpox. The doctor, however, examined therash and said that it was due merely to under-nourishment.

After the inspection we dressed and were sent into the yard,where the porter called our names over, gave us back anypossessions we had left at the office, and distributed mealtickets. These were worth sixpence each, and were directed tocoffee-shops on the route we had named the night before. It wasinteresting to see that quite a number of the tramps could notread, and had to apply to myself and other 'scholards' to deciphertheir tickets.

The gates were opened, and we dispersed immediately. How sweetthe air does smell—even the air of a back street in thesuburbs—after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike! Ihad a mate now, for while we were peeling potatoes I had madefriends with an Irish tramp named Paddy Jaques, a melancholy paleman who seemed clean and decent. He was going to Edbury spike, andsuggested that we should go together. We set out, getting there atthree in the afternoon. It was a twelve-mile walk, but we made itfourteen by getting lost among the desolate north London slums. Ourmeal tickets were directed to a coffee-shop in Ilford. When we gotthere, the little chit of a serving-maid, having seen our ticketsand grasped that we were tramps, tossed her head in contempt andfor a long time would not serve us. Finally she slapped on thetable two 'large teas' and four slices of bread anddripping—that is, eightpenny-worth of food. It appeared thatthe shop habitually cheated the tramps of twopence or so on eachticket; having tickets instead of money, the tramps could notprotest or go elsewhere.

XXVIII

PADDY was my mate for about the next fortnight, and, as he wasthe first tramp I had known at all well, I want to give an accountof him. I believe that he was a typical tramp and there are tens ofthousands in England like him.

He was a tallish man, aged about thirty-five, with fair hairgoing grizzled and watery blue eyes. His features were good, buthis cheeks had lanked and had that greyish, dirty in the grain lookthat comes of a bread and margarine diet. He was dressed, ratherbetter than most tramps, in a tweed shooting-jacket and a pair ofold evening trousers with the braid still on them. Evidently thebraid figured in his mind as a lingering scrap of respectability,and he took care to sew it on again when it came loose. He wascareful of his appearance altogether, and carried a razor andbootbrush that he would not sell, though he had sold his 'papers'and even his pocket-knife long since. Nevertheless, one would haveknown him for a tramp a hundred yards away. There was something inhis drifting style of walk, and the way he had of hunching hisshoulders forward, essentially abject. Seeing him walk, you feltinstinctively that he would sooner take a blow than give one.

He had been brought up in Ireland, served two years in the war,and then worked in a metal polish factory, where he had lost hisjob two years earlier. He was horribly ashamed of being a tramp,but he had picked up all a tramp's ways. He browsed the pavementsunceasingly, never missing a cigarette end, or even an emptycigarette packet, as he used the tissue paper for rollingcigarettes. On our way into Edbury he saw a newspaper parcel on thepavement, pounced on it, and found that it contained two muttonsandwiches/rather frayed at the edges; these he insisted on mysharing. He never passed an automatic machine without giving a tugat the handle, for he said that sometimes they are out of order andwill eject pennies if you tug at them. He had no stomach for crime,however. When we were in the outskirts of Romton, Paddy noticed abottle of milk on a doorstep, evidently left there by mistake. Hestopped, eyeing the bottle hungrily.

'Christ!' he said, 'dere's good food goin' to waste. Somebodycould knock dat bottle off, eh? Knock it off easy.'

I saw that he was thinking of 'knocking it off' himself. Helooked up and down the street; it was a quiet residential streetand there was nobody in sight. Paddy's sickly, chap-fallen faceyearned over the milk. Then he turned away, saying gloomily:

'Best leave it. It don't do a man no good to steal. T'ank God, Iain't never stolen nothin' yet.'

It was funk, bred of hunger, that kept him virtuous. With onlytwo or three sound meals in his belly, he would have found courageto steal the milk.

He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and come-down ofbeing a tramp, and the best way of getting a free meal. As wedrifted through the streets he would keep up a monologue in thisstyle, in a whimpering, self-pitying Irish voice:

'It's hell bein' on de road, eh? It breaks yer heart goin' intodem bloody spikes. But what's a man to do else, eh? I ain't had agood meat meal for about two months, an' me boots is getting bad,an'—Christ! How'd it be if we was to try for a cup o' tay atone o' dem convents on de way to Edbury? Most times dey're good fora cup o' tay. Ah, what'd a man do widout religion, eh? I've tookcups o' tay from de convents, an' de Baptists, an' de Church ofEngland, an' all sorts. I'm a Catholic meself. Dat's to say, Iain't been to confession for about seventeen year, but still I gotme religious feelin's, y'understand. An' dem convents is alwaysgood for a cup o' tay ...' etc. etc. He would keep this up all day,almost without stopping.

His ignorance was limitless and appalling. He once asked me, forinstance, whether Napoleon lived before Jesus Christ or after.Another time, when I was looking into a bookshop window, he grewvery perturbed because one of the books was called Of theImitation of Christ. He took this for blasphemy. 'What de helldo dey want to go imitatin' of Him for?' he demandedangrily. He could read, but he had a kind of loathing for books. Onour way from Romton to Edbury I went into a public library, and,though Paddy did not want to read, I suggested that he should comein and rest his legs. But he preferred to wait on the pavement.'No,' he said, 'de sight of all dat bloody print makes mesick.'

Like most tramps, he was passionately mean about matches. He hada box of matches when I met him, but I never saw him strike one,and he used to lecture me for extravagance when I struck mine. Hismethod was to cadge a light from strangers, sometimes going withouta smoke for half an hour rather than strike a match.

Self-pity was the clue to his character. The thought of his badluck never seemed to leave him for an instant. He would break longsilences to exclaim, apropos of nothing, 'It's hell when yer clo'esbegin to go up de spout, eh?' or 'Dat tay in de spike ain't tay,it's piss,' as though there was nothing else in the world to thinkabout. And he had a low, worm-like envy of anyone who was betteroff—not of the rich, for they were beyond his social horizon,but of men in work. He pined for work as an artist pines to befamous. If he saw an old man working he would say bitterly, 'Lookat dat old—keepin' able-bodied men out o' work'; or if it wasa boy, 'It's dem young devils what's takin' de bread out of ourmouths.' And all foreigners to him were 'dem bloodydagoes'—for, according to his theory, foreigners wereresponsible for unemployment.

He looked at women with a mixture of longing and hatred. Young,pretty women were too much above him to enter into his ideas, buthis mouth watered at prostitutes. A couple of scarlet-lipped oldcreatures would go past; Paddy's face would flush pale pink, and hewould turn and stare hungrily after the women. 'Tarts!' he wouldmurmur, like a boy at a sweetshop window. He told me once that hehad not had to do with a woman for two years—since he hadlost his job, that is—and he had forgotten that one could aimhigher than prostitutes. He had the regular character of atramp—abject, envious, a jackal's character.

Nevertheless, he was a good fellow, generous by nature andcapable of sharing his last crust with a friend; indeed he didliterally share his last crust with me more than once. He wasprobably capable of work too, if he had been well fed for a fewmonths. But two years of bread and margarine had lowered hisstandards hopelessly. He had lived on this filthy imitation of foodtill his own mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. Itwas malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed hismanhood.

XXIX

ON the way to Edbury I told Paddy that I had a friend from whomI could be sure of getting money, and suggested going straight intoLondon rather than face another night in the spike. But Paddy hadnot been in Edbury spike recently, and, tramp-like, he would notwaste a night's free lodging. We arranged to go into London thenext morning. I had only a halfpenny, but Paddy had two shillings,which would get us a bed each and a few cups of tea.

The Edbury spike did not differ much from the one at Romton. Theworst feature was that all tobacco was confiscated at the gate, andwe were warned that any man caught smoking would be turned out atonce. Under the Vagrancy Act tramps can be prosecuted for smokingin the spike—in fact, they can be prosecuted for almostanything; but the authorities generally save the trouble of aprosecution by turning disobedient men out of doors. There was nowork to do, and the cells were fairly comfortable. We slept two ina cell, 'one up, one down'—that is, one on a wooden shelf andone on the floor, with straw palliasses and plenty of blankets,dirty but not verminous. The food was the same as at Romton, exceptthat we had tea instead of cocoa. One could get extra tea in themorning, as the Tramp Major was selling it at a halfpenny a mug,illicitly no doubt. We were each given a hunk of bread and cheeseto take away for our midday meal.

When we got into London we had eight hours to kill before thelodging-houses opened. It is curious how one does not noticethings. I had been in London innumerable times, and yet till thatday I had never noticed one of the worst things aboutLondon—the fact that it costs money even to sit down. InParis, if you had no money and could not find a public bench, youwould sit on the pavement. Heaven knows what sitting on thepavement would lead to in London—prison, probably. By four wehad stood five hours, and our feet seemed red-hot from the hardnessof the stones. We were hungry, having eaten our ration as soon aswe left the spike, and I was out of tobacco—it mattered lessto Paddy, who picked up cigarette ends. We tried two churches andfound them locked. Then we tried a public library, but there wereno seats in it. As a last hope Paddy suggested trying a RowtonHouse; by the rules they would not let us in before seven, but wemight slip in unnoticed. We walked up to the magnificent doorway(the Rowton Houses really are magnificent) and very casually,trying to look like regular lodgers, began to stroll in. Instantlya man lounging in the doorway, a sharp-faced fellow, evidently insome position of authority, barred the way.

'You men sleep 'ere last night?'

'No.'

'Then—off.'

We obeyed, and stood two more hours on the street corner. It wasunpleasant, but it taught me not to use the expression 'streetcorner loafer', so I gained something from it.

At six we went to a Salvation Army shelter. We could not bookbeds till eight and it was not certain that there would be anyvacant, but an official, who called us 'Brother', let us in on thecondition that we paid for two cups of tea. The main hall of theshelter was a great white-washed barn of a place, oppressivelyclean and bare, with no fires. Two hundred decentish, rathersubdued-looking people were sitting packed on long wooden benches.One or two officers in uniform prowled up and down. On the wallwere pictures of General Booth, and notices prohibiting cooking,drinking, spitting, swearing, quarrelling, and gambling. As aspecimen of these notices, here is one that I copied word forword:

Any man found gambling or playing cards will beexpelled and will not be admitted under any circ*mstances.

A reward will be given for information leading to the discovery ofsuch persons.

The officers in charge appeal to all lodgers to assist them inkeeping this hostel free from the DETESTABLE EVIL OFGAMBLING.

'Gambling or playing cards' is a delightful phrase. To my eyethese Salvation Army shelters, though clean, are far drearier thanthe worst of the common lodging-houses. There is such ahopelessness about some of the people there—decent,broken-down types who have pawned their collars but are stilltrying for office jobs. Coming to a Salvation Army shelter, whereit is at least clean, is their last clutch at respectability. Atthe next table to me were two foreigners, dressed in rags butmanifestly gentlemen. They were playing chess verbally, not evenwriting down the moves. One of them was blind, and I heard them saythat they had been saving up for a long time to buy a board, pricehalf a crown, but could never manage it. Here and there were clerksout of work, pallid and moody. Among a group of them a tall, thin,deadly pale young man was talking excitedly. He thumped his fist onthe table and boasted in a strange, feverish style. When theofficers were out of hearing he broke out into startlingblasphemies:

'I tell you what, boys, I'm going to get that job tomorrow. I'mnot one of your bloody down-on-the-knee brigade; I can look aftermyself. Look at that—notice there! "The Lord will provide!" Abloody lot He's ever provided me with. You don't catch me trustingto the—Lord. You leave it to me, boys. I'm going to getthat job,' etc. etc.

I watched him, struck by the wild, agitated way in which hetalked; he seemed hysterical, or perhaps a little drunk. An hourlater I went into a small room, apart from the main hall, which wasintended for reading. It had no books or papers in it, so few ofthe lodgers went there. As I opened the door I saw the young clerkin there all alone; he was on his knees, praying. Before Ishut the door again I had time to see his face, and it lookedagonized. Quite suddenly I realized, from the expression of hisface, that he was starving.

The charge for beds was eightpence. Paddy and I had fivepenceleft, and we spent it at the 'bar', where food was cheap, thoughnot so cheap as in some common lodging-houses. The tea appeared tobe made with tea dust, which I fancy had been given to theSalvation Army in charity, though they sold it at threehalfpence acup. It was foul stuff. At ten o'clock an officer marched round thehall blowing a whistle. Immediately everyone stood up.

'What's this for?' I said to Paddy, astonished.

'Dat means you has to go off to bed. An' you has to look sharpabout it, too.'

Obediently as sheep, the whole two hundred men trooped off tobed, under the command of the officers.

The dormitory was a great attic like a barrack room, with sixtyor seventy beds in it. They were clean and tolerably comfortable,but very narrow and very close together, so that one breathedstraight into one's neighbour's face. Two officers slept in theroom, to see that there was no smoking and no talking afterlights-out. Paddy and I had scarcely a wink of sleep, for there wasa man near us who had some nervous trouble, shellshock perhaps,which made him cry out 'Pip!' at irregular intervals. It was aloud, startling noise, something like the toot of a smallmotor-horn. You never knew when it was coming, and it was a surepreventer of sleep. It appeared that Pip, as the others called him,slept regularly in the shelter, and he must have kept ten or twentypeople awake every night. He was an example of the kind of thingthat prevents one from ever getting enough sleep when men areherded as they are in these lodging-houses.

At seven another whistle blew, and the officers went roundshaking those who did not get up at once. Since then I have sleptin a number of Salvation Army shelters, and found that, though thedifferent houses vary a little, this semi-military discipline isthe same in all of them. They are certainly cheap, but they are toolike workhouses for my taste. In some of them there is even acompulsory religious service once or twice a week, which thelodgers must attend or leave the house. The fact is that theSalvation Army are so in the habit of thinking themselves acharitable body that they cannot even run a lodging-house withoutmaking it stink of charity.

At ten I went to B.'s office and asked him to lend me a pound.He gave me two pounds and told me to come again when necessary, sothat Paddy and I were free of money troubles for a week at least.We loitered the day in Trafalgar Square, looking for a friend ofPaddy's who never turned up, and at night went to a lodging-housein a back alley near the Strand. The charge was elevenpence, but itwas a dark, evil-smelling place, and a notorious haunt of the'nancy boys'. Downstairs, in the murky kitchen, threeambiguous-looking youths in smartish blue suits were sitting on abench apart, ignored by the other lodgers. I suppose they were'nancy boys'. They looked the same type as the apache boys one seesin Paris, except that they wore no side-whiskers. In front of thefire a fully dressed man and a stark-naked man were bargaining.They were newspaper sellers. The dressed man was selling hisclothes to the naked man. He said:

''Ere y'are, the best rig-out you ever 'ad. A tosheroon [half acrown] for the coat, two 'ogs for the trousers, one and a tannerfor the boots, and a 'og for the cap and scarf. That's sevenbob.'

'You got a 'ope! I'll give yer one and a tanner for the coat, a'og for the trousers, and two 'ogs for the rest. That's four and atanner.'

'Take the 'ole lot for five and a tanner, chum.'

'Right y'are, off with 'em. I got to get out to sell my lateedition.'

The clothed man stripped, and in three minutes their positionswere reversed; the naked man dressed, and the other kilted with asheet of the Daily Mail.

The dormitory was dark and close, with fifteen beds in it. Therewas a horrible hot reek of urine, so beastly that at first onetried to breathe in small, shallow puffs, not filling one's lungsto the bottom. As I lay down in bed a man loomed out of thedarkness, leant over me and began babbling in an educated,half-drunken voice:

'An old public schoolboy, what? [He had heard me say somethingto Paddy.] Don't meet many of the old school here. I am an oldEtonian. You know—twenty years hence this weather and allthat.' He began to quaver out the Eton boating-song, notuntunefully:

Jolly boating weather,
And a hay harvest—

'Stop that—noise!' shouted several lodgers.

'Low types,' said the old Etonian, 'very low types. Funny sortof place for you and me, eh? Do you know what my friends say to me?They say, "M—, you are past redemption." Quite true, Iam past redemption. I've come down in the world; not likethese——s here, who couldn't come down if they tried. Wechaps who have come down ought to hang together a bit. Youth willbe still in our faces—you know. May I offer you a drink?'

He produced a bottle of cherry brandy, and at the same momentlost his balance and fell heavily across my legs. Paddy, who wasundressing, pulled him upright.

'Get back to yer bed, you silly ole—!'

The old Etonian walked unsteadily to his bed and crawled underthe sheets with all his clothes on, even his boots. Several timesin the night I heard him murmuring, 'M—, you are pastredemption,' as though the phrase appealed to him. In the morninghe was lying asleep fully dressed, with the bottle clasped in hisarms. He was a man of about fifty, with a refined, worn face, and,curiously enough, quite fashionably dressed. It was queer to seehis good patent-leather shoes sticking out of that filthy bed. Itoccurred to me, too, that the cherry brandy must have cost theequivalent of a fortnight's lodging, so he could not have beenseriously hard up. Perhaps he frequented common lodging-houses insearch of the 'nancy boys'.

The beds were not more than two feet apart. About midnight Iwoke up to find that the man next to me was trying to steal themoney from beneath my pillow. He was pretending to be asleep whilehe did it, sliding his hand under the pillow as gently as a rat. Inthe morning I saw that he was a hunchback, with long, apelike arms.I told Paddy about the attempted theft. He laughed and said:

'Christ! You got to get used to dat. Desc lodgin' houses is fullo' thieves. In some houses dere's nothin' safe but to sleep wid allyer clo'es on. I seen 'em steal a wooden leg off a cripple beforenow. Once I see a man—fourteen-stone man he was—comeinto a lodgin'-house wid four pound ten. He puts it under hismattress. "Now," he says, "any—dat touches dat money does itover my body," he says. But dey done him all de same. In de mornin'he woke up on de floor. Four fellers had took his mattress by decorners an' lifted him off as light as a feather. He never saw hisfour pound ten again.'

XXX

THE next morning we began looking once more for Paddy's friend,who was called Bozo, and was a screever—that is, a pavementartist. Addresses did not exist in Paddy's world, but he had avague idea that Bozo might be found in Lambeth, and in the end weran across him on the Embankment, where he had established himselfnot far from Waterloo Bridge. He was kneeling on the pavement witha box of chalks, copying a sketch of Winston Churchill from a pennynote-book. The likeness was not at all bad. Bozo was a small, dark,hook-nosed man, with curly hair growing low on his head. His rightleg was dreadfully deformed, the foot being twisted heel forward ina way horrible to see. From his appearance one could have taken himfor a Jew, but he used to deny this vigorously. He spoke of hishooknose as 'Roman', and was proud of his resemblance to some RomanEmperor—it was Vespasian, I think.

Bozo had a strange way of talking, co*ckneyfied and yet verylucid and expressive. It was as though he had read good books buthad never troubled to correct Us grammar. For a while Paddy and Istayed on the Embankment, talking, and Bozo gave us an account ofthe screeving trade. I repeat what he said more or less in his ownwords.

'I'm what they call a serious screever. I don't draw inblackboard chalks like these others, I use proper colours the sameas what painters use; bloody expensive they are, especially thereds. I use five bobs' worth of colours in a long day, and neverless than two bobs' worth*. Cartoons is my line—you know,politics and cricket and that. Look here'—he showed me hisnotebook—'here's likenesses of all the political blokes, whatI've copied from the papers. I have a different cartoon every day.For instance, when the Budget was on I had one of Winston trying topush an elephant marked "Debt", and underneath I wrote, "Will hebudge it?" See? You can have cartoons about any of the parties, butyou mustn't put anything in favour of Socialism, because the policewon't stand it. Once I did a cartoon of a boa constrictor markedCapital swallowing a rabbit marked Labour. The copper came alongand saw it, and he says, "You rub that out, and look sharp aboutit," he says. I had to rub it out. The copper's got the right tomove you on for loitering, and it's no good giving them a backanswer.'

[* Pavement artists buy their colours in the form of powder, andwork them into cakes in condensed milk]

I asked Bozo what one could earn at screeving. He said:

'This time of year, when it don't rain, I take about three quidbetween Friday and Sunday—people get their wages Fridays, yousee. I can't work when it rains; the colours get washed offstraight away. Take the year round, I make about a pound a week,because you can't do much in the winter. Boat Race day, and CupFinal day, I've took as much as four pounds. But you have tocut it out of them, you know; you don't take a bob if youjust sit and look at them. A halfpenny's the usual drop [gift], andyou don't get even that unless you give them a bit of backchat.Once they've answered you they feel ashamed not to give you a drop.The best thing's to keep changing your picture, because when theysee you drawing they'll stop and watch you. The trouble is, thebeggars scatter as soon as you turn round with the hat. You reallywant a nobber [assistant] at this game. You keep at work and get acrowd watching you, and the nobber comes casual-like round the backof them. They don't know he's the nobber. Then suddenly he pullshis cap off, and you got them between two fires like. You'll neverget a drop off real toffs. It's shabby sort of blokes you get mostoff, and foreigners. I've had even sixpences off Japs, andblackies, and that. They're not so bloody mean as what anEnglishman is. Another thing to remember is to keep your moneycovered up, except perhaps a penny in the hat. People won't giveyou anything if they see you got a bob or two already.'

Bozo had the deepest contempt for the other screevers on theEmbankment. He called them 'the salmon platers'. At that time therewas a screever almost every twenty-five yards along theEmbankment—twenty-five yards being the recognized minimumbetween pitches. Bozo contemptuously pointed out an oldwhite-bearded screever fifty yards away.

'You see that silly old fool? He's bin doing the same pictureevery day for ten years. "A faithful friend" he calls it. It's of adog pulling a child out of the water. The silly old bastard can'tdraw any better than a child of ten. He's learned just that onepicture by rule of thumb, like you learn to put a puzzle together.There's a lot of that sort about here. They come pinching my ideassometimes; but I don't care; the silly——s can't thinkof anything for themselves, so I'm always ahead of them. The wholething with cartoons is being up to date. Once a child got its headstuck in the railings of Chelsea Bridge. Well, I heard about it,and my cartoon was on the pavement before they'd got the child'shead out of the railings. Prompt, I am.'

Bozo seemed an interesting man, and I was anxious to see more ofhim. That evening I went down to the Embankment to meet him, as hehad arranged to take Paddy and myself to a lodging-house south ofthe river. Bozo washed his pictures off the pavement and countedhis takings—it was about sixteen shillings, of which he saidtwelve or thirteen would be profit. We walked down into Lambeth.Bozo limped slowly, with a queer crablike gait, half sideways,dragging his smashed foot behind him. He carried a stick in eachhand and slung his box of colours over his shoulder. As we werecrossing the bridge he stopped in one of the alcoves to rest. Hefell silent for a minute or two, and to my surprise I saw that hewas looking at the stars. He touched my arm and pointed to the skywith his stick.

'Say, will you look at Aldebaran! Look at the colour. Likea—great blood orange!'

From the way he spoke he might have been an art critic in apicture gallery. I was astonished. I confessed that I did not knowwhich Aldebaran was—indeed, I had never even noticed that thestars were of different colours. Bozo began to give me someelementary hints on astronomy, pointing out-the chiefconstellations. He seemed concerned at my ignorance. I said to him,surprised:

'You seem to know a lot about stars.'

'Not a great lot. I know a bit, though. I got two letters fromthe Astronomer Royal thanking me for writing about meteors. Now andagain I go out at night and watch for meteors. The stars are a freeshow; it don't cost anything to use your eyes.'

'What a good idea! I should never have thought of it.'

'Well, you got to take an interest in something. It don't followthat because a man's on the road he can't think of anything buttea-and-two-slices.'

'But isn't it very hard to take an interest inthings—things like stars—living this life?'

'Screeving, you mean? Not necessarily. It don't need turn youinto a bloody rabbit—that is, not if you set your mind toit.'

'It seems to have that effect on most people.'

'Of course. Look at Paddy—a tea-swilling old moocher, onlyfit to scrounge for fa*g-ends. That's the way most of them go. Idespise them. But you don't need to get like that. If you'vegot any education, it don't matter to you if you're on the road forthe rest of your life.'

'Well, I've found just the contrary,' I said. 'It seems to methat when you take a man's money away he's fit for nothing fromthat moment.'

'No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can livethe same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your booksand your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man inhere"'—he tapped his forehead—'and you're allright.'

Bozo talked further in the same strain, and I listened withattention. He seemed a very unusual screever, and he was, moreover,the first person I had heard maintain that poverty did not matter.I saw a good deal of him during the next few days, for severaltimes it rained and he could not work. He told me the history ofhis life, and it was a curious one.

The son of a bankrupt bookseller, he had gone to work as ahouse-painter at eighteen, and then served three years in Franceand India during the war. After the war he had found ahouse-painting job in Paris, and had stayed there several years.France suited him better than England (he despised the English),and he had been doing well in Paris, saving money, and engaged to aFrench girl. One day the girl was crushed to death under the wheelsof an omnibus. Bozo went on the drink for a week, and then returnedto work, rather shaky; the same morning he fell from a stage onwhich he was working, forty feet on to the pavement, and smashedhis right foot to pulp. For some reason he received only sixtypounds compensation. He returned to England, spent his money inlooking for jobs, tried hawking books in Middlesex Street market,then tried selling toys from a tray, and finally settled down as ascreever. He had lived hand to mouth ever since, half starvedthroughout the winter, and often sleeping in the spike or on theEmbankment.

When I knew him he owned nothing but the clothes he stood up in,and his drawing materials and a few books. The clothes were theusual beggar's rags, but he wore a collar and tie, of which he wasrather proud. The collar, a year or more old, was constantly'going' round the neck, and Bozo used to patch it with bits cutfrom the tail of his shirt so that the shirt had scarcely any tailleft. His damaged leg was getting worse and would probably have tobe amputated, and his knees, from kneeling on the stones, had padsof skin on them as thick as boot-soles. There was, clearly, nofuture for him but beggary and a death in the workhouse.

With all this, he had neither fear, nor regret, nor shame, norself-pity. He had faced his position, and made a philosophy forhimself. Being a beggar, he said, was not his fault, and he refusedeither to have any compunction about it or to let it trouble him.He was the enemy of society, and quite ready to take to crime if hesaw a good opportunity. He refused on principle to be thrifty. Inthe summer he saved nothing, spending his surplus earnings ondrink, as he did not care about women. If he was penniless whenwinter came on, then society must look after him. He was ready toextract every penny he could from charity, provided that he was notexpected to say thank you for it. He avoided religious charities,however, for he said it stuck in his throat to sing hymns for buns.He had various other points of honour; for instance, it was hisboast that never in his life, even when starving, had he picked upa cigarette end. He considered himself in a class above theordinary run of beggars, who, he said, were an abject lot, withouteven the decency to be ungrateful.

He spoke French passably, and had read some of Zola's novels,all Shakespeare's plays, Gulliver's Travels, and a number ofessays. He could describe his adventures in words that oneremembered. For instance, speaking of funerals, he said to me:

'Have you-ever seen a corpse burned? I have, in India. They putthe old chap on the fire, and the next moment I almost jumped outof my skin, because he'd started kicking. It was only his musclescontracting in the heat—still, it give me a turn. Well, hewriggled about for a bit like a kipper on hot coals, and then hisbelly blew up and went off with a bang you could have heard fiftyyards away. It fair put me against cremation.'

Or, again, apropos of his accident:

'The doctor says to me, "You fell on one foot, my man. Andbloody lucky for you you didn't fall on both feet," he says."Because if you had of fallen on both feet you'd have shut up likea bloody concertina, and your thigh bones'd be sticking out of yourears!"'

Clearly the phrase was not the doctor's but Bozo's own. He had agift for phrases. He had managed to keep his brain intact andalert, and so nothing could make him succumb to poverty. He mightbe ragged and cold, or even starving, but so long as he could read,think, and watch for meteors, he was, as he said, free in his ownmind.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does notso much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took asort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would neverimprove. Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, ithad consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that therewere probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theoryabout this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet ispoor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climateand scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondinglyharsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealingsixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thoughtcheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.

XXXI

THE charge at Bozo's lodging-house was ninepence a night. It wasa large, crowded place, with accommodation for five hundred men,and a well-known rendezvous of tramps, beggars, and pettycriminals. All races, even black and white, mixed in it on terms ofequality. There were Indians there, and when I spoke to one of themin bad Urdu he addressed me as 'turn'—a thing to make oneshudder, if it had been in India. We had got below the range ofcolour prejudice. One had glimpses of curious lives. Old 'Grandpa',a tramp of seventy who made his living, or a great part of it, bycollecting cigarette ends and selling the tobacco at threepence anounce. 'The Doctor'—he was a real doctor, who had been struckoff the register for some offence, and besides selling newspapersgave medical advice at a few pence a time. A little Chittagonianlascar, barefoot and starving, who had deserted his ship andwandered for days through London, so vague and helpless that he didnot even know the name of the city he was in—he thought itwas Liverpool, until I told him. A begging-letter writer, a friendof Bozo's, who wrote pathetic appeals for aid to pay for his wife'sfuneral, and, when a letter had taken effect, blew himself out withhuge solitary gorges of bread and margarine. He was a nasty,hyena-like creature. I talked to him and found that, like mostswindlers, he believed a great part of his own lies. Thelodging-house was an Alsatia for types like these.

While I was with Bozo he taught me something about the techniqueof London begging. There is more in it than one might suppose.Beggars vary greatly, and there is a sharp social line betweenthose who merely cadge and those who attempt to give some value formoney. The amounts that one can earn by the different 'gags' alsovary. The stories in the Sunday papers about beggars who die withtwo thousand pounds sewn into their trousers are, of course, lies;but the better-class beggars do have runs of luck, when they earn aliving wage for weeks at a time. The most prosperous beggars arestreet acrobats and street photographers. On a good pitch—atheatre queue, for instance—a street acrobat will often earnfive pounds a week. Street photographers can earn about the same,but they are dependent on fine weather. They have a cunning dodgeto stimulate trade. When they see a likely victim approaching oneof them runs behind the camera and pretends to take a photograph.Then as the victim reaches them, they exclaim:

'There y'are, sir, took yer photo lovely. That'll be a bob.'

'But I never asked you to take it,' protests the victim.

'What, you didn't want it took? Why, we thought you signalledwith your 'and. Well, there's a plate wasted! That's cost ussixpence, that 'as.'

At this the victim usually takes pity and says he will have thephoto after all. The photographers examine the plate and say thatit is spoiled, and that they will take a fresh one free of charge.Of course, they have not really taken the first photo; and so, ifthe victim refuses, they waste nothing.

Organ-grinders, like acrobats, are considered artists ratherthan beggars. An organ-grinder named Shorty, a friend of Bozo's,told me all about his trade. He and his mate 'worked' thecoffee-shops and public-houses round Whitechapel and the CommercialRoad. It is a mistake to think that organ-grinders earn theirliving in the street; nine-tenths of their money is taken incoffee-shops and pubs—only the cheap pubs, for they are notallowed into the good-class ones. Shorty's procedure was to stopoutside a pub and play one tune, after which his mate, who had awooden leg and could excite compassion, went in and passed roundthe hat. It was a point of honour with Shorty always to playanother tune after receiving the 'drop'—an encore, as itwere; the idea being that he was a genuine entertainer and notmerely paid to go away. He and his mate took two or three pounds aweek between them, but, as they had to pay fifteen shillings a weekfor the hire of the organ, they only averaged a pound a week each.They were on the streets from eight in the morning till ten atnight, and later on Saturdays.

Screevers can sometimes be called artists, sometimes not. Bozointroduced me to one who was a 'real' artist—that is, he hadstudied art in Paris and submitted pictures to the Salon in hisday. His line was copies of Old Masters, which he did marvellously,considering that he was drawing on stone. He told me how he beganas a screever:

'My wife and kids Were starving. I was walking home late atnight, with a lot of drawings I'd been taking round the dealers,and wondering how the devil to raise a bob or two. Then, in theStrand, I saw a fellow kneeling on the pavement drawing, and peoplegiving him pennies. As I came past he got up and went into a pub."Damn it," I thought, "if he can make money at that, so can I." Soon the impulse I knelt down and began drawing with his chalks.Heaven knows how I came to do it; I must have been lightheaded withhunger. The curious thing was that I'd never used pastels before; Ihad to learn the technique as I went along. Well, people began tostop and say that my drawing wasn't bad, arid they gave meninepence between them. At this moment the other fellow came out ofthe pub. "What in—are you doing on my pitch?" he said. Iexplained that I was hungry and had to earn something. "Oh," saidhe, "come and have a pint with me." So I had a pint, and since thatday I've been a screever. I make a pound a week. You can't keep sixkids on a pound a week, but luckily my wife earns a bit taking insewing.

'The worst thing in this life is the cold, and the next worst isthe interference you have to put up with. At first, not knowing anybetter, I used sometimes to copy a nude on the pavement. The firstI did was outside St Martin's-in-the-Fields church. A fellow inblack—I suppose he was a churchwarden or something—cameout in a tearing rage. "Do you think we can have that obscenityoutside God's holy house?" he cried. So I had to wash it out. Itwas a copy of Botticelli's Venus. Another time I copied the samepicture on the Embankment. A policeman passing looked at it, andthen, without a word, walked on to it and rubbed it out with hisgreat flat feet.'

Bozo told the same tale of police interference. At the time whenI was with him there had been a case of 'immoral conduct' in HydePark, in which the police had behaved rather badly. Bozo produced acartoon of Hyde Park with policemen concealed in the trees, and thelegend, 'Puzzle, find the policemen.' I pointed out to him how muchmore telling it would be to put, 'Puzzle, find the immoralconduct,' but Bozo would not hear of it. He said that any policemanwho saw it would move him on, and he would lose his pitch forgood.

Below screevers come the people who sing hymns, or sell matches,or bootlaces, or envelopes containing a few grains oflavender—called, euphemistically, perfume. All these peopleare frankly beggars, exploiting an appearance of misery, and noneof them takes on an average more than half a crown a day. Thereason why they have to pretend to sell matches and so forthinstead of begging outright is that this is demanded by the absurdEnglish laws about begging. As the law now stands, if you approacha stranger and ask him for twopence, he can call a policeman andget you seven days for begging. But if you make the air hideous bydroning 'Nearer, my God, to Thee,' or scrawl some chalk daubs onthe pavement, or stand about with a tray of matches—in short,if you make a nuisance of yourself—you are held to befollowing a legitimate trade and not begging. Match-selling andstreet-singing are simply legalized crimes. Not profitable crimes,however; there is not a singer or match-seller in London who can besure of 50 pounds a year—a poor return for standingeighty-four hours a week on the kerb, with the cars grazing yourbackside.

It is worth saying something about the social position ofbeggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that theyare ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by thecurious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem tofeel that there is some essential difference between beggars andordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart—outcasts, likecriminals and prostitutes. Working men 'work', beggars do not'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It istaken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as abricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere socialexcrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, butessentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is noessential difference between a beggar's livelihood and thatof numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said;but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick.An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works bystanding out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins,chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quiteuseless, of course—but, then, many reputable trades are quiteuseless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores ofothers. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patentmedicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor,amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout—in short, aparasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts morethan a bare living from the community, and, what should justify himaccording to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over insuffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar thatsets him in a different class from other people, or gives mostmodern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?—forthey are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simplereason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobodycares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic;the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all themodern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the restof it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, andget a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. Bythis test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If onecould earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become arespectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked atrealistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, likeother businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, morethan most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made themistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to growrich.

XXXII

I WANT to put in some notes, as short as possible, on Londonslang and swearing. These (omitting the ones that everyone knows)are some of the cant words now used in London:

A gagger—beggar or street performer of any kind. Amoocher—one who begs outright, without pretence of doing atrade. A nobbier—one who collects pennies for a beggar. Achanter—a street singer. A clodhopper —a street dancer.A mugfaker—a street photographer. A glimmer—one whowatches vacant motor-cars. A gee (or jee—it is pronouncedjee)—the accomplice of a cheapjack, who stimulates trade bypretending to buy something. A split—a detective. Aflattie—a policeman. A dideki—a gypsy. A toby—atramp.

A drop—money given to a beggar. Funkum—lavender orother perfume sold in envelopes. A boozer—a public-house. Aslang—a hawker's licence. A kip—a place to sleep in, ora night's lodging. Smoke— London. A judy—a woman. Thespike—the casual ward. The lump—the casual ward. Atosheroon—a half-crown. A deaner—a shilling. Ahog—a shilling. A sprowsie—a sixpence.Clods—coppers. A drum—a billy can. Shackles—soup.A chat—a louse. Hard-up—tobacco made from cigaretteends. A stick or cane—a burglar's jemmy. A peter—asafe. A bly—a burglar's oxy-acetylene blow-lamp.

To bawl—to suck or swallow. To knock off—to steal.To skipper—to sleep in the open.

About half of these words are in the larger dictionaries. It isinteresting to guess at the derivation of some of them, though oneor two—for instance, 'funkum' and 'tosheroon'—arebeyond guessing. 'Deaner' presumably comes from 'denier'. 'Glimmer'(with the verb 'to glim') may have something to do with the oldword 'glim', meaning a light, or another old word 'glim', meaning aglimpse; but it is an instance of the formation of new words, forin its present sense it can hardly be older than motor-cars. 'Gee'is a curious word; conceivably it has arisen out of 'gee', meaninghorse, in the sense of stalking horse. The derivation of 'screever'is mysterious. It must come ultimately from scribo, butthere has been no similar word in English for the past hundred andfifty years; nor can it have come directly from the French, forpavement artists are unknown in France. 'Judy' and 'bawl' are EastEnd words, not found west of Tower Bridge. 'Smoke' is a word usedonly by tramps. 'Kip' is Danish. Till quite recently the word'doss' was used in this sense, but it is now quite obsolete.

London slang and dialect seem to change very rapidly. The oldLondon accent described by Dickens and Surtees, with v for w and wfor v and so forth, has now vanished utterly. The co*ckney accent aswe know it seems to have come up in the 'forties (it is firstmentioned in an American book, Herman Melville's WhiteJacket), and co*ckney is already changing; there are few peoplenow who say 'fice' for 'face', 'nawce' for 'nice' and so forth asconsistently as they did twenty years ago. The slang changestogether with the accent. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, forinstance, the 'rhyming slang' was all the rage in London. In the'rhyming slang' everything was named by something rhyming withit—a 'hit or miss' for a kiss, 'plates of meat' for feet,etc. It was so common that it was even reproduced in novels; now itis almost extinct*. Perhaps all the words I have mentioned abovewill have vanished in another twenty years.

[* It survives in certain abbreviations, such as 'use yourtwopenny' or 'use your head.' 'Twopenny' is arrived at like this:head—loaf of bread—twopenny loaf—twopenny]

The swear words also change—or, at any rate, they aresubject to fashions. For example, twenty years ago the Londonworking classes habitually used the word 'bloody'. Now they haveabandoned it utterly, though novelists still represent them asusing it. No born Londoner (it is different with people of Scotchor Irish origin) now says 'bloody', unless he is a man of someeducation. The word has, in fact, moved up in the social scale andceased to be a swear word for the purposes of the working classes.The current London adjective, now tacked on to every noun, is——. No doubt in time ——, like 'bloody',will find its way into the drawing-room and be replaced by someother word.

The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, ismysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational asmagic—indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also aparadox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is toshock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should bekept secret—usually something to do with the sexualfunctions. But the strange thing is that when a word is wellestablished as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning;that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A wordbecomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because ithas become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing. Forexample—. The Londoners do not now use, or very seldom use,this word in its original meaning; it is on their lips from morningtill night, but it is a mere expletive and means nothing. Similarlywith—, which is rapidly losing its original sense. One canthink of similar instances in French—for example—,which is now a quite meaningless expletive.

The word—, also, is still used occasionally in Paris, butthe people who use it, or most of them, have no idea of what itonce meant. The rule seems to be that words accepted as swear wordshave some magical character, which sets them apart and makes themuseless for ordinary conversation.

Words used as insults seem to be governed by the same paradox asswear words. A word becomes an insult, one would suppose, becauseit means something bad; but in practice its insult-value has littleto do with its actual meaning. For example, the most bitter insultone can offer to a Londoner is 'bastard'—which, taken forwhat it means, is hardly an insult at all. And the worst insult toa woman, either in London or Paris, is 'cow'; a name which mighteven be a compliment, for cows are among the most likeable ofanimals. Evidently a word is an insult simply because it is meantas an insult, without reference to its dictionary meaning; words,especially swear words, being what public opinion chooses to makethem. In this connexion it is interesting to see how a swear wordcan change character by crossing a frontier. In England you canprint 'Je m'en fous' without protest from anybody. In Franceyou have to print it 'Je m'en f—'. Or, as anotherexample, take the word 'barnshoot'—a corruption of theHindustani word bahinchut. A vile and unforgivable insult inIndia, this word is a piece of gentle badinage in England. I haveeven seen it in a school text-book; it was in one of Aristophanes'plays, and the annotator suggested it as a rendering of somegibberish spoken by a Persian ambassador. Presumably the annotatorknew what bahinchut meant. But, because it was a foreignword, it had lost its magical swear-word quality and could beprinted.

One other thing is noticeable about swearing in London, and thatis that the men do not usually swear in front of the women. InParis it is quite different. A Parisian workman may prefer tosuppress an oath in front of a woman, but he is not at allscrupulous about it, and the women themselves swear freely. TheLondoners are more polite, or more squeamish, in this matter.

These are a few notes that I have set down more or less atrandom. It is a pity that someone capable of dealing with thesubject does not keep a year-book of London slang and swearing,registering the changes accurately. It might throw useful lightupon the formation, development, and obsolescence of words.

XXXIII

THE two pounds that B. had given me lasted about ten days. Thatit lasted so long was due to Paddy, who had learned parsimony onthe road and considered even one sound meal a day a wildextravagance. Food, to him, had come to mean simply bread andmargarine—the eternal tea-and-two-slices, which will cheathunger for an hour or two. He taught me how to live, food, bed,tobacco, and all, at the rate of half a crown a day. And he managedto earn a few extra shillings by 'glimming' in the evenings. It wasa precarious job, because illegal, but it brought in a little andeked out our money.

One morning we tried for a job as sandwich men. We went at fiveto an alley-way behind some offices, but there was already a queueof thirty or forty men waiting, and after two hours we were toldthat there was no work for us. We had not missed much, for sandwichmen have an unenviable job. They are paid about three shillings aday for ten hours' work—it is hard work, especially in windyweather, and there is no skulking, for an inspector comes roundfrequently to see that the men are on their beat. To add to theirtroubles, they are only engaged by the day, or sometimes for threedays, never weekly, so that they have to wait hours for their jobevery morning. The number of unemployed men who are ready to do thework makes them powerless to fight for better treatment. The joball sandwich men covet is distributing handbills, which is paid forat the same rate. When you see a man distributing handbills you cando him a good turn by taking one, for he goes off duty when he hasdistributed all his bills.

Meanwhile we went on with the lodging-house life—asqualid, eventless life of crushing boredom. For days togetherthere was nothing to do but sit in the underground kitchen, readingyesterday's newspaper, or, when one could get hold of it, a backnumber of the Union Jack. It rained a great deal at thistime, and everyone who came in Steamed, so that the kitchen stankhorribly. One's only excitement was the periodicaltea-and-two-slices. I do not know how many men are living this lifein London—it must be thousands at the least. As to Paddy, itwas actually the best life he had known for two years past. Hisinterludes from tramping, the times when he had somehow laid handson a few shillings, had all been like this; the tramping itself hadbeen slightly worse. Listening to his whimpering voice—he wasalways whimpering when he was not eating—one realized whattorture unemployment must be to him. People are wrong when theythink that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages;on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in hisbones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated mancan put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evilsof poverty. But a man like Paddy, with no means of filling up time,is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why itis such nonsense to pretend that those who have 'come down in theworld' are to be pitied above all others. The man who really meritspity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces povertywith a blank, resourceless mind.

It was a dull rime, and little of it stays in my mind, exceptfor talks with Bozo. Once the lodging-house was invaded by aslumming-party. Paddy and I had been out, and, coming back in theafternoon, we heard sounds of music downstairs. We went down tofind three gentle-people, sleekly dressed, holding a religiousservice in our kitchen. They Were a grave and reverend seignior ina frock coat, a lady sitting at a portable harmonium, and achinless youth toying with a crucifix. It appeared that they hadmarched in and started to hold the service, without any kind ofinvitation whatever.

It was a pleasure to see how the lodgers met this intrusion.They did not offer the smallest rudeness to the slummers; they justignored them. By common consent everyone in the kitchen—ahundred men, perhaps—behaved as though the slummers had notexisted. There they stood patiently singing and exhorting, and nomore notice was taken of them than if they had been earwigs. Thegentleman in the frock coat preached a sermon, but not a word of itwas audible; it was drowned in the usual din of songs, oaths, andthe clattering of pans. Men sat at their meals and card games threefeet away from the harmonium, peaceably ignoring it. Presently theslummers gave it up and cleared out, not insulted in any way, butmerely disregarded. No doubt they consoled themselves by thinkinghow brave they had been, 'freely venturing into the lowest dens,'etc. etc.

Bozo said that these people came to the lodging-house severaltimes a month. They had influence with the police, and the 'deputy'could not exclude them. It is curious how people take it forgranted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over youas soon as your income falls below a certain level.

After nine days B.'s two pounds was reduced to one andninepence. Paddy and I set aside eighteenpence for our beds, andspent threepence on the usual tea-and-two-slices, which weshared—an appetizer rather than a meal. By the afternoon wewere damnably hungry and Paddy remembered a church near King'sCross Station where a free tea was given once a week to tramps.This was the day, and we decided to go there. Bozo, though it wasrainy weather and he was almost penniless, would not come, sayingthat churches were not his style.

Outside the church quite a hundred men were waiting, dirty typeswho had gathered from far and wide at the news of a free tea, likekites round a dead buffalo. Presently the doors opened and aclergyman and some girls shepherded us into a gallery at the top ofthe church. It was an evangelical church, gaunt and wilfully ugly,with texts about blood and fire blazoned on the walls, and ahymn-book containing twelve hundred and fifty-one hymns; readingsome of the hymns, I concluded that the book would do as it stoodfor an anthology of bad verse. There was to be a service after thetea, and the regular congregation were sitting in the well of thechurch below. It was a week-day, and there were only a few dozen ofthem, mostly stringy old women who reminded one of boiling-fowls.We ranged ourselves in the gallery pews and were given our tea; itwas a one-pound jam-jar of tea each, with six slices of bread andmargarine. As soon as tea was over, a dozen tramps who hadstationed themselves near the door bolted to avoid the service; therest stayed, less from gratitude than lacking the cheek to go.

The organ let out a few preliminary hoots and the service began.And instantly, as though at a signal, the tramps began to misbehavein the most outrageous way. One would not have thought such scenespossible in a church. All round the gallery men lolled in theirpews, laughed, chattered, leaned over and flicked pellets of breadamong the congregation; I had to restrain the man next to me, moreor less by force, from lighting a cigarette. The tramps treated theservice as a purely comic spectacle. It was, indeed, a sufficientlyludicrous service—the kind where there are sudden yells of'Hallelujah!' and endless extempore prayers—but theirbehaviour passed all bounds. There was one old fellow in thecongregation—Brother Bootle or some such name—who wasoften called on to lead us in prayer, and whenever he stood up thetramps would begin stamping as though in a theatre; they said thaton a previous occasion he had kept up an extempore prayer fortwenty-five minutes, until the minister had interrupted him. Oncewhen Brother Bootle stood up a tramp called out, 'Two to one 'edon't beat seven minutes!' so loud that the whole church must hear.It was not long before we were making far more noise than theminister. Sometimes somebody below would send up an indignant'Hush!' but it made no impression. We had set ourselves to guy theservice, and there was no stopping us.

It was a queer, rather disgusting scene. Below were the handfulof simple, well-meaning people, trying hard to worship; and abovewere the hundred men whom they had fed, deliberately making worshipimpossible. A ring of dirty, hairy faces grinned down from thegallery, openly jeering. What could a few women and old men doagainst a hundred hostile tramps? They were afraid of us, and wewere frankly bullying them. It was our revenge upon them for havinghumiliated us by feeding us.

The minister was a brave man. He thundered steadily through along sermon on Joshua, and managed almost to ignore the snigg*rsand chattering from above. But in the end, perhaps goaded beyondendurance, he announced loudly:

'I shall address the last five minutes of my sermon to theunsaved sinners!'

Having said which, he turned his face to the gallery and kept itso for five minutes, lest there should be any doubt about who weresaved and who unsaved. But much we cared! Even while the ministerwas threatening hell fire, we were rolling cigarettes, and at thelast amen we clattered down the stairs with a yell, many agreeingto come back for another free tea next week.

The scene had interested me. It was so different from theordinary demeanour of tramps—from the abject worm-likegratitude with which they normally accept charity. The explanation,of course, was that we outnumbered the congregation and so were notafraid of them. A man receiving charity practically always hateshis benefactor—it is a fixed characteristic of human nature;and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he willshow it.

In the evening, after the free tea, Paddy unexpectedly earnedanother eighteenpence at 'glimming'. It was exactly enough foranother night's lodging, and we put it aside and went hungry tillnine the next evening. Bozo, who might have given us some food, wasaway all day. The pavements were wet, and he had gone to theElephant and Castle, where he knew of a pitch under shelter.Luckily I still had some tobacco, so that the day might have beenworse.

At half past eight Paddy took me to the Embankment, where aclergyman was known to distribute meal tickets once a week. UnderCharing Cross Bridge fifty men were waiting, mirrored in theshivering puddles. Some of them were truly appallingspecimens—they were Embankment sleepers, and the Embankmentdredges up worse types than the spike. One of them, I remember, wasdressed in an overcoat without buttons, laced up with rope, a pairof ragged trousers, and boots exposing his toes—not a ragelse. He was bearded like a fakir, and he had managed to streak hischest and shoulders with some horrible black filth resembling trainoil. What one could see of his face under the dirt and hair wasbleached white as paper by some malignant disease. I heard himspeak, and he had a goodish accent, as of a clerk orshopwalker.

Presently the clergyman appeared and the men ranged themselvesin a queue in the order in which they had arrived. The clergymanwas a nice, chubby, youngish man, and, curiously enough, very likeCharlie, my friend in Paris. He was shy and embarrassed, and didnot speak except for a brief good evening; he simply hurried downthe line of men, thrusting a ticket upon each, and not waiting tobe thanked. The consequence was that, for once, there was genuinegratitude, and everyone said that the clergyman was a—goodfeller. Someone (in his hearing, I believe) called out: 'Well,he'll never be a—bishop!'—this, of course,intended as a warm compliment.

The tickets were worth sixpence each, and were directed to aneating-house not far away. When we got there we found that theproprietor, knowing that the tramps could not go elsewhere, wascheating by only giving four pennyworth of food for each ticket.Paddy and I pooled our tickets, and received food which we couldhave got for sevenpence or eightpence at most coffee-shops. Theclergyman had distributed well over a pound in tickets, so that theproprietor was evidently swindling the tramps to the tune of sevenshillings or more a week. This kind of victimization is a regularpart of a tramp's life, and it will go on as long as peoplecontinue to give meal tickets instead of money.

Paddy and I went back to the lodging-house and, still hungry,loafed in the kitchen, making the warmth of the fire a substitutefor food. At half-past ten Bozo arrived, tired out and haggard, forhis mangled leg made walking an agony. He had not earned a penny atscreeving, all the pitches under shelter being taken, and forseveral hours he had begged outright, with one eye on thepolicemen. He had amassed eightpence—a penny short of hiskip. It was long past the hour for paying, and he had only managedto slip indoors when the deputy was not looking; at any moment hemight be caught and turned out, to sleep on the Embankment. Bozotook the things out of his pockets and looked them over, debatingwhat to sell. He decided on his razor, took it round the kitchen,and in a few minutes he had sold it for threepence—enough topay his kip, buy a basin of tea, and leave a half-penny over.

Bozo got his basin of tea and sat down by the fire to dry hisclothes. As he drank the tea I saw that he was laughing to himself,as though at some good joke. Surprised, I asked him what he had tolaugh at.

'It's bloody funny!' he said. 'It's funny enough forPunch. What do you think I been and done?'

'What?'

'Sold my razor without having a shave first: Of allthe—fools!'

He had not eaten since the morning, had walked several mileswith a twisted leg, his clothes were drenched, and he had ahalfpenny between himself and starvation. With all this, he couldlaugh over the loss of his razor. One could not help admiringhim.

XXXIV

THE next morning, our money being at an end, Paddy and I set outfor the spike. We went southward by the Old Kent Road, making forCromley; we could not go to a London spike, for Paddy had been inone recently and did not care to risk going again. It was asixteen-mile walk over asphalt, blistering to the heels, and wewere acutely hungry. Paddy browsed the pavement, laying up a storeof cigarette ends against his time in the spike. In the end hisperseverance was rewarded, for he picked up a penny. We bought alarge piece of stale bread, and devoured it as we walked.

When we got to Cromley, it was too early to go to the spike, andwe walked several miles farther, to a plantation beside a meadow,where one could sit down. It was a regular caravanserai oftramps—one could tell it by the worn grass and the soddennewspaper and rusty cans that they had left behind. Other trampswere arriving by ones and twos. It was jolly autumn weather. Nearby, a deep bed of tansies was growing; it seems to me that even nowI can smell the sharp reek of those tansies, warring with the reekof tramps. In the meadow two carthorse colts, raw sienna colourwith white manes and tails, were nibbling at a gate. We. sprawledabout on the ground, sweaty and exhausted. Someone managed to finddry sticks and get a fire going, and we all had milkless tea out ofa tin 'drum' which was passed round.

Some of the tramps began telling stories. One of them, Bill, wasan interesting type, a genuine sturdy beggar of the old breed,strong as Hercules and a frank foe of work. He boasted that withhis great strength he could get a navvying job any time he liked,but as soon as he drew his first week's wages he went on a terrificdrunk and was sacked. Between whiles he 'mooched', chiefly fromshopkeepers. He talked like this:

'I ain't goin' far in—Kent. Kent's a tight county, Kentis. There's too many bin' moochin' about 'ere. The—bakers getso as they'll throw their bread away sooner'n give it you. NowOxford, that's the place for moochin', Oxford is. When I was inOxford I mooched bread, and I mooched bacon, and I mooched beef,and every night I mooched tanners for my kip off of the students.The last night I was twopence short of my kip, so I goes up to aparson and mooches 'im for threepence. He give me threepence, andthe next moment he turns round and gives me in charge for beggin'."You bin beggin'," the copper says. "No I ain't," I says, "I wasaskin' the gentleman the time," I says. The copper starts feelin'inside my coat, and he pulls out a pound of meat and two loaves ofbread. "Well, what's all this, then?" he says. "You better come'long to the station," he says. The beak give me seven days. Idon't mooch from no more—parsons. But Christ! what do I carefor a lay-up of seven days?' etc. etc.

It seemed that his whole life was this—a round ofmooching, drunks, and lay-ups. He laughed as he talked of it,taking it all for a tremendous joke. He looked as though he made apoor thing out of begging, for he wore only a corduroy suit, scarf,and cap—no socks or linen. Still, he was fat and jolly, andhe even smelt of beer, a most unusual smell in a trampnowadays.

Two of the tramps had been in Cromley spike recently, and theytold a ghost story connected with it. Years earlier, they said,there had been a suicide there. A tramp had managed to smuggle arazor into his cell, and there cut his throat. In the morning, whenthe Tramp Major came round, the body was jammed against the door,and to open it they had to break the dead man's arm. In revenge forthis, the dead man haunted his cell, and anyone who slept there wascertain to die within the year; there were copious instances, ofcourse. If a cell door stuck when you tried to open it, you shouldavoid that cell like the plague, for it was the haunted one.

Two tramps, ex-sailors, told another grisly story. A man (theyswore they had known him) had planned to stow away on a boat boundfor Chile. It was laden with manufactured goods packed in bigwooden crates, and with the help of a docker the stowaway hadmanaged to hide himself in one of these. But the docker had made amistake about the order in which the crates were to be loaded. Thecrane gripped the stowaway, swung him aloft, and depositedhim—at the very bottom of the hold, beneath hundreds ofcrates. No one discovered what had happened until the end of thevoyage, when they found the stowaway rotting, dead ofsuffocation.

Another tramp told the story of Gilderoy, the Scottish robber.Gilderoy was the man who was condemned to be hanged, escaped,captured the judge who had sentenced him, and (splendid fellow!)hanged him. The tramps liked the story, of course, but theinteresting thing was to see that they had got it all wrong. Theirversion was that Gilderoy escaped to America, whereas in reality hewas recaptured and put to death. The story had been amended, nodoubt deliberately; just as children amend the stories of Samsonand Robin Hood, giving them happy endings which are quiteimaginary.

This set the tramps talking about history, and a very old mandeclared that the 'one bite law' was a survival from days when thenobles hunted men instead of deer. Some of the others laughed athim, but he had the idea firm in his head. He had heard, too, ofthe Corn Laws, and the jus primae noctis (he believed it hadreally existed); also of the Great Rebellion, which he thought wasa rebellion of poor against rich—perhaps he had got it mixedup with the peasant rebellions. I doubt whether the old man couldread, and certainly he was not repeating newspaper articles. Hisscraps of history had been passed from generation to generation oftramps, perhaps for centuries in some cases. It was oral traditionlingering on, like a faint echo from the Middle Ages.

Paddy and I went to the spike at six in the evening, getting outat ten in the morning. It was much like Romton and Edbury, and wesaw nothing of the ghost. Among the casuals were two young mennamed William and Fred, ex-fishermen from Norfolk, a lively pairand fond of singing. They had a song called 'Unhappy Bella' that isworth writing down. I heard them sing it half a dozen times duringthe next two days, and I managed to get it by heart, except a lineor two which I have guessed. It ran:

Bella was young and Bella was fair
With bright blue eyes and golden hair,
O unhappy Bella!
Her step was light and her heart was gay,
But she had no sense, and one fine day
She got herself put in the family way
By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.

Poor Bella was young, she didn't believe
That the world is hard and men deceive,
O unhappy Bella!
She said, 'My man will do what's just,
He'll marry me now, because he must';
Her heart was full of loving trust
In a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver
.
She went to his house; that dirty skunk
Had packed his bags and done a bunk,
O unhappy Bella!
Her landlady said, 'Get out, you whor*,
I won't have your sort a-darkening my door.'
Poor Bella was put to affliction sore
By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.

All night she tramped the cruel snows,
What she must have suffered nobody knows,
O unhappy Bella!
And when the morning dawned so red,
Alas, alas, poor Bella was dead,
Sent so young to her lonely bed
By a wicked, heartless, cruel deceiver.

So thus, you see, do what you will,
The fruits of sin are suffering still,
O unhappy Bella!
As into the grave they laid her low,
The men said, 'Alas, but life is so,'
But the women chanted, sweet and low,
'It's all the men, the dirty bastards!'

Written by a woman, perhaps.

William and Fred, the singers of this song, were thoroughscallywags, the sort of men who get tramps a bad name. Theyhappened to know that the Tramp Major at Cromley had a stock of oldclothes, which were to be given at need to casuals. Before going inWilliam and Fred took off their boots, ripped the seams and cutpieces off the soles, more or less ruining them. Then they appliedfor two pairs of boots, and the Tramp Major, seeing how bad theirboots were, gave them almost new pairs. William and Fred werescarcely outside the spike in the morning before they had soldthese boots for one and ninepence. It seemed to them quite worthwhile, for one and ninepence, to make their own boots practicallyunwearable.

Leaving the spike, we all started southward, a long slouchingprocession, for Lower Binfield and Ide Hill. On the way there was afight between two of the tramps. They had quarrelled overnight(there was some silly casus belli about one saying to theother, 'Bull sh*t', which was taken for Bolshevik—a deadlyinsult), and they fought it out in a field. A dozen of us stayed towatch them. The scene sticks in my mind for one thing—the manwho was beaten going down, and his cap falling off and showing thathis hair was quite white. After that some of us intervened andstopped the fight. Paddy had meanwhile been making inquiries, andfound that the real cause of the quarrel was, as usual, a fewpennyworth of food.

We got to Lower Binfield quite early, and Paddy filled in thetime by asking for work at back doors. At one house he was givensome boxes to chop up for firewood, and, saying he had a mateoutside, he brought me in and we did the work together. When it wasdone the householder told the maid to take us out a cup of tea. Iremember the terrified way in which she brought it out, and then,losing her courage, set the cups down on the path and bolted backto the house, shutting herself in the kitchen. So dreadful is thename of 'tramp'. They paid us sixpence each, and we bought athreepenny loaf and half an ounce of tobacco, leavingfivepence.

Paddy thought it wiser to bury our fivepence, for the TrampMajor at Lower Binfield was renowned as a tyrant and might refuseto admit us if we had any money at all. It is quite a commonpractice of tramps to bury their money. If they intend to smuggleat all a large sum into the spike they generally sew it into theirclothes, which may mean prison if they are caught, of course. Paddyand Bozo used to tell a good story about this. An Irishman (Bozosaid it was an Irishman; Paddy said an Englishman), not a tramp,and in possession of thirty pounds, was stranded in a small villagewhere he could not get a bed. He consulted a tramp, who advised himto go to the workhouse. It is quite a regular proceeding, if onecannot get a bed elsewhere, to get one at the workhouse, paying areasonable sum for it. The Irishman, however, thought he would beclever and get a bed for nothing, so he presented himself at theworkhouse as an ordinary casual. He had sewn the thirty pounds intohis clothes. Meanwhile the tramp who had advised him had seen hischance, and that night he privately asked the Tramp Major forpermission to leave the spike early in the morning, as he had tosee about a job. At six in the morning he was released and wentout—in the Irishman's clothes. The Irishman complained of thetheft, and was given thirty days for going into a casual ward underfalse pretences.

XXXV

ARRIVED at Lower Binfield, we sprawled for a long time on thegreen, watched by cottagers from their front gates. A clergyman andhis daughter came and stared silently at us for a while, as thoughwe had been aquarium fishes, and then went away again. There wereseveral dozen of us waiting. William and Fred were there, stillsinging, and the men who had fought, and Bill the moocher. He hadbeen mooching from bakers, and had quantities of stale bread tuckedaway between his coat and his bare body. He shared it out, and wewere all glad of it. There was a woman among us, the first womantramp I had ever seen. She was a fattish, battered, very dirtywoman of sixty, in a long, trailing black skirt. She put on greatairs of dignity, and if anyone sat down near her she sniffed andmoved farther off.

'Where you bound for, missis?' one of the tramps called toher.

The woman sniffed and looked into the distance.

'Come on, missis,' he said, 'cheer up. Be chummy. We're all inthe same boat 'ere.'

'Thank you,' said the woman bitterly, 'when I want to get mixedup with a set of tramps, I'll let you know.'

I enjoyed the way she said tramps. It seemed to show youin a flash the whole other soul; a small, blinkered, feminine soul,that had learned absolutely nothing from years on the road. Shewas, no doubt, a respectable widow woman, become a tramp throughsome grotesque accident.

The spike opened at six. This was Saturday, and we were to beconfined over the week-end, which is the usual practice; why, I donot know, unless it is from a vague feeling that Sunday meritssomething disagreeable. When we registered I gave my trade as'journalist'. It was truer than 'painter', for I had sometimesearned money from newspaper articles, but it was a silly thing tosay, being bound to lead to questions. As soon as we were insidethe spike and had been lined up for the search, the Tramp Majorcalled my name. He was a stiff, soldierly man of forty, not lookingthe bully he had been represented, but with an old soldier'sgruffness. He said sharply:

'Which of you is Blank?' (I forget what name I had given.)

'Me, sir.'

'So you are a journalist?'

'Yes, sir,' I said, quaking. A few questions would betray thefact that I had been lying, which might mean prison. But the TrampMajor only looked me up and down and said:

'Then you are a gentleman?'

'I suppose so.'

He gave me another long look. 'Well, that's bloody bad luck,guv'nor,' he said; 'bloody bad luck that is.' And thereafter hetreated me with unfair favouritism, and even with a kind ofdeference. He did not search me, and in the bathroom he actuallygave me a clean towel to myself—an unheard-of luxury. Sopowerful is the word 'gentleman' in an old soldier's ear.

By seven we had wolfed our bread and tea and were in our cells.We slept one in a cell, and there were bedsteads and strawpalliasses, so that one ought to have had a good night's sleep. Butno spike is perfect, and the peculiar shortcoming at Lower Binfieldwas the cold. The hot pipes were not working, and the two blanketswe had been given were thin cotton things and almost useless. Itwas only autumn, but the cold was bitter. One spent the longtwelve-hour night in turning from side to side, falling asleep fora few minutes and waking up shivering. We could not smoke, for ourtobacco, which we had managed to smuggle in, was in our clothes andwe should not get these back till the morning. All down the passageone could hear groaning noises, and sometimes a shouted oath. Noone, I imagine, got more than an hour or two of sleep.

In the morning, after breakfast and the doctor's inspection, theTramp Major herded us all into the dining-room and locked the doorupon us. It was a limewashed, stone-floored room, unutterablydreary, with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and itsprison smell. The barred windows were too high to look out of, andthere were no ornaments save a clock and a copy of the workhouserules. Packed elbow to elbow on the benches, we were bored already,though it was barely eight in the morning. There was nothing to do,nothing to talk about, not even room to move. The sole consolationwas that one could smoke, for smoking was connived at so long asone was not caught in the act. Scotty, a little hairy tramp with abastard accent sired by co*ckney out of Glasgow, was tobaccoless,his tin of cigarette ends having fallen out of his boot during thesearch and been impounded. I stood him the makings of a cigarette.We smoked furtively, thrusting our cigarettes into our pockets,like schoolboys, when we heard the Tramp Major coming.

Most of the tramps spent ten continuous hours in thiscomfortless, soulless room. Heaven knows how they put up with it. Iwas luckier than the others, for at ten o'clock the Tramp Majortold off a few men for odd jobs, and he picked me out to help inthe workhouse kitchen, the most coveted job of all. This, like theclean towel, was a charm worked by the word 'gentleman'.

There was no work to do in the kitchen, and I sneaked off into asmall shed used for storing potatoes, where some workhouse pauperswere skulking to avoid the Sunday morning service. There werecomfortable packing-cases to sit on, and some back numbers of theFamily Herald, and even a copy of Raffles from theworkhouse library. The paupers talked interestingly about workhouselife. They told me, among other things, that the thing really hatedin the workhouse, as a stigma of charity, is the uniform; if themen could wear their own clothes, or even their own caps andscarves, they would not mind being paupers. I had my dinner fromthe workhouse table, and it was a meal fit for aboa-constrictor—the largest meal I had eaten since my firstday at the Hôtel X. The paupers said that they habituallygorged to the bursting-point on Sunday and were underfed the restof the week. After dinner the cook set me to do the washing up, andtold me to throw away the food that remained. The wastage wasastonishing and, in the circ*mstances, appalling. Half-eaten jointsof meat, and bucketfuls of broken bread and vegetables, werepitched away like so much rubbish and then defiled with tea-leaves.I filled five dustbins to overflowing with quite eatable food. Andwhile I did so fifty tramps were sitting in the spike with theirbellies half filled by the spike dinner of bread and cheese, andperhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in honour of Sunday.According to the paupers, the food was thrown away from deliberatepolicy, rather than that it should be given to the tramps.

At three I went back to the spike. The tramps had been sittingthere since eight, with hardly room to move an elbow, and they werenow half mad with boredom. Even smoking was at an end, for atramp's tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and he starves if heis more than a few hours away from the pavement. Most of the menwere too bored even to talk; they just sat packed on the benches,staring at nothing, their scrubby faces split in two by enormousyawns. The room stank of ennui.

Paddy, his backside aching from the hard bench, was in awhimpering mood, and to pass the time away I talked with a rathersuperior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie and wason the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a littlealoof from the other tramps, and held himself more like a free manthan a casual. He had literary tastes, too, and carried a copy ofQuentin Durward in his pocket. He told me that he never wentinto a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under hedgesand behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had beggedby day and slept in bathing-huts for weeks at a time.

We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system thatmakes a tramp spend fourteen hours a day in the spike, and theother ten in walking and dodging the police. He spoke of his owncase—six months at the public charge for want of a fewpounds' worth of tools. It was idiotic, he said.

Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhousekitchen, and what I thought of it. And at that he changed his toneinstantly. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps inevery English workman. Though he had been famished along with theothers, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrownaway rather that given to the tramps. He admonished me quiteseverely.

'They have to do it,' he said. 'If they made these places toocomfortable, you'd have all the scum of the country flocking intothem. It's only the bad food as keeps all that scum away. Thesehere tramps are too lazy to work, that's all that's wrong withthem. You don't want to go encouraging of them. They're scum.'

I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would notlisten. He kept repeating:

'You don't want to have any pity on these heretramps—scum, they are. You don't want to judge them by thesame standards as men like you and me. They're scum, justscum.'

It was interesting to see the subtle way in which hedisassociated himself from 'these here tramps'. He had been on theroad six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, hewas not a tramp. I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps whothank God they are not tramps. They are like the trippers who saysuch cutting things about trippers.

Three hours dragged by. At six supper arrived, and turned out tobe quite uneatable; the bread, tough enough in the morning (it hadbeen cut into slices on Saturday night), was now as hard as ship'sbiscuit. Luckily it was spread with dripping, and we scraped thedripping off and ate that alone, which was better than nothing. Ata quarter past six we were sent to bed. New tramps were arriving,and in order not to mix the tramps of different days (for fear ofinfectious diseases) the new men were put in the cells and we indormitories. Our dormitory was a barn-like room with thirty bedsclose together, and a tub to serve as a common chamber-pot. Itstank abominably, and the older men coughed and got up all night.But being so many together kept the room warm, and we had somesleep.

We dispersed at ten in the morning, after a fresh medicalinspection, with a hunk of bread and cheese for our midday dinner.William and Fred, strong in the possession of a shilling, impaledtheir bread on the spike railings—as a protest, they said.This was the second spike in Kent that they had made too hot tohold them, and they thought it a great joke. They were cheerfulsouls, for tramps. The imbecile (there is an imbecile in everycollection of tramps) said that he was too tired to walk and clungto the railings, until the Tramp Major had to dislodge him andstart him with a kick. Paddy and I turned north, for London. Mostof the others were going on to Ide Hill, said to be about the worstspike in England*.

[* I have been in it since, and it is not so bad.]

Once again it was jolly autumn weather, and the road was quiet,with few cars passing. The air was like sweet-briar after thespike's mingled stenches of sweat, soap, and drains. We two seemedthe only tramps on the road. Then I heard a hurried step behind us,and someone calling. It was little Scotty, the Glasgow tramp, whohad run after us panting. He produced a rusty tin from his pocket.He wore a friendly smile, like someone repaying an obligation.

'Here y'are, mate,' he said cordially. 'I owe you some fa*g ends.You stood me a smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my boxof fa*g ends when we come out this morning. One good turn deservesanother—here y'are.'

And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette ends intomy hand.

XXXVI

I WANT to set down some general remarks about tramps. When onecomes to think of it, tramps are a queer product and worth thinkingover. It is queer that a tribe of men, tens of thousands in number,should be marching up and down England like so many Wandering Jews.But though the case obviously wants considering, one cannot evenstart to consider it until one has got rid of certain prejudices.These prejudices are rooted in the idea that every tramp, ipsofacto, is a blackguard. In childhood we have been taught thattramps are blackguards, and consequently there exists in our mindsa sort of ideal or typical tramp—a repulsive, ratherdangerous creature, who would die rather than work or wash, andwants nothing but to beg, drink, and rob hen-houses. Thistramp-monster is no truer to life than the sinister Chinaman of themagazine stories, but he is very hard to get rid of. The very word'tramp' evokes his image. And the belief in him obscures the realquestions of vagrancy.

To take a fundamental question about vagrancy: Why do trampsexist at all? It is a curious thing, but very few people know whatmakes a tramp take to the road. And, because of the belief in thetramp-monster, the most fantastic reasons are suggested. It issaid, for instance, that tramps tramp to avoid work, to beg moreeasily, to seek opportunities for crime, even—least probableof reasons—because they like tramping. I have even read in abook of criminology that the tramp is an atavism, a throw-back tothe nomadic stage of humanity. And meanwhile the quite obviouscause of vagrancy is staring one in the face. Of course a tramp isnot a nomadic atavism—one might as well say that a commercialtraveller is an atavism. A tramp tramps, not because he likes it,but for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because therehappens to be a law compelling him to do so. A destitute man, if heis not supported by the parish, can only get relief at the casualwards, and as each casual ward will only admit him for one night,he is automatically kept moving. He is a vagrant because, in thestate of the law, it is that or starve. But people have beenbrought up to believe in the tramp-monster, and so they prefer tothink that there must be some more or less villainous motive fortramping.

As a matter of fact, very little of the tramp-monster willsurvive inquiry. Take the generally accepted idea that tramps aredangerous characters. Quite apart from experience, one can say apriori that very few tramps are dangerous, because if they weredangerous they would be treated accordingly. A casual ward willoften admit a hundred tramps in one night, and these are handled bya staff of at most three porters. A hundred ruffians could not becontrolled by three unarmed men. Indeed, when one sees how trampslet themselves be bullied by the workhouse officials, it is obviousthat they are the most docile, broken-spirited creaturesimaginable. Or take the idea that all tramps are drunkards—anidea ridiculous on the face of it. No doubt many tramps would drinkif they got the chance, but in the nature of things they cannot getthe chance. At this moment a pale watery stuff called beer issevenpence a pint in England. To be drunk on it would cost at leasthalf a crown, and a man who can command half a crown at all oftenis not a tramp. The idea that tramps are impudent social parasites('sturdy beggars') is not absolutely unfounded, but it is only truein a few per cent of the cases. Deliberate, cynical parasitism,such as one reads of in Jack London's books on American tramping,is not in the English character. The English are aconscience-ridden race, with a strong sense of the sinfulness ofpoverty. One cannot imagine the average Englishman deliberatelyturning parasite, and this national character does not necessarilychange because a man is thrown out of work. Indeed, if oneremembers that a tramp is only an Englishman out of work, forced bylaw to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-monster vanishes. I amnot saying, of course, that most tramps are ideal characters; I amonly saying that they are ordinary human beings, and that if theyare worse than other people it is the result and not the cause oftheir way of life.

It follows that the 'Serve them damned well right' attitude thatis normally taken towards tramps is no fairer than it would betowards cripples or invalids. When one has realized that, onebegins to put oneself in a tramp's place and understand what hislife is like. It is an extraordinarily futile, acutely unpleasantlife. I have described the casual ward—the routine of atramp's day—but there are three especial evils that needinsisting upon. The first is hunger, which is the almost generalfate of tramps. The casual ward gives them a ration which isprobably not even meant to be sufficient, and anything beyond thismust be got by begging—that is, by breaking the law. Theresult is that nearly every tramp is rotted by malnutrition; forproof of which one need only look at the men lining up outside anycasual ward. The second great evil of a tramp's life—it seemsmuch smaller at first sight, but it is a good second—is thathe is entirely cut off from contact with women. This point needselaborating.

Spending the night in the streets, 60 men, 18 women*. Inshelters and homes not licensed as common lodging-houses, 1,057men, 137 women. In the crypt of St Martin's-in-the-Fields Church,88 men, 12 women. In L.C.C. casual wards and hostels, 674 men, 15women.

[* This must be an underestimate. Still, the proportionsprobably hold good.]

It will be seen from these figures that at the charity level menoutnumber women by something like ten to one. The cause ispresumably that unemployment affects women less than men; also thatany presentable woman can, in the last resort, attach herself tosome man. The result, for a tramp, is that he is condemned toperpetual celibacy. For of course it goes without saying that if atramp finds no women at his own level, those above—even avery little above—are as far out of his reach as the moon.The reasons are not worth discussing, but there is no doubt thatwomen never, or hardly ever, condescend to men who are much poorerthan themselves. A tramp, therefore, is a celibate from the momentwhen he takes to the road. He is absolutely without hope of gettinga wife, a mistress, or any kind of woman except—very rarely,when he can raise a few shillings—a prostitute.

It is obvious what the results of this must be: hom*osexuality,for instance, and occasional rape cases. But deeper than thesethere is the degradation worked in a man who knows that he is noteven considered fit for marriage. The sexual impulse, not to put itany higher, is a fundamental impulse, and starvation of it can bealmost as demoralizing as physical hunger. The evil of poverty isnot so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots himphysically and spiritually. And there can be no doubt that sexualstarvation contributes to this rotting process. Cut off from thewhole race of women, a tramp feels himself degraded to the rank ofa cripple or a lunatic. No humiliation could do more damage to aman's self-respect.

The other great evil of a tramp's life is enforced idleness. Byour vagrancy laws things are so arranged that when he is notwalking the road he is sitting in a cell; or, in the intervals,lying on the ground waiting for the casual ward to open. It isobvious that this is a dismal, demoralizing way of life, especiallyfor an uneducated man.

Besides these one could enumerate scores of minor evils—toname only one, discomfort, which is inseparable from life on theroad; it is worth remembering that the average tramp has no clothesbut what he stands up in, wears boots that are ill-fitting, anddoes not sit in a chair for months together. But the importantpoint is that a tramp's sufferings are entirely useless. He lives afantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purposewhatever. One could not, in fact, invent a more futile routine thanwalking from prison to prison, spending perhaps eighteen hours aday in the cell and on the road. There must be at the least severaltens of thousands of tramps in England. Each day they expendinnumerable foot-pounds of energy—enough to plough thousandsof acres, build miles of road, put up dozens of houses—inmere, useless walking. Each day they waste between them possiblyten years of time in staring at cell walls. They cost the countryat least a pound a week a man, and give nothing in return for it.They go round and round, on an endless boring game of general post,which is of no use, and is not even meant to be of any use to anyperson whatever. The law keeps this process going, and we have gotso accustomed to it that We are not surprised. But it is verysilly.

Granting the futility of a tramp's life, the question is whetheranything could be done to improve it. Obviously it would bepossible, for instance, to make the casual wards a little morehabitable, and this is actually being done in some cases. Duringthe last year some of the casual wards have beenimproved—beyond recognition, if the accounts aretrue—and there is talk of doing the same to all of them. Butthis does not go to the heart of the problem. The problem is how toturn the tramp from a bored, half alive vagrant into aself-respecting human being. A mere increase of comfort cannot dothis. Even if the casual wards became positively luxurious (theynever will)* a tramp's life would still be wasted. He would stillbe a pauper, cut off from marriage and home life, and a dead lossto the community. What is needed is to depauperize him, and thiscan only be done by finding him work—not work for the sake ofworking, but work of which he can enjoy the benefit. At present, inthe great majority of casual wards, tramps do no work whatever. Atone time they were made to break stones for their food, but thiswas stopped when they had broken enough stone for years ahead andput the stone-breakers out of work. Nowadays they are kept idle,because there is seemingly nothing for them to do. Yet there is afairly obvious way of making them useful, namely this: Eachworkhouse could run a small farm, or at least a kitchen garden, andevery able-bodied tramp who presented himself could be made to do asound day's work. The produce of the farm or garden could be usedfor feeding the tramps, and at the worst it would be better thanthe filthy diet of bread and margarine and tea. Of course, thecasual wards could never be quite self-supporting, but they couldgo a long way towards it, and the rates would probably benefit inthe long run. It must be remembered that under the present systemtramps are as dead a loss to the country as they could possibly be,for they do not only do no work, but they live on a diet that isbound to undermine their health; the system, therefore, loses livesas well as money. A scheme which fed them decently, and made themproduce at least a part of their own food, would be worthtrying.

[* In fairness, it must be added that a few of the casual wardshave been improved recently, at least from the point of view ofsleeping accommodation. But most of them are the same as ever, andthere has been no real improvement in the food.]

It may be objected that a farm or even a garden could not be runwith casual labour. But there is no real reason why tramps shouldonly stay a day at each casual ward; they might stay a month oreven a year, if there were work for them to do. The constantcirculation of tramps is something quite artificial. At present atramp is an expense to the rates, and the object of each workhouseis therefore to push him on to the next; hence the rule that he canstay only one night. If he returns within a month he is penalizedby being confined for a week, and, as this is much the same asbeing in prison, naturally he keeps moving. But if he representedlabour to the workhouse, and the workhouse represented sound foodto him, it would be another matter. The workhouses would developinto partially self-supporting institutions, and the tramps,settling down here or there according as they were needed, wouldcease to be tramps. They would be doing something comparativelyuseful, getting decent food, and living a settled life. By degrees,if the scheme worked well, they might even cease to be regarded aspaupers, and be able to marry and take a respectable place insociety.

This is only a rough idea, and there are some obvious objectionsto it. Nevertheless, it does suggest a way of improving the statusof tramps without piling new burdens on the rates. And the solutionmust, in any case, be something of this kind. For the question is,what to do with men who are underfed and idle; and theanswer—to make them grow their own food—imposes itselfautomatically.

XXXVII

A WORD about the sleeping accommodation open to a homelessperson in London. At present it is impossible to get a bedin any non-charitable institution in London for less thansevenpence a night. If you cannot afford seven-pence for a bed, youmust put up with one of the following substitutes:

1. The Embankment. Here is the account that Paddy gave me ofsleeping on the Embankment:

'De whole t'ing wid de Embankment is gettin' to sleep early. Yougot to be on your bench by eight o'clock, because dere ain't toomany benches and sometimes dey're all taken. And you got to try toget to sleep at once. 'Tis too cold to sleep much after twelveo'clock, an' de police turns you off at four in de mornin'. Itain't easy to sleep, dough, wid dem bloody trams flyin' past yourhead all de time, an' dem sky-signs across de river flickin' on an'off in your eyes. De cold's cruel. Dem as sleeps dere generallywraps demselves up in newspaper, but it don't do much good. You'dbe bloody lucky if you got t'ree hours' sleep.'

I have slept on the Embankment and found that it corresponded toPaddy's description. It is, however, much better than not sleepingat all, which is the alternative if you spend the night in thestreets, elsewhere than on the Embankment. According to the law inLondon, you may sit down for the night, but the police must moveyou on if they see you asleep; the Embankment and one or two oddcorners (there is one behind the Lyceum Theatre) are specialexceptions. This law is evidently a piece of wilful offensiveness.Its object, so it is said, is to prevent people from dying ofexposure; but clearly if a man has no home and is going to die ofexposure, die he will, asleep or awake. In Paris there is no suchlaw. There, people sleep by the score under the Seine bridges, andin doorways, and on benches in the squares, and round theventilating shafts of the Métro, and even inside theMétro stations. It does no apparent harm. No one will spenda night in the street if he can possibly help it, and if he isgoing to stay out of doors he might as well be allowed to sleep, ifhe can.

2. The Twopenny Hangover. This comes a little higher than theEmbankment. At the Twopenny Hangover, the lodgers sit in a row on abench; there is a rope in front of them, and they lean on this asthough leaning over a fence. A man, humorously called the valet,cuts the rope at five in the morning. I have never been theremyself, but Bozo had been there often. I asked him whether anyonecould possibly sleep in such an attitude, and he said that it wasmore comfortable than it sounded—at any rate, better thanbare floor. There are similar shelters in Paris, but the chargethere is only twenty-five centimes (a halfpenny) instead oftwopence.

3. The Coffin, at fourpence a night. At the Coffin you sleep ina wooden box, with a tarpaulin for covering. It is cold, and theworst thing about it are the bugs, which, being enclosed in a box,you cannot escape.

Above this come the common lodging-houses, with charges varyingbetween sevenpence and one and a penny a night. The best are theRowton Houses, where the charge is a shilling, for which you get acubicle to yourself, and the use of excellent bathrooms. You canalso pay half a crown for a 'special', which is practically hotelaccommodation. The Rowton Houses are splendid buildings, and theonly objection to them is the strict discipline, with rules againstcooking, card-playing, etc. Perhaps the best advertisem*nt for theRowton Houses is the fact that they are always full to overflowing.The Bruce Houses, at one and a penny, are also excellent.

Next best, in point of cleanliness, are the Salvation Armyhostels, at sevenpence or eightpence. They vary (I have been in oneor two that were not very unlike common lodging-houses), but mostof them are clean, and they have good bathrooms; you have to payextra for a bath, however. You can get a cubicle for a shilling. Inthe eightpenny dormitories the beds are comfortable, but there areso many of them (as a rule at least forty to a room), and so closetogether, that it is impossible to get a quiet night. The numerousrestrictions stink of prison and charity. The Salvation Armyhostels would only appeal to people who put cleanliness beforeanything else.

Beyond this there are the ordinary common lodging-houses.Whether you pay sevenpence or a shilling, they are all stuffy andnoisy, and the beds are uniformly dirty and uncomfortable. Whatredeems them are their laissez-faire atmosphere and the warmhome-like kitchens where one can lounge at all hours of the day ornight. They are squalid dens, but some kind of social life ispossible in them. The women's lodging-houses are said to begenerally worse than the men's, and there are very few houses withaccommodation for married couples. In fact, it is nothing out ofthe common for a homeless man to sleep in one lodging-house and hiswife in another.

At this moment at least fifteen thousand people in London areliving in common lodging-houses. For an unattached man earning twopounds a week, or less, a lodging-house is a great convenience. Hecould hardly get a furnished room so cheaply, and the lodging-housegives him free firing, a bathroom of sorts, and plenty of society.As for the dirt, it is a minor evil. The really bad fault oflodging-houses is that they are places in which one pays to sleep,and in which sound sleep is impossible. All one gets for one'smoney is a bed measuring five feet six by two feet six, with a hardconvex mattress and a pillow like a block of wood, covered by onecotton counterpane and two grey, stinking sheets. In winter thereare blankets, but never enough. And this bed is in a room wherethere are never less than five, and sometimes fifty or sixty beds,a yard or two apart. Of course, no one can sleep soundly in suchcirc*mstances. The only other places where people are herded likethis are barracks and hospitals. In the public wards of a hospitalno one even hopes to sleep well. In barracks the soldiers arecrowded, but they have good beds, and they are healthy; in a commonlodging-house nearly all the lodgers have chronic coughs, and alarge number have bladder diseases which make them get up at allthe hours of the night. The result is a perpetual racket, makingsleep impossible. So far as my observation goes, no one in alodging-house sleeps more than five hours a night—a damnableswindle when one has paid sevenpence or more.

Here legislation could accomplish something. At present there isall manner of legislation by the L.C.C. about lodging-houses, butit is not done in the interests of the lodgers. The L.C.C. onlyexert themselves to forbid drinking, gambling, fighting, etc. etc.There is no law to say that the beds in a lodging-house must becomfortable. This would be quite an easy thing toenforce—much easier, for instance, than restrictions upongambling. The lodging-house keepers should be compelled to provideadequate bedclothes and better mattresses, and above all to dividetheir dormitories into cubicles. It does not matter how small acubicle is, the important thing is that a man should be alone whenhe sleeps. These few changes, strictly enforced, would make anenormous difference. It is not impossible to make a lodging-housereasonably comfortable at the usual rates of payment. In theCroydon municipal lodging-house, where the charge is onlyninepence, there are cubicles, good beds, chairs (a very rareluxury in lodging-houses), and kitchens above ground instead of ina cellar. There is no reason why every ninepenny lodging-houseshould not come up to this standard.

Of course, the owners of lodging-houses would be opposed enbloc to any improvement, for their present business is animmensely profitable one. The average house takes five or tenpounds a night, with no bad debts (credit being strictlyforbidden), and except for rent the expenses are small. Anyimprovement would mean less crowding, and hence less profit. Still,the excellent municipal lodging-house at Croydon shows how well onecan be served for ninepence. A few well-directed laws couldmake these conditions general. If the authorities are going toconcern themselves with lodging-houses at all, they ought to startby making them more comfortable, not by silly restrictions thatwould never be tolerated in a hotel.

XXXVIII

AFTER we left the spike at Lower Binfield, Paddy and I earnedhalf a crown at weeding and sweeping in somebody's garden, stayedthe night at Cromley, and walked back to London. I parted fromPaddy a day or two later. B. lent me a final two pounds, and, as Ihad only another eight days to hold out, that was the end of mytroubles. My tame imbecile turned out worse than I had expected,but not bad enough to make me wish myself back in the spike or theAuberge de Jehan Cottard.

Paddy set out for Portsmouth, where he had a. friend who mightconceivably find work for him, and I have never seen him since. Ashort time ago I was told that he had been run over and killed, butperhaps my informant was mixing him up with someone else. I hadnews of Bozo only three days ago. He is inWandsworth—fourteen days for begging. I do not suppose prisonworries him very much.

My story ends here. It is a fairly trivial story, and I can onlyhope that it has been interesting in the same way as a travel diaryis interesting. I can at least say, Here is the world that awaitsyou if you are ever penniless. Some days I want to explore thatworld more thoroughly. I should like to know people like Mario andPaddy and Bill the moocher, not from casual encounters, butintimately; I should like to understand what really goes on in thesouls of plongeurs and tramps and Embankment sleepers. Atpresent I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe ofpoverty.

Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learnedby being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps aredrunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I givehim a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, norsubscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse ahandbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is abeginning.

THE END

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