When the last café had ceased its shouting, another villager, half in uniform, pushed past me and knocked for admittance. Certain that he was a gendarme, I followed him inside. At the back of the room, over a stove from which rose tantalizing odors, stood two women who, catching sight of me, deluged the officer with a flood of words.
“Here, mon vieux,” he snapped, whirling upon me, “what do you mean by marching into my house and frightening my women out of their wits?”
I excused my conduct on the ground of advice too hastily taken. The gendarme scowled over my papers, tucked them away in a greasy cupboard behind the stove, and turned with me out into the night. The Asile was not far distant, and it was unoccupied. The officer set a candle-end on a beam and, bidding me not to set the place on fire and to exchange the key for my papers in the morning, departed. I burrowed deep into the straw with which the shelf was covered and fell to sleep in my water-soaked garments.
Short rations and plank beds had left me in no condition to cover in a single day the thirty-five miles between Le Beausset and Marseilles. I found my legs giving way when darkness caught me some distance from the harbor and, having no hope of finding a better lodging, sat down against a tree on an outer boulevard. A bitter wind blew, for it was the last day of October and well north of Naples. In the far west of my own country, however, I had learned a trick of great value “on the road.” It is, that a coat thrown over the head is far more protection while sleeping out of doors than when worn in the usual manner. I was, therefore, unmolested as long as the night lasted, no doubt because passers-by saw in my huddled form only a grain-sack dropped by the wayside.
CHAPTER V
A “BEACHCOMBER” IN MARSEILLES
It was well for my immediate peace of mind that no prophet accosted me on my way down to the harbor next morning, to foretell the hungry days that were to be my portion in Marseilles. One of the strikes that periodically tie up the seaport of southern France was at its height. Dozens of sailing vessels rode at anchor in the little “Old Harbor”; the râde behind the great V-shaped breakwater was crowded with shipping; at the wharves were moored long rows of ocean-liners, among which the white, clipper-built steamers of the Méssagéries Maritimes predominated, their cargoes rotting in their holds. In a season of customary activity it would have been easy to “sign on” some ship eastward bound. On this November morning, a blind man must have known, from the silence of the port, that there was small prospect even of finding work ashore.
Six sous rattled in my pocket. I squandered the half of them for a breakfast and set out on a tour of the warehouses on the wharves. But at every spot where twenty longshoremen were needed for the unloading of a mail steamer, there were hundreds surging around the timekeeper, clamoring for employment. I reached the front ranks of several of these groups by football tactics, only to be informed, when I shouted my name to the official on the top of a cask or bale, that he was hiring only those stevedores whom he knew personally, and could not find places for a fourth of them. As darkness came on, I gave over the useless tramping up and down the roadstead, wolfed a “stevedore’s hand-out” in one of the open-air booths of the Place de la Joliette, and utterly penniless at last, turned away to the Asile de Nuit, as the only refuge left me.
The night asylum of Marseilles, situated beyond the Avenue de la République, just off the silent wharves, was no such one-room hovel as housed the wanderer in Cannes or Cuers. It covered what would have been a block in an American city and rose to a height of three stories; a plain, cold structure above the door of which the legend, “Asile de Nuit,” cut in stone, seemed to suggest how permanent and irremediable is poverty. Before the entrance were at least a hundred men of every age, from mere boys to wrinkled greybeards, chattering in groups, leaning against the building, seated on the sidewalk with their feet in the gutter, or strolling anxiously up and down. Not all of them were vagabonds in outward appearance. Here and there were men in comparatively clean linen and otherwise as faultless in attire as well-to-do merchants. A half-dozen of them wore dress-suits. They did not sit with their feet in the gutter; most of them held aloof from their ragged companions and strutted back and forth with the pompous air of successful politicians. But their conversation was, like that of the others, of the “grafts” of the road throughout the continent of Europe.
The “dress-suit vagabond” was a type new to me then. He became a familiar figure long before my wanderings ended. Wherever I met him, he hailed from the Kaiser’s realm. The German is admitted by the vagabonds of every nationality to be the most successful beggar in “the profession.” It is this well-dressed tramp who awakens the blatant sympathy of English and American tourists—those infallible judges of human nature—the world over. “Poor fellow!” will cry the hysterical lady abroad, when approached by one of this suave-mannered gentry; “He is, indeed, making a struggle to keep up in the world! Let’s give him something worth while, Arthur, for, surely, he cannot be ranked with those lazy, ragged tramps over there.” As a matter of fact, “those ragged tramps over there” are, more often than not, unpresumptuous sailors reduced to tatters by the rascalities of shipping companies or their able assistants, the land sharks of great ports. They would jump at any chance of employment, while the “poor fellow,” who has begged the very clothes that give him this false appearance of respectability, has been approaching just such hysterical ladies for years, fully intends doing so to the end of his days, and would not accept the presidency of a railroad.
The Asile of Marseilles was not controlled, as those of other French cities, by the gendarmerie, but was the branch establishment of a neighboring monastery. By eight o’clock the crowd before the building had doubled, the doors were thrown open, and we filed into an office where three monks, in cowl and soutane, sat behind a wicket. In Europe, man’s fate often hangs on a few scraps of paper. The applicant for lodging in the Asile was irrevocably turned out into the night unless he could show two of these all-important documents, one to establish his identity and nationality, and another to prove that he had been at work at a not-too-distant date. To forge certificates of employment is no unsurmountable task to those who cannot come by them honestly, and the most laudatory ones presented were those of the “dress-suit tramps.” A grey-haired frère read my papers rapidly and asked me, in English, with hardly a trace of foreign accent, if I spoke French. Upon my affirmative reply he pushed the documents I had handed him to his younger colleague, who entered my name and biography in a huge book and gave me, with my papers, a check entitling me to a bed in the Asile for eight nights.