I passed into the common room, a sort of chapel, the long benches of which were already half-filled with grumbling tramps. In front was a plain pulpit, around the walls fifteen large crucifixes, and at the back a table where several men were writing letters with materials furnished by the establishment. The room was crowded when nine o’clock sounded from the great Asile bell. The outer door closed with a bang, the grey-haired monk marched in with a gigantic Bible in his arms, mounted the pulpit, and launched forth in a service worthy of note for the length of its prayers and a drowsy discourse on the life of some saint or other, to which the assembled vagabonds listened with stolid tolerance as something which must be endured as a punishment for being penniless. A gong rang out in the hall at the end of the sermon. We mounted the stairs and each, according to his check, entered one of several large rooms containing fifty beds apiece. Those who had registered at some previous date went at once to their cots. The newcomers filed by a frère in charge of a huge pile of bedding in the center of the room. As each one received two clean sheets and a pillow-case, he promptly sought out the cot assigned him, pulled off the soiled linen, carried it back to the monk, and returned to make up his bed. The cleanliness of the cots was truly monasterial. But they were so narrow that to turn over was a precarious operation, and so much harder than a plank bed as to suggest that they were filled with ground stone. In spite, however, of the chorus of snores which mocked the printed notices on the walls, commanding silence, I lay not long awake, for I had long since parted company with soft beds.
At five in the morning, long before daylight, we were awakened by a clanging bell and a trio of frères who marched up and down the room, shouting to us to be up and away. Woe betide the man who turned over for another nap, for one of the monks was upon him in an instant and, with an agility and a force that suggested that he had been a champion wrestler before taking orders, dumped him unceremoniously on the floor. When we had made up our beds and soused our faces at a hydrant in the outer courtyard, we were driven out into the dreary streets.
I had fallen in with a stranded English sailor at the Asile. Not even on shipboard can one strike up acquaintances as quickly as in a band of sans-sous. For an hour we wandered about the city, shivering in the chill that precedes the dawn, and then made our way down to the harbor. A British merchantman was discharging a cargo at one of the wharves. We slunk on board and, keeping out of sight of the officers, dodged into the forecastle. The crew was struggling to do away with a plentiful breakfast.
“I sye, shipmites,” cried my companion, “any show for a bite?”
“Sure, lads!” shouted several of the sailors, with that hearty unselfishness of the English seamen the world over. “Eat up and give the old ship a good name!”
“English? Eh, lad?” asked the old tar who gave me his seat at the table.
“My mate is, but I’m an American,” I answered, a bit dubiously.
“Oh, hell,” rumbled the veteran salt, heaping his plate in front of me, “English or American! What’s the bloody difference? I mean you’re not a dago or a Dutchman? How long have you been on the beach?”
We did full justice to the ship’s good name and left her with bread and meat enough in our pockets to stave off the hunger engendered by a day of tramping up and down the wharves. Next morning the only English vessel in harbor lay well out in mid-stream, and we subsisted on unroasted peanuts and broken cocoanut-meat imported for its oil, of which several vessels from the Orient were discharging whole shiploads.
Penniless sailors swarmed in the Place de la Joliette and the Place Victor Gélu, the rendezvous of seamen in Marseilles. As my acquaintance with these “beachcombers” increased, I picked up knowledge of the “grafts” of the port. On my fourth morning in the city I was aroused from a nap against the pedestal of the bronze Gélu by a Brazilian sailor, who had been long stranded in the city.