‘We have been looking for someone to practise our English on,’ he said. ‘Our clients are all Americans, and the only English we know is——’ He repeated something that little boys write on the walls in London. ‘You may be useful. Come downstairs.’

He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow passage, deep underground, and so low that I had to stoop in places. It was stiflingly hot and very dark, with only dim yellow bulbs several yards apart. There seemed to be miles of dark labyrinthine passages–actually, I suppose, a few hundred yards in all–that reminded one queerly of the lower decks of a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring noise (it came from the kitchen furnaces) just like the whir of engines. We passed doorways which let out sometimes a shouting of oaths, sometimes the red glare of a fire, once a shuddering draught from an ice chamber. As we went along, something struck me violently in the back. It was a hundred-pound block of ice, carried by a blue-aproned porter. After him came a boy with a great slab of veal on his shoulder, his cheek pressed into the damp, spongy flesh. They shoved me aside with a cry of ‘Rangetoi, idiot!’ and rushed on. On the wall, under one of the lights, someone had written in a very neat hand: ‘Sooner will you find a cloudless sky in winter, than a woman at the Hôtel X. who has her maidenhead.’ It seemed a queer sort of place.

One of the passages branched off into a laundry, where an old skull-face woman gave me a blue apron and a pile of dishcloths. Then the chef du personnel took me to a tiny underground den–a cellar below a cellar, as it were–where there were a sink and some gas-ovens. It was too low for me to stand quite upright, and the temperature was perhaps 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The chef du personnel explained that my job was to fetch meals for the higher hotel employees, who fed in a small dining-room above, clean their room and wash their crockery. When he had gone, a waiter, another Italian, thrust a fierce fuzzy head into the doorway and looked down at me.

‘English, eh?’ he said. ‘Well, I’m in charge here. If you work well’–he made the motion of up-ending a bottle and sucked noisily. ‘If you don’t’–he gave the doorpost several vigorous kicks. ‘To me, twisting your neck would be no more than spitting on the floor. And if there’s any trouble, they’ll believe me, not you. So be careful.’