‘All right, if you like to put it like that. Give you ten quid.’
‘But as it happens, you see, I don’t want it.’
‘But dash it all! You might as well have a decent place to live in.’
‘But I don’t want a decent place. I want an indecent place. This one, for instance.’
‘But why? Why?’
‘It’s suited to my station,’ said Gordon, turning his face to the wall.
A few days later Ravelston wrote him a long, diffident sort of letter. It reiterated most of what he had said in their conversation. Its general effect was that Ravelston saw Gordon’s point entirely, that there was a lot of truth in what Gordon said, that Gordon was absolutely right in principle, but–! It was the obvious, the inevitable ‘but’. Gordon did not answer. It was several months before he saw Ravelston again. Ravelston made various attempts to get in touch with him. It was a curious fact–rather a shameful fact from a Socialist’s point of view–that the thought of Gordon, who had brains and was of gentle birth, lurking in that vile place and that almost menial job, worried him more than the thought of ten thousand unemployed in Middlesbrough. Several times, in hope of cheering Gordon up, he wrote asking him to send contributions to Antichrist. Gordon never answered. The friendship was at an end, it seemed to him. The evil time when he had lived on Ravelston had spoiled everything. Charity kills friendship.
And then there were Julia and Rosemary. They differed from Ravelston in this, that they had no shyness about speaking their minds. They did not say euphemistically that Gordon was ‘right in principle’; they knew that to refuse a ‘good’ job can never be right. Over and over again they besought him to go back to the New Albion. The worst was that he had both of them in pursuit of him together. Before this business they had never met, but now Rosemary had got to know Julia somehow. They were in feminine league against him. They used to get together and talk about the ‘maddening’ way in which Gordon was behaving. It was the only thing they had in common, their feminine rage against his ‘maddening’ behaviour. Simultaneously and one after the other, by letter and by word of mouth, they harried him. It was unbearable.
Thank God, neither of them had seen his room at Mother Meakin’s yet. Rosemary might have endured it, but the sight of that filthy attic would have been almost the death of Julia. They had been round to see him at the library, Rosemary a number of times, Julia once, when she could make a pretext to get away from the teashop. Even that was bad enough. It dismayed them to see what a mean, dreary little place the library was. The job at McKechnie’s, though wretchedly paid, had not been the kind of job that you need actually be ashamed of. It brought Gordon into touch with cultivated people; seeing that he was a ‘writer’ himself, it might conceivably ‘lead to something’. But here, in a street that was almost a slum, serving out yellow-jacketed trash at thirty bob a week–what hope was there in a job like that? It was just a derelict’s job, a blind-alley job. Evening after evening, walking up and down the dreary misty street after the library was shut, Gordon and Rosemary argued about it. She kept on and on at him. Would he go back to the New Albion? Why wouldn’t he go back to the New Albion? He always told her that the New Albion wouldn’t take him back. After all, he hadn’t applied for the job and there was no knowing whether he could get it; he preferred to keep it uncertain. There was something about him now that dismayed and frightened her. He seemed to have changed and deteriorated so suddenly. She divined, though he did not speak to her about it, that desire of his to escape from all effort and all decency, to sink down, down into the ultimate mud. It was not only from money but from life itself that he was turning away. They did not argue now as they had argued in the old days before Gordon had lost his job. In those days she had not paid much attention to his preposterous theories. His tirades against the money-morality had been a kind of joke between them. And it had hardly seemed to matter that time was passing and that Gordon’s chance of earning a decent living was infinitely remote. She had still thought of herself as a young girl and of the future as limitless. She had watched him fling away two years of his life–two years of her life, for that matter; and she would have felt it ungenerous to protest.
But now she was growing frightened. Time’s winged chariot was hurrying near. When Gordon lost his job she had suddenly realized, with the sense of making a startling discovery, that after all she was no longer very young. Gordon’s thirtieth birthday was past; her own was not far distant. And what lay ahead of them? Gordon was sinking effortless into grey, deadly failure. He seemed to want to sink. What hope was there that they could ever get married now? Gordon knew that she was right. The situation was impossible. And so the thought, unspoken as yet, grew gradually in both their minds that they would have to part–for good.
One night they were to meet under the railway arches. It was a horrible January night; no mist, for once, only a vile wind that screeched round corners and flung dust and torn paper into your face. He waited for her, a small slouching figure, shabby almost to raggedness, his hair blown about by the wind. She was punctual, as usual. She ran towards him, pulled his face down, and kissed his cold cheek.
‘Gordon, dear, how cold you are! Why did you come out without an overcoat?’
‘My overcoat’s up the spout. I thought you knew.’
‘Oh, dear! Yes.’
She looked up at him, a small frown between her black brows. He looked so haggard, so despondent, there in the ill-lit archway, his face full of shadows. She wound her arm through his and pulled him out into the light.
‘Let’s keep walking. It’s too cold to stand about. I’ve got something serious I want to say to you.’
‘What?’
‘I expect you’ll be very angry with me.’
‘What is it?’
‘This afternoon I went and saw Mr Erskine. I asked leave to speak to him for a few minutes.’
He knew what was coming. He tried to free his arm from hers, but she held on to it.
‘Well?’ he said sulkily.
‘I spoke to him about you. I asked him if he’d take you back. Of course he said trade was bad and they couldn’t afford to take on new staff and all that. But I reminded him of what he’d said to you, and he said, Yes, he’d always thought you were very promising. And in the end he said he’d be quite ready to find a job for you if you’d come back. So you see I was right. They will give you the job.’
He did not answer. She squeezed his arm. ‘So now what do you think about it?’ she said.
‘You know what I think,’ he said coldly.
Secretly he was alarmed and angry. This was what he had been fearing. He had known all along that she would do it sooner or later. It made the issue more definite and his own blame clearer. He slouched on, his hands still in his coat pockets, letting her cling to his arm but not looking towards her.
‘You’re angry with me?’ she said.
‘No, I’m not. But I don’t see why you had to do it–behind my back.’
That wounded her. She had had to plead very hard before she had managed to extort that promise from Mr Erskine. And it had needed all her courage to beard the managing director in his den. She had been in deadly fear that she might be sacked for doing it. But she wasn’t going to tell Gordon anything of that.
‘I don’t think you ought to say behind your back. After all, I was only trying to help you.’
‘How does it help me to get the offer of a job I wouldn’t touch with a stick?’
‘You mean you won’t go back, even now?’
‘Never.’
‘Why?’
‘Must we go into it again?’ he said wearily.
She squeezed his arm with all her strength and pulled him round, making him face her. There was a kind of desperation in the way she clung to him. She had made her last effort and it had failed. It was as though she could feel him receding, fading away from her like a ghost.
‘You’ll break my heart if you go on like this,’ she said.
&n
bsp; ‘I wish you wouldn’t trouble about me. It would be so much simpler if you didn’t.’
‘But why do you have to throw your life away?’
‘I tell you I can’t help it. I’ve got to stick to my guns.’
‘You know what this will mean?’
With a chill at his heart, and yet with a feeling of resignation, even of relief, he said: ‘You mean we shall have to part–not see each other again?’
They had walked on, and now they emerged into the Westminster Bridge Road. The wind met them with a scream, whirling at them a cloud of dust that made both of them duck their heads. They halted again. Her small face was full of lines, and the cold wind and the cold lamplight did not improve it.
‘You want to get rid of me,’ he said.
‘No. No. It’s not exactly that.’
‘But you feel we ought to part.’
‘How can we go on like this?’ she said desolately.
‘It’s difficult, I admit.’
‘It’s all so miserable, so hopeless! What can it ever lead to?’
‘So you don’t love me after all?’ he said.
‘I do, I do! You know I do.’
‘In a way, perhaps. But not enough to go on loving me when it’s certain I’ll never have the money to keep you. You’ll have me as a husband, but not as a lover. It’s still a question of money, you see.’
‘It is not money, Gordon! It’s not that.’
‘Yes, it’s just money. There’s been money between us from the start. Money, always money!’
The scene continued, but not for very much longer. Both of them were shivering with cold. There is no emotion that matters greatly when one is standing at a street corner in a biting wind. When finally they parted it was with no irrevocable farewell. She simply said, ‘I must get back,’ kissed him, and ran across the road to the tram-stop. Mainly with relief he watched her go. He could not stop now to ask himself whether he loved her. Simply he wanted to get away–away from the windy street, away from scenes and emotional demands, back in the frowzy solitude of his attic. If there were tears in his eyes it was only from the cold of the wind.
With Julia it was almost worse. She asked him to go and see her one evening. This was after she had heard, from Rosemary, of Mr Erskine’s offer of a job. The dreadful thing with Julia was that she understood nothing, absolutely nothing, of his motives. All she understood was that a ‘good’ job had been offered him and that he had refused it. She implored him almost on her knees not to throw this chance away. And when he told her that his mind was made up, she wept, actually wept. That was dreadful. The poor goose-like girl, with streaks of grey in her hair, weeping without grace or dignity in her little Drage-furnished bed-sitting room! This was the death of all her hopes. She had watched the family go down and down, moneyless and childless, into grey obscurity. Gordon alone had had it in him to succeed; and he, from mad perverseness, would not. He knew what she was thinking; he had to induce in himself a kind of brutality to stand firm. It was only because of Rosemary and Julia that he cared. Ravelston did not matter, because Ravelston understood. Aunt Angela and Uncle Walter, of course, were bleating weakly at him in long, fatuous letters. But them he disregarded.
In desperation Julia asked him, what did he mean to do now that he had flung away his last chance of succeeding in life. He answered simply, ‘My poems.’ He had said the same to Rosemary and to Ravelston. With Ravelston the answer had sufficed. Rosemary had no longer any belief in his poems, but she would not say so. As for Julia, his poems had never at any time meant anything to her. ‘I don’t see much sense in writing if you can’t make money out of it,’ was what she had always said. And he himself did not believe in his poems any longer. But he still struggled to ‘write’, at least at times. Soon after he changed his lodgings he had copied out on to clean sheets the completed portions of London Pleasures–not quite four hundred lines, he discovered. Even the labour of copying it out was a deadly bore. Yet he still worked on it occasionally; cutting out a line here, altering another there, not making or even expecting to make any progress. Before long the pages were as they had been before, a scrawled, grimy labyrinth of words. He used to carry the wad of grimy manuscript about with him in his pocket. The feeling of it there upheld him a little; after all it was a kind of achievement, demonstrable to himself though to nobody else. There it was, sole product of two years–of a thousand hours’ work, it might be. He had no feeling for it any longer as a poem. The whole concept of poetry was meaningless to him now. It was only that if London Pleasures were ever finished it would be something snatched from fate, a thing created outside the money-world. But he knew, far more clearly than before, that it never would be finished. How was it possible that any creative impulse should remain to him, in the life he was living now? As time went on, even the desire to finish London Pleasures vanished. He still carried the manuscript about in his pocket; but it was only a gesture, a symbol of his private war. He had finished for ever with that futile dream of being a ‘writer’. After all, was not that too a species of ambition? He wanted to get away from all that, below all that. Down, down! Into the ghost-kingdom, out of the reach of hope, out of the reach of fear! Under ground, under ground! That was where he wished to be.
Yet in a way it was not so easy. One night about nine he was lying on his bed, with the ragged counterpane over his feet, his hands under his head to keep them warm. The fire was out. The dust was thick on everything. The aspidistra had died a week ago and was withering upright in its pot. He slid a shoeless foot from under the counterpane, held it up, and looked at it. His sock was full of holes–there were more holes than sock. So here he lay, Gordon Comstock, in a slum attic on a ragged bed, with his feet sticking out of his socks, with one and fourpence in the world, with three decades behind him and nothing, nothing accomplished! Surely now he was past redemption? Surely, try as they would, they couldn’t prise him out of a hole like this? He had wanted to reach the mud–well, this was the mud, wasn’t it?
Yet he knew that it was not so. That other world, the world of money and success, is always so strangely near. You don’t escape it merely by taking refuge in dirt and misery. He had been frightened as well as angry when Rosemary told him about Mr Erskine’s offer. It brought the danger so close to him. A letter, a telephone message, and from this squalor he could step straight back into the money-world–back to four quid a week, back to effort and decency and slavery. Going to the devil isn’t so easy as it sounds. Sometimes your salvation hunts you down like the Hound of Heaven.
For a while he lay in an almost mindless state, gazing at the ceiling. The utter futility of just lying there, dirty and cold, comforted him a little. But presently he was roused by a light tap at the door. He did not stir. It was Mother Meakin, presumably, though it did not sound like her knock.
‘Come in,’ he said.
The door opened. It was Rosemary.
She stepped in, and then stopped as the dusty sweetish smell of the room caught her. Even in the bad light of the lamp she could see the state of filth the room was in–the litter of food and papers on the table, the grate full of cold ashes, the foul crocks in the fender, the dead aspidistra. As she came slowly towards the bed she pulled her hat off and threw it on to the chair.
‘What a place for you to live in!’ she said.
‘So you’ve come back?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
He turned a little away from her, his arm over his face. ‘Come back to lecture me some more, I suppose?’
‘No.’
‘Then why?’
‘Because–’
She had knelt down beside the bed. She pulled his arm away, put her face forward to kiss him, then drew back, surprised, and began to stroke the hair over his temple with the tips of her fingers.
‘Oh, Gordon!’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got grey in your hair!’
‘Have I? Where?’
‘Here–over the temple. There’s quite a li
ttle patch of it. It must have happened all of a sudden.’
‘“My golden locks time hath to silver turned,’” he said indifferently.
‘So we’re both going grey,’ she said.
She bent her head to show him the three white hairs on her crown. Then she wriggled herself on to the bed beside him, put an arm under him, pulled him towards her, covered his face with kisses. He let her do it. He did not want this to happen–it was the very thing that he least wanted. But she had wriggled herself beneath him; they were breast to breast. Her body seemed to melt into his. By the expression of her face he knew what had brought her here. After all, she was virgin. She did not know what she was doing. It was magnanimity, pure magnanimity, that moved her. His wretchedness had drawn her back to him. Simply because he was penniless and a failure she had got to yield to him, even if it was only once.
‘I had to come back,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘I couldn’t bear to think of you here alone. It seemed so awful, leaving you like that.’
‘You did quite right to leave me. You’d much better not have come back. You know we can’t ever get married.’
‘I don’t care. That isn’t how one behaves to people one loves. I don’t care whether you marry me or not. I love you.’
‘This isn’t wise,’ he said.
‘I don’t care. I wish I’d done it years ago.’
‘We’d much better not.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Yes!’
After all, she was too much for him. He had wanted her so long, and he could not stop to weigh the consequences. So it was done at last, without much pleasure, on Mother Meakin’s dingy bed. Presently Rosemary got up and rearranged her clothes. The room, though stuffy, was dreadfully cold. They were both shivering a little. She pulled the coverlet further over Gordon. He lay without stirring, his back turned to her, his face hidden against his arm. She knelt down beside the bed, took his other hand, and laid it for a moment against her cheek. He scarcely noticed her. Then she shut the door quietly behind her and tiptoed down the bare, evil-smelling stairs. She felt dismayed, disappointed, and very cold.
The Complete Novels Page 113
