But one thought was clearly in my mind. I must find a house where the sign "Rooms" was displayed in a window, and there I must go in.
For the first half-hour I kept this purpose in view, walking slowly and turning my head now to one side of the street, now to the other, so as to miss no promising haven. A room being all I needed, any room within my price would do. Having no experience, I could have no choice. If I had choice, it would have been for Miss Flowerdew’s; but that would have brought me back into the circle from which I was trying to slip out.
Miss Flowerdew’s setting my only standard as to "Rooms," I had imagined myself as walking into something of the kind, though possibly more cheerful. It is hardly necessary to say that in this I was disappointed. Drifting in and out of houses through most of that afternoon, I saw women and conditions that almost shattered such faith as I had left in human nature. The first to answer my ring at a doorbell was a virago. An enormous creature, bigger if not taller than myself, and clad in a loose pink-flannel wrapper that added to her bulk, she challenged me to find a fault with the room I declined after having seen it. "Better men than you have slept in that bed," she called after me as I clattered down the stairs, "and any one who says different ’ll lie." The next was a poor, leering thing who smiled in a way that would have been horrible if it had not been so sickeningly imbecile. The next was a slattern, pawing her face and wiping it with her apron while she showed me the doghole for which I was to pay seven dollars a week. There were others of whom it is useless to attempt a catalogue further than to say that they left me appalled. When the lights were being lit I was still in the streets with my two bags, and the snow falling faster.
I was about to go back to the Barcelona for the night when something happened which I tell to you just as it occurred.
That morning I had read in a paper the account given by a young Canadian officer of his escape from a German prison, of his beating his way to the Rhine, and of his final swim across the river to Switzerland. But the point that remained in my memory was his picture of himself as he lay like a lizard with his nose to the stream and his feet in the underbrush as the bank rose behind him. Listening to the current, he could guess how strong it was; putting his hand in the water, he could feel it cold. For over two hours he lay there in the darkness, resting, wondering, and thinking of a little cemetery not far from Basel where lay the bodies of the prisoners who had tried to make this swim.