Down and Out in Paris and London (9 page)

that I was willing to work.

‘We will give you a permanent job if you like,’ he said.

‘The head waiter says he would enjoy calling an Englishman

names. Will you sign on for a month?’

Here was a job at last, and I was ready to jump at it. Then

I remembered the Russian restaurant, due to open in a fort-

night. It seemed hardly fair to promise working a month,

and then leave in the middle. I said that I had other work in

prospect—could I be engaged for a fortnight? But at that the

CHEF DU PERSONNEL shrugged his shoulders and said

that the hotel only engaged men by the month. Evidently I

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had lost my chance of a job.

Boris, by arrangement, was waiting for me in the Arcade

of the Rue de Rivoli. When I told him what had happened,

he was furious. For the first time since I had known him he

forgot his manners and called me a fool.

‘Idiot! Species of idiot! What’s the good of my finding you

a job when you go and chuck it up the next moment? How

could you be such a fool as to mention the other restaurant?

You’d only to promise you would work for a month.’

‘It seemed more honest to say I might have to leave,’ I

objected.

‘Honest! Honest! Who ever heard of a PLONGEUR be-

ing honest? MON AMI’ —suddenly he seized my lapel and

spoke very earnestly—‘MON AMI, you have worked here all

day. You see what hotel work is like. Do you think a PLON-

GEUR can afford a sense of honour?’

‘No, perhaps not.’

‘Well, then, go back quickly and tell the CHEF DU PER-

SONNEL you are quite ready to work for a month. Say you

will throw the other job over. Then, when our restaurant

opens, we have only to walk out.’

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

‘Boris banged his stick on the pavement and cried out

at such stupidity. ‘Ask to be paid by the day, then you won’t

lose a sou. Do you suppose they would prosecute a PLON-

GEUR for breaking Us contract? A PLONGEUR is too low

to be prosecuted.’

I hurried back, found the CHEF DU PERSONNEL, and

told him that I would work for a month, whereat he signed

Down and Out in Paris and London

me on. Ibis was my first lesson in PLONGEUR morality.

Later I realized how foolish it had been to have any scruples,

for the big hotels are quite merciless towards their employ-

ees. They engage or discharge men as the work demands,

and they all sack ten per cent or more of their staff when the

season is over. Nor have they any difficulty in replacing a

man who leaves at short notice, for Paris is thronged by ho-

tel employees out of work.

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XI

As it turned out, I did not break my contract, for it was

six weeks before the Auberge de Jehan Cottard even

showed signs of opening. In the meantime I worked at the

Hotel X, four days a week in the cafeterie, one day helping

the waiter on the fourth floor, and one day replacing the

woman who washed up for the dining-room. My day off,

luckily, was Sunday, but sometimes another man was ill and

I had to work that day as well. The hours were from seven in

the morning till two in the afternoon, and from five in the

evening till nine—eleven hours; but it was a fourteen-hour

day when I washed up for the dining-room. By the ordinary

standards of a Paris PLONGEUR, these are exceptionally

short hours. The only hardship of life was the fearful heat

and stuffiness of these labyrinthine cellars. Apart from this

the hotel, which was large and well organized, was consid-

ered a comfortable one.

Our cafeterie was a murky cellar measuring twenty feet

by seven by eight high, and so crowded with coffee-urns,

breadcutters and the like that one could hardly move with-

out banging against something. It was lighted by one dim

electric bulb, and four or five gas-fires that sent out a fierce

red breath. There was a thermometer there, and the tem-

perature never fell below 110 degrees Fahrenheit—it neared

130 at some times of the day. At one end were five service

0

Down and Out in Paris and London

lifts, and at the other an ice cupboard where we stored

milk and butter. When you went into the ice cupboard you

dropped a hundred degrees of temperature at a single step;

it used to remind me of the hymn about Greenland’s icy

mountains and India’s coral strand. Two men worked in the

cafeterie besides Boris and myself. One was Mario, a huge,

excitable Italian—he was like a city policeman with operatic

gestures— and the other, a hairy, uncouth animal whom we

called the Magyar; I think he was a Transylvanian, or some-

thing even more remote. Except the Magyar we were all big

men, and at the rush hours we collided incessantly.

The work in the cafeterie was spasmodic. We were nev-

er idle, but the real work only came in bursts of two hours

at a time—we called each burst ‘UN COUP DE FEU’. The

first COUP DE FEU came at eight, when the guests upstairs

began to wake up and demand breakfast. At eight a sud-

den banging and yelling would break out all through the

basement; bells rang on all sides, blue-aproned men rushed

through the passages, our service lifts came down with a

simultaneous crash, and the waiters on all five floors began

shouting Italian oaths down the shafts. I don’t remember

all our duties, but they included making tea, coffee and

chocolate, fetching meals from the kitchen, wines from the

cellar and fruit and so forth from the dining-room, slicing

bread, making toast, rolling pats of butter, measuring jam,

opening milk-cans, counting lumps of sugar, boiling eggs,

cooking porridge, pounding ice, grinding coffee—all this

for from a hundred to two hundred customers. The kitchen

was thirty yards away, and the dining-room sixty or seventy

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1

yards. Everything we sent up in the service lifts had to be

covered by a voucher, and the vouchers had to be carefully

filed, and there was trouble if even a lump of sugar was lost.

Besides this, we had to supply the staff with bread and cof-

fee, and fetch the meals for the waiters upstairs. All in all, it

was a complicated job.

I calculated that one had to walk and run about fifteen

miles during the day, and yet the strain of the work was

more mental than physical. Nothing could be easier, on the

face of it, than this stupid scullion work, but it is astonish-

ingly hard when one is in a hurry. One has to leap to and

fro between a multitude of jobs—it is like sorting a pack of

cards against the clock. You are, for example, making toast,

when bang! down comes a service lift with an order for tea,

rolls and three different kinds of jam, and simultaneous-

ly bang! down comes another demanding scrambled eggs,

coffee and grapefruit; you run to the kitchen for the eggs

and to the dining-room for the fruit, going like lightning

so as to be back before your toast bums, and having to re-

member about the tea and coffee, besides half a dozen other

orders that are still pending; and at the same time some

waiter is following you and making trouble about a lost bot-

tle of soda-water, and you are arguing with him. It needs

more brains than one might think. Mario said, no doubt

truly, that it took a year to make a reliable cafetier.

The time between eight and half past ten was a sort of

delirium. Sometimes we were going as though we had only

five minutes to live; sometimes there were sudden lulls

when the orders stopped and everything seemed quiet for a

Down and Out in Paris and London

moment. Then we swept up the litter from the floor, threw

down fresh sawdust, and swallowed gallipots of wine or cof-

fee or water—anything, so long as it was wet. Very often

we used to break off chunks of ice and suck them while we

worked. The heat among the gas-fires was nauseating; we

swallowed quarts of drink during the day, and after a few

hours even our aprons were drenched with sweat. At times

we were hopelessly behind with the work, and some of the

customers would have gone without their breakfast, but

Mario always pulled us through. He had worked fourteen

years in the cafeterie, and he had the skill that never wastes

a second between jobs. The Magyar was very stupid and I

was inexperienced, and Boris was inclined to shirk, partly

because of his lame leg, partly because he was ashamed of

working in the cafeterie after being a waiter; but Mario was

wonderful. The way he would stretch his great arms right

across the cafeterie to fill a coffee-pot with one hand and

boil an egg with the other, at the same time watching toast

and shouting directions to the Magyar, and between whiles

singing snatches from RIGOLETTO, was beyond all praise.

The PATRON knew his value, and he was paid a thousand

francs a month, instead of five hundred like the rest of us.

The breakfast pandemonium stopped at half past ten.

Then we scrubbed the cafeterie tables, swept the floor and

polished the brasswork, and, on good mornings, went one at

a time to the lavatory for a smoke. This was our slack time—

only relatively slack, however, for we had only ten minutes

for lunch, and we never got through it uninterrupted. The

customers’ luncheon hour, between twelve and two, was

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another period of turmoil like the breakfast hour. Most of

our work was fetching meals from the kitchen, which meant

constant ENGUEULADES from the cooks. By this time the

cooks had sweated in front of their furnaces for four or five

hours, and their tempers were all warmed up.

At two we were suddenly free men. We threw off our

aprons and put on our coats, hurried out of doors, and,

when we had money, dived into the nearest BISTRO. It was

strange, coming up into the street from those firelit cellars.

The air seemed blindingly clear and cold, like arctic sum-

mer; and how sweet the petrol did smell, after the stenches

of sweat and food! Sometimes we met some of our cooks

and waiters in the BISTROS, and they were friendly and

stood us drinks. Indoors we were their slaves, but it is an

etiquette in hotel life that between hours everyone is equal,

and the ENGUEULADES do not count.

At a quarter to five we went back to the hotel. Till half-

past six there were no orders, and we used this time to

polish silver, clean out the coffee-urns, and do other odd

jobs. Then the grand turmoil of the day started—the din-

ner hour. I wish I could be Zola for a little while, just to

describe that dinner hour. The essence of the situation was

that a hundred or two hundred people were demanding in-

dividually different meals of five or six courses, and that

fifty or sixty people had to cook and serve them and clean

up the mess afterwards; anyone with experience of catering

will know what that means. And at this time when the work

was doubled, the whole staff was tired out, and a number

of them were drunk. I could write pages about the scene

Down and Out in Paris and London

without giving a true idea of it. The chargings to and fro in

the narrow passages, the collisions, the yells, the struggling

with crates and trays and blocks of ice, the heat, the dark-

ness, the furious festering quarrels which there was no time

to fight out—they pass description. Anyone coming into the

basement for the first time would have thought himself in

a den of maniacs. It was only later, when I understood the

working of a hotel, that I saw order in all this chaos.

At half past eight the work stopped very suddenly. We

were not free till nine, but we used to throw ourselves full

length on the floor, and lie there resting our legs, too lazy

even to go to the ice cupboard for a drink. Sometimes the

CHEF DU PERSONNEL would come in with bottles of

beer, for the hotel stood us an extra beer when we had had a

hard day. The food we were given was no more than eatable,

but the PATRON was not mean about drink; he allowed us

two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a PLONGEUR

is not given two litres he will steal three. We had the heel-

taps of bottles as well, so that we often drank too much—a

good thing, for one seemed to work faster when partially

drunk.

Four days of the week passed like this; of the other two

working days, one was better and one worse. After a week

of this life I felt in need of a holiday. It was Saturday night,

so the people in our BISTRO were busy getting drunk, and

with a free day ahead of me I was ready to join them. We

all went to bed, drunk, at two in the morning, meaning to

sleep till noon. At half past five I was suddenly awakened.

A night-watchman, sent from the hotel, was standing at my