The Complete Novels of George Orwell

by George Orwell

  But with Gordon it was different. Gordon's income was two pounds a week. Therefore the hatred of modern life, the desire to see our money-civilization blown to hell by bombs, was a thing he genuinely felt. They were walking southward, down a darkish, meanly decent residential street with a few shuttered shops. From a hoarding on the blank end of a house the yard-wide face of Corner Table simpered, pallid in the lamplight. Gordon caught a glimpse of a withering aspidistra in a lower window. London! Mile after mile of mean lonely houses, let off in flats and single rooms; not homes, not communities, just clusters of meaningless lives drifting in a sort of drowsy chaos to the grave! He saw men as corpses walking. The thought that he was merely objectifying his own inner misery hardly troubled him. His mind went back to Wednesday afternoon, when he had desired to hear the enemy aeroplanes zooming over London. He caught Ravelston's arm and paused to gesticulate at the Corner Table poster.

  'Look at that bloody thing up there! Look at it, just look at it! Doesn't it make you spew?'

  'It's aesthetically offensive, I grant. But I don't see that it matters very greatly.'

  'Of course it matters-having the town plastered with things like that.'

  'Oh, well, it's merely a temporary phenomenon. Capitalism in its last phase. I doubt whether it's worth worrying about.'

  'But there's more in it than that. Just look at that fellow's face gaping down at us! You can see our whole civilization written there. The imbecility, the emptiness, the desolation! You can't look at it without thinking of French letters and machine guns. Do you know that the other day I was actually wishing war would break out? I was longing for it-praying for it, almost.'

  'Of course, the trouble is, you see, that about half the young men in Europe are wishing the same thing.'

  'Let's hope they are. Then perhaps it'll happen.'

  'My dear old chap, no! Once is enough, surely.'

  Gordon walked on, fretfully. 'This life we live nowadays! It's not life, it's stagnation, death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses, and the meaningless people inside them! Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.'

  'But where you make your mistake, don't you see, is in talking as if all this was incurable. This is only something that's got to happen before the proletariat take over.'

  'Oh, Socialism! Don't talk to me about Socialism.'

  'You ought to read Marx, Gordon, you really ought. Then you'd realize that this is only a phase. It can't go on for ever.'

  'Can't it? It feels as if it was going on for ever.'

  'It's merely that we're at a bad moment. We've got to die before we can be reborn, if you take my meaning.'

  'We're dying right enough. I don't see much signs of our being reborn.'

  Ravelston rubbed his nose. 'Oh, well, we must have faith, I suppose. And hope.'

  'We must have money you mean,' said Gordon gloomily.

  'Money?'

  'It's the price of optimism. Give me five quid a week and I'd be a Socialist, I dare say.'

  Ravelston looked away, discomforted. This money-business! Everywhere it came up against you! Gordon wished he had not said it. Money is the one thing you must never mention when you are with people richer than yourself. Or if you do, then it must be money in the abstract, money with a big 'M', not the actual concrete money that's in your pocket and isn't in mine. But the accursed subject drew him like a magnet. Sooner or later, especially when he had a few drinks inside him, he invariably began talking with self-pitiful detail about the bloodiness of life on two quid a week. Sometimes, from sheer nervous impulse to say the wrong thing, he would come out with some squalid confession-as, for instance, that he had been without tobacco for two days, or that his underclothes were in holes and his overcoat up the spout. But nothing of that sort should happen tonight, he resolved. They veered swiftly away from the subject of money and began talking in a more general way about Socialism. Ravelston had been trying for years to convert Gordon to Socialism, without even succeeding in interesting him in it. Presently they passed a low-looking pub on a corner in a side-street. A sour cloud of beer seemed to hang about it. The smell revolted Ravelston. He would have quickened his pace to get away from it. But Gordon paused, his nostrils tickled.

  'Christ! I could do with a drink,' he said.

  'So could I,' said Ravelston gallantly.

  Gordon shoved open the door of the public bar, Ravelston following. Ravelston persuaded himself that he was fond of pubs, especially low-class pubs. Pubs are genuinely proletarian. In a pub you can meet the working class on equal terms-or that's the theory, anyway. But in practice Ravelston never went into a pub unless he was with somebody like Gordon, and he always felt like a fish out of water when he got there. A foul yet coldish air enveloped them. It was a filthy, smoky room, low-ceilinged, with a sawdusted floor and plain deal tables ringed by generations of beer-pots. In one corner four monstrous women with breasts the size of melons were sitting drinking porter and talking with bitter intensity about someone called Mrs Croop. The landlady, a tall grim woman with a black fringe, looking like the madame of a brothel, stood behind the bar, her powerful forearms folded, watching a game of darts which was going on between four labourers and a postman. You had to duck under the darts as you crossed the room, there was a moment's hush and people glanced inquisitively at Ravelston. He was so obviously a gentleman. They didn't see his type very often in the public bar.

  Ravelston pretended not to notice that they were staring at him. He lounged towards the bar, pulling off a glove to feel for the money in his pocket. 'What's yours?' he said casually.

  But Gordon had already shoved his way ahead and was tapping a shilling on the bar. Always pay for the first round of drinks! It was his point of honour. Ravelston made for the only vacant table. A navvy leaning on the bar turned on his elbow and gave him a long, insolent stare 'A -- toff!' he was thinking. Gordon came back balancing two pint glasses of the dark common ale. They were thick cheap glasses, thick as jam jars almost, and dim and greasy. A thin yellow froth was subsiding on the beer. The air was thick with gunpowdery tobacco-smoke. Ravelston caught sight of a well-filled spittoon near the bar and averted his eyes. It crossed his mind that this beer had been sucked up from some beetle-ridden cellar through yards of slimy tube, and that the glasses had never been washed in their lives, only rinsed in beery water. Gordon was very hungry. He could have done with some bread and cheese, but to order any would have been to betray the fact that he had had no dinner. He took a deep pull at his beer and lighted a cigarette, which made him forget his hunger a little. Ravelston also swallowed a mouthful or so and set his glass gingerly down. It was typical London beer, sickly and yet leaving a chemical after-taste. Ravelston thought of the wines of Burgundy. They went on arguing about Socialism.

  'You know, Gordon, it's really time you started reading Marx,' said Ravelston, less apologetically than usual, because the vile taste of the beer had annoyed him.

  'I'd sooner read Mrs Humphry Ward,' said Gordon.

  'But don't you see, your attitude is so unreasonable. You're always tirading against Capitalism, and yet you won't accept the only possible alternative. One can't put things right in a hole-and-corner way. One's got to accept either Capitalism or Socialism. There's no way out of it.'

  'I tell you I can't be bothered with Socialism. The very thought of it makes me yawn.'

  'But what's your objection to Socialism, anyway?'

  'There's only one objection to Socialism, and that is that nobody wants it.'

  'Oh, surely it's rather absurd to say that!'

  'That's to say, nobody who could see what Socialism would really mean.'

  'But what would Socialism mean, according to your idea of it?'

  'Oh! Some kind of Aldous Huxley Brave New World: only not so amusing. Four hours a day in a model factory, tightening up bolt number 6003. Rations served out in grease-proof paper at the communal kitchen. Community-hikes from Marx Hostel to Lenin Hostel and back. Free abortion-clinics on all th
e corners. All very well in its way, of course. Only we don't want it.'

  Ravelston sighed. Once a month, in Antichrist, he repudiated this version of Socialism. 'Well, what do we want, then?'

  'God knows. All we know is what we don't want. That's what's wrong with us nowadays. We're stuck, like Buridan's donkey. Only there are three alternatives instead of two, and all three of them make us spew. Socialism's only one of them.'

  'And what are the other two?'

  'Oh, I suppose suicide and the Catholic Church.'

  Ravelston smiled, anticlerically shocked. 'The Catholic Church! Do you consider that an alternative?'

  'Well, it's a standing temptation to the intelligentsia, isn't it?'

  'Not what I should call the intelligentsia. Though there was Eliot, of course,' Ravelston admitted.

  'And there'll be plenty more, you bet. I dare say it's fairly cosy under Mother Church's wing. A bit insanitary, of course-but you'd feel safe there, anyway.'

  Ravelston rubbed his nose reflectively. 'It seems to me that's only another form of suicide.'

  'In a way. But so's Socialism. At least it's a counsel of despair. But I couldn't commit suicide, real suicide. It's too meek and mild. I'm not going to give up my share of earth to anyone else. I'd want to do in a few of my enemies first.'

  Ravelston smiled again. 'And who are your enemies?'

  'Oh, anyone with over five hundred a year.'

  A momentary uncomfortable silence fell. Ravelston's income, after payment of income tax, was probably two thousand a year. This was the kind of thing Gordon was always saying. To cover the awkwardness of the moment, Ravelston took up his glass, steeled himself against the nauseous taste, and swallowed about two-thirds of his beer-enough at any rate, to give the impression that he had finished it.

  'Drink up!' he said with would-be heartiness. 'It's time we had the other half of that.'

  Gordon emptied his glass and let Ravelston take it. He did not mind letting Ravelston pay for the drinks now. He had paid the first round and honour was satisfied. Ravelston walked self-consciously to the bar. People began staring at him again as soon as he stood up. The navvy, still leaning against the bar over his untouched pot of beer, gazed at him with quiet insolence. Ravelston resolved that he would drink no more of this filthy common ale.

  'Two double whiskies, would you, please?' he said apologetically.

  The grim landlady stared. 'What?' she said.

  'Two double whiskies, please.'

  'No whisky 'ere. We don't sell spirits. Beer 'ouse, we are.'

  The navvy smiled flickering under his moustache. '-- ignorant toff!' he was thinking. 'Asking for a whisky in a - beer 'ouse!' Ravelston's pale face flushed slightly. He had not known till this moment that some of the poorer pubs cannot afford a spirit licence.

  'Bass, then, would you? Two pint bottles of Bass.'

  There were no pint bottles, they had to have four half pints. It was a very poor house. Gordon took a deep, satisfying swallow of Bass. More alcoholic than the draught beer, it fizzed and prickled in his throat, and because he was hungry it went a little to his head. He felt at once more philosophic and more self-pitiful. He had made up his mind not to begin belly-aching about his poverty; but now he was going to begin after all. He said abruptly:

  'This is all b--s that we've been talking.'

  'What's all b--s?'

  'All this about Socialism and Capitalism and the state of the modern world and God knows what. I don't give a - for the state of the modern world. If the whole of England was starving except myself and the people I care about, I wouldn't give a damn.'

  'Don't you exaggerate just a little?'

  'No. All this talk we make-we're only objectifying our own feelings. It's all dictated by what we've got in our pockets. I go up and down London saying it's a city of the dead, and our civilization's dying, and I wish war would break out, and God knows what; and all it means is that my wages are two quid a week and I wish they were five.'

  Ravelston, once again reminded obliquely of his income, stroked his nose slowly with the knuckle of his left forefinger.

  'Of course, I'm with you up to a point. After all, it's only what Marx said. Every ideology is a reflection of economic circumstances.'

  'Ah, but you only understand it out of Marx! You don't know what it means to have to crawl along on two quid a week. It isn't a question of hardship-it's nothing so decent as hardship. It's the bloody, sneaking, squalid meaness of it. Living alone for weeks on end because when you've no money you've no friends. Calling yourself a writer and never even producing anything because you're always too washed out to write. It's a sort of filthy sub-world one lives in. A sort of spiritual sewer.'

  He had started now. They were never together long without Gordon beginning to talk in this strain. It was the vilest manners. It embarrassed Ravelston horribly. And yet somehow Gordon could not help it. He had got to retail his troubles to somebody, and Ravelston was the only person who understood. Poverty, like every other dirty wound, has got to be exposed occasionally. He began to talk in obscene detail of his life in Willowbed Road. He dilated on the smell of slops and cabbage, the clotted sauce-bottles in the dining-room, the vile food, the aspidistras. He described his furtive cups of tea and his trick of throwing used tea-leaves down the w.c. Ravelston, guilty and miserable, sat staring at his glass and revolving it slowly between his hands. Against his right breast he could feel, a square accusing shape, the pocket-book in which, as he knew, eight pound notes and two ten-bob notes nestled against his fat green cheque-book. How awful these details of poverty are! Not that what Gordon was describing was real poverty. It was at worst the fringe of poverty. But what of the real poor? What of the unemployed in Middlesbrough, seven in a room on twenty-five bob a week? When there are people living like that, how dare one walk the world with pound notes and cheque-books in one's pocket?

  'It's bloody,' he murmured several times, impotently. In his heart he wondered-it was his invariable reaction-whether Gordon would accept a tenner if you offered to lend it to him.

  They had another drink, which Ravelston again paid for, and went out into the street. It was almost time to part. Gordon never spent more than an hour or two with Ravelston. One's contacts with rich people, like one's visits to high altitudes, must always be brief. It was a moonless, starless night, with a damp wind blowing. The night air, the beer, and the watery radiance of the lamps induced in Gordon a sort of dismal clarity. He perceived that it is quite impossible to explain to any rich person, even to anyone so decent as Ravelston, the essential bloodiness of poverty. For this reason it became all the more important to explain it. He said suddenly:

  'Have you read Chaucer's Man of Lowe's Tale?'

  'The Man of Lowe's Tale? Not that I remember. What's it about?'

  'I forget. I was thinking of the first six stanzas. Where he talks about poverty. The way it gives everyone the right to stamp on you! The way everyone wants to stamp on you! It makes people hate you, to know that you've no money. They insult you just for the pleasure of insulting you and knowing that you can't hit back.'

  Ravelston was pained. 'Oh, no, surely not! People aren't so bad as all that.'

  'Ah, but you don't know the things that happen!'

  Gordon did not want to be told that 'people aren't so bad'. He clung with a sort of painful joy to the notion that because he was poor everyone must want to insult him. It fitted in with his philosophy of life. And suddenly, with the feeling that he could not stop himself, he was talking of the thing that had been rankling in his mind for two days past-the snub he had had from the Dorings on Thursday. He poured the whole story out quite shamelessly. Ravelston was amazed. He could not understand what Gordon was making such a fuss about. To be disappointed at missing a beastly literary tea-party seemed to him absurd. He would not have gone to a literary tea-party if you had paid him. Like all rich people, he spent far more time in avoiding human society than in seeking it. He interrupted Gordon:

  'Re
ally, you know, you ought not to take offence so easily. After all, a thing like that doesn't really matter.'

  'It isn't the thing itself that matters, it's the spirit behind it. The way they snub you as a matter of course, just because you've got no money.'

  'But quite possibly it was all a mistake, or something. Why should anyone want to snub you?'

  ' "If thou be poure, thy brother hateth thee,"' quoted Gordon perversely.

  Ravelston, deferential even to the opinions of the dead, rubbed his nose. 'Does Chaucer say that? Then I'm afraid I disagree with Chaucer. People don't hate you, exactly.'

  'They do. And they're quite right to hate you. You are hateful. It's like those ads for Listerine. "Why is he always alone? Halitosis is ruining his career." Poverty is spiritual halitosis.'

  Ravelston sighed. Undoubtedly Gordon was perverse. They walked on, arguing, Gordon vehemently, Ravelston deprecatingly. Ravelston was helpless against Gordon in an argument of this kind. He felt that Gordon exaggerated, and yet he never liked to contradict him. How could he? He was rich and Gordon was poor. And how can you argue about poverty with someone who is genuinely poor?

  'And then the way women treat you when you've no money!' Gordon went on. 'That's another thing about this accursed money business-women!'

  Ravelston nodded rather gloomily. This sounded to him more reasonable than what Gordon had been saying before. He thought of Hermione Slater, his own girl. They had been lovers two years but had never bothered to get married. It was 'too much fag', Hermione always said. She was rich, of course, or rather her people were. He thought of her shoulders, wide, smooth, and young, that seemed to rise out of her clothes like a mermaid rising from the sea; and her skin and hair, which were somehow warm and sleepy, like a wheatfield in the sun. Hermione always yawned at the mention of Socialism, and refused even to read Antichrist. 'Don't talk to me about the lower classes,' she used to say. 'I hate them. They smell.' And Ravelston adored her.