A few minutes later the police came to search
Roucolle’s
room.
Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
When one is overworked, it is a good cure
for self-pity to think of the thousands of people in Paris restaurants who 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 hotel who worked from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year, only
sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking her to come to a dance, and she
laughed and said that she had not been farther than the street comer for several months.
She was consumptive, and died about the time I left Paris.
After only a week we were all neurasthenic with fatigue, except Jules, who skulked
persistently. The quarrels, intennittent at first, had now become continuous. For hours’
one would keep up a drizzle of useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few
minutes. ‘Get me down that saucepan, idiot! ’ the cook would cry (she was not tall enough
to reach the shelves where the saucepans were kept). ‘Get it down yourself, you old
whore,’ I would answer. Such remarks seemed to be generated spontaneously from the
air of the kitchen.
We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness. The dustbin, for instance, was an
unending source of quarrels — whether it should be put where I wanted it, which was in
the cook’s way, or where she wanted it, which was between me and the sink. Once she
nagged and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the dustbin up and put it out in the
middle of the floor, 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 sat down, put her head on the
table and burst out crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that fatigue has
upon one’s manners.
After a few days the cook had ceased talking about Tolstoy and her artistic nature, and
she and I were not on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and Boris and
Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither of them was on speaking terms with the
cook. Even Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had agreed beforehand that
the ENGUEULADES of working hours did not count between times; but we had called
each other things too bad to be forgotten — and besides, there were no between times.
Jules grew lazier and lazier, and he stole food constantly — from a sense of duty, he said.
He called the rest of us JAUNE — blackleg — when we would not join with him in
stealing. He had a curious, malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that he had
sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer’s soup before taking it in, just to be
revenged upon a member of the bourgeoisie.
The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though we trapped a few of them. Looking
round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted
saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to
wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other
three all said that they had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure in seeings
things dirty. In the afternoon, when he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen
doorway jeering at us for working too hard:
‘Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trousers. Who cares about the
customers? THEY don’t know what’s going on. What is restaurant work? You are
carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologize, you bow, you go out; and in
five minutes you come back by another door — with the same chicken. That is restaurant
work,’ etc.
And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and incompetence, the Auberge de Jehan
Cottard was actually a success. For the first few days all our customers were Russians,
friends of the PATRON, and these were followed by Americans and other foreigners — no
Frenchmen. Then one night there was tremendous excitement, because our first
Frenchman had arrived. For a moment our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in
the effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the kitchen, jerked his thumb over his
shoulder and whispered conspiratorially:
‘SH! ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! ’
A moment later the PATRON’S wife came and whispered:
‘ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! See that he gets a double portion of all vegetables. ’
While the Frenchman ate, the PATRON’S wife stood behind the grille of the kitchen
door and watched the expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came back with
two other Frenchmen. This meant that we were earning a good name; the surest sign of a
bad restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Probably part of the reason for our
success was that the PATRON, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in fitting out
the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-knives. Sharp knives, of course, are THE
secret of a successful restaurant. I am glad that this happened, for it destroyed one of my
illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or perhaps
we WERE a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards; in which case the bad ones must be
past imagining.
In a very few days after I had written to B he replied to say that there was a job he could
get for me. It was to look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure
after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I pictured myself loafing in the country lanes,
knocking thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and treacle tart, and
sleeping ten hours a night in sheets smelling of lavender. B sent me a fiver to pay my
passage and get my clothes out of the pawn, and as soon as the money arrived I gave one
day’s notice and left the restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the PATRON,
for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay my wages thirty francs short. However
he stood me a glass of Courvoisier ‘48 brandy, and I think he felt that this made up the
difference. They engaged a Czech, a thoroughly competent PLONGEUR, in my place,
and the poor old cook was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I heard that, with two
first-rate people in the kitchen, the PLONGEUR’ S work had been cut down to fifteen
hours a day. Below that no one could have cut it, short of modernizing the kitchen.
CHAPTER XXII
For what they are worth I want to give my opinions about the life of a Paris PLONGEUR.
When one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modem
city should spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The
question I am raising is why this life goes on — what purpose it serves, and who wants it
to continue, and why I am not taking the merely rebellious, FAINEANT attitude. I am
trying to consider the social significance of a PLONGEUR’ S life.
I think one should start by saying that a PLONGEUR is one of the slaves of the modem
world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual
workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile 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, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky
chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men
with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One
cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a PLONGEUR;
they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If
PLONGEURS thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on
strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their
life has made slaves of them.
The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for
granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a
disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is
necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary — we must have
coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And
similarly with a PLONGEUR’ S work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other
people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore
unquestionable. This point is worth considering.
Is a PLONGEUR’ S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must
be ‘honest’ work, because it is hard and 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 is filling a
social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be
cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same
with a PLONGEUR. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow
that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying 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 an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In
any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing
eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years
old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with
the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger
calls them BAHINCHUT. They earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs
out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold
cheap as having a few years’ work left in them. Their master looks on the whip as a
substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation — whip plus food
equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food.
Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw
flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing
them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the
whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of
unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist
because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has
ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience,
which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.
Similarly with the PLONGEUR. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a
gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his
slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is the REAL need of big hotels 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
than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for
the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but
there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in
them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury.
Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the
customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy
himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essentially, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred
people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they
do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work
done with simple efficiency, PLONGEURS might work six or eight hours a day instead
often or fifteen.
Suppose it is granted that a PLONGEUR’S work is more or less useless. Then the
question follows, Why does anyone want him to go on working? I am trying to go
beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone
to think of men swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people — comfortably
situated people — do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Gato said, should
be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not,
he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least. This sentiment still
survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the
mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if
they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be
intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions,
usually says something like this:
‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy
harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do
anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a, cat with
the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We
feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are
not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear
brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be
damned to you. ’
This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the
substance of it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four
hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that
any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal
Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.
Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the
vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the
poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob
that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some
mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two
different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference.
The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,
and the. average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change
places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has
mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that
intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal
opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know
about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary
to explain the line ‘NE PAIN NE VOYENT QU’AUX FENESTRES’ by a footnote; so
remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience.
From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated
man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his
books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he
thinks, ‘any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose. ’ He does not see that since there is
no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob
loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to
set up enonnous treadmills of boredom, 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 dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side,
acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are
afraid of him. I say this of the PLONGEUR because it is his case I have been
considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are only
my own ideas about the basic facts of a PLONGEUR’S life, made without reference to
immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a
sample of the thoughts that are put into one’s head by working in an hotel.
CHAPTER XXIII
As soon as I left the Auberge de Jehan Cottard I went to bed and slept the clock round, all
but one hour. Then I washed my teeth for the first time in a fortnight, bathed and had my
hair cut, and got my clothes out of pawn. I had two glorious days of loafing. I even went
in my best suit to the Auberge, leant against the bar and spent five francs on a bottle of
English beer. It is a curious sensation, being a customer where you have been a slave’s
slave. Boris was sorry that I had left the restaurant just at the moment when we were
LANCES and there was a chance of making money. I have heard from him since, and he
tells me that he is making a hundred francs a day and has set up a girl who is TRES
SERIEUSE and never smells of garlic.
I spent a day wandering about our quarter, saying good-bye to everyone. It was on this
day that Charlie told me about the death of old Roucolle the miser, who had once lived in
the quarter. Very likely Charlie was lying as usual, but it was a good story.
Roucolle died, aged seventy-four, a year or two before I went to Paris, but the people in
the quarter still talked of him while I was there. He never equalled Daniel Dancer or
anyone of that kind, but he was an interesting character. He went to Les Halles every
morning to pick up damaged vegetables, and ate cat’s meat, and wore newspaper instead
of underclothes, and used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and made himself a
pair of trousers out of a sack — all this with half a million francs invested. I should like
very much to have known him.
Like many misers, Roucolle came to a bad end through putting his money into a wildcat
scheme. One day a Jew appeared in the quarter, an alert, business-like young chap who
had a first-rate plan for smuggling cocaine into England. It is easy enough, of course, to
buy cocaine in Paris, and the smuggling would be quite simple in itself, only there is
always some spy who betrays the plan to the customs or the police. It is said that this is
often done by the very people who sell the cocaine, because the smuggling trade is in the
hands of a large combine, who do not want competition. The Jew, however, swore that
there was no danger. He knew a way of getting cocaine direct from Vienna, not through
the usual channels, and there would be no blackmail to pay. He had got into touch with
Roucolle through a young Pole, a student at the Sorbonne, who was going to put four
thousand francs into the scheme if Roucolle would put 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 money from between old
Roucolle’s claws. Six thousand francs was not much — he had more than that sewn into
the mattress in his room — but it was agony for him to part with a sou. The Pole and the
Jew were at him for weeks on end, explaining, bullying, coaxing, arguing, going down on
their knees and imploring him to produce the money. The old man was half frantic
between greed and fear. His bowels yearned at the thought of getting, perhaps, fifty
thousand francs’ profit, and yet he could not bring himself to risk the money. He used to
sit in a comer with his head in his hands, groaning and sometimes yelling out in agony,
and often he would kneel down (he was very pious) and pray for strength, but still he
couldn’t do it. But at last, more from exhaustion than anything else, he gave in quite
suddenly; he slit open the mattress where his money was concealed and handed over six
thousand francs to the Jew.
The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and promptly vanished. And meanwhile, as
was not surprising after the fuss Roucolle had made, the affair had been noised all over
the quarter. The very next morning the hotel was raided and searched by the police.
Roucolle and the Pole were in agonies. The police were downstairs, working their way up
and searching every room in turn, and there was the great packet of cocaine on the table,
with no place to hide it and no chance of escaping down the stairs. The Pole was for
throwing the stuff out of the window, but Roucolle would not hear of it. Charlie told me
that he had been present at the scene. He said that when they tried to take the packet from
Roucolle 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 of face-powder which he was selling on
commission; it was suggested that the cocaine could be put into the tins and passed off as
face-powder. The powder was hastily thrown out of the window and the cocaine
substituted, and the tins were put openly on Roucolle’s table, as though there there were
nothing to conceal.
A few minutes later the police came to search Roucolle’s room. They
tapped the walls and looked up the chimney and turned out the drawers and examined the
floorboards, and then, just as they were about to give it up, having found nothing, the
inspector noticed the tins on the table.
‘TIENS,’ he said, ‘have a look at those tins. I hadn’t noticed them. What’s in them, eh? ’
‘Face-powder,’ said the Pole as calmly as he could manage. But at the same instant
Roucolle let out a loud groaning noise, from alann, and the police became suspicious
immediately. They opened one of the tins and tipped out the contents, and after smelling
it, the inspector said that he believed it was cocaine. Roucolle and the Pole began
swearing on the names of the saints that it was only face-powder; but it was no use, the
more they protested the more suspicious the police became. The two men were arrested
and led off to the police station, followed by half the quarter.
At the station, Roucolle and the Pole were interrogated by the Commissaire while a tin of
the cocaine was sent away to be analysed. Charlie said that the scene Roucolle made was
beyond description. He wept, prayed, made contradictory statements and denounced the
Pole all at once, so loud that he could be heard half a street away. The policemen almost
burst with laughing at him.
After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of cocaine and a 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 exonerated but very angry. The Jew
had double-crossed them. Afterwards, when the excitement was over, it turned out that he
had played the same trick on two other people in the quarter.
The Pole was glad enough to escape, even though he had lost his four thousand francs,
but poor old Roucolle was utterly broken down. He took to his bed at once, and all that
day and half the night they could hear him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimes
yelling out at the top of his voice:
‘Six thousand francs! NOM DE JESUS-CHRIST! Six thousand francs! ’
Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in a fortnight he was dead — of a broken
heart, Charlie said.
CHAPTER XXIV
I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury, which is the cheapest and not
the worst way of crossing the Channel. You had to pay extra for a cabin, so I slept in the
saloon, together with most of the third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary for
that day:
‘Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women, not a single
one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the women
merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirt with powder. Q. A secondary sexual
difference? ’
On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, mere children, who were going to
England on their honeymoon trip. They asked innumerable questions about England, and
I told them some startling lies. I was so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up
for months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are,
indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs,
mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with
veritable hops — they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is a very good
country when you are not poor; and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was
not going to be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. The more
questions the Roumanians asked, the more I praised England; the climate, the scenery,
the art, the literature, the laws — 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.
But London — ’
Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building we saw on the waterside
was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the English coast
like idiots staring over an asylum wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything,
cocking their eyes at the hotel. ‘Built by French architects,’ I assured them; and even
later, when the train was crawling into London through the eastern slums, I still kept it up
about the beauties of English architecture. Nothing seemed too good to say about
England, now that I was coming home and was not hard up any more.
I went to B. ‘s office, and his first words knocked everything to ruins. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said;
‘your employers have gone abroad, patient and all. However, they’ll be back in a month.
I suppose you can hang on till then? ’
I was outside in the street before it even occurred to me to borrow some more money.
There was a month to wait, and I had exactly nineteen and sixpence in hand. The news
had taken my breath away. For a long time I could not make up my mind what to do. I
loafed the day in the streets, and at night, not having the slightest notion of how to get a
cheap bed in London, I went to a ‘family’ hotel, where the charge was seven and
sixpence. After paying the bill I had ten and twopence in hand.
By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later I should have to go to B. for more
money, but it seemed hardly decent to do so yet, and in the meantime I must exist in
some hole-and-comer way. Past experience set me against pawning my best suit. I would
leave all my things at the station cloakroom, except my second-best suit, which I could
exchange for some cheap clothes and perhaps a pound. If I was going to live a month on
thirty shillings I must have bad clothes — indeed, the worse the better. Whether thirty
shillings could be made to last a month I had no idea, not knowing London as I knew
Paris. Perhaps I could beg, or sell bootlaces, and I remembered articles I had read in the
Sunday papers about beggars who have two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers. It
was, at any rate, notoriously impossible to starve in London, so there was nothing to be
anxious about.
To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where the people are poor and there are a
lot of rag shops. At the first shop I tried the proprietor was polite but unhelpful; at the
second he was rude; at the third he was stone deaf, or pretended to be so. The fourth
shopman was a large blond young man, very pink all over, like a slice of ham. He looked
at the clothes I was wearing and felt them disparagingly between thumb and linger.
‘Poor stuff,’ he said, ‘very poor stuff, that is. ’ (It was quite a good suit. ) ‘What yer want
for ‘em? ’
I explained that I wanted some older clothes and as much money as he could spare. He
thought for a moment, then collected some dirty-looking rags and threw them on to the
counter. ‘What about the money? ’ I said, hoping for a pound. He pursed Us lips, then
produced A SHILLING and laid it beside the clothes. I did not argue — I was going to
argue, but as I opened my mouth he reached out as though to take up the shilling again; I
saw that I was helpless. He let me change in a small room behind the shop.
The clothes were a coat, once dark brown, a pair of black dungaree trousers, a scarf and a
cloth cap; I had kept my own shirt, socks and boots, and I had a comb and razor in my
pocket. It gives one a very strange feeling to be wearing such clothes. I had worn bad
enough things before, but nothing at all like these; they were not merely dirty and
shapeless, they had — how is one to express it? — a gracelessness, a patina of antique fdth,
quite different from mere shabbiness. They were the sort of clothes you see on a bootlace
seller, or a tramp. An hour later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp,
coming towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window.
The dirt was plastering my face already. Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you
alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you
from all directions.
I stayed in the streets till late at night, keeping on the move all the time. Dressed as I was,
I was half afraid that the police might arrest me as a vagabond, and I dared not speak to
anyone, imagining that they must notice a disparity between my accent and my clothes.
(Later I discovered that this never happened. ) My new clothes had put me instantly into a
new world. Everyone’s demeanour seemed to have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker
pick up a barrow that he had upset. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said with a grin. No one had called
me mate before in my life — it was the clothes that had done it. For the first time I noticed,
too, how the attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a badly dressed man
passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as
though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp’s clothes it is
very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded.
You might feel the same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in prison.
At about eleven I began looking for a bed. I had read about doss-houses (they are never
called doss-houses, by the way), and I supposed that one could get a bed for fourpence or
thereabouts. Seeing a man, a navvy or something of the kind, standing on the kerb in the
Waterloo Road, I stopped and questioned him. I said that 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’ll find it cheap AND clean. ’
It was a tall, battered-looking house, with dim lights in all the windows, some of which
were patched with brown paper. I entered a stone passage-way, and a little etiolated boy
with sleepy eyes appeared from a door leading to a cellar. Murmurous sounds came from
the cellar, and a wave of hot air and cheese. The boy yawned and held out his hand.
‘Want a kip? That’ 11 be a ‘og, guv’nor. ’
I paid the shilling, and the boy led me up a rickety unlighted staircase to a bedroom. It
had a sweetish reek of paregoric and foul linen; the windows seemed to be tight shut, and
the air was almost suffocating at first. There was a candle burning, and I saw that the
room measured fifteen feet square by eight high, and had eight beds in it. Already six
lodgers were in bed, queer lumpy shapes with all their own clothes, even their boots,
piled on top of them. Someone was coughing in a loathsome manner in one corner.
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 of wood. It was rather worse than sleeping on a table,
because the bed was not six feet long, and very narrow, and the mattress was convex, so
that one had to hold on to avoid falling out. The sheets stank so horribly of sweat that I
could not bear them near my nose. Also, the bedclothes only consisted of the sheets and a
cotton counterpane, so that though stuffy it was none too wann. Several noises recurred
throughout the night. About once in an hour the man on my left — a sailor, I think — woke
up, swore vilely, and lighted a cigarette. Another man, victim of a bladder disease, got up
and noisily used his chamber-pot half a dozen times during the night. The man in the
comer had a coughing fit once in every twenty minutes, so regularly that one came to
listen for it as one listens for the next yap when a dog is baying the moon. It was an
unspeakably repellent sound; a foul bubbling and retching, as though the man’s bowels
were being churned up within him. Once when he struck a match I saw that he was a very
old man, with a grey, su nk en face like that of a corpse, and he was wearing his trousers
wrapped round his head as a nightcap, a thing which for some reason disgusted me very
much. Every time he coughed or the other man swore, 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 ah. In the morning I was woken by a dim impression of
some large brown thing coming towards me. I opened 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 dark brown
like an Indian’s, with dirt. The walls were leprous, and the sheets, three weeks from the
wash, were almost raw umber colour. I got up, dressed and went downstairs. In the cellar
were a row of basins and two slippery roller towels. I had a piece of soap in my pocket,
and I was going to wash, when I noticed that every basin was streaked with grime — solid,
sticky filth as black as boot-blacking. I went out unwashed. Altogether, the lodging-house
had not come up to its description as cheap and clean. It was however, as I found later, a
fairly representative lodging-house.
I crossed the river and walked a long way eastward, finally going into a coffee-shop on
Tower Hill. An ordinary London coffee-shop, like a thousand others, it seemed queer,
and foreign after Paris. It was a little stuffy room with the high-backed pews that were
fashionable in the ‘forties, the day’s menu written on a mirror with a piece of soap, and a
girl of fourteen handling the dishes. Navvies were eating out of newspaper parcels, and
drinking tea in vast saucerless mugs like china tumblers. In a corner by himself a Jew,
muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon.
‘Could I have some tea and bread and butter? ’ I said to the girl.
She stared. ‘No butter, only marg,’ she said, surprised. And she repeated the order in the
phrase that is to London what the eternal COUP DE ROUGE is to Paris: ‘Large tea and
two slices! ’
On the wall beside my pew there was a notice saying ‘Pocketing the sugar not allowed,’
and beneath it some poetic customer had written:
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.
CHAPTER XXV
The eight shillings lasted three days and four nights. After my bad experience in the
Waterloo Road I moved eastward, and spent the next night in a lodging-house in
Pennyfields. This was a typical lodging-house, like scores of others in London. It had
accommodation for between fifty and a hundred men, and was managed by a ‘deputy’ — a
deputy for the owner, that is, for these lodging-houses are profitable concerns and are
owned by rich men. We slept fifteen or twenty in a dormitory; the beds were again cold
and 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 of four) and the terms were cash down by seven in the evening
or out you went.
[It is a curious but well-known fact that bugs are much commoner in south than
north London. For some reason they have not yet crossed the river in any great
numbers. ]
Downstairs there was a kitchen common to all lodgers, with free firing and a supply of
cooking-pots, tea-basins, and toasting-forks. There were two great clinker fires, which
were kept burning day and night the year through. The work of tending the fires,
sweeping the kitchen and making the beds was done by the lodgers in rotation. One
senior lodger, a fine Norman-looking stevedore named Steve, was known as ‘head of the
house’, and was arbiter of disputes and unpaid chucker-out.
I liked the kitchen. It was a low-ceiled cellar deep underground, very hot and drowsy
with coke fumes, and lighted only by the fires, which cast black velvet shadows in the
comers. Ragged washing hung on strings from the ceiling. Red-lit men, stevedores
mostly, moved about the fires with cooking-pots; some of them were quite naked, for
they had been laundering and were waiting for their clothes to dry. At night there were
games of nap and draughts, and songs — ’ I’m a chap what’s done wrong by my parents,’
was a favourite, and so was another popular song about a shipwreck. Sometimes late at
night men would come in with a pail of winkles they had bought cheap, and share them
out. There was a general sharing of food, and it was taken for granted to feed men who
were out of work. A little pale, wizened creature, obviously dying, referred to as ‘pore
Brown, bin under the doctor and cut open three times,’ was regularly fed by the others.
Two or three of the lodgers were old-age pensioners. Till meeting them I had never
realized that there are people in England who live on nothing but the old-age pension
often shillings a week. None of these old men had any other resource whatever. One of
them was talkative, and I asked him how he managed to exist. He said:
‘Well, there’s ninepence a night for yer kip — that’s five an’ threepence a week. Then
there’s threepence on Saturday for a shave — that’s five an’ six. Then say you ‘as a
‘aircut once a month for sixpence — that’s another three’apence a week. So you ‘as about
four an’ four-pence for food an’ bacca. ’
He could imagine no other expenses. His food was bread and margarine and tea —
towards the end of the week dry bread and tea 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 a shave — it is awe-inspiring.
All day I loafed in the streets, east as far as Wapping, west as far as Whitechapel. It was
queer after Paris; everything was so much cleaner and quieter and drearier. One missed
the scream of the trams, and the noisy, festering life of the back streets, and the armed
men clattering through the squares. The crowds were better dressed and the faces
comelier and milder and more alike, without that fierce individuality and malice of the
French. There was less drunkenness, and less dirt, and less quarrelling, and more idling.
for self-pity to think of the thousands of people in Paris restaurants who 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 hotel who worked from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year, only
sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking her to come to a dance, and she
laughed and said that she had not been farther than the street comer for several months.
She was consumptive, and died about the time I left Paris.
After only a week we were all neurasthenic with fatigue, except Jules, who skulked
persistently. The quarrels, intennittent at first, had now become continuous. For hours’
one would keep up a drizzle of useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few
minutes. ‘Get me down that saucepan, idiot! ’ the cook would cry (she was not tall enough
to reach the shelves where the saucepans were kept). ‘Get it down yourself, you old
whore,’ I would answer. Such remarks seemed to be generated spontaneously from the
air of the kitchen.
We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness. The dustbin, for instance, was an
unending source of quarrels — whether it should be put where I wanted it, which was in
the cook’s way, or where she wanted it, which was between me and the sink. Once she
nagged and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the dustbin up and put it out in the
middle of the floor, 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 sat down, put her head on the
table and burst out crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that fatigue has
upon one’s manners.
After a few days the cook had ceased talking about Tolstoy and her artistic nature, and
she and I were not on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and Boris and
Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither of them was on speaking terms with the
cook. Even Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had agreed beforehand that
the ENGUEULADES of working hours did not count between times; but we had called
each other things too bad to be forgotten — and besides, there were no between times.
Jules grew lazier and lazier, and he stole food constantly — from a sense of duty, he said.
He called the rest of us JAUNE — blackleg — when we would not join with him in
stealing. He had a curious, malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that he had
sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a customer’s soup before taking it in, just to be
revenged upon a member of the bourgeoisie.
The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though we trapped a few of them. Looking
round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted
saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to
wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other
three all said that they had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure in seeings
things dirty. In the afternoon, when he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen
doorway jeering at us for working too hard:
‘Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your trousers. Who cares about the
customers? THEY don’t know what’s going on. What is restaurant work? You are
carving a chicken and it falls on the floor. You apologize, you bow, you go out; and in
five minutes you come back by another door — with the same chicken. That is restaurant
work,’ etc.
And, strange to say, in spite of all this filth and incompetence, the Auberge de Jehan
Cottard was actually a success. For the first few days all our customers were Russians,
friends of the PATRON, and these were followed by Americans and other foreigners — no
Frenchmen. Then one night there was tremendous excitement, because our first
Frenchman had arrived. For a moment our quarrels were forgotten and we all united in
the effort to serve a good dinner. Boris tiptoed into the kitchen, jerked his thumb over his
shoulder and whispered conspiratorially:
‘SH! ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! ’
A moment later the PATRON’S wife came and whispered:
‘ATTENTION, UN FRANCAIS! See that he gets a double portion of all vegetables. ’
While the Frenchman ate, the PATRON’S wife stood behind the grille of the kitchen
door and watched the expression of his face. Next night the Frenchman came back with
two other Frenchmen. This meant that we were earning a good name; the surest sign of a
bad restaurant is to be frequented only by foreigners. Probably part of the reason for our
success was that the PATRON, with the sole gleam of sense he had shown in fitting out
the restaurant, had bought very sharp table-knives. Sharp knives, of course, are THE
secret of a successful restaurant. I am glad that this happened, for it destroyed one of my
illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it. Or perhaps
we WERE a fairly good restaurant by Paris standards; in which case the bad ones must be
past imagining.
In a very few days after I had written to B he replied to say that there was a job he could
get for me. It was to look after a congenital imbecile, which sounded a splendid rest cure
after the Auberge de Jehan Cottard. I pictured myself loafing in the country lanes,
knocking thistle-heads off with my stick, feeding on roast lamb and treacle tart, and
sleeping ten hours a night in sheets smelling of lavender. B sent me a fiver to pay my
passage and get my clothes out of the pawn, and as soon as the money arrived I gave one
day’s notice and left the restaurant. My leaving so suddenly embarrassed the PATRON,
for as usual he was penniless, and he had to pay my wages thirty francs short. However
he stood me a glass of Courvoisier ‘48 brandy, and I think he felt that this made up the
difference. They engaged a Czech, a thoroughly competent PLONGEUR, in my place,
and the poor old cook was sacked a few weeks later. Afterwards I heard that, with two
first-rate people in the kitchen, the PLONGEUR’ S work had been cut down to fifteen
hours a day. Below that no one could have cut it, short of modernizing the kitchen.
CHAPTER XXII
For what they are worth I want to give my opinions about the life of a Paris PLONGEUR.
When one comes to think of it, it is strange that thousands of people in a great modem
city should spend their waking hours swabbing dishes in hot dens underground. The
question I am raising is why this life goes on — what purpose it serves, and who wants it
to continue, and why I am not taking the merely rebellious, FAINEANT attitude. I am
trying to consider the social significance of a PLONGEUR’ S life.
I think one should start by saying that a PLONGEUR is one of the slaves of the modem
world. Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual
workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile 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, if he marries, his wife must work too. Except by a lucky
chance, he has no escape from this life, save into prison. At this moment there are men
with university degrees scrubbing dishes in Paris for ten or fifteen hours a day. One
cannot say that it is mere idleness on their part, for an idle man cannot be a PLONGEUR;
they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If
PLONGEURS thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on
strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their
life has made slaves of them.
The question is, why does this slavery continue? People have a way of taking it for
granted that all work is done for a sound purpose. They see somebody else doing a
disagreeable job, and think that they have solved things by saying that the job is
necessary. Coal-mining, for example, is hard work, but it is necessary — we must have
coal. Working in the sewers is unpleasant, but somebody must work in the sewers. And
similarly with a PLONGEUR’ S work. Some people must feed in restaurants, and so other
people must swab dishes for eighty hours a week. It is the work of civilization, therefore
unquestionable. This point is worth considering.
Is a PLONGEUR’ S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must
be ‘honest’ work, because it is hard and 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 is filling a
social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be
cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue. I believe it is the same
with a PLONGEUR. He earns his bread in the sweat of his brow, but it does not follow
that he is doing anything useful; he may be only supplying 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 an Indian rickshaw puller, or a gharry pony. In
any Far Eastern town there are rickshaw pullers by the hundred, black wretches weighing
eight stone, clad in loin-cloths. Some of them are diseased; some of them are fifty years
old. For miles on end they trot in the sun or rain, head down, dragging at the shafts, with
the sweat dripping from their grey moustaches. When they go too slowly the passenger
calls them BAHINCHUT. They earn thirty or forty rupees a month, and cough their lungs
out after a few years. The gharry ponies are gaunt, vicious things that have been sold
cheap as having a few years’ work left in them. Their master looks on the whip as a
substitute for food. Their work expresses itself in a sort of equation — whip plus food
equals energy; generally it is about sixty per cent whip and forty per cent food.
Sometimes their necks are encircled by one vast sore, so that they drag all day on raw
flesh. It is still possible to make them work, however; it is just a question of thrashing
them so hard that the pain behind outweighs the pain in front. After a few years even the
whip loses its virtue, and the pony goes to the knacker. These are instances of
unnecessary work, for there is no real need for gharries and rickshaws; they only exist
because Orientals consider it vulgar to walk. They are luxuries, and, as anyone who has
ridden in them knows, very poor luxuries. They afford a small amount of convenience,
which cannot possibly balance the suffering of the men and animals.
Similarly with the PLONGEUR. He is a king compared with a rickshaw puller or a
gharry pony, but his case is analogous. He is the slave of a hotel or a restaurant, and his
slavery is more or less useless. For, after all, where is the REAL need of big hotels 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
than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for
the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but
there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in
them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury.
Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the
customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy
himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essentially, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred
people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they
do not really want. If the nonsense were cut out of hotels and restaurants, and the work
done with simple efficiency, PLONGEURS might work six or eight hours a day instead
often or fifteen.
Suppose it is granted that a PLONGEUR’S work is more or less useless. Then the
question follows, Why does anyone want him to go on working? I am trying to go
beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone
to think of men swabbing dishes for life. For there is no doubt that people — comfortably
situated people — do find a pleasure in such thoughts. A slave, Marcus Gato said, should
be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not,
he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least. This sentiment still
survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.
I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the
mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if
they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be
intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions,
usually says something like this:
‘We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy
harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do
anything about it. We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a, cat with
the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition. We
feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are
not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear
brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be
damned to you. ’
This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the
substance of it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four
hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that
any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal
Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.
Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the
vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the
poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob
that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.
Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some
mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two
different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference.
The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,
and the. average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change
places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has
mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that
intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal
opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know
about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary
to explain the line ‘NE PAIN NE VOYENT QU’AUX FENESTRES’ by a footnote; so
remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience.
From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated
man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his
books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. ‘Anything,’ he
thinks, ‘any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose. ’ He does not see that since there is
no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob
loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to
set up enonnous treadmills of boredom, 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 dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side,
acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are
afraid of him. I say this of the PLONGEUR because it is his case I have been
considering; it would apply equally to numberless other types of worker. These are only
my own ideas about the basic facts of a PLONGEUR’S life, made without reference to
immediate economic questions, and no doubt largely platitudes. I present them as a
sample of the thoughts that are put into one’s head by working in an hotel.
CHAPTER XXIII
As soon as I left the Auberge de Jehan Cottard I went to bed and slept the clock round, all
but one hour. Then I washed my teeth for the first time in a fortnight, bathed and had my
hair cut, and got my clothes out of pawn. I had two glorious days of loafing. I even went
in my best suit to the Auberge, leant against the bar and spent five francs on a bottle of
English beer. It is a curious sensation, being a customer where you have been a slave’s
slave. Boris was sorry that I had left the restaurant just at the moment when we were
LANCES and there was a chance of making money. I have heard from him since, and he
tells me that he is making a hundred francs a day and has set up a girl who is TRES
SERIEUSE and never smells of garlic.
I spent a day wandering about our quarter, saying good-bye to everyone. It was on this
day that Charlie told me about the death of old Roucolle the miser, who had once lived in
the quarter. Very likely Charlie was lying as usual, but it was a good story.
Roucolle died, aged seventy-four, a year or two before I went to Paris, but the people in
the quarter still talked of him while I was there. He never equalled Daniel Dancer or
anyone of that kind, but he was an interesting character. He went to Les Halles every
morning to pick up damaged vegetables, and ate cat’s meat, and wore newspaper instead
of underclothes, and used the wainscoting of his room for firewood, and made himself a
pair of trousers out of a sack — all this with half a million francs invested. I should like
very much to have known him.
Like many misers, Roucolle came to a bad end through putting his money into a wildcat
scheme. One day a Jew appeared in the quarter, an alert, business-like young chap who
had a first-rate plan for smuggling cocaine into England. It is easy enough, of course, to
buy cocaine in Paris, and the smuggling would be quite simple in itself, only there is
always some spy who betrays the plan to the customs or the police. It is said that this is
often done by the very people who sell the cocaine, because the smuggling trade is in the
hands of a large combine, who do not want competition. The Jew, however, swore that
there was no danger. He knew a way of getting cocaine direct from Vienna, not through
the usual channels, and there would be no blackmail to pay. He had got into touch with
Roucolle through a young Pole, a student at the Sorbonne, who was going to put four
thousand francs into the scheme if Roucolle would put 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 money from between old
Roucolle’s claws. Six thousand francs was not much — he had more than that sewn into
the mattress in his room — but it was agony for him to part with a sou. The Pole and the
Jew were at him for weeks on end, explaining, bullying, coaxing, arguing, going down on
their knees and imploring him to produce the money. The old man was half frantic
between greed and fear. His bowels yearned at the thought of getting, perhaps, fifty
thousand francs’ profit, and yet he could not bring himself to risk the money. He used to
sit in a comer with his head in his hands, groaning and sometimes yelling out in agony,
and often he would kneel down (he was very pious) and pray for strength, but still he
couldn’t do it. But at last, more from exhaustion than anything else, he gave in quite
suddenly; he slit open the mattress where his money was concealed and handed over six
thousand francs to the Jew.
The Jew delivered the cocaine the same day, and promptly vanished. And meanwhile, as
was not surprising after the fuss Roucolle had made, the affair had been noised all over
the quarter. The very next morning the hotel was raided and searched by the police.
Roucolle and the Pole were in agonies. The police were downstairs, working their way up
and searching every room in turn, and there was the great packet of cocaine on the table,
with no place to hide it and no chance of escaping down the stairs. The Pole was for
throwing the stuff out of the window, but Roucolle would not hear of it. Charlie told me
that he had been present at the scene. He said that when they tried to take the packet from
Roucolle 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 of face-powder which he was selling on
commission; it was suggested that the cocaine could be put into the tins and passed off as
face-powder. The powder was hastily thrown out of the window and the cocaine
substituted, and the tins were put openly on Roucolle’s table, as though there there were
nothing to conceal.
A few minutes later the police came to search Roucolle’s room. They
tapped the walls and looked up the chimney and turned out the drawers and examined the
floorboards, and then, just as they were about to give it up, having found nothing, the
inspector noticed the tins on the table.
‘TIENS,’ he said, ‘have a look at those tins. I hadn’t noticed them. What’s in them, eh? ’
‘Face-powder,’ said the Pole as calmly as he could manage. But at the same instant
Roucolle let out a loud groaning noise, from alann, and the police became suspicious
immediately. They opened one of the tins and tipped out the contents, and after smelling
it, the inspector said that he believed it was cocaine. Roucolle and the Pole began
swearing on the names of the saints that it was only face-powder; but it was no use, the
more they protested the more suspicious the police became. The two men were arrested
and led off to the police station, followed by half the quarter.
At the station, Roucolle and the Pole were interrogated by the Commissaire while a tin of
the cocaine was sent away to be analysed. Charlie said that the scene Roucolle made was
beyond description. He wept, prayed, made contradictory statements and denounced the
Pole all at once, so loud that he could be heard half a street away. The policemen almost
burst with laughing at him.
After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of cocaine and a 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 exonerated but very angry. The Jew
had double-crossed them. Afterwards, when the excitement was over, it turned out that he
had played the same trick on two other people in the quarter.
The Pole was glad enough to escape, even though he had lost his four thousand francs,
but poor old Roucolle was utterly broken down. He took to his bed at once, and all that
day and half the night they could hear him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimes
yelling out at the top of his voice:
‘Six thousand francs! NOM DE JESUS-CHRIST! Six thousand francs! ’
Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in a fortnight he was dead — of a broken
heart, Charlie said.
CHAPTER XXIV
I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury, which is the cheapest and not
the worst way of crossing the Channel. You had to pay extra for a cabin, so I slept in the
saloon, together with most of the third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary for
that day:
‘Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women, not a single
one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the women
merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirt with powder. Q. A secondary sexual
difference? ’
On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, mere children, who were going to
England on their honeymoon trip. They asked innumerable questions about England, and
I told them some startling lies. I was so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up
for months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are,
indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs,
mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with
veritable hops — they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is a very good
country when you are not poor; and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was
not going to be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic. The more
questions the Roumanians asked, the more I praised England; the climate, the scenery,
the art, the literature, the laws — 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.
But London — ’
Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first building we saw on the waterside
was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the English coast
like idiots staring over an asylum wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything,
cocking their eyes at the hotel. ‘Built by French architects,’ I assured them; and even
later, when the train was crawling into London through the eastern slums, I still kept it up
about the beauties of English architecture. Nothing seemed too good to say about
England, now that I was coming home and was not hard up any more.
I went to B. ‘s office, and his first words knocked everything to ruins. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said;
‘your employers have gone abroad, patient and all. However, they’ll be back in a month.
I suppose you can hang on till then? ’
I was outside in the street before it even occurred to me to borrow some more money.
There was a month to wait, and I had exactly nineteen and sixpence in hand. The news
had taken my breath away. For a long time I could not make up my mind what to do. I
loafed the day in the streets, and at night, not having the slightest notion of how to get a
cheap bed in London, I went to a ‘family’ hotel, where the charge was seven and
sixpence. After paying the bill I had ten and twopence in hand.
By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later I should have to go to B. for more
money, but it seemed hardly decent to do so yet, and in the meantime I must exist in
some hole-and-comer way. Past experience set me against pawning my best suit. I would
leave all my things at the station cloakroom, except my second-best suit, which I could
exchange for some cheap clothes and perhaps a pound. If I was going to live a month on
thirty shillings I must have bad clothes — indeed, the worse the better. Whether thirty
shillings could be made to last a month I had no idea, not knowing London as I knew
Paris. Perhaps I could beg, or sell bootlaces, and I remembered articles I had read in the
Sunday papers about beggars who have two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers. It
was, at any rate, notoriously impossible to starve in London, so there was nothing to be
anxious about.
To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where the people are poor and there are a
lot of rag shops. At the first shop I tried the proprietor was polite but unhelpful; at the
second he was rude; at the third he was stone deaf, or pretended to be so. The fourth
shopman was a large blond young man, very pink all over, like a slice of ham. He looked
at the clothes I was wearing and felt them disparagingly between thumb and linger.
‘Poor stuff,’ he said, ‘very poor stuff, that is. ’ (It was quite a good suit. ) ‘What yer want
for ‘em? ’
I explained that I wanted some older clothes and as much money as he could spare. He
thought for a moment, then collected some dirty-looking rags and threw them on to the
counter. ‘What about the money? ’ I said, hoping for a pound. He pursed Us lips, then
produced A SHILLING and laid it beside the clothes. I did not argue — I was going to
argue, but as I opened my mouth he reached out as though to take up the shilling again; I
saw that I was helpless. He let me change in a small room behind the shop.
The clothes were a coat, once dark brown, a pair of black dungaree trousers, a scarf and a
cloth cap; I had kept my own shirt, socks and boots, and I had a comb and razor in my
pocket. It gives one a very strange feeling to be wearing such clothes. I had worn bad
enough things before, but nothing at all like these; they were not merely dirty and
shapeless, they had — how is one to express it? — a gracelessness, a patina of antique fdth,
quite different from mere shabbiness. They were the sort of clothes you see on a bootlace
seller, or a tramp. An hour later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp,
coming towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window.
The dirt was plastering my face already. Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you
alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you
from all directions.
I stayed in the streets till late at night, keeping on the move all the time. Dressed as I was,
I was half afraid that the police might arrest me as a vagabond, and I dared not speak to
anyone, imagining that they must notice a disparity between my accent and my clothes.
(Later I discovered that this never happened. ) My new clothes had put me instantly into a
new world. Everyone’s demeanour seemed to have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker
pick up a barrow that he had upset. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said with a grin. No one had called
me mate before in my life — it was the clothes that had done it. For the first time I noticed,
too, how the attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a badly dressed man
passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as
though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp’s clothes it is
very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded.
You might feel the same shame, irrational but very real, your first night in prison.
At about eleven I began looking for a bed. I had read about doss-houses (they are never
called doss-houses, by the way), and I supposed that one could get a bed for fourpence or
thereabouts. Seeing a man, a navvy or something of the kind, standing on the kerb in the
Waterloo Road, I stopped and questioned him. I said that 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’ll find it cheap AND clean. ’
It was a tall, battered-looking house, with dim lights in all the windows, some of which
were patched with brown paper. I entered a stone passage-way, and a little etiolated boy
with sleepy eyes appeared from a door leading to a cellar. Murmurous sounds came from
the cellar, and a wave of hot air and cheese. The boy yawned and held out his hand.
‘Want a kip? That’ 11 be a ‘og, guv’nor. ’
I paid the shilling, and the boy led me up a rickety unlighted staircase to a bedroom. It
had a sweetish reek of paregoric and foul linen; the windows seemed to be tight shut, and
the air was almost suffocating at first. There was a candle burning, and I saw that the
room measured fifteen feet square by eight high, and had eight beds in it. Already six
lodgers were in bed, queer lumpy shapes with all their own clothes, even their boots,
piled on top of them. Someone was coughing in a loathsome manner in one corner.
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 of wood. It was rather worse than sleeping on a table,
because the bed was not six feet long, and very narrow, and the mattress was convex, so
that one had to hold on to avoid falling out. The sheets stank so horribly of sweat that I
could not bear them near my nose. Also, the bedclothes only consisted of the sheets and a
cotton counterpane, so that though stuffy it was none too wann. Several noises recurred
throughout the night. About once in an hour the man on my left — a sailor, I think — woke
up, swore vilely, and lighted a cigarette. Another man, victim of a bladder disease, got up
and noisily used his chamber-pot half a dozen times during the night. The man in the
comer had a coughing fit once in every twenty minutes, so regularly that one came to
listen for it as one listens for the next yap when a dog is baying the moon. It was an
unspeakably repellent sound; a foul bubbling and retching, as though the man’s bowels
were being churned up within him. Once when he struck a match I saw that he was a very
old man, with a grey, su nk en face like that of a corpse, and he was wearing his trousers
wrapped round his head as a nightcap, a thing which for some reason disgusted me very
much. Every time he coughed or the other man swore, 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 ah. In the morning I was woken by a dim impression of
some large brown thing coming towards me. I opened 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 dark brown
like an Indian’s, with dirt. The walls were leprous, and the sheets, three weeks from the
wash, were almost raw umber colour. I got up, dressed and went downstairs. In the cellar
were a row of basins and two slippery roller towels. I had a piece of soap in my pocket,
and I was going to wash, when I noticed that every basin was streaked with grime — solid,
sticky filth as black as boot-blacking. I went out unwashed. Altogether, the lodging-house
had not come up to its description as cheap and clean. It was however, as I found later, a
fairly representative lodging-house.
I crossed the river and walked a long way eastward, finally going into a coffee-shop on
Tower Hill. An ordinary London coffee-shop, like a thousand others, it seemed queer,
and foreign after Paris. It was a little stuffy room with the high-backed pews that were
fashionable in the ‘forties, the day’s menu written on a mirror with a piece of soap, and a
girl of fourteen handling the dishes. Navvies were eating out of newspaper parcels, and
drinking tea in vast saucerless mugs like china tumblers. In a corner by himself a Jew,
muzzle down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon.
‘Could I have some tea and bread and butter? ’ I said to the girl.
She stared. ‘No butter, only marg,’ she said, surprised. And she repeated the order in the
phrase that is to London what the eternal COUP DE ROUGE is to Paris: ‘Large tea and
two slices! ’
On the wall beside my pew there was a notice saying ‘Pocketing the sugar not allowed,’
and beneath it some poetic customer had written:
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.
CHAPTER XXV
The eight shillings lasted three days and four nights. After my bad experience in the
Waterloo Road I moved eastward, and spent the next night in a lodging-house in
Pennyfields. This was a typical lodging-house, like scores of others in London. It had
accommodation for between fifty and a hundred men, and was managed by a ‘deputy’ — a
deputy for the owner, that is, for these lodging-houses are profitable concerns and are
owned by rich men. We slept fifteen or twenty in a dormitory; the beds were again cold
and 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 of four) and the terms were cash down by seven in the evening
or out you went.
[It is a curious but well-known fact that bugs are much commoner in south than
north London. For some reason they have not yet crossed the river in any great
numbers. ]
Downstairs there was a kitchen common to all lodgers, with free firing and a supply of
cooking-pots, tea-basins, and toasting-forks. There were two great clinker fires, which
were kept burning day and night the year through. The work of tending the fires,
sweeping the kitchen and making the beds was done by the lodgers in rotation. One
senior lodger, a fine Norman-looking stevedore named Steve, was known as ‘head of the
house’, and was arbiter of disputes and unpaid chucker-out.
I liked the kitchen. It was a low-ceiled cellar deep underground, very hot and drowsy
with coke fumes, and lighted only by the fires, which cast black velvet shadows in the
comers. Ragged washing hung on strings from the ceiling. Red-lit men, stevedores
mostly, moved about the fires with cooking-pots; some of them were quite naked, for
they had been laundering and were waiting for their clothes to dry. At night there were
games of nap and draughts, and songs — ’ I’m a chap what’s done wrong by my parents,’
was a favourite, and so was another popular song about a shipwreck. Sometimes late at
night men would come in with a pail of winkles they had bought cheap, and share them
out. There was a general sharing of food, and it was taken for granted to feed men who
were out of work. A little pale, wizened creature, obviously dying, referred to as ‘pore
Brown, bin under the doctor and cut open three times,’ was regularly fed by the others.
Two or three of the lodgers were old-age pensioners. Till meeting them I had never
realized that there are people in England who live on nothing but the old-age pension
often shillings a week. None of these old men had any other resource whatever. One of
them was talkative, and I asked him how he managed to exist. He said:
‘Well, there’s ninepence a night for yer kip — that’s five an’ threepence a week. Then
there’s threepence on Saturday for a shave — that’s five an’ six. Then say you ‘as a
‘aircut once a month for sixpence — that’s another three’apence a week. So you ‘as about
four an’ four-pence for food an’ bacca. ’
He could imagine no other expenses. His food was bread and margarine and tea —
towards the end of the week dry bread and tea 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 a shave — it is awe-inspiring.
All day I loafed in the streets, east as far as Wapping, west as far as Whitechapel. It was
queer after Paris; everything was so much cleaner and quieter and drearier. One missed
the scream of the trams, and the noisy, festering life of the back streets, and the armed
men clattering through the squares. The crowds were better dressed and the faces
comelier and milder and more alike, without that fierce individuality and malice of the
French. There was less drunkenness, and less dirt, and less quarrelling, and more idling.
