’ The word
‘dead’
re-echoed in his mind, setting up its own train of
thought.
thought.
Orwell - Keep the Apidistra Flying
Suddenly he loathed his own poem and
was acutely ashamed of it. He felt it the weakest, silliest poem ever written. Without
looking at it again he tore it into small bits and flung them into the wastepaper basket. He
would put that poem out of his mind for ever. The rejection slip, however, he did not tear
up yet. He fingered it, feeling its loathly sleekness. Such an elegant little thing, printed in
admirable type. You could tell at a glance that it came from a ‘good’ magazine — a snooty
highbrow magazine with the money of a publishing house behind it. Money, money!
Money and culture! It was a stupid thing that he had done. Fancy sending a poem to a
paper like the Primrose! As though they’d accept poems from people like HIM. The mere
fact that the poem wasn’t typed would tell them what kind of person he was. He might as
well have dropped a card on Buckingham Palace. He thought of the people who wrote for
the Primrose; a coterie of moneyed highbrows — those sleek, refined young animals who
suck in money and culture with their mother’s milk. The idea of trying to horn in among
that pansy crowd! But he cursed them all the same. The sods! The bloody sods! ‘The
Editor regrets! ’ Why be so bloody mealy-mouthed about it? Why not say outright, ‘We
don’t want your bloody poems. We only take poems from chaps we were at Cambridge
with. You proletarians keep your distance’? The bloody, hypocritical sods!
At last he crumpled up the rejection slip, threw it away, and stood up. Better get to bed
while he had the energy to undress. Bed was the only place that was warm. But wait.
Wind the clock, set the alarm. He went through the familiar action with a sense of deadly
staleness. His eye fell upon the aspidistra. Two years he had inhabited this vile room; two
mortal years in which nothing had been accomplished. Seven hundred wasted days, all
ending in the lonely bed. Snubs, failures, insults, all of them unavenged. Money, money,
all is money! Because he had no money the Dorings’ snubbed him, because he had no
money the Primrose had turned down his poem, because he had no money Rosemary
wouldn’t sleep with him. Social failure, artistic failure, sexual failure — they are all the
same. And lack of money is at the bottom of them all.
He must hit back at somebody or something. He could not go to bed with that rejection
slip as the last thing in his mind. He thought of Rosemary. It was five days now since she
had written. If there had been a letter from her this evening even that rap over the
knuckles from the Primrose Quarterly would have mattered less. She declared that she
loved him, and she wouldn’t sleep with him, wouldn’t even write to him! She was the
same as all the others. She despised him and forgot about him because he had no money
and therefore didn’t matter. He would write her an enonnous letter, telling her what it felt
like to be ignored and insulted, making her see how cruelly she had treated him.
He found a clean sheet of paper and wrote in the top right-hand corner:
‘31 Willowbed Road, NW, 1 December, 9. 30 p. m. ’
But having written that much, he found that he could write no more. He was in the
defeated mood when even the writing of a letter is too great an effort. Besides, what was
the use? She would never understand. No woman ever understands. But he must write
something. Something to wound her — that was what he most wanted, at this moment. He
meditated for a long time, and at last wrote, exactly in the middle of the sheet:
Y ou have broken my heart.
No address, no signature. Rather neat it looked, all by itself, there in the middle of the
sheet, in his small ‘scholarly’ handwriting. Almost like a little poem in itself. This
thought cheered him up a little.
He stuck the letter in an envelope and went out and posted it at the post office on the
comer, spending his last three halfpence on a penny stamp and a halfpenny stamp out of
the slot machine.
Chapter 5
‘We’re printing that poem of yours in next month’s Antichrist,’ said Ravelston from his
first-floor window.
Gordon, on the pavement below, affected to have forgotten the poem Ravelston was
speaking about; he remembered it intimately, of course, as he remembered all his poems.
‘Which poem? ’ he said.
‘The one about the dying prostitute. We thought it was rather successful. ’ Gordon
laughed a laugh of gratified conceit, and managed to pass it off as a laugh of sardonic
amusement.
‘Aha! A dying prostitute! That’s rather what you might call one of my subjects. I’ll do
you one about an aspidistra next time. ’
Ravelston’s over-sensitive, boyish face, framed by nice dark-brown hair, drew back a
little from the window.
‘It’s intolerably cold,’ he said. ‘You’d better come up and have some food, or
something. ’
‘No, you come down. I’ve had dinner. Let’s go to a pub and have some beer. ’
‘All right then. Half a minute while I get my shoes on. ’
They had been talking for some minutes, Gordon on the pavement, Ravelston leaning out
of the window above. Gordon had announced his arrival not by knocking at the door but
by throwing a pebble against the window pane. He never, if he could help it, set foot
inside Ravelston’s flat. There was something in the atmosphere of the flat that upset him
and made him feel mean, dirty, and out of place. It was so overwhelmingly, though
unconsciously, upper-class. Only in the street or in a pub could he feel himself
approximately Ravelston’s equal. It would have astonished Ravelston to learn that his
four-roomed flat, which he thought of as a poky little place, had this effect upon Gordon.
To Ravelston, living in the wilds of Regent’s Park was practically the same thing as
living in the slums; he had chosen to live there, en bon socialiste, precisely as your social
snob will live in a mews in Mayfair for the sake of the ‘WT on his notepaper. It was part
of a lifelong attempt to escape from his own class and become, as it were, an honorary
member of the proletariat. Like all such attempts, it was foredoomed to failure. No rich
man ever succeeds in disguising himself as a poor man; for money, like murder, will out.
On the street door there was a brass plate inscribed:
P. W. H. RAVELSTON
ANTICHRIST
Ravelston lived on the first floor, and the editorial offices of Antichrist were downstairs.
Antichrist was a middle — to high-brow monthly, Socialist in a vehement but ill-defined
way. In general, it gave the impression of being edited by an ardent Nonconformist who
had transferred his allegiance from God to Marx, and in doing so had got mixed up with a
gang of vers libre poets. This was not really Ravelston’s character; merely he was softer-
hearted than an editor ought to be, and consequently was at the mercy of his contributors.
Practically anything got printed in Antichrist if Ravelston suspected that its author was
starving.
Ravelston appeared a moment later, hatless and pulling on a pair of gauntlet gloves. You
could tell him at a glance for a rich young man. He wore the unifonn of the moneyed
intelligentsia; an old tweed coat — but it was one of those coats which have been made by
a good tailor and grow more aristocratic as they grow older — very loose grey flannel
bags, a grey pullover, much-wom brown shoes. He made a point of going everywhere,
even to fashionable houses and expensive restaurants, in these clothes, just to show his
contempt for upper-class conventions; he did not fully realize that it is only the upper
classes who can do these things. Though he was a year older than Gordon he looked
much younger. He was very tall, with a lean, wide-shouldered body and the typical
lounging grace of the upper-class youth. But there was something curiously apologetic in
his movements and in the expression of his face. He seemed always in the act of stepping
out of somebody else’s way. When expressing an opinion he would rub his nose with the
back of his left forefinger. The truth was that in every moment of his life he was
apologizing, tacitly, for the largeness of his income. You could make him uncomfortable
as easily by reminding him that he was rich as you could make Gordon by reminding him
that he was poor.
‘You’ve had dinner, I gather? ’ said Ravelston, in his rather Bloomsbury voice.
‘Yes, ages ago. Haven’t you? ’
‘Oh, yes, certainly. Oh, quite! ’
It was twenty past eight and Gordon had had no food since midday. Neither had
Ravelston. Gordon did not know that Ravelston was hungry, but Ravelston knew that
Gordon was hungry, and Gordon knew that Ravelston knew it. Nevertheless, each saw
good reason for pretending not to be hungry. They seldom or never had meals together.
Gordon would not let Ravelston buy his meals for him, and for himself he could not
afford to go to restaurants, not even to a Lyons or an A. B. C. This was Monday and he
had five and ninepence left. He might afford a couple of pints at a pub, but not a proper
meal. When he and Ravelston met it was always agreed, with silent manoeuvrings, that
they should do nothing that involved spending money, beyond the shilling or so one
spends in a pub. In this way the fiction was kept up that there was no serious difference in
their incomes.
Gordon sidled closer to Ravelston as they started down the pavement. He would have
taken his arm, only of course one can’t do that kind of thing. Beside Ravelston’s taller,
comelier figure he looked frail, fretful, and miserably shabby. He adored Ravelston and
was never quite at ease in his presence. Ravelston had not merely a charm of manner, but
also a kind of fundamental decency, a graceful attitude to life, which Gordon scarcely
encountered elsewhere. Undoubtedly it was bound up with the fact that Ravelston was
rich. For money buys all virtues. Money suffereth long and is kind, is not puffed up, doth
not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own. But in some ways Ravelston was not even
like a moneyed person. The fatty degeneration of the spirit which goes with wealth had
missed him, or he had escaped it by a conscious effort. Indeed his whole life was a
struggle to escape it. It was for this reason that he gave up his time and a large part of his
income to editing an unpopular Socialist monthly. And apart from Antichrist, money
flowed from him in all directions. A tribe of cadgers ranging from poets to pavement-
artists browsed upon him unceasingly. For himself he lived upon eight hundred a year or
thereabouts. Even of this income he was acutely ashamed. It was not, he realized, exactly
a proletarian income; but he had never learned to get along on less. Eight hundred a year
was a minimum living wage to him, as two pounds a week was to Gordon.
‘How is your work getting on? ’ said Ravelston presently.
‘Oh, as usual. It’s a drowsy kind of job. Swapping back-chat with old hens about Hugh
Walpole. I don’t object to it. ’
‘I meant your own work — your writing. Is London Pleasures getting on all right? ’
‘Oh, Christ! Don’t speak of it. It’s turning my hair grey. ’
‘Isn’t it going forward at all? ’
‘My books don’t go forward. They go backward. ’
Ravelston sighed. As editor of Antichrist, he was used to encouraging despondent poets
that it had become a second nature to him. He did not need telling why Gordon ‘couldn’t’
write, and why all poets nowadays ‘can’t’ write, and why when they do write it is
something as arid as the rattling of a pea inside a big drum. He said with sympathetic
gloom:
‘Of course I admit this isn’t a hopeful age to write poetry in. ’
‘You bet it isn’t. ’
Gordon kicked his heel against the pavement. He wished that London Pleasures had not
been mentioned. It brought back to him the memory of his mean, cold bedroom and the
grimy papers littered under the aspidistra. He said abruptly:
‘This writing business! What b — s it all is! Sitting in a corner torturing a nerve which
won’t even respond any longer. And who wants poetry nowadays? Training performing
fleas would be more useful by comparison. ’
‘Still, you oughtn’t to let yourself be discouraged. After all, you do produce something,
which is more than one can say for a lot of poets nowadays. There was Mice, for
instance. ’
‘Oh, Mice! It makes me spew to think of it. ’
He thought with loathing of that sneaky little foolscap octavo. Those forty or fifty drab,
dead little poems, each like a little abortion in its labelled jar. ‘Exceptional promise’, The
Times Lit. Supp. had said. A hundred and fifty-three copies sold and the rest
remaindered. He had one of those movements of contempt and even horror which every
artist has at times when he thinks of his own work.
‘It’s dead,’ he said. ‘Dead as a blasted foetus in a bottle. ’
‘Oh, well, I suppose that happens to most books. You can’t expect an enormous sale for
poetry nowadays. There’s too much competition. ’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant the poems themselves are dead. There’s no life in them.
Everything I write is like that. Lifeless, gutless. Not necessarily ugly or vulgar; but
dead — just dead.
’ The word ‘dead’ re-echoed in his mind, setting up its own train of
thought. He added: ‘My poems are dead because I’m dead. You’re dead. We’re all dead.
Dead people in a dead world. ’
Ravelston murmured agreement, with a curious air of guilt. And now they were off upon
their favourite subject — Gordon’s favourite subject, anyway; the futility, the bloodiness,
the deathliness of modern life. They never met without talking for at least half an hour in
this vein. But it always made Ravelston feel rather uncomfortable. In a way, of course, he
knew — it was precisely this that Antichrist existed to point out — that life under a
decaying capitalism is deathly and meaningless. But this knowledge was only theoretical.
You can’t really feel that kind of thing when your income is eight hundred a year. Most
of the time, when he wasn’t thinking of coal-miners, Chinese junk-coolies, and the
unemployed in Middlesbrough, he felt that life was pretty good fun. Moreover, he had the
naive belief that in a little while Socialism is going to put things right. Gordon always
seemed to him to exaggerate. So there was subtle disagreement between them, which
Ravelston was too good-mannered to press home.
But with Gordon it was different. Gordon’s income was two pounds a week. Therefore
the hatred of modem 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 ann 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 comer 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 fdthy, smoky room, low-ceilinged, with a
sawdusted floor and plain deal tables ringed by generations of beer-pots. In one comer
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 jamjars 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 the comers. 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 / 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.
was acutely ashamed of it. He felt it the weakest, silliest poem ever written. Without
looking at it again he tore it into small bits and flung them into the wastepaper basket. He
would put that poem out of his mind for ever. The rejection slip, however, he did not tear
up yet. He fingered it, feeling its loathly sleekness. Such an elegant little thing, printed in
admirable type. You could tell at a glance that it came from a ‘good’ magazine — a snooty
highbrow magazine with the money of a publishing house behind it. Money, money!
Money and culture! It was a stupid thing that he had done. Fancy sending a poem to a
paper like the Primrose! As though they’d accept poems from people like HIM. The mere
fact that the poem wasn’t typed would tell them what kind of person he was. He might as
well have dropped a card on Buckingham Palace. He thought of the people who wrote for
the Primrose; a coterie of moneyed highbrows — those sleek, refined young animals who
suck in money and culture with their mother’s milk. The idea of trying to horn in among
that pansy crowd! But he cursed them all the same. The sods! The bloody sods! ‘The
Editor regrets! ’ Why be so bloody mealy-mouthed about it? Why not say outright, ‘We
don’t want your bloody poems. We only take poems from chaps we were at Cambridge
with. You proletarians keep your distance’? The bloody, hypocritical sods!
At last he crumpled up the rejection slip, threw it away, and stood up. Better get to bed
while he had the energy to undress. Bed was the only place that was warm. But wait.
Wind the clock, set the alarm. He went through the familiar action with a sense of deadly
staleness. His eye fell upon the aspidistra. Two years he had inhabited this vile room; two
mortal years in which nothing had been accomplished. Seven hundred wasted days, all
ending in the lonely bed. Snubs, failures, insults, all of them unavenged. Money, money,
all is money! Because he had no money the Dorings’ snubbed him, because he had no
money the Primrose had turned down his poem, because he had no money Rosemary
wouldn’t sleep with him. Social failure, artistic failure, sexual failure — they are all the
same. And lack of money is at the bottom of them all.
He must hit back at somebody or something. He could not go to bed with that rejection
slip as the last thing in his mind. He thought of Rosemary. It was five days now since she
had written. If there had been a letter from her this evening even that rap over the
knuckles from the Primrose Quarterly would have mattered less. She declared that she
loved him, and she wouldn’t sleep with him, wouldn’t even write to him! She was the
same as all the others. She despised him and forgot about him because he had no money
and therefore didn’t matter. He would write her an enonnous letter, telling her what it felt
like to be ignored and insulted, making her see how cruelly she had treated him.
He found a clean sheet of paper and wrote in the top right-hand corner:
‘31 Willowbed Road, NW, 1 December, 9. 30 p. m. ’
But having written that much, he found that he could write no more. He was in the
defeated mood when even the writing of a letter is too great an effort. Besides, what was
the use? She would never understand. No woman ever understands. But he must write
something. Something to wound her — that was what he most wanted, at this moment. He
meditated for a long time, and at last wrote, exactly in the middle of the sheet:
Y ou have broken my heart.
No address, no signature. Rather neat it looked, all by itself, there in the middle of the
sheet, in his small ‘scholarly’ handwriting. Almost like a little poem in itself. This
thought cheered him up a little.
He stuck the letter in an envelope and went out and posted it at the post office on the
comer, spending his last three halfpence on a penny stamp and a halfpenny stamp out of
the slot machine.
Chapter 5
‘We’re printing that poem of yours in next month’s Antichrist,’ said Ravelston from his
first-floor window.
Gordon, on the pavement below, affected to have forgotten the poem Ravelston was
speaking about; he remembered it intimately, of course, as he remembered all his poems.
‘Which poem? ’ he said.
‘The one about the dying prostitute. We thought it was rather successful. ’ Gordon
laughed a laugh of gratified conceit, and managed to pass it off as a laugh of sardonic
amusement.
‘Aha! A dying prostitute! That’s rather what you might call one of my subjects. I’ll do
you one about an aspidistra next time. ’
Ravelston’s over-sensitive, boyish face, framed by nice dark-brown hair, drew back a
little from the window.
‘It’s intolerably cold,’ he said. ‘You’d better come up and have some food, or
something. ’
‘No, you come down. I’ve had dinner. Let’s go to a pub and have some beer. ’
‘All right then. Half a minute while I get my shoes on. ’
They had been talking for some minutes, Gordon on the pavement, Ravelston leaning out
of the window above. Gordon had announced his arrival not by knocking at the door but
by throwing a pebble against the window pane. He never, if he could help it, set foot
inside Ravelston’s flat. There was something in the atmosphere of the flat that upset him
and made him feel mean, dirty, and out of place. It was so overwhelmingly, though
unconsciously, upper-class. Only in the street or in a pub could he feel himself
approximately Ravelston’s equal. It would have astonished Ravelston to learn that his
four-roomed flat, which he thought of as a poky little place, had this effect upon Gordon.
To Ravelston, living in the wilds of Regent’s Park was practically the same thing as
living in the slums; he had chosen to live there, en bon socialiste, precisely as your social
snob will live in a mews in Mayfair for the sake of the ‘WT on his notepaper. It was part
of a lifelong attempt to escape from his own class and become, as it were, an honorary
member of the proletariat. Like all such attempts, it was foredoomed to failure. No rich
man ever succeeds in disguising himself as a poor man; for money, like murder, will out.
On the street door there was a brass plate inscribed:
P. W. H. RAVELSTON
ANTICHRIST
Ravelston lived on the first floor, and the editorial offices of Antichrist were downstairs.
Antichrist was a middle — to high-brow monthly, Socialist in a vehement but ill-defined
way. In general, it gave the impression of being edited by an ardent Nonconformist who
had transferred his allegiance from God to Marx, and in doing so had got mixed up with a
gang of vers libre poets. This was not really Ravelston’s character; merely he was softer-
hearted than an editor ought to be, and consequently was at the mercy of his contributors.
Practically anything got printed in Antichrist if Ravelston suspected that its author was
starving.
Ravelston appeared a moment later, hatless and pulling on a pair of gauntlet gloves. You
could tell him at a glance for a rich young man. He wore the unifonn of the moneyed
intelligentsia; an old tweed coat — but it was one of those coats which have been made by
a good tailor and grow more aristocratic as they grow older — very loose grey flannel
bags, a grey pullover, much-wom brown shoes. He made a point of going everywhere,
even to fashionable houses and expensive restaurants, in these clothes, just to show his
contempt for upper-class conventions; he did not fully realize that it is only the upper
classes who can do these things. Though he was a year older than Gordon he looked
much younger. He was very tall, with a lean, wide-shouldered body and the typical
lounging grace of the upper-class youth. But there was something curiously apologetic in
his movements and in the expression of his face. He seemed always in the act of stepping
out of somebody else’s way. When expressing an opinion he would rub his nose with the
back of his left forefinger. The truth was that in every moment of his life he was
apologizing, tacitly, for the largeness of his income. You could make him uncomfortable
as easily by reminding him that he was rich as you could make Gordon by reminding him
that he was poor.
‘You’ve had dinner, I gather? ’ said Ravelston, in his rather Bloomsbury voice.
‘Yes, ages ago. Haven’t you? ’
‘Oh, yes, certainly. Oh, quite! ’
It was twenty past eight and Gordon had had no food since midday. Neither had
Ravelston. Gordon did not know that Ravelston was hungry, but Ravelston knew that
Gordon was hungry, and Gordon knew that Ravelston knew it. Nevertheless, each saw
good reason for pretending not to be hungry. They seldom or never had meals together.
Gordon would not let Ravelston buy his meals for him, and for himself he could not
afford to go to restaurants, not even to a Lyons or an A. B. C. This was Monday and he
had five and ninepence left. He might afford a couple of pints at a pub, but not a proper
meal. When he and Ravelston met it was always agreed, with silent manoeuvrings, that
they should do nothing that involved spending money, beyond the shilling or so one
spends in a pub. In this way the fiction was kept up that there was no serious difference in
their incomes.
Gordon sidled closer to Ravelston as they started down the pavement. He would have
taken his arm, only of course one can’t do that kind of thing. Beside Ravelston’s taller,
comelier figure he looked frail, fretful, and miserably shabby. He adored Ravelston and
was never quite at ease in his presence. Ravelston had not merely a charm of manner, but
also a kind of fundamental decency, a graceful attitude to life, which Gordon scarcely
encountered elsewhere. Undoubtedly it was bound up with the fact that Ravelston was
rich. For money buys all virtues. Money suffereth long and is kind, is not puffed up, doth
not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own. But in some ways Ravelston was not even
like a moneyed person. The fatty degeneration of the spirit which goes with wealth had
missed him, or he had escaped it by a conscious effort. Indeed his whole life was a
struggle to escape it. It was for this reason that he gave up his time and a large part of his
income to editing an unpopular Socialist monthly. And apart from Antichrist, money
flowed from him in all directions. A tribe of cadgers ranging from poets to pavement-
artists browsed upon him unceasingly. For himself he lived upon eight hundred a year or
thereabouts. Even of this income he was acutely ashamed. It was not, he realized, exactly
a proletarian income; but he had never learned to get along on less. Eight hundred a year
was a minimum living wage to him, as two pounds a week was to Gordon.
‘How is your work getting on? ’ said Ravelston presently.
‘Oh, as usual. It’s a drowsy kind of job. Swapping back-chat with old hens about Hugh
Walpole. I don’t object to it. ’
‘I meant your own work — your writing. Is London Pleasures getting on all right? ’
‘Oh, Christ! Don’t speak of it. It’s turning my hair grey. ’
‘Isn’t it going forward at all? ’
‘My books don’t go forward. They go backward. ’
Ravelston sighed. As editor of Antichrist, he was used to encouraging despondent poets
that it had become a second nature to him. He did not need telling why Gordon ‘couldn’t’
write, and why all poets nowadays ‘can’t’ write, and why when they do write it is
something as arid as the rattling of a pea inside a big drum. He said with sympathetic
gloom:
‘Of course I admit this isn’t a hopeful age to write poetry in. ’
‘You bet it isn’t. ’
Gordon kicked his heel against the pavement. He wished that London Pleasures had not
been mentioned. It brought back to him the memory of his mean, cold bedroom and the
grimy papers littered under the aspidistra. He said abruptly:
‘This writing business! What b — s it all is! Sitting in a corner torturing a nerve which
won’t even respond any longer. And who wants poetry nowadays? Training performing
fleas would be more useful by comparison. ’
‘Still, you oughtn’t to let yourself be discouraged. After all, you do produce something,
which is more than one can say for a lot of poets nowadays. There was Mice, for
instance. ’
‘Oh, Mice! It makes me spew to think of it. ’
He thought with loathing of that sneaky little foolscap octavo. Those forty or fifty drab,
dead little poems, each like a little abortion in its labelled jar. ‘Exceptional promise’, The
Times Lit. Supp. had said. A hundred and fifty-three copies sold and the rest
remaindered. He had one of those movements of contempt and even horror which every
artist has at times when he thinks of his own work.
‘It’s dead,’ he said. ‘Dead as a blasted foetus in a bottle. ’
‘Oh, well, I suppose that happens to most books. You can’t expect an enormous sale for
poetry nowadays. There’s too much competition. ’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant the poems themselves are dead. There’s no life in them.
Everything I write is like that. Lifeless, gutless. Not necessarily ugly or vulgar; but
dead — just dead.
’ The word ‘dead’ re-echoed in his mind, setting up its own train of
thought. He added: ‘My poems are dead because I’m dead. You’re dead. We’re all dead.
Dead people in a dead world. ’
Ravelston murmured agreement, with a curious air of guilt. And now they were off upon
their favourite subject — Gordon’s favourite subject, anyway; the futility, the bloodiness,
the deathliness of modern life. They never met without talking for at least half an hour in
this vein. But it always made Ravelston feel rather uncomfortable. In a way, of course, he
knew — it was precisely this that Antichrist existed to point out — that life under a
decaying capitalism is deathly and meaningless. But this knowledge was only theoretical.
You can’t really feel that kind of thing when your income is eight hundred a year. Most
of the time, when he wasn’t thinking of coal-miners, Chinese junk-coolies, and the
unemployed in Middlesbrough, he felt that life was pretty good fun. Moreover, he had the
naive belief that in a little while Socialism is going to put things right. Gordon always
seemed to him to exaggerate. So there was subtle disagreement between them, which
Ravelston was too good-mannered to press home.
But with Gordon it was different. Gordon’s income was two pounds a week. Therefore
the hatred of modem 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 ann 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 comer 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 fdthy, smoky room, low-ceilinged, with a
sawdusted floor and plain deal tables ringed by generations of beer-pots. In one comer
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 jamjars 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 the comers. 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 / 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.
