Down and Out in Paris and London (5 page)

to try crime.

‘Sooner rob than starve, MON AMI. I have often planned

it. A fat, rich American—some dark corner down Montpar-

nasse 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 recognized.

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 be-

gan making a list of the people who would probably give us

jobs. There were dozens of them, he said.

‘Tomorrow 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 tick-

ets— where the clerk had written ‘EN OR’ he would add ‘ET

DIAMANTS’ and he would change ‘fifteen francs’ to ‘fif-

teen thousand”. Neat, eh? Then, you see, he could borrow a

Down and Out in Paris and London

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.

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VI

We again failed to find work the next day, and it was

three weeks before the luck changed. My two hun-

dred francs saved me from trouble about the rent, but

everything else went as badly as possible. Day after day Bo-

ris 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 ingra-

tiatingly, 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 him-

self with his stick, and the .manager did not see that he was

lame. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we want two men in the cellars. Per-

haps you would do. Come inside.’ Then Boris moved, the

game was up. ‘Ah,’ said the manager, ‘you limp. MALHEU-

REUSEMENT—’

We enrolled our names at agencies and answered adver-

tisements, 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.

Down and Out in Paris and London

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 gentle-

man 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 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 hur-

ried 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 in 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

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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 hundred-

weight, 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

recognized 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 Wolf,

With what delight did I open thy charming letter, re-

minding me of the days of our perfect love, and of the so

dear kisses which I have received from thy lips. Such memo-

ries 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 conies 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

Down and Out in Paris and London

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 al-

ways. 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 sauce-

pan 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 ev-

erything 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

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and sleeping on the floor kept his leg and back in con-

stant pain, and with his vast Russian appetite he suffered

torments of hunger, though he never seemed to grow thin-

ner. 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

restaurant near by, and we were going to ask for a job there.

Suddenly, Boris made up his mind to go into the Madeleine

and bum 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 cap-

tain, and my father was a colonel. And here I am, eating the

bread of a Jew. A Jew …

0

Down and Out in Paris and London

‘I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early

months of the war, we were on the march, and we had halt-

ed 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.’ ‘Dis-

eases!’ 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 Rus-

sian 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 news-

papers. Sometimes we played chess. We had no board, but

we wrote down the moves on a piece of paper, and after-

wards 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 chess-

board you do not mind being hungry, which was certainly

not true in my case.

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1

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 newspa-

per. 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 pleas-

ant 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 bluebottles.

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

siege of Paris, and none of them has been caught since, ex-

cept 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 SHER-