Page 157 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

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, sunken 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 all. In the morning I was
woken by a dim impression of some large brown thing com-
ing 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 lodg-
ing-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, fi-
nally 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

1 Down and Out in Paris and London