Page 153 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

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 hard-
ly decent to do so yet, and in the meantime I must exist in
some hole-and-corner way. Past experience set me against
pawning my best suit. I would leave all my things at the sta-
tion 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 thir-
ty 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, notori-
ously 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 be-
tween thumb and finger.
‘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,

1 Down and Out in Paris and London