George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London
replied. It was a woman who, besides having been
his mistress, owed him two hundred francs. When
Boris saw the letter waiting and recognised the
handwriting, he was wild with hope. We seized the
letter and rushed up to Boris's room to read it, like a
child with stolen sweets. Boris read the letter, then
handed it silently to me. It ran:
MY LITTLE CHERISHED WOOLF,-- With what delight did I
open thy charming letter, reminding me of the days of our
perfect love, and of the so dear kisses which I have received
from thy lips. Such memories linger for ever in the heart, like
the perfume of a flower that is dead.
"As to thy request for two hundred francs, alas! it is
impossible. Thou dost not know, my dear one, how I am
desolated to hear of thy embarrassments. But what wouldst
thou? In this life which is so sad, trouble comes to everyone. I
too have had my share. My little sister has been ill (ah, the
poor little one, how she suffered!) and we are obliged to pay I
know not what to the doctor. All our money is gone and we
are passing, I assure thee, very difficult days.
"Courage, my little wolf, always the courage! Remember that
the bad days are not for ever, and the trouble which seems so
terrible will disappear at last.
"Rest assured, my dear one, that I will remember thee always.
And receive the most sincere embraces of her who has never
ceased to love thee, thy
"YVONNE."
This letter disappointed Boris so much that he went
straight to bed and would not look for work again that
day.
My sixty francs lasted about a fortnight. I had
given up the pretence of going out to restaurants, and
we used to eat in my room, one of us sitting on the
bed and the other on the chair. Boris would contribute
his two francs and I three or four francs, and we
would buy bread, potatoes, milk and cheese, and make
soup over my spirit lamp. We had a saucepan and a
coffee-bowl and one spoon; every day there was a
polite squabble as to who should eat out of the
saucepan and who out of the coffee-bowl (the
saucepan held more), and every day, to my secret
anger, Boris gave in first and had the saucepan.
Sometimes we had more bread in the evening,
sometimes not. Our linen was getting filthy, and it
was three weeks since I had had a bath; Boris, so he
said, had not had a bath for months. It was tobacco
that made everything tolerable. We had plenty of
tobacco, for some time before Boris had met a soldier
(the soldiers are given their tobacco free) and bought
twenty or thirty packets at fifty centimes each.
All this was far worse for Boris than for me. The
walking and sleeping on the floor kept his leg and
back in constant pain, and with his vast Russian
appetite he suffered torments of hunger, though he
never seemed to grow thinner. On the whole he was
surprisingly gay, and he had vast capacities for hope.
He used to say seriously that he had a patron saint who
watched over him, and when things were very bad he would
search the gutter for money, saying that the saint often
dropped a two-franc piece there. One day we were waiting
in the Rue Royale; there was a Russian retaurant near by,
and we were going to ask for a job there. Suddenly, Boris
made up his mind to go into the Madeleine and burn a
fifty-centime candle to his patron saint. Then, coming
out, he said that he would be on the safe side, and
solemnly put a match to a fifty-centime stamp, as a
sacrifice to the immortal gods. Perhaps the gods and the
saints did not get on together; at any rate, we missed the
job.
On some mornings Boris collapsed in the most utter
despair. He would lie in bed almost weeping, cursing the
Jew with whom he lived. Of late the Jew had become
restive about paying the daily two francs, and, what was
worse, had begun putting on intolerable airs of
patronage. Boris said that I, as an Englishman, could not
conceive what torture it was to a Russian of family to be
at the mercy of a Jew.
"A Jew,
mon ami, a veritable Jew! And he hasn't even
the decency to be ashamed of it. To think that I, a
captain in the Russian Army-have I ever told you, mon
ami, that I was a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles?
Yes, a captain, and my father was a colonel. And here I
am, eating the bread of a Jew. A Jew ...
"I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early
months of the war, we were on the march, and we had
halted at a village for the night. A horrible old Jew, with
a red beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking up to my
billet. I asked him what he wanted. 'Your honour,' he
said, 'I have brought a girl for you, a beautiful young
girl only seventeen. It will only be fifty francs.' 'Thank
you,' I said, 'you can take her away again. I don't want
to catch any diseases.' 'Diseases!'
cried the Jew, mais,
monsieur le capitaine, there's no fear
of that. It's my own daughter!' That is the Jewish
national character for you.
"Have I ever told you,
mon ami, that in the old Russian
Army,it was considered bad form to spit on a Jew? Yes,
we thought a Russian officer's spittle was too precious to
be wasted on Jews . . ." etc. etc.
On these days Boris usually declared himself too ill to
go out and look for work. He would lie till evening in the
greyish, verminous sheets, smoking and reading old
newspapers. Sometimes we played chess. We had no
board, but we wrote down the moves on a piece of paper,
and afterwards we made a board from the side of a
packing-case, and a set of men from buttons, Belgian
coins and the like. Boris, like many Russians, had a
passion for chess. It was a saying of his that the rules of
chess are the same as the rules of love and war, and that
if you can win at one you can win at the others. But he
also said that if you have a chessboard you do not mind
being hungry, which was certainly not true in my case.
VII
MY MONEY oozed away-to eight francs, to four
francs, to one franc, to twenty-five centimes; and twenty-
five centimes is useless, for it will buy nothing except a
newspaper. We went several days on dry bread, and then
I was two and a half days with nothing to eat whatever.
This was an ugly experience. There are people who do
fasting cures of three weeks or more, and they say that
fasting is quite pleasant after the fourth day; I do not
know, never having gone beyond the third day. Probably
it seems different when one is doing it voluntarily and is
not underfed at the start.
The first day, too inert to look for work, I borrowed a
rod and went fishing in the Seine, baiting with blue-
bottles. I hoped to catch enough for a meal, but of course
I did not. The Seine is full of dace, but they grew cunning
during the seige of Paris, and none of
them has been
caught since, except in nets. On the second day I thought
of pawning my overcoat, but it seemed too far to walk to
the pawnshop, and I spent the day in bed, reading the
Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
. It was all that I felt equal to,
without food. Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless,
brainless condition, more like the after-effects of
influenza than anything else. It is as though one had been
turned into a jellyfish, or as though all one's blood had
been pumped out and luke-warm water substituted.
Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger; that, and
being obliged to spit very frequently, and the spittle
being curiously white and flocculent, like cuckoo-spit. I
do not know the reason for this, but everyone who has
gone hungry several days has noticed it.
On the third morning I felt very much better. I
realised that I must do something at once, and I decided
to go and ask Boris to let me share his two francs, at
any rate for a day or two. When I arrived I found Boris
in bed, and furiously angry. As soon as I came in he
burst out, almost choking:
"He has taken it back, the dirty thief! He has taken it
back!"
"Who's taken what?" I said.
"The Jew! Taken my two francs, the dog, the thief! He
robbed me in my sleep!"
It appeared that on the previous night the Jew had
flatly refused to pay the daily two francs. They had
argued and argued, and at last the Jew had consented to
hand over the money; he had done it, Boris said, in
the most offensive manner, making a little speech
about how kind he was, and extorting abject gratitude.
And then in the morning he had stolen the money back
before Boris was awake.
This was a blow. I was horribly disappointed, for I
had allowed my belly to expect food, a great mistake
when one is hungry. However, rather to my surprise,
Boris was far from despairing. He sat up in bed,
lighted his pipe and reviewed the situation.
"Now listen,
mon-ami, this is a tight corner. We have
only twenty-five centimes between us, and I don't
suppose the Jew will ever pay my two francs again. In
any case his behaviour is becoming intolerable. Will
you believe it, the other night he had the indecency to
bring a woman in here, while I was there on the floor.
The low animal! And I have a worse thing to tell you.
The Jew intends clearing out of here. He owes a week's
rent, and his idea is to avoid paying that and give me the
slip at the same time. If the Jew shoots the moon I shall
be left without a roof, and the
patron will will take my
suitcase in lieu of rent, curse him! We have got to make
a vigorous move."
"All right. But what can we do? It seems to me that
the only thing is to pawn our overcoats and get some
food."
"We'll do that, of course, but I must get my posses-
sions out of this house first. To think of my photographs
being seized! Well, my plan is ready. I'm going to
forestall the Jew and shoot the moon myself. F-----
le
camp
-retreat, you understand. I think that is the correct
move, eh?"
"But, my dear Boris, how can you, in daytime? You're
bound to be caught."
« Ah well, it will need strategy, of course. Our
patron
is on the watch for people slipping out without paying
their rent; he's been had that way before. He and his
wife take it in turns all day to sit in the office-what
misers, these Frenchmen! But I have thought of a way
to do it, if you will help."
I did not feel in a very helpful mood, but I asked
Boris what his plan was. He explained it carefully.
"Now listen. We must start by pawning our overcoats.
First go back to your room and fetch your overcoat, then
come back here and fetch mine, and smuggle it out under
cover of yours. Take them to the pawnshop in the Rue
des Francs Bourgeois. You ought to get twenty francs
for the two, with luck. Then go down to the Seine bank
and fill your pockets with stones, and bring them back
and put them in my suitcase. You see the idea? I shall
