the hotel was raided and searched by the police.
Roucolle and the Pole were in agonies. The police were
downstairs, working their way up and searching every
room in turn, and there was the great packet of cocaine
on the table, with no place to hide it and no chance of
escaping down the stairs. The Pole was for throwing the
stuff out of the window, but Roucolle
would not hear of it. Charlie told me that he had been
present at the scene. He said that when they tried to
take the packet from Roucolle he clasped it to his
breast and struggled like a madman, although he was
seventy-four years old. He was wild with fright, but he
would go to prison rather than throw his money away.
At last, when the police were searching only one floor
below, somebody had an idea. A man on Roucolle's floor
had a dozen tins of face-powder which he was selling on
commission; it was suggested that the cocaine could be
put into the tins and passed off as face-powder. The
powder was hastily thrown out of the window and the
cocaine substituted, and the tins were put openly on
Roucolle's table, as though there there were nothing to
conceal. A few minutes later the police came to search
Roucolle's room. They tapped the walls and looked up the
chimney and turned out the drawers and examined the
floorboards, and then, just as they were about to give it
up, having found nothing, the inspector noticed the tins
on the table.
"
Tiens," he said, "have a look at those tins. I hadn't
noticed them. What's in them, eh?"
"Face-powder," said the Pole as calmly as he could
manage. But at the same instant Roucolle let out a loud
groaning noise, from alarm, and the police became
suspicious immediately. They opened one of the tins and
tipped out the contents, and after smelling it, the
inspector said that he believed it was cocaine. Roucolle
and the Pole began swearing on the names of the saints
that it was only face-powder; but it was no use, the more
they protested the more suspicious the police became.
The two men were arrested and led off to the police
station, followed by half the quarter.
At the station, Roucolle and the Pole were inter
rogated by the Commissaire while a tin of the cocaine
was sent away to be analysed. Charlie said that the
scene Roucolle made was beyond description. He wept,
prayed, made contradictory statements and denounced
the Pole all at once, so loud that he could be heard half
a street away. The policemen almost burst with
laughing at him.
After an hour a policeman came back with the tin of
cocaine and a note from the analyst. He was laughing.
"This is not cocaine, monsieur," he said.
"What, not cocaine?" said the Commissaire. "
Mais,
alors
-what is it, then?"
"It is face-powder."
Roucolle and the Pole were released at once, entirely
exonerated but very angry. The Jew had doublecrossed
them. Afterwards, when the excitement was over, it
turned out that he had played the same trick on two
other people in the quarter.
The Pole was glad enough to escape, even though he
had lost his four thousand francs, but poor old
Roucolle was utterly broken down. He took to his bed at
once, and all that day and half the night they could
hear him thrashing about, mumbling, and sometimes
yelling out at the top of his voice:
"Six thousand francs!
Nom de Jesus-Christ! Six
thousand francs!"
Three days later he had some kind of stroke, and in
a fortnight he was dead-of a broken heart, Charlie said.
XXIV
I TRAVELLED to England third class via Dunkirk and
Tilbury, which is the cheapest and not the worst way of
crossing the Channel. You had to pay extra for
a cabin, so I slept in the saloon, together with most of
the third-class passengers. I find this entry in my diary
for that day:
"Sleeping in the saloon, twenty-seven men, sixteen
women. Of the women, not a single one has washed her
face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom;
the women merely produced vanity cases and covered the
dirt with powder.
Q,. A secondary sexual difference?"
On the journey I fell in with a couple of Roumanians,
mere children, who were going to England on their
honeymoon trip. They asked innumerable questions
about England, and I told them some startling lies. I was
so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up for
months in a foreign city, that England seemed to me a
sort of Paradise. There are, indeed, many things in
England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms,
armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked,
brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable hops-
they are all splendid, if you can pay for them. England is
a very good country when you are not poor; and, of
course, with a tame imbecile to look after, I was not
going to be poor. The thought of not being poor made me
very patriotic. The more questions the Roumanians
asked, the more I praised England; the climate, the
scenery, the art, the literature, the laws-everything in
England was perfect.
Was the architecture in England good? the Rou-
manians asked. "Splendid!" I said. "And you should just
see the London statues! Paris is vulgar-half grandiosity
and half slums. But London-"
Then the boat drew alongside Tilbury pier. The first
building we saw on the waterside was one of those huge
hotels, all stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the
English coast like idiots staring over an asylum
wall. I saw the Roumanians, too polite to say anything,
cocking their eyes at the hotel. "Built by French