But, as he who has come into contact with tramps and adventurers knows, it is difficult to suppress the inventive talents of the genus vagabundus by mere printed statutes, even with a cohort of officers to enforce them. The second of the rules, especially, was not strictly adhered to. The crowds that reported daily at the institution were so great as to fill the tables a third and even a fourth time. The wily ones about me, knowing that this was only the “first table,” nibbled their wedges ever so slowly, until the uninitiated had finished their portions and the officers cried “allez,” when they tucked what was left under their coats, and tumbled with the rest of us through a back door, there to trade the wedge for tobacco, or to eat it with what they had picked up about the city.
“Vámonos, hombre,” said the Brazilian; “now for the soup.”
A full two miles we walked over another steep hill to find, before a building styled “Cuillère de Soupe,” much the same crowd as had been at the Bouchée de Pain. The soup was more carefully doled out than the bread had been. An officer at the door called for our papers, set down our names in his register, and handed us tickets which entitled us to soup at eleven and four daily, but only for eight days.
The fates preserve me from ever again tasting the concoction, misnamed soup, which was set before me when I had gained admittance. A bowl of water, grey in color, and of the temperature which the doctor calls for when he has by him neither a stomach-pump nor a feather with which to tickle the patient’s throat, contained one leaf—and that the very outside one—of a cabbage, half an inch of the top of a carrot with the leaves still on it, and three sprigs of what looked like grass. When I had made a complete inventory of my own dish, I turned to peer into that of the Brazilian. He had the selfsame portion of a carrot, a companion to my cabbage-leaf, and three quite similar blades of grass. Certainly, one could not accuse the soup officials of partiality, and if the cook was sparing of specimens from the vegetable kingdom he made up for it in ingredients from the world of minerals. There was salt enough in my mess to have preserved a side of beef, and pebbles of various sizes and shapes chased each other merrily around behind the spoon with which I stirred up the mixture. I know not who supplied the establishment with water, but the beach was not far distant.
Several times I returned to the Bouchée de Pain before I left Marseilles behind; the Cuillère de Soupe I struck off my calling list at once.
The city of Marseilles has established these two institutions in an attempt to reduce the begging class, and to provide an alternative for the indiscriminate asking of alms, which is strictly forbidden in the city. The buildings have purposely been placed in the most inconvenient sections of the municipality and far apart, in the hope that only those who are in dire want will visit them. As small an amount of food is given as will sustain life, because it is fancied that this arrangement will cause the penniless to redouble their efforts to become self-supporting. Yet the plan is not entirely a success, though the authorities may not know it. Many a man I have seen at these places whom I knew had money enough on his person to buy a dozen hotel dinners—money wheedled out of soft-hearted and soft-headed tourists, which he would have considered it a sin to pay out for food when cool, green absinthe could be bought with it. The “dress-suit tramps,” if they had no “bigger game on the string,” made this walk their daily exercise, and referred to it as their “constitutional.” Those who wished really to look for work found that the long tramp twice a day used up both their time and their strength, until they had little of either left to prosecute their search.
The strike broke and business was slowly and half-heartedly resumed. All my efforts to find work, however, turned to naught. It became evident that if ever I “shipped” for the Orient it must be through the assistance of someone of better standing. A few of the “beachcombers” signed on, but every captain who wandered through the Place Victor Gélu to pick up a sailor was at once surrounded by a half-hundred seamen headed by their “boarding masters,” and chose his man long before an “outsider” could gain a hearing. In many a city of Europe I had been advised by fellow-wayfarers to appeal to the American consul. In the opinion of my English companion and others: “That’s all the bloody loafers are shipped over here for, anyway, to give we honest chaps a lift when we’re down.” Not quite sharing this view, I had, thus far, thanked the advisers and gone my way. But when I had seen several “beachcombers” sail away through the assistance of higher authorities, I determined to make my existence known to our Marseilles representative.
Accordingly, on my return from the Bouchée de Pain one morning, I stopped in at the consulate. My papers were inspected by a negro secretary in the outer office, passed on to the vice-consul, and finally to the consul-general. That official, calling me inside to satisfy himself as to my nationality, gave me a note to one “Portuguese Joe,” whom I would find “hanging around on the Place Victor Gélu.” Joe, the consul explained, was master of a sailors’ boarding house, who undertook to shelter and feed such penniless mariners as the consul could vouch for, until he found them berths, and took his reward in a month’s advance on their wages—the regular blood-money system that is in vogue in almost every port.
I found Joe “hanging around” as the consul had promised, hanging around a lamp-post in the center of the place, and if he had not been able to find some such support he would have been lying around the same public spot. He was a big, greasy, half-breed nigger—I should hate to say negro—and he had what, in Jack Tar’s parlance, is known as “a full cargo.” In a ring about him were a score of sailors of various nationalities and colors, from plain New Yorkers and Baltimore negroes, to East Indians and men from the Congo Free State, who were making the boarding master the butt of their raillery. These same men, except, perhaps, the Anglo-Saxons, would have quailed before this maudlin rascal, sober, whom they were repaying, now, by their ridicule, for many a perfidious trick he had played them.
I received a franc from the drunken lout as soon as I had made him understand the note from the consul, and lost no time in leaving it in a restaurant. That night I slept on the floor of Joe’s house, with a huge Antigua negro as a roommate. The house was a shack bordering on the fish-market and the red-light district, a quarter requiring six policemen to the block. Several times during the night I started up at some piercing scream or long-drawn wail, and I borrowed a morning paper fully expecting to read of deeds of unusual violence. But it was only the customary list of minor misfortunes that was chronicled; a carousing sailor run down in that street, an Italian stabbed by a fellow-countryman in this, a demi-mondaine thrown out of a window in a third.