Flight Without End

XXVII

About this time Tunda’s money began to run out.

He wrote to his brother. George replied that unfortunately he was unable to help with ready cash. Of course, his house was always open.

The boldness of the beautiful hotelière, which had so impressed Tunda, turned into derision. For beautiful, young bold hotel manageresses do not spend their lives behind gloomy, cheap, floral curtains for nothing. They expect some payment in return.

They regard the poverty of a tenant as malicious cunning, aimed at them personally by the tenant.

The conception the lower middle class has of poverty is that the poor man diligently courts it in order to inflict injury on his neighbour.

But it is precisely the lower middle class on whom the man who has nothing depends. High up behind the clouds lives God, whose infinite bounty has become proverbial. A little lower live those pampered individuals who are comfortably off, and who are so immune to any contagion from poverty that they develop those powerful virtues: sympathy for the needy, compassion, benevolence, and even freedom from prejudice. But squeezed between these noble folk and the others who need generosity most urgently, acting as insulators as it were, are the middle classes who trade in bread and provide food and lodging. The entire ‘social problem’ would be solved if only the rich, who are in a position to give away a loaf, were also the world’s bakers. There would be far less injustice if the jurists of the highest tribunals were to sit in the small criminal courts, and if police commissioners had personally to arrest petty thieves.

But life is not like that.

The hotel servant was the first to sense that Tunda’s money had run out. In the course of a long life he had developed his natural instinct for the fortunes of a fluctuating clientele to prophetic dimensions. He had seen millions of razor-blades grow blunt, millions of cakes of soap grow smaller, millions of toothpaste tubes go flat. He had seen a thousand suits make their exodus from the wardrobes. He had learned to recognize whether a man was returning hungry from the park or satisfied from a restaurant.