Page 72 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

lifts, and at the other an ice cupboard where we stored
milk and butter. When you went into the ice cupboard you
dropped a hundred degrees of temperature at a single step;
it used to remind me of the hymn about Greenland’s icy
mountains and India’s coral strand. Two men worked in the
cafeterie besides Boris and myself. One was Mario, a huge,
excitable Italian—he was like a city policeman with operatic
gestures— and the other, a hairy, uncouth animal whom we
called the Magyar; I think he was a Transylvanian, or some-
thing even more remote. Except the Magyar we were all big
men, and at the rush hours we collided incessantly.
The work in the cafeterie was spasmodic. We were nev-
er idle, but the real work only came in bursts of two hours
at a time—we called each burst ‘UN COUP DE FEU’. The
first COUP DE FEU came at eight, when the guests upstairs
began to wake up and demand breakfast. At eight a sud-
den banging and yelling would break out all through the
basement; bells rang on all sides, blue-aproned men rushed
through the passages, our service lifts came down with a
simultaneous crash, and the waiters on all five floors began
shouting Italian oaths down the shafts. I don’t remember
all our duties, but they included making tea, coffee and
chocolate, fetching meals from the kitchen, wines from the
cellar and fruit and so forth from the dining-room, slicing
bread, making toast, rolling pats of butter, measuring jam,
opening milk-cans, counting lumps of sugar, boiling eggs,
cooking porridge, pounding ice, grinding coffee—all this
for from a hundred to two hundred customers. The kitchen
was thirty yards away, and the dining-room sixty or seventy

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