He gazed out at the
graceless
street.
Orwell - Keep the Apidistra Flying
But my son-in-law, now, ‘e’s more for Burroughs.
I don’t know, I’m sure.
’
A spasm passed over Mrs Penn’s face at the mention of Burroughs. She turned her back
markedly on Mrs Weaver.
‘What I feel, Mr Comstock, is that there’s something so BIG about Galsworthy. He’s so
broad, so universal, and yet at the same time so thoroughly English in spirit, so HUMAN.
His books are real HUMAN documents. ’
‘And Priestley, too,’ said Gordon. ‘I think Priestley’s such an awfully fine writer, don’t
you? ’
‘Oh, he is! So big, so broad, so human! And so essentially English! ’
Mrs Weaver pursed her lips. Behind them were three isolated yellow teeth.
‘I think p’raps I can do better’n ‘ave another Dell,’ she said. ‘You ‘ave got some more
Dells, ‘aven’t you? I DO enjoy a good read of Dell, I must say. I says to my daughter, I
says, “You can keep your Deepings and your Burroughses. Give me Dell,” I says. ’
Ding Dong Dell! Dukes and dogwhips! Mrs Penn’s eye signalled highbrow irony.
Gordon returned her signal. Keep in with Mrs Penn! A good, steady customer.
‘Oh, certainly, Mrs Weaver. We’ve got a whole shelf by Ethel M. Dell. Would you like
The Desire of his Life? Or perhaps you’ve read that. Then what about The Alter of
Honour? ’
‘I wonder whether you have Hugh Walpole’s latest book? ’ said Mrs Penn. ‘I feel in the
mood this week for something epic, something BIG. Now Walpole, you know, I consider
a really GREAT writer, I put him second only to Galsworthy. There’s something so BIG
about him. And yet he’s so human with it. ’
‘And so essentially English,’ said Gordon.
‘Oh, of course! So essentially English! ’
‘I b’lieve I’ll jest ‘ave The Way of an Eagle over again,’ said Mrs Weaver finally. ‘You
don’t never seem to get tired of The Way of an Eagle, do you, now? ’
‘It’s certainly astonishingly popular,’ said Gordon, diplomatically, his eye on Mrs Penn.
‘Oh, asTONishingly! ’ echoed Mrs Penn, ironically, her eye on Gordon.
He took their twopences and sent them happy away, Mrs Penn with Walpole’s Rogue
Herries and Mrs Weaver with The Way of an Eagle.
Soon he had wandered back to the other room and towards the shelves of poetry. A
melancholy fascination, those shelves had for him. His own wretched book was there —
skied, of course, high up among the unsaleable. Mice, by Gordon Comstock; a sneaky
little foolscap octavo, price three and sixpence but now reduced to a bob. Of the thirteen
B. F. s who had reviewed it (and The Times Lit. Supp. had declared that it showed
‘exceptional promise’) not one had seen the none too subtle joke of that title. And in the
two years he had been at McKechnie’s bookshop, not a single customer, not a single one,
had ever taken Mice out of its shelf.
There were fifteen or twenty shelves of poetry. Gordon regarded them sourly. Dud stuff,
for the most part. A little above eye-level, already on their way to heaven and oblivion,
were the poets of yesteryear, the stars of his earlier youth. Yeats, Davies, Housman,
Thomas, De la Mare, Hardy. Dead stars. Below them, exactly at eye-level, were the
squibs of the passing minute. Eliot, Pound, Auden, Campbell, Day Lewis, Spender. Very
damp squibs, that lot. Dead stars above, damp squibs below. Shall we ever again get a
writer worth reading? But Lawrence was all right, and Joyce even better before he went
off his coconut. And if we did get a writer worth reading, should we know him when we
saw him, so choked as we are with trash?
Ping! Shop bell. Gordon turned. Another customer.
A youth of twenty, cherry-lipped, with gilded hair, tripped Nancifully in. Moneyed,
obviously. He had the golden aura of money. He had been in the shop before. Gordon
assumed the gentlemanly-servile mien reserved for new customers. He repeated the usual
formula:
‘Good afternoon. Can I do anything for you? Are you looking for any particular book? ’
‘Oh, no, not weally. ’ An R-less Nancy voice. ‘May I just BWOWSE? I simply couldn’t
wesist your fwont window. I have such a tewwible weakness for bookshops! So I just
floated in — tee-hee! ’
Float out again, then, Nancy. Gordon smiled a cultured smile, as booklover to booklover.
‘Oh, please do. We like people to look round. Are you interested in poetry, by any
chance? ’
‘Oh, of course! I ADORE poetwy! ’
Of course! Mangy little snob. There was a sub-artistic look about his clothes. Gordon slid
a ‘slim’ red volume from the poetry shelves.
‘These are just out. They might interest you, perhaps. They’re translations — something
rather out of the common. Translations from the Bulgarian. ’
Very subtle, that. Now leave him to himself. That’s the proper way with customers. Don’t
hustle them; let them browse for twenty minutes or so; then they get ashamed and buy
something. Gordon moved to the door, discreetly, keeping out of Nancy’s way; yet
casually, one hand in his pocket, with the insouciant air proper to a gentleman.
Outside, the slimy street looked grey and drear. From somewhere round the corner came
the clatter of hooves, a cold hollow sound. Caught by the wind, the dark columns of
smoke from the chimneys veered over and rolled flatly down the sloping roofs. Ah!
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And the dark
ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward tumty tumty (something like ‘murky’) air.
Good. But the impulse faded. His eye fell again upon the ad-posters across the street.
He almost wanted to laugh at them, they were so feeble, so dead-alive, so unappetizing.
As though anybody could be tempted by THOSE! Like succubi with pimply backsides.
But they depressed him all the same. The money-stink, everywhere the money-stink. He
stole a glance at the Nancy, who had drifted away from the poetry shelves and taken out a
large expensive book on the Russian ballet. He was holding it delicately between his pink
non-prehensile paws, as a squirrel holds a nut, studying the photographs. Gordon knew
his type. The moneyed ‘artistic’ young man. Not an artist himself, exactly, but a hanger-
on of the arts; frequenter of studios, retailer of scandal. A nice-looking boy, though, for
all his Nancitude. The skin at the back of his neck was as silky-smooth as the inside of a
shell. You can’t have a skin like that under five hundred a year. A sort of chann he had, a
glamour, like all moneyed people. Money and charm; who shall separate them?
Gordon thought of Ravelston, his charming, rich friend, editor of Antichrist, of whom he
was extravagantly fond, and whom he did not see so often as once in a fortnight; and of
Rosemary, his girl, who loved him — adored him, so she said — and who, all the same, had
never slept with him. Money, once again; all is money. All human relationships must be
purchased with money. If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t
love you; won’t, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters. And how
right they are, after all! For, moneyless, you are unlovable. Though I speak with the
tongues of men and of angels. But then, if I haven’t money, I DON’T speak with the
tongues of men and of angels.
He looked again at the ad-posters. He really hated them this time. That Vitamalt one, for
instance! ‘Hike all day on a slab of Vitamalt! ’ A youthful couple, boy and girl, in clean-
minded hiking kit, their hair picturesquely tousled by the wind, climbing a stile against a
Sussex landscape. That girl’s face! The awful bright tomboy cheeriness of it! The kind of
girl who goes in for Plenty of Clean Fun. Windswept. Tight khaki shorts but that doesn’t
mean you can pinch her backside. And next to them — Comer Table. ‘Comer Table
enjoys his meal with Bovex’. Gordon examined the thing with the intimacy of hatred.
The idiotic grinning face, like the face of a self-satisfied rat, the slick black hair, the silly
spectacles. Corner Table, heir of the ages; victor of Waterloo, Corner Table, Modern man
as his master want him to be. A docile little porker, sitting in the money-sty, drinking
Bovex.
Faces passed, wind-yellowed. A tram boomed across the square, and the clock over the
Prince of Wales stmck three. A couple of old creatures, a tramp or a beggar and his wife,
in long greasy overcoats that reached almost to the ground, were shuffling towards the
shop. Book-pinchers, by the look of them. Better keep an eye on the boxes outside. The
old man halted on the kerb a few yards away while his wife came to the door. She pushed
it open and looked up at Gordon, between grey strings of hair, with a sort of hopeful
malevolence.
‘Ju buy books? ’ she demanded hoarsely.
‘Sometimes. It depends what books they are. ’
‘I gossome LOVELY books ‘ere. ’
She came in, shutting the door with a clang. The Nancy glanced over his shoulder
distastefully and moved a step or two away, into the corner. The old woman had
produced a greasy little sack from under her overcoat. She moved confidentially nearer to
Gordon. She smelt of very, very old breadcrusts.
‘Will you ‘ave ‘em? ’ she said, clasping the neck of the sack. ‘Only ‘alf a crown the lot. ’
‘What are they? Let me see them, please. ’
‘LOVELY books, they are,’ she breathed, bending over to open the sack and emitting a
sudden very powerful whiff of breadcrusts.
“Ere! ’ she said, and thrust an armful of filthy-looking books almost into Gordon’s face.
They were an 1884 edition of Charlotte M. Yonge’s novels, and had the appearance of
having been slept on for many years. Gordon stepped back, suddenly revolted.
‘We can’t possibly buy those,’ he said shortly.
‘Can’t buy ‘em? WHY can’t yer buy ‘em? ’
‘Because they’re no use to us. We can’t sell that kind of thing. ’
‘Wotcher make me take ‘em out o’ me bag for, then? ’ demanded the old woman
ferociously.
Gordon made a detour round her, to avoid the smell, and held the door open, silently. No
use arguing. You had people of this type coming into the shop all day long. The old
woman made off, mumbling, with malevolence in the hump of her shoulders, and joined
her husband. He paused on the kerb to cough, so fruitily that you could hear him through
the door. A clot of phlegm, like a little white tongue, came slowly out between his lips
and was ejected into the gutter. Then the two old creatures shuffled away, beetle-like in
the long greasy overcoats that hid everything except their feet.
Gordon watched them go. They were just by-products. The throw-outs of the money-god.
All over London, by tens of thousands, draggled old beasts of that description; creeping
like unclean beetles to the grave.
He gazed out at the graceless street. At this moment it seemed to him that in a street like
this, in a town like this, every life that is lived must be meaningless and intolerable. The
sense of disintegration, of decay, that is endemic in our time, was strong upon him.
Somehow it was mixed up with the ad-posters opposite. He looked now with more seeing
eyes at those grinning yard-wide faces. After all, there was more there than mere
silliness, greed, and vulgarity. Comer Table grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a
flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of
doom. For can you not see, if you know how to look, that behind that slick self-
satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there is nothing but a frightful emptiness, a
secret despair? The great death-wish of the modern world. Suicide pacts. Heads stuck in
gas-ovens in lonely maisonettes. French letters and Amen Pills. And the reverberations of
future wars. Enemy aeroplanes flying over London; the deep threatening hum of the
propellers, the shattering thunder of the bombs. It is all written in Corner Table’s face.
More customers coming. Gordon stood back, gentlemanly-servile.
The door-bell clanged. Two upper-middle-class ladies sailed noisily in. One pink and
fruity, thirty-fivish, with voluptuous bosom burgeoning from her coat of squirrel-skin,
emitting a super-feminine scent of Panna violets: the other middle-aged, tough, and
curried — India, presumably. Close behind them a dark, grubby, shy young man slipped
through the doorway as apologetically as a cat. He was one of the shop’s best
customers — a flitting, solitary creature who was almost too shy to speak and who by
some strange manipulation kept himself always a day away from a shave.
Gordon repeated his formula:
‘Good afternoon. Can I do anything for you? Are you looking for any particular book? ’
Fruity-face overwhelmed him with a smile, but curry-face decided to treat the question as
an impertinence. Ignoring Gordon, she drew fruity-face across to the shelves next to the
new books where the dog-books and cat-books were kept. The two of them immediately
began taking books out of the shelves and talking loudly. Curry-face had the voice of a
drill-sergeant. She was no doubt a colonel’s wife, or widow. The Nancy, still deep in the
big book on the Russian ballet, edged delicately away. His face said that he would leave
the shop if his privacy were disturbed again. The shy young man had already found his
way to the poetry shelves. The two ladies were fairly frequent visitors to the shop. They
always wanted to see books about cats and dogs, but never actually bought anything.
There were two whole shelves of dog-books and cat-books. ‘Ladies’ Comer,’ old
McKechnie called it.
Another customer arrived, for the library. An ugly girl of twenty, hatless, in a white
overall, with a sallow, blithering, honest face and powerful spectacles that distorted her
eyes. She was an assistant at a chemist’s shop. Gordon put on his homey library manner.
She smiled at him, and with a gait as clumsy as a bear’s followed him into the library.
‘What kind of book would you like this time, Miss Weeks? ’
‘Well’ — she clutched the front of her overall. Her distorted, black-treacle eyes beamed
trustfully into his. ‘Well, what I’d REALLY like’s a good hot-stuff love story. You
know — something MODERN. ’
‘Something modern? Something by Barbara Bedworthy for instance? Have you read
Almost a Virgin? ’
‘Oh no, not her. She’s too Deep. I can’t bear Deep books. But I want something — well,
YOU kn ow — MODERN. Sex-problems and divorce and all that. YOU know. ’
‘Modem, but not Deep,’ said Gordon, as lowbrow to lowbrow.
He ranged among the hot-stuff modern love-stories. There were not less than three
hundred of them in the library. From the front room came the voices of the two upper-
middle-class ladies, the one fruity, the other curried, disputing about dogs. They had
taken out one of the dog-books and were examining the photographs. Fruity-voice
enthused over the photograph of a Peke, the ickle angel pet, wiv his gweat big Soulful
eyes and his ickle black nosie — oh, so ducky-duck! But curry-voice — yes, undoubtedly a
colonel’s widow — said Pekes were soppy. Give her dogs with guts — dogs that would
fight, she said; she hated these soppy lapdogs, she said. ‘You have no Soul, Bedelia, no
Soul,’ said fruity-voice plaintively. The door-bell pinged again. Gordon handed the
chemist’s girl Seven Scarlet Nights and booked it on her ticket. She took a shabby leather
purse out of her overall pocket and paid him twopence.
He went back to the front room. The Nancy had put his book back in the wrong shelf and
vanished. A lean, straight-nosed, brisk woman, with sensible clothes and gold-rimmed
pince-nez — schoolmarm possibly, feminist certainly — came in and demanded Mrs
Wharton-Beverley’s history of the suffrage movement. With secret joy Gordon told her
that they hadn’t got it. She stabbed his male incompetence with gimlet eyes and went out
again. The thin young man stood apologetically in the corner, his face buried in D. H.
Lawrence’s Collected Poems, like some long-legged bird with its head buried under its
wing.
Gordon waited by the door. Outside, a shabby-genteel old man with a strawberry nose
and a khaki muffler round his throat was picking over the books in the sixpenny box. The
two upper-middle-class ladies suddenly departed, leaving a litter of open books on the
table. Fruity-face cast reluctant backward glances at the dog-books, but curry-face drew
her away, resolute not to buy anything. Gordon held the door open. The two ladies sailed
noisily out, ignoring him.
He watched their fur-coated upper-middle-class backs go down the street. The old
strawberry-nosed man was talking to himself as he pawed over the books. A bit wrong in
the head, presumably. He would pinch something if he wasn’t watched. The wind blew
colder, drying the slime of the street. Time to light up presently. Caught by a swirl of air,
the tom strip of paper on the Q. T. Sauce advertisement fluttered sharply, like a piece of
washing on the line. Ah!
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And the dark
ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward; flicked by whips of air Tom posters flutter.
Not bad, not bad at all. But he had no wish to go on — could not go on, indeed. He
fingered the money in his pocket, not chinking it, lest the shy young man should hear.
Twopence-halfpenny. No tobacco all tomorrow. His bones ached.
A light sprang up in the Prince of Wales. They would be swabbing out the bar. The old
strawberry-nosed man was reading an Edgar Wallace out of the twopenny box. A tram
boomed in the distance. In the room upstairs Mr McKechnie, who seldom came down to
the shop, drowsed by the gas-fire, white-haired and white-bearded, with snuff-box handy,
over his calf-bound folio of Middleton’s Travels in the Levant.
The thin young man suddenly realized that he was alone and looked up guiltily. He was a
habitue of bookshops, yet never stayed longer than ten minutes in any one shop. A
passionate hunger for books, and the fear of being a nuisance, were constantly at war in
him. After ten minutes in any shop he would grow uneasy, feel himself de trop, and take
to flight, having bought something out of sheer nervousness. Without speaking he held
out the copy of Lawrence’s poems and awkwardly extracted three florins from his pocket.
In handing them to Gordon he dropped one. Both dived for it simultaneously; their heads
bumped against one another. The young man stood back, blushing sallowly.
Til wrap it up for you,’ said Gordon.
But the shy young man shook his head — he stammered so badly that he never spoke
when it was avoidable. He clutched his book to him and slipped out with the air of having
committed some disgraceful action.
Gordon was alone. He wandered back to the door. The strawberry-nosed man glanced
over his shoulder, caught Gordon’s eye, and moved off, foiled. He had been on the point
of slipping Edgar Wallace into his pocket. The clock over the Prince of Wales struck a
quarter past three.
Ding Dong! A quarter past three. Light up at half past. Pour and three-quarter hours till
closing time. Live and a quarter hours till supper. Twopence halfpenny in pocket. No
tobacco tomorrow.
Suddenly a ravishing, irresistible desire to smoke came over Gordon. He had made up his
mind not to smoke this afternoon. He had only four cigarettes left. They must be saved
for tonight, when he intended to ‘write’; for he could no more ‘write’ without tobacco
than without air. Nevertheless, he had got to have a smoke. He took out his packet of
Player’s Weights and extracted one of the dwarfish cigarettes. It was sheer stupid
indulgence; it meant half an hour off tonight’s ‘writing’ time. But there was no resisting
it. With a sort of shameful joy he sucked the soothing smoke into his lungs.
The reflection of his own face looked back at him from the greyish pane. Gordon
Comstock, author of MICE; en Tan trentiesme de son eage, and moth-eaten already. Only
twenty-six teeth left. However, Villon at the same age was poxed on his own showing.
Let’s be thankful for small mercies.
He watched the ribbon of tom paper whirling, fluttering on the Q. T. Sauce
advertisement. Our civilization is dying. It MUST be dying. But it isn’t going to die in its
bed. Presently the aeroplanes are coming. Zoom — whizz — crash! The whole western
world going up in a roar of high explosives.
He looked at the darkening street, at the greyish reflection of his face in the pane, at the
shabby figures shuffling past. Almost involuntarily he repeated:
‘C’est l’Ennui — l’oeil charge d’un pleur involontaire, II reve d’echafauds en fumant son
houka! ’
Money, money! Corner Table! The humming of the aeroplanes and the crash of the
bombs.
Gordon squinted up at the leaden sky. Those aeroplanes are coming. In imagination he
saw them coming now; squadron after squadron, innumerable, darkening the sky like
clouds of gnats. With his tongue not quite against his teeth he made a buzzing, bluebottle-
on-the-window-pane sound to represent the humming of the aeroplanes. It was a sound
which, at that moment, he ardently desired to hear.
Chapter 2
Gordon walked homeward against the rattling wind, which blew his hair backward and
gave him more of a ‘good’ forehead than ever. His manner conveyed to the passers-by —
at least, he hoped it did — that if he wore no overcoat it was from pure caprice. His
overcoat was up the spout for fifteen shillings, as a matter of fact.
Willowbed Road, NW, was not definitely slummy, only dingy and depressing. There
were real slums hardly five minutes’ walk away. Tenement houses where families slept
five in a bed, and, when one of them died, slept every night with the corpse until it was
buried; alley-ways where girls of fifteen were deflowered by boys of sixteen against
leprous plaster walls. But Willowbed Road itself contrived to keep up a kind of mingy,
lower-middle-class decency. There was even a dentist’s brass plate on one of the houses.
In quite two-thirds of them, amid the lace curtains of the parlour window, there was a
green card with ‘Apartments’ on it in silver lettering, above the peeping foliage of an
aspidistra.
Mrs Wisbeach, Gordon’s landlady, specialized in ‘single gentlemen’. Bed-sitting-rooms,
with gaslight laid on and find your own heating, baths extra (there was a geyser), and
meals in the tomb-dark dining-room with the phalanx of clotted sauce-bottles in the
middle of the table. Gordon, who came home for his midday dinner, paid twenty-seven
and six a week.
The gaslight shone yellow through the frosted transom above the door of Number 3 1 .
Gordon took out his key and fished about in the keyhole — in that kind of house the key
never quite fits the lock. The darkish little hallway — in reality it was only a passage —
smelt of dishwater, cabbage, rag mats, and bedroom slops. Gordon glanced at the
japanned tray on the hall-stand. No letters, of course. He had told himself not to hope for
a letter, and nevertheless had continued to hope. A stale feeling, not quite a pain, settled
upon his breast. Rosemary might have written! It was four days now since she had
written. Moreover, there were a couple of poems that he had sent out to magazines and
had not yet had returned to him. The one thing that made the evening bearable was to find
a letter waiting for him when he got home. But he received very few letters — four or five
in a week at the very most.
On the left of the hall was the never-used parlour, then came the staircase, and beyond
that the passage ran down to the kitchen and to the unapproachable lair inhabited by Mrs
Wisbeach herself. As Gordon came in, the door at the end of the passage opened a foot or
so. Mrs Wisbeach’s face emerged, inspected him briefly but suspiciously, and
disappeared again. It was quite impossible to get in or out of the house, at any time before
eleven at night, without being scrutinized in this manner. Just what Mrs Wisbeach
suspected you of it was hard to say; smuggling women into the house, possibly. She was
one of those malignant respectable women who keep lodging-houses. Age about forty-
five, stout but active, with a pink, fine-featured, horribly observant face, beautifully grey
hair, and a permanent grievance.
Gordon halted at the foot of the narrow stairs. Above, a coarse rich voice was singing,
‘Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? ’ A very fat man of thirty-eight or nine came round
the angle of the stairs, with the light dancing step peculiar to fat men, dressed in a smart
grey suit, yellow shoes, a rakish trilby hat, and a belted blue overcoat of startling
vulgarity. This was Flaxman, the first-floor lodger and travelling representative of the
Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. He saluted Gordon with a lemon-coloured glove as
he came down.
‘Hullo, chappie! ’ he said blithely. (Flaxman called everyone ‘chappie’.
A spasm passed over Mrs Penn’s face at the mention of Burroughs. She turned her back
markedly on Mrs Weaver.
‘What I feel, Mr Comstock, is that there’s something so BIG about Galsworthy. He’s so
broad, so universal, and yet at the same time so thoroughly English in spirit, so HUMAN.
His books are real HUMAN documents. ’
‘And Priestley, too,’ said Gordon. ‘I think Priestley’s such an awfully fine writer, don’t
you? ’
‘Oh, he is! So big, so broad, so human! And so essentially English! ’
Mrs Weaver pursed her lips. Behind them were three isolated yellow teeth.
‘I think p’raps I can do better’n ‘ave another Dell,’ she said. ‘You ‘ave got some more
Dells, ‘aven’t you? I DO enjoy a good read of Dell, I must say. I says to my daughter, I
says, “You can keep your Deepings and your Burroughses. Give me Dell,” I says. ’
Ding Dong Dell! Dukes and dogwhips! Mrs Penn’s eye signalled highbrow irony.
Gordon returned her signal. Keep in with Mrs Penn! A good, steady customer.
‘Oh, certainly, Mrs Weaver. We’ve got a whole shelf by Ethel M. Dell. Would you like
The Desire of his Life? Or perhaps you’ve read that. Then what about The Alter of
Honour? ’
‘I wonder whether you have Hugh Walpole’s latest book? ’ said Mrs Penn. ‘I feel in the
mood this week for something epic, something BIG. Now Walpole, you know, I consider
a really GREAT writer, I put him second only to Galsworthy. There’s something so BIG
about him. And yet he’s so human with it. ’
‘And so essentially English,’ said Gordon.
‘Oh, of course! So essentially English! ’
‘I b’lieve I’ll jest ‘ave The Way of an Eagle over again,’ said Mrs Weaver finally. ‘You
don’t never seem to get tired of The Way of an Eagle, do you, now? ’
‘It’s certainly astonishingly popular,’ said Gordon, diplomatically, his eye on Mrs Penn.
‘Oh, asTONishingly! ’ echoed Mrs Penn, ironically, her eye on Gordon.
He took their twopences and sent them happy away, Mrs Penn with Walpole’s Rogue
Herries and Mrs Weaver with The Way of an Eagle.
Soon he had wandered back to the other room and towards the shelves of poetry. A
melancholy fascination, those shelves had for him. His own wretched book was there —
skied, of course, high up among the unsaleable. Mice, by Gordon Comstock; a sneaky
little foolscap octavo, price three and sixpence but now reduced to a bob. Of the thirteen
B. F. s who had reviewed it (and The Times Lit. Supp. had declared that it showed
‘exceptional promise’) not one had seen the none too subtle joke of that title. And in the
two years he had been at McKechnie’s bookshop, not a single customer, not a single one,
had ever taken Mice out of its shelf.
There were fifteen or twenty shelves of poetry. Gordon regarded them sourly. Dud stuff,
for the most part. A little above eye-level, already on their way to heaven and oblivion,
were the poets of yesteryear, the stars of his earlier youth. Yeats, Davies, Housman,
Thomas, De la Mare, Hardy. Dead stars. Below them, exactly at eye-level, were the
squibs of the passing minute. Eliot, Pound, Auden, Campbell, Day Lewis, Spender. Very
damp squibs, that lot. Dead stars above, damp squibs below. Shall we ever again get a
writer worth reading? But Lawrence was all right, and Joyce even better before he went
off his coconut. And if we did get a writer worth reading, should we know him when we
saw him, so choked as we are with trash?
Ping! Shop bell. Gordon turned. Another customer.
A youth of twenty, cherry-lipped, with gilded hair, tripped Nancifully in. Moneyed,
obviously. He had the golden aura of money. He had been in the shop before. Gordon
assumed the gentlemanly-servile mien reserved for new customers. He repeated the usual
formula:
‘Good afternoon. Can I do anything for you? Are you looking for any particular book? ’
‘Oh, no, not weally. ’ An R-less Nancy voice. ‘May I just BWOWSE? I simply couldn’t
wesist your fwont window. I have such a tewwible weakness for bookshops! So I just
floated in — tee-hee! ’
Float out again, then, Nancy. Gordon smiled a cultured smile, as booklover to booklover.
‘Oh, please do. We like people to look round. Are you interested in poetry, by any
chance? ’
‘Oh, of course! I ADORE poetwy! ’
Of course! Mangy little snob. There was a sub-artistic look about his clothes. Gordon slid
a ‘slim’ red volume from the poetry shelves.
‘These are just out. They might interest you, perhaps. They’re translations — something
rather out of the common. Translations from the Bulgarian. ’
Very subtle, that. Now leave him to himself. That’s the proper way with customers. Don’t
hustle them; let them browse for twenty minutes or so; then they get ashamed and buy
something. Gordon moved to the door, discreetly, keeping out of Nancy’s way; yet
casually, one hand in his pocket, with the insouciant air proper to a gentleman.
Outside, the slimy street looked grey and drear. From somewhere round the corner came
the clatter of hooves, a cold hollow sound. Caught by the wind, the dark columns of
smoke from the chimneys veered over and rolled flatly down the sloping roofs. Ah!
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And the dark
ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward tumty tumty (something like ‘murky’) air.
Good. But the impulse faded. His eye fell again upon the ad-posters across the street.
He almost wanted to laugh at them, they were so feeble, so dead-alive, so unappetizing.
As though anybody could be tempted by THOSE! Like succubi with pimply backsides.
But they depressed him all the same. The money-stink, everywhere the money-stink. He
stole a glance at the Nancy, who had drifted away from the poetry shelves and taken out a
large expensive book on the Russian ballet. He was holding it delicately between his pink
non-prehensile paws, as a squirrel holds a nut, studying the photographs. Gordon knew
his type. The moneyed ‘artistic’ young man. Not an artist himself, exactly, but a hanger-
on of the arts; frequenter of studios, retailer of scandal. A nice-looking boy, though, for
all his Nancitude. The skin at the back of his neck was as silky-smooth as the inside of a
shell. You can’t have a skin like that under five hundred a year. A sort of chann he had, a
glamour, like all moneyed people. Money and charm; who shall separate them?
Gordon thought of Ravelston, his charming, rich friend, editor of Antichrist, of whom he
was extravagantly fond, and whom he did not see so often as once in a fortnight; and of
Rosemary, his girl, who loved him — adored him, so she said — and who, all the same, had
never slept with him. Money, once again; all is money. All human relationships must be
purchased with money. If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t
love you; won’t, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters. And how
right they are, after all! For, moneyless, you are unlovable. Though I speak with the
tongues of men and of angels. But then, if I haven’t money, I DON’T speak with the
tongues of men and of angels.
He looked again at the ad-posters. He really hated them this time. That Vitamalt one, for
instance! ‘Hike all day on a slab of Vitamalt! ’ A youthful couple, boy and girl, in clean-
minded hiking kit, their hair picturesquely tousled by the wind, climbing a stile against a
Sussex landscape. That girl’s face! The awful bright tomboy cheeriness of it! The kind of
girl who goes in for Plenty of Clean Fun. Windswept. Tight khaki shorts but that doesn’t
mean you can pinch her backside. And next to them — Comer Table. ‘Comer Table
enjoys his meal with Bovex’. Gordon examined the thing with the intimacy of hatred.
The idiotic grinning face, like the face of a self-satisfied rat, the slick black hair, the silly
spectacles. Corner Table, heir of the ages; victor of Waterloo, Corner Table, Modern man
as his master want him to be. A docile little porker, sitting in the money-sty, drinking
Bovex.
Faces passed, wind-yellowed. A tram boomed across the square, and the clock over the
Prince of Wales stmck three. A couple of old creatures, a tramp or a beggar and his wife,
in long greasy overcoats that reached almost to the ground, were shuffling towards the
shop. Book-pinchers, by the look of them. Better keep an eye on the boxes outside. The
old man halted on the kerb a few yards away while his wife came to the door. She pushed
it open and looked up at Gordon, between grey strings of hair, with a sort of hopeful
malevolence.
‘Ju buy books? ’ she demanded hoarsely.
‘Sometimes. It depends what books they are. ’
‘I gossome LOVELY books ‘ere. ’
She came in, shutting the door with a clang. The Nancy glanced over his shoulder
distastefully and moved a step or two away, into the corner. The old woman had
produced a greasy little sack from under her overcoat. She moved confidentially nearer to
Gordon. She smelt of very, very old breadcrusts.
‘Will you ‘ave ‘em? ’ she said, clasping the neck of the sack. ‘Only ‘alf a crown the lot. ’
‘What are they? Let me see them, please. ’
‘LOVELY books, they are,’ she breathed, bending over to open the sack and emitting a
sudden very powerful whiff of breadcrusts.
“Ere! ’ she said, and thrust an armful of filthy-looking books almost into Gordon’s face.
They were an 1884 edition of Charlotte M. Yonge’s novels, and had the appearance of
having been slept on for many years. Gordon stepped back, suddenly revolted.
‘We can’t possibly buy those,’ he said shortly.
‘Can’t buy ‘em? WHY can’t yer buy ‘em? ’
‘Because they’re no use to us. We can’t sell that kind of thing. ’
‘Wotcher make me take ‘em out o’ me bag for, then? ’ demanded the old woman
ferociously.
Gordon made a detour round her, to avoid the smell, and held the door open, silently. No
use arguing. You had people of this type coming into the shop all day long. The old
woman made off, mumbling, with malevolence in the hump of her shoulders, and joined
her husband. He paused on the kerb to cough, so fruitily that you could hear him through
the door. A clot of phlegm, like a little white tongue, came slowly out between his lips
and was ejected into the gutter. Then the two old creatures shuffled away, beetle-like in
the long greasy overcoats that hid everything except their feet.
Gordon watched them go. They were just by-products. The throw-outs of the money-god.
All over London, by tens of thousands, draggled old beasts of that description; creeping
like unclean beetles to the grave.
He gazed out at the graceless street. At this moment it seemed to him that in a street like
this, in a town like this, every life that is lived must be meaningless and intolerable. The
sense of disintegration, of decay, that is endemic in our time, was strong upon him.
Somehow it was mixed up with the ad-posters opposite. He looked now with more seeing
eyes at those grinning yard-wide faces. After all, there was more there than mere
silliness, greed, and vulgarity. Comer Table grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a
flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of
doom. For can you not see, if you know how to look, that behind that slick self-
satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there is nothing but a frightful emptiness, a
secret despair? The great death-wish of the modern world. Suicide pacts. Heads stuck in
gas-ovens in lonely maisonettes. French letters and Amen Pills. And the reverberations of
future wars. Enemy aeroplanes flying over London; the deep threatening hum of the
propellers, the shattering thunder of the bombs. It is all written in Corner Table’s face.
More customers coming. Gordon stood back, gentlemanly-servile.
The door-bell clanged. Two upper-middle-class ladies sailed noisily in. One pink and
fruity, thirty-fivish, with voluptuous bosom burgeoning from her coat of squirrel-skin,
emitting a super-feminine scent of Panna violets: the other middle-aged, tough, and
curried — India, presumably. Close behind them a dark, grubby, shy young man slipped
through the doorway as apologetically as a cat. He was one of the shop’s best
customers — a flitting, solitary creature who was almost too shy to speak and who by
some strange manipulation kept himself always a day away from a shave.
Gordon repeated his formula:
‘Good afternoon. Can I do anything for you? Are you looking for any particular book? ’
Fruity-face overwhelmed him with a smile, but curry-face decided to treat the question as
an impertinence. Ignoring Gordon, she drew fruity-face across to the shelves next to the
new books where the dog-books and cat-books were kept. The two of them immediately
began taking books out of the shelves and talking loudly. Curry-face had the voice of a
drill-sergeant. She was no doubt a colonel’s wife, or widow. The Nancy, still deep in the
big book on the Russian ballet, edged delicately away. His face said that he would leave
the shop if his privacy were disturbed again. The shy young man had already found his
way to the poetry shelves. The two ladies were fairly frequent visitors to the shop. They
always wanted to see books about cats and dogs, but never actually bought anything.
There were two whole shelves of dog-books and cat-books. ‘Ladies’ Comer,’ old
McKechnie called it.
Another customer arrived, for the library. An ugly girl of twenty, hatless, in a white
overall, with a sallow, blithering, honest face and powerful spectacles that distorted her
eyes. She was an assistant at a chemist’s shop. Gordon put on his homey library manner.
She smiled at him, and with a gait as clumsy as a bear’s followed him into the library.
‘What kind of book would you like this time, Miss Weeks? ’
‘Well’ — she clutched the front of her overall. Her distorted, black-treacle eyes beamed
trustfully into his. ‘Well, what I’d REALLY like’s a good hot-stuff love story. You
know — something MODERN. ’
‘Something modern? Something by Barbara Bedworthy for instance? Have you read
Almost a Virgin? ’
‘Oh no, not her. She’s too Deep. I can’t bear Deep books. But I want something — well,
YOU kn ow — MODERN. Sex-problems and divorce and all that. YOU know. ’
‘Modem, but not Deep,’ said Gordon, as lowbrow to lowbrow.
He ranged among the hot-stuff modern love-stories. There were not less than three
hundred of them in the library. From the front room came the voices of the two upper-
middle-class ladies, the one fruity, the other curried, disputing about dogs. They had
taken out one of the dog-books and were examining the photographs. Fruity-voice
enthused over the photograph of a Peke, the ickle angel pet, wiv his gweat big Soulful
eyes and his ickle black nosie — oh, so ducky-duck! But curry-voice — yes, undoubtedly a
colonel’s widow — said Pekes were soppy. Give her dogs with guts — dogs that would
fight, she said; she hated these soppy lapdogs, she said. ‘You have no Soul, Bedelia, no
Soul,’ said fruity-voice plaintively. The door-bell pinged again. Gordon handed the
chemist’s girl Seven Scarlet Nights and booked it on her ticket. She took a shabby leather
purse out of her overall pocket and paid him twopence.
He went back to the front room. The Nancy had put his book back in the wrong shelf and
vanished. A lean, straight-nosed, brisk woman, with sensible clothes and gold-rimmed
pince-nez — schoolmarm possibly, feminist certainly — came in and demanded Mrs
Wharton-Beverley’s history of the suffrage movement. With secret joy Gordon told her
that they hadn’t got it. She stabbed his male incompetence with gimlet eyes and went out
again. The thin young man stood apologetically in the corner, his face buried in D. H.
Lawrence’s Collected Poems, like some long-legged bird with its head buried under its
wing.
Gordon waited by the door. Outside, a shabby-genteel old man with a strawberry nose
and a khaki muffler round his throat was picking over the books in the sixpenny box. The
two upper-middle-class ladies suddenly departed, leaving a litter of open books on the
table. Fruity-face cast reluctant backward glances at the dog-books, but curry-face drew
her away, resolute not to buy anything. Gordon held the door open. The two ladies sailed
noisily out, ignoring him.
He watched their fur-coated upper-middle-class backs go down the street. The old
strawberry-nosed man was talking to himself as he pawed over the books. A bit wrong in
the head, presumably. He would pinch something if he wasn’t watched. The wind blew
colder, drying the slime of the street. Time to light up presently. Caught by a swirl of air,
the tom strip of paper on the Q. T. Sauce advertisement fluttered sharply, like a piece of
washing on the line. Ah!
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And the dark
ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward; flicked by whips of air Tom posters flutter.
Not bad, not bad at all. But he had no wish to go on — could not go on, indeed. He
fingered the money in his pocket, not chinking it, lest the shy young man should hear.
Twopence-halfpenny. No tobacco all tomorrow. His bones ached.
A light sprang up in the Prince of Wales. They would be swabbing out the bar. The old
strawberry-nosed man was reading an Edgar Wallace out of the twopenny box. A tram
boomed in the distance. In the room upstairs Mr McKechnie, who seldom came down to
the shop, drowsed by the gas-fire, white-haired and white-bearded, with snuff-box handy,
over his calf-bound folio of Middleton’s Travels in the Levant.
The thin young man suddenly realized that he was alone and looked up guiltily. He was a
habitue of bookshops, yet never stayed longer than ten minutes in any one shop. A
passionate hunger for books, and the fear of being a nuisance, were constantly at war in
him. After ten minutes in any shop he would grow uneasy, feel himself de trop, and take
to flight, having bought something out of sheer nervousness. Without speaking he held
out the copy of Lawrence’s poems and awkwardly extracted three florins from his pocket.
In handing them to Gordon he dropped one. Both dived for it simultaneously; their heads
bumped against one another. The young man stood back, blushing sallowly.
Til wrap it up for you,’ said Gordon.
But the shy young man shook his head — he stammered so badly that he never spoke
when it was avoidable. He clutched his book to him and slipped out with the air of having
committed some disgraceful action.
Gordon was alone. He wandered back to the door. The strawberry-nosed man glanced
over his shoulder, caught Gordon’s eye, and moved off, foiled. He had been on the point
of slipping Edgar Wallace into his pocket. The clock over the Prince of Wales struck a
quarter past three.
Ding Dong! A quarter past three. Light up at half past. Pour and three-quarter hours till
closing time. Live and a quarter hours till supper. Twopence halfpenny in pocket. No
tobacco tomorrow.
Suddenly a ravishing, irresistible desire to smoke came over Gordon. He had made up his
mind not to smoke this afternoon. He had only four cigarettes left. They must be saved
for tonight, when he intended to ‘write’; for he could no more ‘write’ without tobacco
than without air. Nevertheless, he had got to have a smoke. He took out his packet of
Player’s Weights and extracted one of the dwarfish cigarettes. It was sheer stupid
indulgence; it meant half an hour off tonight’s ‘writing’ time. But there was no resisting
it. With a sort of shameful joy he sucked the soothing smoke into his lungs.
The reflection of his own face looked back at him from the greyish pane. Gordon
Comstock, author of MICE; en Tan trentiesme de son eage, and moth-eaten already. Only
twenty-six teeth left. However, Villon at the same age was poxed on his own showing.
Let’s be thankful for small mercies.
He watched the ribbon of tom paper whirling, fluttering on the Q. T. Sauce
advertisement. Our civilization is dying. It MUST be dying. But it isn’t going to die in its
bed. Presently the aeroplanes are coming. Zoom — whizz — crash! The whole western
world going up in a roar of high explosives.
He looked at the darkening street, at the greyish reflection of his face in the pane, at the
shabby figures shuffling past. Almost involuntarily he repeated:
‘C’est l’Ennui — l’oeil charge d’un pleur involontaire, II reve d’echafauds en fumant son
houka! ’
Money, money! Corner Table! The humming of the aeroplanes and the crash of the
bombs.
Gordon squinted up at the leaden sky. Those aeroplanes are coming. In imagination he
saw them coming now; squadron after squadron, innumerable, darkening the sky like
clouds of gnats. With his tongue not quite against his teeth he made a buzzing, bluebottle-
on-the-window-pane sound to represent the humming of the aeroplanes. It was a sound
which, at that moment, he ardently desired to hear.
Chapter 2
Gordon walked homeward against the rattling wind, which blew his hair backward and
gave him more of a ‘good’ forehead than ever. His manner conveyed to the passers-by —
at least, he hoped it did — that if he wore no overcoat it was from pure caprice. His
overcoat was up the spout for fifteen shillings, as a matter of fact.
Willowbed Road, NW, was not definitely slummy, only dingy and depressing. There
were real slums hardly five minutes’ walk away. Tenement houses where families slept
five in a bed, and, when one of them died, slept every night with the corpse until it was
buried; alley-ways where girls of fifteen were deflowered by boys of sixteen against
leprous plaster walls. But Willowbed Road itself contrived to keep up a kind of mingy,
lower-middle-class decency. There was even a dentist’s brass plate on one of the houses.
In quite two-thirds of them, amid the lace curtains of the parlour window, there was a
green card with ‘Apartments’ on it in silver lettering, above the peeping foliage of an
aspidistra.
Mrs Wisbeach, Gordon’s landlady, specialized in ‘single gentlemen’. Bed-sitting-rooms,
with gaslight laid on and find your own heating, baths extra (there was a geyser), and
meals in the tomb-dark dining-room with the phalanx of clotted sauce-bottles in the
middle of the table. Gordon, who came home for his midday dinner, paid twenty-seven
and six a week.
The gaslight shone yellow through the frosted transom above the door of Number 3 1 .
Gordon took out his key and fished about in the keyhole — in that kind of house the key
never quite fits the lock. The darkish little hallway — in reality it was only a passage —
smelt of dishwater, cabbage, rag mats, and bedroom slops. Gordon glanced at the
japanned tray on the hall-stand. No letters, of course. He had told himself not to hope for
a letter, and nevertheless had continued to hope. A stale feeling, not quite a pain, settled
upon his breast. Rosemary might have written! It was four days now since she had
written. Moreover, there were a couple of poems that he had sent out to magazines and
had not yet had returned to him. The one thing that made the evening bearable was to find
a letter waiting for him when he got home. But he received very few letters — four or five
in a week at the very most.
On the left of the hall was the never-used parlour, then came the staircase, and beyond
that the passage ran down to the kitchen and to the unapproachable lair inhabited by Mrs
Wisbeach herself. As Gordon came in, the door at the end of the passage opened a foot or
so. Mrs Wisbeach’s face emerged, inspected him briefly but suspiciously, and
disappeared again. It was quite impossible to get in or out of the house, at any time before
eleven at night, without being scrutinized in this manner. Just what Mrs Wisbeach
suspected you of it was hard to say; smuggling women into the house, possibly. She was
one of those malignant respectable women who keep lodging-houses. Age about forty-
five, stout but active, with a pink, fine-featured, horribly observant face, beautifully grey
hair, and a permanent grievance.
Gordon halted at the foot of the narrow stairs. Above, a coarse rich voice was singing,
‘Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? ’ A very fat man of thirty-eight or nine came round
the angle of the stairs, with the light dancing step peculiar to fat men, dressed in a smart
grey suit, yellow shoes, a rakish trilby hat, and a belted blue overcoat of startling
vulgarity. This was Flaxman, the first-floor lodger and travelling representative of the
Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. He saluted Gordon with a lemon-coloured glove as
he came down.
‘Hullo, chappie! ’ he said blithely. (Flaxman called everyone ‘chappie’.
