Page 65 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

space and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring
noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like the whir
of engines. We passed doorways which let out sometimes
a shouting of oaths, sometimes the red glare of a fire, once
a shuddering draught from an ice chamber. As we went
along, something struck me violently in the back. It was a
hundred-pound block of ice, carried by a blue-aproned por-
ter. After him came a boy with a great slab of veal on his
shoulder, his cheek pressed into the damp, spongy flesh.
They shoved me aside with a cry of ‘SAUVE-TOI, IDIOT!’
and rushed on. On the wall, under one of the lights, some-
one had written in a very neat hand: ‘Sooner will you find
a cloudless sky in winter, than a woman at the Hotel X who
has her maidenhead.’ It seemed a queer sort of place.
One of the passages branched off into a laundry, where
an old, skull-faced woman gave me a blue apron and a pile
of dishcloths. Then the CHEF DU PERSONNEL took me to
a tiny underground den—a cellar below a cellar, as it were—
where there were a sink and some gas-ovens. It was too low
for me to stand quite upright, and the temperature was per-
haps 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The CHEF DU PERSONNEL
explained that my job was to fetch meals for the higher ho-
tel employees, who fed in a small dining-room above, clean
their room and wash their crockery. When he had gone, a
waiter, another Italian, thrust a fierce, fuzzy head into the
doorway and looked down at me.
‘English, eh?’ he said. ‘Well, I’m in charge here. If you
work well’ —he made the motion of up-ending a bottle and
sucked noisily. ‘If you don’t’—he gave the doorpost sever-

Down and Out in Paris and London