George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

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

wrap as many of my things as I can carry in a

newspaper, and go down and ask the patron the way to

the nearest laundry. I shall be very brazen and casual,

you understand, and of course the patron will think the

bundle is nothing but dirty linen. Or, if he does suspect

anything, he will do what he always does, the mean

sneak; he will go up to my room and feel the weight of

my suitcase. And when he feels the weight of stones he

will think it is still full. Strategy, eh? Then afterwards I

can come back and carry my other things out in my

pockets."

"But what about the suitcase?"

"Oh, that? We shall have to abandon it. The miser-

able thing only cost about twenty francs. Besides, one

always abandons something in a retreat. Look at

Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole

army."

Boris was so pleased with this scheme (he called it

une

ruse de guerre

) that he almost forgot being hungry. Its

main weakness-that he would have nowhere to sleep

after shooting the moon-he ignored.

At first the

ruse de guerre worked well. I went home

and fetched my overcoat (that made already nine kilo-

metres, on an empty belly) and smuggled Boris's coat

out successfully. Then a hitch occured. The receiver at