Page 202 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

XXXI

he charge at Bozo’s lodging-house was ninepence a
Tnight. It was a large, crowded place, with accommoda-
tion for five hundred men, and a well-known rendezvous of
tramps, beggars, and petty criminals. All races, even black
and white, mixed in it on terms of equality. There were In-
dians there, and when I spoke to one of them in bad Urdu
he addressed me as ‘turn’—a thing to make one shudder, if
it had been in India. We had got below the range of colour
prejudice. One had glimpses of curious lives. Old ‘Grandpa’,
a tramp of seventy who made his living, or a great part of it,
by collecting cigarette ends and selling the tobacco at three-
pence an ounce. ‘The Doctor’—he was a real doctor, who
had been struck off the register for some offence, and be-
sides selling newspapers gave medical advice at a few pence
a time. A little Chittagonian lascar, barefoot and starving,
who had deserted his ship and wandered for days through
London, so vague and helpless that he did not even know
the name of the city he was in—he thought it was Liverpool,
until I told him. A begging-letter writer, a friend of Bozo’s,
who wrote pathetic appeals for aid to pay for his wife’s fu-
neral, and, when a letter had taken effect, blew himself out
with huge solitary gorges of bread and margarine. He was a
nasty, hyena-like creature. I talked to him and found that,
like most swindlers, he believed a great part of his own lies.

01