He is right, as always.  I, who am still young; I, who am on a higher level than his; I must play a part, and subdue the desire one has to let things go on as they may.

A sudden movement of will appears in my life, which otherwise proceeds as usual.

CHAPTER VI

A VOICE IN THE EVENING

I approached the workpeople with all possible sympathy.  The toiler’s lot, moreover, raises interesting problems, which one should seek to understand.  So I inform myself in the matter of those around me.

“You want to see the greasers’ work?  Here I am,” said Marcassin, surnamed Petrolus.  “I’m the lamp-man.  Before that I was a greaser.  Is that any better?  Can’t say.  It’s here that that goes on, look—­there.  My place you’ll find at night by letting your nose guide you.”

The truth is that the corner of the factory to which he leads me has an aggressive smell.  The shapeless walls of this sort of grotto are adorned with shelves full of leaking lamps—­lamps dirty as beasts.  In a bucket there are old wicks and other departed things.  At the foot of a wooden cupboard which looks like iron are lamp glasses in paper shirts; and farther away, groups of oil-drums.  All is dilapidated and ruinous; all is dark in this angle of the great building where light is elaborated.  The specter of a huge window stands yonder.  The panes only half appear; so encrusted are they they might be covered with yellow paper.  The great stones—­the rocks—­of the walls are upholstered with a dark deposit of grease, like the bottom of a stewpan, and nests of dust hang from them.  Black puddles gleam on the floor, with beds of slime from the scraping of the lamps.

There he lives and moves, in his armored tunic encrusted with filth as dark as coffee-grounds.  In his poor claw he grips the chief implement of his work—­a black rag.  His grimy hands shine with paraffin, and the oil, sunk and blackened in his nails, gives them a look of wick ends.  All day long he cleans lamps, and repairs, and unscrews, and fills, and wipes them.  The dirt and the darkness of this population of appliances he attracts to himself, and he works like a nigger.

“For it’s got to be well done,” he says, “and even when you’re fagged out, you must keep on rubbing hard.”

“There’s six hundred and sixty-three, monsieur” (he says “monsieur” as soon as he embarks on technical explanations), “counting the smart ones in the fine offices, and the lanterns in the wood-yard, and the night watchmen.  You’ll say to me, ’Why don’t they have electricity that lights itself?’ It’s ’cos that costs money and they get paraffin for next to nothing, it seems, through a big firm ’at they’re in with up yonder.  As for me, I’m always on my legs, from the morning when I’m tired through sleeping badly, from after dinner when you feel sick with eating, up to the evening, when you’re sick of everything.”