I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tilbury, which is the cheapest and not the worst way of crossing the Channel. You had to pay extra for a cabin, so I slept in the saloon, together with most of the third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary for that day:
‘Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women, not a single one has washed her face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the women merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirt with powder. Q. A secondary sexual difference?’
On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians, mere2 children, who were going to England on their honeymoon4 trip. They asked innumerable questions about England, and I told them some startling lies. I was so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up for months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are, indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable hops5 — they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is a very good country when you are not poor; and, of course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not going to be poor. The thought of not being poor made me very patriotic6. The more questions the Roumanians asked, the more I praised England; the climate, the scenery, the art, the literature, the laws — everything in England was perfect.
Was the architecture in England good? the Roumanians asked. ‘Splendid!’ I said. ‘And you should just see the London statues! Paris is vulgar — half grandiosity7 and half slums. But London — ’
Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier8. The first building we saw on the waterside was one of those huge hotels, all stucco and pinnacles9, which stare from the English coast like idiots staring over an asylum10 wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything, cocking their eyes at the hotel. ‘Built by French architects,’ I assured them; and even later, when the train was crawling into London through the eastern slums, I still kept it up about the beauties of English architecture. Nothing seemed too good to say about England, now that I was coming home and was not hard up any more.
I went to B.‘s office, and his first words knocked everything to ruins. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said; ‘your employers have gone abroad, patient and all. However, they’ll be back in a month. I suppose you can hang on till then?’
I was outside in the street before it even occurred to me to borrow some more money. There was a month to wait, and I had exactly nineteen and sixpence in hand. The news had taken my breath away. For a long time I could not make up my mind what to do. I loafed the day in the streets, and at night, not having the slightest notion of how to get a cheap bed in London, I went to a ‘family’ hotel, where the charge was seven and sixpence. After paying the bill I had ten and twopence in hand.
By the morning I had made my plans. Sooner or later I should have to go to B. for more money, but it seemed hardly decent to do so yet, and in the meantime I must exist in some hole-and-corner way. Past experience set me against pawning11 my best suit. I would leave all my things at the station cloakroom, except my second-best suit, which I could exchange for some cheap clothes and perhaps a pound. If I was going to live a month on thirty shillings I must have bad clothes — indeed, the worse the better. Whether thirty shillings could be made to last a month I had no idea, not knowing London as I knew Paris. Perhaps I could beg, or sell bootlaces, and I remembered articles I had read in the Sunday papers about beggars who have two thousand pounds sewn into their trousers. It was, at any rate, notoriously impossible to starve in London, so there was nothing to be anxious about.
To sell my clothes I went down into Lambeth, where the people are poor and there are a lot of rag shops. At the first shop I tried the proprietor12 was polite but unhelpful; at the second he was rude; at the third he was stone deaf, or pretended to be so. The fourth shopman was a large blond young man, very pink all over, like a slice of ham. He looked at the clothes I was wearing and felt them disparagingly13 between thumb and finger.
‘Poor stuff,’ he said, ‘very poor stuff, that is.’ (It was quite a good suit.) ‘What yer want for ‘em?’
I explained that I wanted some older clothes and as much money as he could spare. He thought for a moment, then collected some dirty-looking rags and threw them on to the counter. ‘What about the money?’ I said, hoping for a pound. He pursed Us lips, then produced A SHILLING and laid it beside the clothes. I did not argue — I was going to argue, but as I opened my mouth he reached out as though to take up the shilling again; I saw that I was helpless. He let me change in a small room behind the shop.
The clothes were a coat, once dark brown, a pair of black dungaree trousers, a scarf and a cloth cap; I had kept my own shirt, socks and boots, and I had a comb and razor in my pocket. It gives one a very strange feeling to be wearing such clothes. I had worn bad enough things before, but nothing at all like these; they were not merely dirty and shapeless, they had — how is one to express it? — a gracelessness, a patina14 of antique filth15, quite different from mere shabbiness. They were the sort of clothes you see on a bootlace seller, or a tramp. An hour later, in Lambeth, I saw a hang-dog man, obviously a tramp, coming towards me, and when I looked again it was myself, reflected in a shop window. The dirt was plastering my face already. Dirt is a great respecter of persons; it lets you alone when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions.
I stayed in the streets till late at night, keeping on the move all the time. Dressed as I was, I was half afraid that the police might arrest me as a vagabond, and I dared not speak to anyone, imagining that they must notice a disparity between my accent and my clothes. (Later I discovered that this never happened.) My new clothes had put me instantly into a new world. Everyone’s demeanour seemed to have changed abruptly16. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my life — it was the clothes that had done it. For the first time I noticed, too, how the attitude of women varies with a man’s clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder17 away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp’s clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded. You might feel the same shame, irrational18 but very real, your first night in prison.
At about eleven I began looking for a bed. I had read about doss-houses (they are never called doss-houses, by the way), and I supposed that one could get a bed for fourpence or thereabouts. Seeing a man, a navvy or something of the kind, standing19 on the kerb in the Waterloo Road, I stopped and questioned him. I said that I was stony20 broke and wanted the cheapest bed I could get.
‘Oh,’ said he, ‘you go to that ‘ouse across the street there, with the sign “Good Beds for Single Men”. That’s a good kip [sleeping place], that is. I bin1 there myself on and off. You’ll find it cheap AND clean.’
It was a tall, battered-looking house, with dim lights in all the windows, some of which were patched with brown paper. I entered a stone passage-way, and a little etiolated boy with sleepy eyes appeared from a door leading to a cellar. Murmurous21 sounds came from the cellar, and a wave of hot air and cheese. The boy yawned and held out his hand.
‘Want a kip? That’ll be a ‘og, guv’nor.’
I paid the shilling, and the boy led me up a rickety unlighted staircase to a bedroom. It had a sweetish reek22 of paregoric and foul23 linen24; the windows seemed to be tight shut, and the air was almost suffocating25 at first. There was a candle burning, and I saw that the room measured fifteen feet square by eight high, and had eight beds in it. Already six lodgers26 were in bed, queer lumpy shapes with all their own clothes, even their boots, piled on top of them. Someone was coughing in a loathsome27 manner in one corner.
When I got into the bed I found that it was as hard as a board, and as for the pillow, it was a mere hard cylinder28 like a block of wood. It was rather worse than sleeping on a table, because the bed was not six feet long, and very narrow, and the mattress29 was convex, so that one had to hold on to avoid falling out. The sheets stank30 so horribly of sweat that I could not bear them near my nose. Also, the bedclothes only consisted of the sheets and a cotton counterpane, so that though stuffy31 it was none too warm. Several noises recurred32 throughout the night. About once in an hour the man on my left — a sailor, I think — woke up, swore vilely33, and lighted a cigarette. Another man, victim of a bladder disease, got up and noisily used his chamber-pot half a dozen times during the night. The man in the corner had a coughing fit once in every twenty minutes, so regularly that one came to listen for it as one listens for the next yap when a dog is baying the moon. It was an unspeakably repellent sound; a foul bubbling and retching, as though the man’s bowels34 were being churned up within him. Once when he struck a match I saw that he was a very old man, with a grey, sunken face like that of a corpse35, and he was wearing his trousers wrapped round his head as a nightcap, a thing which for some reason disgusted me very much. Every time he coughed or the other man swore, a sleepy voice from one of the other beds cried out:
‘Shut up! Oh, for Christ’s — SAKE shut up!’
I had about an hour’s sleep in all. In the morning I was woken by a dim impression of some large brown thing coming towards me. I opened my eyes and saw that it was one of the sailor’s feet, sticking out of bed close to my face. It was dark brown, quite dark brown like an Indian’s, with dirt. The walls were leprous, and the sheets, three weeks from the wash, were almost raw umber colour. I got up, dressed and went downstairs. In the cellar were a row of basins and two slippery roller towels. I had a piece of soap in my pocket, and I was going to wash, when I noticed that every basin was streaked36 with grime — solid, sticky filth as black as boot-blacking. I went out unwashed. Altogether, the lodging-house had not come up to its description as cheap and clean. It was however, as I found later, a fairly representative lodging-house.
I crossed the river and walked a long way eastward37, finally going into a coffee-shop on Tower Hill. An ordinary London coffee-shop, like a thousand others, it seemed queer. and foreign after Paris. It was a little stuffy room with the high-backed pews that were fashionable in the ‘forties, the day’s menu written on a mirror with a piece of soap, and a girl of fourteen handling the dishes. Navvies were eating out of newspaper parcels, and drinking tea in vast saucerless mugs like china tumblers. In a corner by himself a Jew, muzzle38 down in the plate, was guiltily wolfing bacon.
‘Could I have some tea and bread and butter?’ I said to the girl.
She stared. ‘No butter, only marg,’ she said, surprised. And she repeated the order in the phrase that is to London what the eternal COUP3 DE ROUGE39 is to Paris: ‘Large tea and two slices!’
On the wall beside my pew there was a notice saying ‘Pocketing the sugar not allowed,’ and beneath it some poetic40 customer had written:
He that takes away the sugar,
Shall be called a dirty ——
but someone else had been at pains to scratch out the last word. This was England. The tea-and-two-slices cost threepence halfpenny, leaving me with eight and twopence.
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bin
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| n.箱柜；vt.放入箱内；[计算机] DOS文件名:二进制目标文件 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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3
coup
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| n.政变；突然而成功的行动 | |
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4
honeymoon
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| n.蜜月（假期）；vi.度蜜月 | |
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hops
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| 跳上[下]( hop的第三人称单数 )； 单足蹦跳； 齐足（或双足）跳行； 摘葎草花 | |
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patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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grandiosity
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| n. 宏伟, 堂皇, 铺张 | |
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pier
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| n.码头；桥墩，桥柱；[建]窗间壁，支柱 | |
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pinnacles
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| 顶峰( pinnacle的名词复数 )； 顶点； 尖顶； 小尖塔 | |
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asylum
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| n.避难所，庇护所，避难 | |
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11
pawning
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| v.典当，抵押( pawn的现在分词 )；以（某事物）担保 | |
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12
proprietor
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| n.所有人；业主；经营者 | |
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13
disparagingly
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| adv.以贬抑的口吻，以轻视的态度 | |
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14
patina
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| n.铜器上的绿锈，年久而产生的光泽 | |
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filth
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| n.肮脏，污物，污秽；淫猥 | |
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16
abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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17
shudder
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| v.战粟，震动，剧烈地摇晃；n.战粟，抖动 | |
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irrational
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| adj.无理性的，失去理性的 | |
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19
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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stony
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| adj.石头的，多石头的，冷酷的，无情的 | |
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21
murmurous
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| adj.低声的 | |
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22
reek
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| v.发出臭气；n.恶臭 | |
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23
foul
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| adj.污秽的；邪恶的；v.弄脏；妨害；犯规；n.犯规 | |
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24
linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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25
suffocating
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| a.使人窒息的 | |
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lodgers
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| n.房客，租住者( lodger的名词复数 ) | |
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27
loathsome
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| adj.讨厌的，令人厌恶的 | |
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28
cylinder
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| n.圆筒，柱(面)，汽缸 | |
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29
mattress
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| n.床垫，床褥 | |
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30
stank
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| n. (英)坝，堰，池塘 动词stink的过去式 | |
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31
stuffy
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| adj.不透气的，闷热的 | |
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32
recurred
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| 再发生，复发( recur的过去式和过去分词 )； 治愈 | |
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33
vilely
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| adv.讨厌地，卑劣地 | |
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34
bowels
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| n.肠，内脏，内部；肠( bowel的名词复数 )；内部，最深处 | |
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35
corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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36
streaked
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| adj.有条斑纹的，不安的v.快速移动( streak的过去式和过去分词 )；使布满条纹 | |
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37
eastward
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| adv.向东；adj.向东的；n.东方，东部 | |
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38
muzzle
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| n.鼻口部；口套；枪(炮)口；vt.使缄默 | |
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39
rouge
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| n.胭脂，口红唇膏；v.(在…上)擦口红 | |
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40
poetic
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| adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的 | |
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