George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London

cook and I were feeling unsteady on our feet, not having

eaten or sat down since seven. We used to collapse, she

on the dustbin and I on the floor, drink a bottle of beer,

and apologise for some of the things we had said in the

morning. Tea was what kept us going. We took care to

have a pot always stewing, and drank pints during the

day.

At half-past five the hurry and quarrelling began

again, and now worse than before, because everyone was

tired out. The cook had a

crise de nerfs at six and another

at nine; they came on so regularly that one could have

told the time by them. She would flop down on the

dustbin, begin weeping hysterically, and cry out that

never, no, never had she thought to come to such a life as

this; her nerves would not stand it; she had studied

music at Vienna; she had a bedridden husband to

support, etc. etc. At another time one would have been

sorry for her, but, tired as we all were, her whimpering

voice merely infuriated us. Jules used. to stand in the

doorway and mimic her weeping. The

patron's wife nagged,

and Boris and Jules quarrelled all day, because Jules

shirked his work, and Boris, as head waiter, claimed the

larger share of the tips. Only the second day after the

restaurant opened, they came to blows in the kitchen over

a two-franc tip, and the cook and I had to separate them.

The only person who never forgot his manners was the

patron

. He kept the same hours as the rest of us, but he

had no work to do, for it was his wife who really managed

things. His sole job, besides ordering the supplies, was to

stand in the bar smoking cigarettes and looking

gentlemanly, and he did that to perfection.

The cook and I generally found time to eat our

dinner between ten and eleven o'clock. At midnight the

cook would steal a packet of food for her husband, stow

it under her clothes, and make off, whimpering that

these hours would kill her and she would give notice in

the morning. Jules also left at midnight, usually after a

dispute with Boris, who had to look after the bar till two.

Between twelve and half-past I did what I could to finish

the washing up. There was no time to attempt doing the

work properly, and I used simply to rub the grease off

the plates with tablenapkins. As for the dirt on the floor,

I let it lie, or swept the worst of it out of sight under the

stoves.

At half-past twelve I would put on my coat and hurry

out. The

patron , bland as ever, would stop me as I went

down the alley-way past the bar. «

Mais, mon cher

monsieur

, how tired you look! Please do me the favour of

accepting this glass of brandy."

He would hand me the glass of brandy as courteously

as though I had been a Russian duke instead of a

plongeur. He treated all of us like this. It was our com-

pensation for working seventeen hours a day.

As a rule the last Metro was almost empty-a great

advantage, for one could sit down and sleep for a

quarter of an hour. Generally I was in bed by halfpast

one. Sometimes I missed the train and had to sleep on

the floor of the restaurant, but it hardly mattered, for I

could have slept on cobblestones at that time.

XXI

THIS life went on for about a fortnight, with a slight

increase of work as more customers came to the restaur-

ant. I could have saved an hour a day by taking a

room near the restaurant, but it seemed impossible to

find time to change lodgings-or, for that matter, to get

my hair cut, look at a newspaper, or even undress

completely. After ten days I managed to find a free

quarter of an hour, and wrote to my friend B. in London

asking him if he could get me a job of some sort-

anything, so long as it allowed more than five hours

sleep. I was simply not equal to going on with a

seventeen-hour day, though there are plenty of people

who think nothing of it. When one is overworked, it is a

good cure for self-pity to think of the thousands of

people in Paris restaurants who work such hours, and

will go on doing it, not for a few weeks, but for years.

There was a girl in a

bistro near my hotel who worked

from seven in the morning till midnight for a whole year,

only sitting down to her meals. I remember once asking

her to come to a dance, and she laughed and said that

she had not been further than the street corner for

several months. She was consumptive, and died about

the time I left Paris.

After only a week we were all neurasthenic with

fatigue, except Jules, who skulked persistently. The

quarrels, intermittent at first, had now become con-

tinuous. For hours one would keep up a drizzle of

useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few

minutes. "Get me down that saucepan, idiot!' the cook

would cry (she was not tall enough to reach the shelves

where the saucepans were kept). "Get it down yourself,

you old whore," I would answer. Such remarks seemed to

be generated spontaneously from the air of the kitchen.

We quarrelled over things of inconceivable pettiness.

The dustbin, for instance, was an unending source of

quarrels-whether it should be put where I wanted it,

which was in the cook's way, or where she wanted it,

which was between me and the sink. Once she nagged

and nagged until at last, in pure spite, I lifted the

dustbin up and put it out in the middle of the floor,

where she was bound to trip over it.

"Now, you cow," I said, "move it yourself."

Poor old woman, it was too heavy for her to lift, and

she sat down, put her head on the table and burst out

crying. And I jeered at her. This is the kind of effect that

fatigue has upon one's manners.

After a few days the cook had ceased talking about

Tolstoi and her artistic nature, and she and I were not

on speaking terms, except for the purposes of work, and

Boris and Jules were not on speaking terms, and neither

of them was on speaking terms with the cook. Even

Boris and I were barely on speaking terms. We had

agreed beforehand that the

engueulades of working hours

did not count between times; but we had called each

other things too bad to be forgotten-and besides, there

were no between times. Jules grew lazier and lazier, and

he stole food constantly-from a sense of duty, he said.

He called the rest of us

jaune -blackleg-when we would

not join with him in stealing. He had a curious,

malignant spirit. He told me, as a matter of pride, that

he had sometimes wrung a dirty dishcloth into a

customer's soup before taking it in, just to be revenged

upon a member of the bourgeoisie.

The kitchen grew dirtier and the rats bolder, though

we trapped a few of them. Looking round that filthy

room, with raw meat lying among refuse on the floor,

and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and

the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to

wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world

as bad as ours. But the other three all said that they

had been in dirtier places. Jules took a positive pleasure

in seeings things dirty. In the afternoon, when 8

he had not much to do, he used to stand in the kitchen

doorway jeering at us for working too hard:

"Fool! Why do you wash that plate? Wipe it on your

trousers. Who cares about the customers?