“Then I can’t admit you.”
“But I only stayed five of my eight days.”
“Ça ne fait rien! When you have been admitted once you can’t come back again for six months. Allez-vous en!”
This mandate proved inexorable. When I attempted to argue the matter a burly doorkeeper sent me spinning into the street. I wandered away through the city and, towards midnight, turned down to the wharves. An empty box car stood behind a warehouse. I crawled inside to find it already occupied by three English sailors of former acquaintance. To sleep was impossible, for it was bitter cold. After a couple of hours of shivering on the icy floor of the car, we crept out and took to tramping up and down the streets and byways—that most dismal experience, known professionally as “carrying the banner”—until daybreak.
Long, hungry days passed, days in which I could scarcely withstand the temptation to carry my kodak to the mont de piété just off the sailors’ square. Among the beachcombers there were daily some who gained a few francs, by an odd job, by the sale of an extra garment, or by “grafting,” pure and simple. When his hand closed on a bit of money, the stranded fellow may have been weak with fasting. Yet his first thought was not to gorge himself, but to share his fortune with his companions under hatches. In those bleak November days, many a man, ranked a “worthless outcast” by his more fortunate fellow-beings, toiled all day at the coal-wharves of Marseilles, and tramped back, cold and hungry, to the Place Victor Gélu to divide his earning with other famished misérables, whom he had not known a week before. More than one man sold the only shirt he owned to feed a new arrival who was an absolute stranger to all. These men won no praise for their benefactions. They expected none, and would have opened their eyes in wonder if they had been told that their actions were worthy of praise. The stranded band grew to be a corporate body. By a job here and there I contributed my share to the common fund, and between us we fought off gaunt starvation. In a dirty alley just off the Place was an inn kept by a Greek, in which one could sleep on the floor at three sous, or in a cot at six; and every evening a band of ragged mortals might have been seen dividing the earnings of some of them into three-sou lots as they made their way towards l’Auberge chez le Grec.
One spot in all Marseilles was the sole oasis in this desert of dreariness and desolation, the Sailors’ Home. Here, as winter drove us away from the sunny side of the breakwater, where we had been able to swim in early November, we congregated around the roaring stove to discuss the hopelessness of the situation, and to peruse the newspapers that kept us somewhat in touch with the moving world outside. But when dusk fell, the doors were closed behind us, and the biting air and the squalor of other quarters were only increased by contrast. I turned in at the Home one morning, to find that misfortune had overtaken the three Englishmen of the box car. My first acquaintance had arrived in Marseilles in the thinnest of overalls and jumper. Man can endure far more than most of us suspect; but night after night out of doors in such garb had broken the health of the Englishman, and the gendarme who had found him unconscious on the wharf had bundled him off to the Home. Sick as he was, it took four days of official red-tape and nonsense to get him admitted to the hospital, and it was only by strenuous efforts that we were able to pay his bad chez le Grec while the question was pending. His two companions had deserted from the British navy in Buenos Ayres, changed in name and dress, and signed on a “windjammer” for Genoa. To escape the king’s service had cost them months of labor and danger, a year’s wages, and their possessions. Nothing will better indicate the misery of Marseilles on strike than the fact that, with six months’ imprisonment at Gibraltar and a re-serving of their time in prospect, they had resolved to endure “the beach” no longer, and had marched up to the consul’s office to give themselves up. They were held under arrest at the Home for the first British steamer for the Rock.
There were those among the beachcombers who would not be outdone by the force of circumstances, who put on a bold front and set out to get the “living the world owed them.” In beggardom as in the world at large, the brazenface carries the day, and the modest and unassuming are pushed into the background. Among the first victims of this class, in foreign ports, are the consuls. There was in Marseilles a certain Welshman who won fame for his exploits during this season. Signed off in Barcelona, he had made his way to the French port, and had received from the British consul, within an hour of his arrival, two francs and a promise of clothes, next day. In the morning, as per promise, he was well fitted out and given another franc. He promptly hunted up a pawn shop, got back into his rags, and made tracks for the nearest wine-shop. Next morning, penniless, he was back early to see the consul, spun a pathetic yarn, and came out with two more francs. This amount, however, could not last long in a café. The Welshman pocketed the money, marched over to the American consulate, and proved so satisfactorily that Pittsburg was his home that two more francs were added to his collection. Day after day new variations of his story were sprung in all sections of the city. On his ability to speak some German, he “worked” the Austrian, Swiss, and German consuls, besides several foreign charitable societies. These institutions gave only clothing for the most part, but one of the Welshman’s experience had little difficulty in turning them into money.
Meanwhile, he was “pumping” his own consul, who twice more fitted him out, only to have him turn up again next morning as ragged and unkempt as ever. The consul was not blind, but when a vagabond sits down in your office and refuses to move until he receives a franc, it is often cheaper to give it than to take time to throw him out. The day came, however, when the consul determined to put an end to this system of blackmail, and, after giving the customary franc one morning, he ordered the Welshman not to come back again under pain of arrest. Bright and early the next morning the “beachcomber” turned up, a strong smell of absinthe entering the room with him.
“Good morning, consul,” he burst out, gaily, and loud enough to be heard by those of us who were listening outside, “I wonder if you can spare me a couple of francs for a morning bite?”
The consul stepped to the telephone and called for a policeman. A few minutes later, a gendarme pushed past us, stepped inside, and received orders to put the offender under arrest. But the Welshman, who lolled undisturbed in an office chair through all this, had taken the trouble to make himself familiar with the fine points of international law. He grasped a heavy ruler from the table as the officer approached.