Puffing at his cigarette slowly, McPhillip examined the hall and the men who passed, with the same quick, sharp cunning with which he had examined the street. Again he could see nobody that aroused his interest. Again he sighed gently and moved away to the right. He entered a large room through a swing door.
The room was crowded. It was furnished with long tables and wooden forms, like a café for the working class. There were newspapers on some tables. On others there were games or draughts and dominoes. Men sat at all the tables. Some read. Others played games. The majority, however, sat in silence, their eyes staring vacantly in front of them, contemplating the horror of their lives. Those who could find no seat stood about the tables, watching the progress of the games, with their hands in their pockets and their faces set in an expression of stolid and absentminded indifference.
McPhillip walked about from one table to another, his cigarette in his left hand, the fingers of his right hand clutching the butt of his automatic, between the two top buttons of his raincoat. Nobody noticed him. The melancholy eyes, that were raised casually to look, saw only another shabby wreck like themselves. Even had his identity been suddenly disclosed by means of a loud trumpet to the men in that room, it is questionable whether the news would have occasioned excitement in more than a few breasts. Casual workers, casual criminals and broken old men, their connection with the ordered scheme of civilized life, with its moral laws and its horror of crime, was so thin and weak that they were unable to feel the interest that murder arouses in the tender breasts of our wives and sisters.
McPhillip examined the room carefully without discovering what he wanted. Then he walked out into the corridor again. He entered another room that was used by the occupants of the lodging-house for the purpose of writing letters. That room was empty. Then he descended a stairway to the lavatories and bathrooms. Here men were shaving and washing themselves. He walked about and discovered nobody. He came up again into the corridor and entered the dining-room.
The dining-room was very large and furnished with small deal tables and long forms of the same material. The wooden floor was covered with sawdust, like the floor of a slum public-house. Here and there the sawdust was mixed with refuse that had been swept from the tables. At the far end of the room a great number of men were gathered around an immense range, some with frying-pans in their hands awaiting their turn to cook, others rushing about attending to cooking utensils that were already on the range. They all had knives, spoons and forks in their hands. They were jostling, perspiring, cursing, laughing and scratching themselves. There was a great din of voices and a smell of food and of human bodies.
At the other end of the room there was a counter and behind the counter a large bright kitchen, shining bright with white crockery, polished brasses and the clean white uniforms of the women who served in it. Three young women were there cooking and serving food, for the lodgers who had not the means or the inclination to prepare their own food. These lodgers stood at the counter buying tea, bread and butter, cooked eggs and meat. They also purchased knives, forks, spoons and salt, because these necessities were not provided by the management in the lodging-house, owing to the moral character of the lodgers, except on payment of a fixed sum, which was returned at the conclusion of the meal, when the articles were handed back at the counter.
McPhillip walked down across the room to the far side. He had seen the man he sought at the first glance. He walked straight to a table by the wall at the far side. At that table a young man of thirty or so was eating his supper.
He ate off an enamelled plate that was loaded high with potatoes, coarse cabbage and a large piece of boiled bacon. A great steam rose from the plate and twisted up towards the ceiling in front of the man’s face. The man was dressed in a suit of blue dungarees, with a white muffler wound round and round his neck. He had a close-cropped bullet-shaped head, fair hair and dark eyebrows. The eyebrows were just single tufts, one over the centre of each eye. They grew long and narrowed to a single hair, like the ends of waxed moustaches. They were just like ominous snouts, and they had more expression than the dim little blue eyes that were hidden away behind their scowling shadows. The face was bronzed red and it was covered by swellings that looked like humps at a distance. These humps came out on the forehead, on the cheekbones, on the chin and on either side of the neck below the ears. On close observation, however, they almost disappeared in the general glossy colour of the brownish red skin, that looked as if there were several tiers of taut skin covering the face. The nose was short and bulbous. The mouth was large. The lips were thick and they fitted together in such a manner that the mouth gave the face an expression of being perpetually asleep. His body was immense, with massive limbs and bulging muscles pushing out here and there, like excrescences of the earth breaking the expected regularity of a countryside. He sat upright in his seat, with his large square head bolted on to his squat neck, like an iron stanchion riveted to a deck.
He stared straight in front of him as he ate. He held his fork by the handle, upright, in his left hand. He rapped the table with the end of the fork, as if he were keeping time
