Page 198 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

all right.’
Bozo talked further in the same strain, and I listened
with attention. He seemed a very unusual screever, and he
was, moreover, the first person I had heard maintain that
poverty did not matter. I saw a good deal of him during the
next few days, for several times it rained and he could not
work. He told me the history of his life, and it was a curi-
ous one.
The son of a bankrupt bookseller, he had gone to work
as a house-painter at eighteen, and then served three years
in France and India during the war. After the war he had
found a house-painting job in Paris, and had stayed there
several years. France suited him better than England (he
despised the English), and he had been doing well in Paris,
saving money, and engaged to a French girl. One day the
girl was crushed to death under the wheels of an omnibus.
Bozo went on the drink for a week, and then returned to
work, rather shaky; the same morning he fell from a stage
on which he was working, forty feet on to the pavement, and
smashed his right foot to pulp. For some reason he received
only sixty pounds compensation. He returned to England,
spent his money in looking for jobs, tried hawking books in
Middlesex Street market, then tried selling toys from a tray,
and finally settled down as a screever. He had lived hand to
mouth ever since, half starved throughout the winter, and
often sleeping in the spike or on the Embankment.
When I knew him he owned nothing but the clothes he
stood up in, and his drawing materials and a few books. The
clothes were the usual beggar’s rags, but he wore a collar

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