No More Learning

The street was so crowded that you could only with difficulty thread your way down the
cabbage-littered alley between the stalls. In the glare of hanging electric bulbs, the stuff
on the stalls glowed with fine lurid colours — hacked, crimson chu nk s of meat, piles of
oranges and green and white broccoli, stiff, glassy-eyed rabbits, live eels looping in
enamel troughs, plucked fowls hanging in rows, sticking out their naked breasts like
guardsmen naked on parade. Gordon’s spirits revived a little. He liked the noise, the
bustle, the vitality. Whenever you see a street-market you know there’s hope for England
yet. But even here he felt his solitude. Girls were thronging everywhere, in knots of four
or five, prowling desirously about the stalls of cheap underwear and swapping backchat
and screams of laughter with the youths who followed them. None had eyes for Gordon.
He walked among them as though invisible, save that their bodies avoided him when he
passed them. Ah, look there! Involuntarily he paused. Over a pile of art-silk undies on a
stall, three girls were bending, intent, their faces close together — three youthful faces,
flower-like in the harsh light, clustering side by side like a truss of blossom on a Sweet
William or phlox. His heart stirred. No eyes for him, of course! One girl looked up. Ah!
Hurriedly, with an offended air, she looked away again. A delicate flush like a wash of
aquarelle flooded her face. The hard, sexual stare in his eyes had frightened her. They
flee from me that sometime did me seek! He walked on. If only Rosemary were here! He
forgave her now for not writing to him. He could forgive her anything, if only she were
here. He knew how much she meant to him, because she alone of all women was willing
to save him from the humiliation of his loneliness.

At this moment he looked up, and saw something that made his heart jump. He changed
the focus of his eyes abruptly. For a moment he thought he was imagining it. But no! It
WAS Rosemary!

She was coming down the alley between the stalls, twenty or thirty yards away. It was as
though his desire had called her into being. She had not seen him yet. She came towards



him, a small debonair figure, picking her way nimbly through the crowd and the muck
underfoot, her face scarcely visible because of a flat black hat which she wore cocked
down over her eyes like a Harrow boy’s straw hat. He started towards her and called her
name.

‘Rosemary! Hi, Rosemary! ’

A blue-aproned man thumbing codfish on a stall turned to stare at him. Rosemary did not
hear him because of the din. He called again.

‘Rosemary! I say, Rosemary! ’

They were only a few yards apart now. She started and looked up.

‘Gordon! What are you doing here? ’

‘What are YOU doing here? ’

‘I was coming to see you. ’

‘But how did you know I was here? ’

‘I didn’t. I always come this way. I get out of the tube at Camden Town. ’

Rosemary sometimes came to see Gordon at Willowbed Road. Mrs Wisbeach would
inform him sourly that ‘there was a young woman to see him’, and he would come
downstairs and they would go out for a walk in the streets. Rosemary was never allowed
indoors, not even into the hall. That was a rule of the house. You would have thought
‘young women’ were plague -rats by the way Mrs Wisbeach spoke of them. Gordon took
Rosemary by the upper arm and made to pull her against him.

‘Rosemary! Oh, what a joy to see you again! I was so vilely lonely. Why didn’t you come
before? ’

She shook off his hand and stepped back out of his reach. Under her slanting hat-brim she
gave him a glance that was intended to be angry.



‘Let me go, now! I’m very angry with you. I very nearly didn’t come after that beastly
letter you sent me. ’


‘What beastly letter? ’

‘You know very well. ’

‘No, I don’t. Oh, well, let’s get out of this. Somewhere where we can talk. This way. ’

He took her arm, but she shook him off again, continuing however, to walk at his side.
Her steps were quicker and shorter than his. And walking beside him she had the
appearance of something extremely small, nimble, and young, as though he had had some
lively little animal, a squirrel for instance, frisking at his side. In reality she was not very
much smaller than Gordon, and only a few months younger. But no one would ever have
described Rosemary as a spinster of nearly thirty, which in fact she was. She was a
strong, agile girl, with stiff black hair, a small triangular face, and very pronounced
eyebrows. It was one of those small, peaky faces, full of character, which one sees in
sixteenth-century portraits. The first time you saw her take her hat off you got a surprise,
for on her crown three white hairs glittered among the black ones like silver wires. It was
typical of Rosemary that she never bothered to pull the white hairs out. She still thought
of herself as a very young girl, and so did everybody else. Yet if you looked closely the
marks of time were plain enough on her face.

Gordon walked more boldly with Rosemary at his side. He was proud of her. People were
looking at her, and therefore at him as well. He was no longer invisible to women. As
always, Rosemary was rather nicely dressed. It was a mystery how she did it on four
pounds a week. He liked particularly the hat she was wearing — one of those flat felt hats
which were then coming into fashion and which caricatured a clergyman’s shovel hat.
There was something essentially frivolous about it. In some way difficult to be described,
the angle at which it was cocked forward harmonized appealingly with the curve of
Rosemary’s behind.

‘I like your hat,’ he said.

In spite of herself, a small smile flickered at the comer of her mouth.



‘It IS rather nice,’ she said, giving the hat a little pat with her hand.

She was still pretending to be angry, however. She took care that their bodies should not
touch. As soon as they had reached the end of the stalls and were in the main street she
stopped and faced him sombrely.

‘What do you mean by writing me letters like that? ’ she said.

‘Letters like what? ’

‘Saying I’d broken your heart. ’

‘So you have. ’

‘It looks like it, doesn’t it! ’

‘I don’t know. It certainly feels like it. ’

The words were spoken half jokingly, and yet they made her look more closely at him —
at his pale, wasted face, his uncut hair, his general down-at-heel, neglected appearance.
Her heart softened instantly, and yet she frowned. Why WON’T he take care of himself?
was the thought in her mind. They had moved closer together. He took her by the
shoulders. She let him do it, and, putting her small arms round him, squeezed him very
hard, partly in affection, partly in exasperation.

‘Gordon, you ARE a miserable creature! ’ she said.

‘Why am I a miserable creature? ’

‘Why can’t you look after yourself properly? You’re a perfect scarecrow. Look at these
awful old clothes you’re wearing! ’

‘They’re suited to my station. One can’t dress decently on two quid a week, you know. ’


‘But surely there’s no need to go about looking like a rag-bag? Look at this button on
your coat, broken in half! ’



She fingered the broken button, then suddenly lifted his discoloured Woolworth’s tie
aside. In some feminine way she had divined that he had no buttons on his shirt.


‘Yes, AGAIN! Not a single button. You are awful, Gordon! ’

‘I tell you I can’t be bothered with things like that. I’ve got a soul above buttons. ’

‘But why not give them to ME and let me sew them on for you? And, oh, Gordon! You
haven’t even shaved today. How absolutely beastly of you. You might at least take the
trouble to shave every morning. ’

‘I can’t afford to shave every morning,’ he said perversely.

‘What DO you mean, Gordon? It doesn’t cost money to shave, does it? ’

‘Yes, it does. Everything costs money. Cleanness, decency, energy, self-respect —
everything. It’s all money. Haven’t I told you that a million times? ’

She squeezed his ribs again — she was surprisingly strong — and frowned up at him,
studying his face as a mother looks at some peevish child of which she is unreasonably
fond.

‘WHAT a fool I am! ’ she said.

‘In what way a fool? ’

‘Because I’m so fond of you. ’

‘Are you fond of me? ’

‘Of course I am. You know I am. I adore you. It’s idiotic of me. ’

‘Then come somewhere where it’s dark. I want to kiss you. ’

‘Fancy being kissed by a man who hasn’t even shaved! ’

‘Well, that’ll be a new experience for you. ’



‘No, it won’t, Gordon. Not after knowing YOU for two years. ’


‘Oh, well, come on, anyway. ’

They found an almost dark alley between the backs of houses. All their lovemaking was
done in such places. The only place where they could ever be private was the streets. He
pressed her shoulders against the rough damp bricks of the wall. She turned her face
readily up to his and clung to him with a sort of eager violent affection, like a child. And
yet all the while, though they were body to body, it was as though there were a shield
between them. She kissed him as a child might have done, because she knew that he
expected to be kissed. It was always like this. Only at very rare moments could he awake
in her the beginnings of physical desire; and these she seemed afterwards to forget, so
that he always had to begin at the beginning over again. There was something defensive
in the feeling of her small, shapely body. She longed to know the meaning of physical
love, but also she dreaded it. It would destroy her youth, the youthful, sexless world in
which she chose to live.

He parted his mouth from hers in order to speak to her.

‘Do you love me? ’ he said.

‘Of course, silly. Why do you always ask me that? ’

‘I like to hear you say it. Somehow I never feel sure of you till I’ve heard you say it. ’

‘But why? ’

‘Oh, well, you might have changed your mind. After all, I’m not exactly the answer to a
maiden’s prayer. I’m thirty, and moth-eaten at that. ’

‘Don’t be so absurd, Gordon! Anyone would think you were a hundred, to hear you talk.
You know I’m the same age as you are. ’


‘Yes, but not moth-eaten. ’



She rubbed her cheek against his, feeling the roughness of his day-old beard. Their bellies
were close together. He thought of the two years he had wanted her and never had her.
With his lips almost against her ear he murmured:

‘Are you EVER going to sleep with me? ’

‘Yes, some day I will. Not now. Some day. ’

‘It’s always “some day”. It’s been “some day” for two years now. ’

‘I know. But I can’t help it. ’

He pressed her back against the wall, pulled off the absurd flat hat, and buried his face in
her hair.
It was tormenting to be so close to her and all for nothing. He put a hand under
her chin and lifted her small face up to his, trying to distinguish her features in the almost
complete darkness.

‘Say you will, Rosemary. There’s a dear! Do! ’

‘You know I’m going to SOME time. ’

‘Yes, but not SOME time — now. I don’t mean this moment, but soon. When we get an
opportunity. Say you will! ’

‘I can’t. I can’t promise. ’

‘Say “yes,” Rosemary. PLEASE do! ’

‘No. ’

Still stroking her invisible face, he quoted:

‘Veuillez le dire done selon Que vous estes benigne et doulche, Car ce doulx mot n’est
pas si long Qu’il vous face mal en la bouche. ’


‘What does that mean? ’



He translated it.


‘I can’t, Gordon. I just can’t. ’

‘Say “yes,” Rosemary, there’s a dear. Surely it’s as easy to say “yes” as “no”? ’

‘No, it isn’t, it’s easy enough for you. You’re a man. It’s different for a woman. ’

‘Say “yes,” Rosemary! “Yes” — it’s such an easy word. Go on, now; say it. “Yes! ”’
‘Anyone would think you were teaching a parrot to talk, Gordon. ’

‘Oh, damn! Don’t make jokes about it. ’

It was not much use arguing. Presently they came out into the street and walked on,
southward. Somehow, from Rosemary’s swift, neat movements, from her general air of a
girl who knows how to look after herself and who yet treats life mainly as a joke, you
could make a good guess at her upbringing and her mental background. She was the
youngest child of one of those huge hungry families which still exist here and there in the
middle classes. There had been fourteen children all told — the father was a country
solicitor. Some of Rosemary’s sisters were married, some of them were schoolmistresses
or running typing bureaux; the brothers were fanning in Canada, on tea-plantations in
Ceylon, in obscure regiments of the Indian Anny. Like all women who have had an
eventful girlhood, Rosemary wanted to remain a girl. That was why, sexually, she was so
immature. She had kept late into life the high-spirited sexless atmosphere of a big family.
Also she had absorbed into her very bones the code of fair play and live-and-let-live. She
was profoundly magnanimous, quite incapable of spiritual bullying. From Gordon, whom
she adored, she put up with almost anything. It was the measure of her magnanimity that
never once, in the two years that she had known him, had she blamed him for not
attempting to earn a proper living.

Gordon was aware of all this. But at the moment he was thinking of other things. In the
pallid circles of light about the lamp-posts, beside Rosemary’s smaller, trimmer figure, he
felt graceless, shabby, and dirty. He wished very much that he had shaved that morning.
Furtively he put a hand into his pocket and felt his money, half afraid — it was a recurrent
fear with him — that he might have dropped a coin. However, he could feel the milled



edge of a form, his principal coin at the moment. Four and fourpence left. He couldn’t
possibly take her out to supper, he reflected. They’d have to trail dismally up and down
the streets, as usual, or at best go to a Lyons for a coffee. Bloody! How can you have any
fim when you’ve got no money? He said broodingly:

‘Of course it all comes back to money. ’

This remark came out of the blue. She looked up at him in surprise.

‘What do you mean, it all comes back to money? ’

‘I mean the way nothing ever goes right in my life. It’s always money, money, money
that’s at the bottom of everything. And especially between me and you. That’s why you
don’t really love me. There’s a sort of film of money between us. I can feel it every time I
kiss you. ’

‘Money! What HAS money got to do with it, Gordon? ’

‘Money’s got to do with everything. If I had more money you’d love me more. ’

‘Of course, I wouldn’t! Why should I? ’

‘You couldn’t help it. Don’t you see that if I had more money I’d be more worth loving?
Look at me now! Look at my face, look at these clothes I’m wearing, look at everything
else about me. Do you suppose I’d be like that if I had two thousand a year? If I had more
money I should be a different person. ’

‘If you were a different person I shouldn’t love you. ’

‘That’s nonsense, too. But look at it like this. If we were married would you sleep with
me? ’


‘What questions you do ask! Of course I would. Otherwise, where would be the sense of
being married? ’


‘Well then, suppose I was decently well off, WOULD you marry me? ’



‘What’s the good of talking about it, Gordon? You know we can’t afford to marry. ’

‘Yes, but IF we could. Would you? ’

‘I don’t know. Yes, I would, I dare say. ’

‘There you are, then! That’s what I said — money! ’

‘No, Gordon, no! That’s not fair! You’re twisting my words round. ’

‘No, I’m not. You’ve got this money-business at the bottom of your heart. Every
woman’s got it. You wish I was in a GOOD job now, don’t you? ’

‘Not in the way you mean it. I’d like you to be earning more money — yes. ’

‘And you think I ought to have stayed on at the New Albion, don’t you? You’d like me to
go back there now and write slogans for Q. T. Sauce and Truweet Breakfast Crisps.
Wouldn’t you? ’

‘No, I wouldn’t. I NEVER said that. ’

‘You thought it, though. It’s what any woman would think. ’

He was being horribly unfair, and he knew it. The one thing Rosemary had never said,
the thing she was probably quite incapable of saying, was that he ought to go back to the
New Albion. But for the moment he did not even want to be fair. His sexual
disappointment still pricked him. With a sort of melancholy triumph he reflected that,
after all, he was right. It was money that stood between them. Money, money, all is
money! He broke into a half-serious tirade:

‘Women! What nonsense they make of all our ideas! Because one can’t keep free of
women, and every woman makes one pay the same price. “Chuck away your decency and
make more money” — that’s what women say. “Chuck away your decency, suck the
blacking off the boss’s boots, and buy me a better fur coat than the woman next door. ”
Every man you can see has got some blasted woman hanging round his neck like a
mermaid, dragging him down and down — down to some beastly little semi-detached villa



in Putney, with hire-purchase furniture and a portable radio and an aspidistra in the
window. It’s women who make all progress impossible. Not that I believe in progress,’
he added rather unsatisfactorily.

‘What absolute NONSENSE you do talk, Gordon! As though women were to blame for
everything! ’

‘They are to blame, finally. Because it’s the women who really believe in the money-
code. The men obey it; they have to, but they don’t believe in it. It’s the women who
keep it going. The women and their Putney villas and their fur coats and their babies and
their aspidistras. ’

‘It is NOT the women, Gordon! Women didn’t invent money, did they? ’

‘It doesn’t matter who invented it, the point is that it’s women who worship it. A
woman’s got a sort of mystical feeling towards money. Good and evil in a women’s mind
mean simply money and no money. Look at you and me. You won’t sleep with me,
simply and solely because I’ve got no money. Yes, that IS the reason. (He squeezed her
ann to silence her. ) You admitted it only a minute ago. And if I had a decent income
you’d go to bed with me tomorrow. It’s not because you’re mercenary. You don’t want
me to PAY you for sleeping with me. It’s not so crude as that. But you’ve got that deep-
down mystical feeling that somehow a man without money isn’t worthy of you. He’s a
weakling, a sort of half-man — that’s how you feel. Hercules, god of strength and god of
money — you’ll find that in Lempriere. It’s women who keep all mythologies going.
Women! ’

‘Women! ’ echoed Rosemary on a different note. ‘I hate the way men are always talking
about WOMEN. “Women do this,” and “WOMEN do that” — as though all women were
exactly the same! ’

‘Of course all women are the same! What does any woman want except a safe income
and two babies and a semi-detached villa in Putney with an aspidistra in the window? ’

‘Oh, you and your aspidistras! ’


‘On the contrary, YOUR aspidistras. You’re the sex that cultivates them. ’



She squeezed his arm and burst out laughing. She was really extraordinarily good-
natured. Besides, what he was saying was such palpable nonsense that it did not even
exasperate her. Gordon’s diatribes against women were in reality a kind of perverse joke;
indeed, the whole sex-war is at bottom only a joke. For the same reason it is great fun to
pose as a feminist or an anti-feminist according to your sex. As they walked on they
began a violent argument upon the eternal and idiotic question of Man versus Woman.
The moves in this argument — for they had it as often as they met — were always very
much the same. Men are brutes and women are soulless, and women have always been
kept in subjection and they jolly well ought to be kept in subjection, and look at Patient
Griselda and look at Lady Astor, and what about polygamy and Hindu widows, and what
about Mother Pankhurst’s piping days when every decent woman wore mousetraps on
her garters and couldn’t look at a man without feeling her right hand itch for a castrating
knife? Gordon and Rosemary never grew tired of this kind of thing. Each laughed with
delight at the other’s absurdities. There was a merry war between them. Even as they
disputed, ann in arm, they pressed their bodies delightedly together. They were very
happy. Indeed, they adored one another. Each was to the other a standing joke and an
object infinitely precious. Presently a red and blue haze of Neon lights appeared in the
distance. They had reached the beginning of the Tottenham Court Road. Gordon put his
ann round her waist and turned her to the right, down a darkish side-street. They were so
happy together that they had got to kiss. They stood clasped together under the lamp-post,
still laughing, two enemies breast to breast. She rubbed her cheek against his.

‘Gordon, you are such a dear old ass! I can’t help loving you, scrubby jaw and all. ’

‘Do you really? ’

‘Really and truly. ’

Her arms still round him, she leaned a little backwards, pressing her belly against his with
a sort of innocent voluptuousness.

‘Life IS worth living, isn’t it, Gordon? ’


‘Sometimes. ’



‘If only we could meet a bit oftener! Sometimes I don’t see you for weeks. ’


‘I know. It’s bloody. If you knew how I hate my evenings alone! ’

‘One never seems to have time for anything. I don’t even leave that beastly office till
nearly seven. What do you do with yourself on Sundays, Gordon? ’

‘Oh, God! Moon about and look miserable, like everyone else. ’

‘Why not let’s go out for a walk in the country sometimes.