London, and So On: Low Company! 135
square
meals, clean shirt and collar and a pressed suit at all costs. I gave
up my boarding-house and found a room under the roof in Great Russell
Street at five shillings a week. What qualifications must a man have, I
asked myself in bewilderment, that would give him a living wage in this
strange and mighty city of London? I was master of three languages, a
fluent correspondent, a good bookkeeper, a graduate of the University
of Vienna, an expert in metals, and knew as much about gems as any
ordinary dealer did. And yet nobody could use my services.
Luckily,
however, I had kept in with Mrs. Francis, my first landlady. She was a
motherly person and a lady who had come down in the world. One day I
called in to see her and she said: "I have good news for you. Father
Reilly has lost his job with Pitman's."
Father
Reilly was the unfrocked Catholic priest who was one of her boarders.
His job had been teaching English to foreigners. Mrs. Francis, who
knew that I was a foreigner who could speak English, thought I would
fit the bill. In point of fact, I got the job at a salary of two pounds
fifteen shillings a week.
Most
of my pupils were older than I was. I remember one, Herr Meltner,
mainly because I got him into a continental news service, my tuition
having enabled him to qualify as a translator of news items
translated from the London dailies. He showed his appreciation by
making me free of the bachelor establishment of his new boss. There his
chief lived in perfect amity with his paste-and-scissors men in a kind
of Bohemian communism which knew no
