Within the hall three old men were waiting in a row outside the closed glass window of the office on the right-hand side. The nearest old man to the door wore a brown pauper’s uniform. Both his eyes had cataracts and he seemed to be on the point of going into a faint. He was leaning on a stick and his head kept bobbing like a man that is in a drunken stupor and is on the point of falling asleep. The second old man wore a torn old dress suit. He looked like a waiter thrown out of employment through old age. He had a sharp lean face. The farthest old man was dressed in a medley of unspeakable rags and he shook his body continually trying to scratch himself on the insides of his clothes. The three of them stood in silence. Beyond them, four more concrete steps led to a long passage through the building. A corridor crossed the passage at the far end. Men passed along the corridor now and again in groups.
McPhillip was about to push through the door when the glass panel was pulled up with a screech and a man’s head appeared at the window. The man cracked his thumb and forefinger and motioned the nearest old man to approach, the old man dressed in rags. The old man started and cried out in a weak, childish voice: “Oh be Janey I’d forgotten.” Smiling weakly and muttering to himself he began to rummage among his rags. The man at the window looked at him, pursed up his lips angrily and disappeared.
Presently he reappeared from around the corner of the office. He came up to the old man and stood in front of him with his hands on his hips and his legs spread wide apart. His neat blue trousers were perfectly creased. He was in his shirt sleeves, so that his diamond sleeve links and the large diamond in his tie flashed in the half darkness. His hair was glued to his head with perfumed oil. Its odour pervaded the whole hallway. He looked at the old man with an expression of mixed contempt and anger. The two other old men began to snigger fawningly and tried to appear to have absolutely no connection with the ragged old man.
At last the ragged old man found a red handkerchief, and in his excitement he could not undo the knot that bound it together in a ball.
“Here,” he cried, holding out the handkerchief to the clerk, “there are five pennies and four halfpennies there. Me fingers are all stiff with the rheumatism an’ I can’t untie it. Maybe ye’d do it for me for th’ honour o’ God?”
Then he looked up into the clerk’s face with his mouth open. But the clerk, without taking any notice of the handkerchief, was looking at the old man’s face as if he were going to strike him. The old man began to tremble.
“Get out of here,” yelled the clerk suddenly in a thunderous voice.
Then he became motionless again. The old man began to babble and shiver. He turned about and shuffled down the steps to the door, scratching his shoulder-blades against his clothes as he moved. He went down two steps and then paused uncertainly and looked behind him. Then he shuddered, took another step, lost his balance and slipped. He slithered to the door on his buttocks. The other two old men began to laugh and titter. The clerk scowled at them. “What are ye laughing at?” he cried. They stopped immediately. “Hey you,” he continued, pointing his finger at the ragged old man, who had reached the street outside and was standing irresolutely on the kerb looking back over his shoulders. “If I catch you here again, you old fool, I’ll hand you over to the police. Go away now and get into the workhouse where you belong. Huh!”
The old man wrinkled up his monkey-like face into a grimace of surprise and misery. He cast a terrified look at the haggard face of McPhillip, that peered at him out of the angle of the wall to the left of the door. Then he mumbled something and set off down the lane at a broken trot. The other two old men in the hall began to whisper to one another as soon as the clerk turned his back and walked back into the office.
“Be the holy,” said one, “he should be shot, wha?”
“So he should,” whined the other old man, “the dirty, rotten—to be goin’ about like that.”
Then they shuffled up to the window for their bed tickets. The clerk swore at them and called them filthy names, but they kept apologizing to him and sniggering.
While the two old men were getting their bed tickets at the window, McPhillip pushed through the door quietly and slipped along the hall. He turned to the right at the far end. He stopped there. He leaned up against the wall casually, took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. He looked around examining the passage. It was a wide corridor with a concrete floor and walls of glazed brick. There were windows at regular intervals opening on a large yard at the rear of the building. In the alcoves formed by the windows seats were placed. By the opposite wall there were spittoons placed at equal distances of three yards or so. Men were strewn along the passage in groups, some sitting on the seats conversing in low voices, others walking up and down singly or in pairs, with their eyes on the ground and their hands muffed behind their backs in their coat sleeves. They were all wretchedly dressed and melancholy. Some were quite young, but their faces had already assumed the dejected appearance that
