afterwards, when it was too late, that the dodge was to
bribe the barman; if you could afford twenty francs he
would generally get you a job.
We went to the Hôtel Scribe and waited an hour on
the pavement, hoping that the manager would come
out, but he never did. Then we dragged ourselves down
to the Rue du Commerce, only to find that the new
restaurant, which was being redecorated, was shut up
and the patron away. It was now night. We had walked
fourteen kilometres over pavement, and we were so
tired that we had to waste one franc-fifty on going
home by Metro. Walking was agony to Boris with his game
leg, and his optimism wore thinner and thinner as the day
went on. When he got out of the Metro at the Place
d'Italie he was in despair. He began to say that it was
no use looking for work-there was nothing for it but to
try crime.
"Sooner rob than starve, mon ami. I have often
planned it. A fat, rich American-some dark corner
down Montparnasse way-a cobblestone in a stocking -
bang! And then go through his pockets and bolt. It is
feasible, do you not think? I would not flinch-I have
been a soldier, remember."
He decided against the plan in the end, because we
were both foreigners and easily recognised.
When we had got back to my room we spent another
one franc-fifty on bread and chocolate. Boris devoured
his share, and at once cheered up like magic; food
seemed to act on his system as rapidly as a cocktail. He
took out a pencil and began making a list of the people
who would probably give us jobs. There were dozens
of them, he said.
"To-morrow we shall find something, mon ami, I
know it in my bones. The luck always changes. Besides,
we both have brains-a man with brains can't starve.
"What things a man can do with brains! Brains will =-
make money out 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 and pawn it for
fifteen francs. Then-you know how carelessly the clerks
fill up the tickets-where the clerk had written ' en or' he
would add 'et diamants' and he would change 'fifteen
francs' to 'fifteen thousand.' Neat, eh? Then, you see,
he could borrow a thousand francs on the security of the
ticket. That is what I mean by brains . . ."
For the rest of the evening Boris was in a hopeful
mood, talking of the times we should have together
when we were waiters together at Nice or Biarritz, with
smart rooms and enough money to set up mistresses. He
was too tired to walk the three kilometres back to his
hotel, and slept the night on the floor of my room, with
his coat rolled round his shoes for a pillow.
VI
WE again failed to find work the next day, and it was
three weeks before the luck changed. My two hundred
francs saved me from trouble about the rent, but
everything else went as badly as possible. 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 Seine eleven times. We loitered for hours outside
service doorways, and when the manager came out we
would go up to him ingratiatingly, cap in hand. We
always got the same answer: they did not want a lame
man, nor a man without experience. Once we were very
nearly engaged. While we spoke to the manager Boris
stood straight upright, not supporting himself with his
stick, and the manager did not see that he was lame.
"Yes," he said, "we want two men in the cellars.
Perhaps you would do. Come inside." Then Boris
moved, the game was up. « Ah, » said the manager,
"you limp. Malheureusement--- "
We enrolled our names at agencies and answered
advertisements,_ but walking everywhere made us
slow, and we seemed to miss every job by half an
hour. Once we very nearly got a job swabbing out
railway trucks, but at the last moment they rejected us
in favour of Frenchmen. Once we answered an
advertisement calling for hands at a circus. You had to
shift benches and clean up litter, and, during the
performance, stand on two tubs and let a lion jump
through your legs. When we got to the place, an hour
before the time named, we found a queue of fifty men
already waiting. There is some attraction in lions,
evidently.
Once an agency to which I had applied months
earlier sent me a petit bleu, telling me of an Italian
gentleman who wanted English lessons. The petit bleu
said "Come at once" and promised twenty francs an
hour. Boris and I were in despair. Here was a splendid
chance, and I could not take it, for it was impossible to
go to the agency with my coat out at the elbow. Then it
occurred to us that I could wear Boris's coat-it did did
not match my trousers, but the trousers were grey and
might pass for flannel at a short distance. The coat was
so much too big for me that I had to wear it unbuttoned
and keep one hand in my pocket. I hurried out, and
wasted seventy-five centimes on a bus fare to get to the
agency. When I got there I found that the Italian had
changed his mind and left Paris.
Once Boris suggested that I should go to Les Halles
and try for a job as a porter. I arrived at half-past four
the morning, when the work was getting into its swing.
Seeing a short, fat man in a bowler hat directing some
porters, I went up to him and asked for work.
Before answering he seized my right hand and felt the palm.
"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 shoulders and turned away. I
made off When I had gone some distance I looked
back and saw four men lifting the basket on to a cart.
It weighed three hundredweight, possibly. The man
had seen that I was no use, and taken this way of
getting rid of me.
Sometimes in his hopeful moments Boris spent
fifty centimes on a stamp and wrote to one of his ex-
mistresses, asking for money. Only one of them ever
replied. It was a woman who, besides having been
his mistress, owed him two hundred francs. When
Boris saw the letter waiting and recognised the
handwriting, he was wild with hope. We seized the
letter and rushed up to Boris's room to read it, like a
child with stolen sweets. Boris read the letter, then
handed it silently to me. It ran:
MY LITTLE CHERISHED WOOLF,-- With what delight did I
open thy charming letter, reminding me of the days of our
perfect love, and of the so dear kis
ses which I have received
from thy lips. Such memories linger for ever in the heart, 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 thy embarrassments. But what wouldst
thou? In this life which is so sad, trouble comes to everyone. I
too have had my share. My little sister 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 our money is gone and we
are passing, I assure thee, very difficult days.
"Courage, my little wolf, always the courage! Remember that
the bad days are not for ever, and the trouble which seems so
terrible will disappear at last.
"Rest assured, my dear one, that I will remember thee always.
And receive the most sincere embraces of her who has never
ceased to love thee, thy
"YVONNE."
This letter disappointed Boris so much that he went
straight to bed and would not look for work again that
day.
My sixty francs lasted about a fortnight. I had
given up the pretence of going out to restaurants, and
we used to eat in my room, one of us sitting on the
bed and the other on the chair. Boris would contribute
his two francs and I three or four francs, and we
would buy bread, potatoes, milk and cheese, and make
soup over my spirit lamp. We had a saucepan and a
coffee-bowl and one spoon; every day there was a
polite squabble as to who should eat out of the
saucepan and who out of the coffee-bowl (the
saucepan held more), and every day, to my secret
anger, Boris gave in first and had the saucepan.
Sometimes we had more bread in the evening,
sometimes not. Our linen was getting filthy, and it
was three weeks since I had had a bath; Boris, so he
said, had not had a bath for months. It was tobacco
that made everything tolerable. We had plenty of
tobacco, for some time before Boris had met a soldier
(the soldiers are given their tobacco free) and bought
twenty or thirty packets at fifty centimes each.
All this was far worse for Boris than for me. The
walking and sleeping on the floor kept his leg and
back in constant pain, and with his vast Russian
appetite he suffered torments of hunger, though he
never seemed to grow thinner. On the whole he was
surprisingly gay, and he had vast capacities for hope.
He used to say seriously that he had a patron saint who
watched over him, and when things were very bad he would
search the gutter for money, saying that the saint often
dropped a two-franc piece there. One day we were waiting
in the Rue Royale; there was a Russian retaurant near by,
and we were going to ask for a job there. Suddenly, Boris
made up his mind to go into the Madeleine and burn a
fifty-centime candle to his patron saint. Then, coming
out, he said that he would be on the safe side, and
solemnly put a match to a fifty-centime stamp, as a
sacrifice to the immortal gods. Perhaps the gods and the
saints did not get on together; at any rate, we missed the
job.
On some mornings Boris collapsed in the most utter
despair. He would lie in bed almost weeping, cursing the
Jew with whom he lived. Of late the Jew had become
restive about paying the daily two francs, and, what was
worse, had begun putting on intolerable airs of
patronage. Boris said that I, as an Englishman, could not
conceive what torture it was to a Russian of family to be
at the mercy of a Jew.
"A Jew, mon ami, a veritable Jew! And he hasn't even
the decency to be ashamed of it. To think that I, a
captain in the Russian Army-have I ever told you, mon
ami, that I was a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles?
Yes, a captain, and my father was a colonel. And here I
am, eating the bread of a Jew. A Jew ...
"I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early
months of the war, we were on the march, and we had
halted at a village for the night. A horrible old Jew, with
a red beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking up to my
billet. I asked him what he wanted. 'Your honour,' he
said, 'I have brought a girl for you, a beautiful young
girl only seventeen. It will only be fifty francs.' 'Thank
you,' I said, 'you can take her away again. I don't want
to catch any diseases.' 'Diseases!'
cried the Jew, mais, monsieur le 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 Russian
Army,it was considered bad form to spit on a Jew? Yes,
we thought a Russian officer's spittle was too precious to
be wasted on Jews . . ." etc. etc.
On these days Boris usually declared himself too ill to
go out and look for work. He would lie till evening in the
greyish, verminous sheets, smoking and reading old
newspapers. Sometimes we played chess. We had no
board, but we wrote down the moves on a piece of paper,
and afterwards we made a board from the side of a
packing-case, and a set of men from buttons, Belgian
coins and 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 the rules of love and war, and that
if you can win at one you can win at the others. But he
also said that if you have a chessboard you do not mind
being hungry, which was certainly not true in my case.
VII
MY MONEY oozed away-to eight francs, to four
francs, to one franc, to twenty-five centimes; and twenty-
five centimes is useless, for it will buy nothing except a
newspaper. We went several days on dry bread, and then
I was two and a half days with nothing to eat whatever.
This was an ugly experience. There are people who do
fasting cures of three weeks or more, and they say that
fasting is quite pleasant after the fourth day; I do not
know, never having gone beyond the third day. Probably
it seems different when one is doing it voluntarily and is
not underfed at the start.
The first day, too inert to look for work, I borrowed a
rod and went fishing in the Seine, baiting with blue-
bottles. I hoped to catch enough for a meal, but of course
I did not. The Seine is full of dace, but they grew cunning
during the seige of Paris, and none of them has been
caught since, except in nets. On the second day I thought
of pawning my overcoat, but it seemed too far to walk to
the pawnshop, and I spent the day in bed, reading the
Memoirs of Sherlock 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 is as though one had been
turned into a jellyfish, or as though all one's blood
had
been pumped out and luke-warm water substituted.
Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger; that, and
being obliged to spit very frequently, and the spittle
being curiously white and flocculent, like cuckoo-spit. I
do not know the reason for this, but everyone who has
gone hungry several days has noticed it.
On the third morning I felt very much better. I
realised that I must do something at once, and I decided
to go and ask Boris to let me share his two francs, at
any rate for a day or two. When I arrived I found Boris
in bed, and furiously angry. As soon as I came in he
burst out, almost choking:
"He has taken it back, the dirty thief! He has taken it
back!"
"Who's taken what?" I said.
"The Jew! Taken my two francs, the dog, the thief! He
robbed me in my sleep!"
It appeared that on the previous night the Jew had
flatly refused to pay the daily two francs. They had
argued and argued, and at last the Jew had consented to
hand over the money; he had done it, Boris said, in
the most offensive manner, making a little speech
about how kind he was, and extorting abject gratitude.
And then in the morning he had stolen the money back
before Boris was awake.
This was a blow. I was horribly disappointed, for I
had allowed my belly to expect food, a great mistake
when one is hungry. However, rather to my surprise,
Boris was far from despairing. He sat up in bed,
lighted his pipe and reviewed the situation.
"Now listen, mon-ami, this is a tight corner. We have
only twenty-five centimes between us, and I don't
suppose the Jew will ever pay my two francs again. In
any case his behaviour is becoming intolerable. Will
you believe it, the other night he had the indecency 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 Jew intends clearing out of here. He owes a week's
rent, and his idea is to avoid paying that and give me the
slip at the same time. If the Jew shoots the moon I shall
be left without a roof, and the patron will will take my
suitcase in lieu of rent, curse him! We have got to make
a vigorous move."
"All right. But what can we do? It seems to me that
the only thing is to pawn our overcoats and get some
food."
Down and Out in London and Paris Page 4
