He
wondered
dully how they cleaned as high up as the ceiling.
Orwell - Keep the Apidistra Flying
Here’s the taxi.
We’ll go straight home and put you
to bed. ’
Dora caught Gordon’s other arm and hauled him out of reach as though he had been a
stolen handbag.
‘What bloody business is it of yours? ’ she cried ferociously.
‘You don’t want to insult these two ladies, I hope? ’ said Gordon.
Ravelston faltered, stepped back, rubbed his nose. It was a moment to be Finn; but
Ravelston had never in his life been firm. He looked from Dora to Gordon, from Gordon
to Barbara. That was fatal. Once he had looked them in the face he was lost. Oh, God!
What could he do? They were human beings — he couldn’t insult them. The same instinct
that sent his hand into his pocket at the very sight of a beggar made him helpless at this
moment. The poor, wretched girls! He hadn’t the heart to send them packing into the
night. Suddenly he realized that he would have to go through with this abominable
adventure into which Gordon had led him. For the first time in his life he was let in for
going home with a tart.
‘But dash it all! ’ he said feebly.
‘Allons-y,’ said Gordon.
The taximan had taken his direction at a nod from Dora. Gordon slumped into the corner
seat and seemed immediately to sink into some immense abyss from which he rose again
more gradually and with only partial consciousness of what he had been doing. He was
gliding smoothly through darkness starred with lights. Or were the lights moving and he
stationary? It was like being on the ocean bottom, among the luminous, gliding fishes.
The fancy returned to him that he was a damned soul in hell. The landscape in hell would
be just like this. Ravines of cold evil-coloured fire, with darkness all above. But in hell
there would be tonnent. Was this torment? He strove to classify his sensations. The
momentary lapse into unconsciousness had left him weak, sick, shaken; his forehead
seemed to be splitting. He put out a hand. It encountered a knee, a garter, and a small soft
hand which sought mechanically for his. He became aware that Ravelston, sitting
opposite, was tapping his toe urgently and nervously.
‘Gordon! Gordon! Wake up! ’
‘What? ’
‘Gordon! Oh, damn! Causons en francais. Qu’est-ce que tu as fait? Crois-tu que je veux
coucher avec une sale — oh, damnation! ’
‘Oo-parley-voo francey! ’ squealed the girls.
Gordon was mildly amused. Do Ravelston good, he thought. A parlour Socialist going
home with a tart! The first genuinely proletarian action of his life. As though aware of
this thought, Ravelston subsided into his comer in silent misery, sitting as far away from
Barbara as possible. The taxi drew up at a hotel in a side-street; a dreadful, shoddy, low
place it was. The ‘hotel’ sign over the door looked skew-eyed. The windows were almost
dark, but the sound of singing, boozy and dreary, trickled from within. Gordon staggered
out of the taxi and felt for Dora’s arm. Give us a hand, Dora. Mind the step. What ho!
A smallish, darkish, smelly hallway, lino-carpeted, mean, uncared-for, and somehow
impermanent. From a room somewhere on the left the singing swelled, mournful as a
church organ. A cross-eyed, evil-looking chambermaid appeared from nowhere. She and
Dora seemed to know one another. What a mug! No competition there. From the room on
the left a single voice took up the song with would-be facetious emphasis:
‘The man that kisses a pretty girl And goes and tells his mother, Ought to have his lips
cut off, Ought to — ’
It tailed away, full of the ineffable, undisguisable sadness of debauchery. A very young
voice it sounded. The voice of some poor boy who in his heart only wanted to be at home
with his mother and sisters, playing hunt-the-slipper. There was a party of young fools in
there, on the razzle with whisky and girls. The tune reminded Gordon. He turned to
Ravelston as he came in, Barbara following.
‘Where’s my Chianti? ’ he said.
Ravelston gave him the bottle. His face looked pale, harassed, hunted, almost. With
guilty restless movements he kept himself apart from Barbara. He could not touch her or
even look at her, and yet to escape was beyond him. His eyes sought Gordon’s. ‘For the
love of God can’t we get out of it somehow? ’ they signalled. Gordon frowned at him.
Stick it out! No flinching! He took Dora’s ann again. Come on, Dora! Now for those
stairs. Ah! Wait a moment.
Her arm round his waist, supporting him, Dora drew him aside. Down the darkish, smelly
stairs a young woman came mincingly, buttoning on a glove; after her a bald, middle-
aged man in evening clothes, black overcoat, and white silk muffler, his opera hat in his
hand. He walked past them with small mean mouth tightened, pretending not to see them.
A family man, by the guilty look in his eye. Gordon watched the gaslight gleam on the
back of his bald head. His predecessor. In the same bed, probably. The mantle of Elisha.
Now then, Dora, up we go! Ah, these stairs! Difficilis ascensus Averni. That’s right, here
we are! ‘Mind the step,’ said Dora. They were on the landing. Black and white lino like a
chessboard. White-painted doors. A smell of slops and a fainter smell of stale linen.
We this way, you that. At the other door Ravelston halted, his fingers on the handle. He
could not — no, he COULD not do it. He could not enter that dreadful room. For the last
time his eyes, like those of a dog about to be whipped, turned upon Gordon. ‘Must I,
must I? ’ his eyes said. Gordon eyed him sternly. Stick it out, Regulus! March to your
doom! Atqui sciebat quae sibi Barbara. It is a far, far more proletarian thing that you do.
And then with startling suddenness Ravelston’ s face cleared. An expression of relief,
almost of joy, stole over it. A wonderful thought had occurred to him. After all, you could
always pay the girl without actually doing anything! Thank God! He set his shoulders,
plucked up courage, went in. The door shut.
So here we are. A mean, dreadful room. Lino on the floor, gas-fire, huge double bed with
sheets vaguely dingy. Over the bed a framed coloured picture from La Vie Parisienne. A
mistake, that. Sometimes the originals don’t compare so well. And, by Jove! on the
bamboo table by the window, positively an aspidistra! Hast thou found me, O mine
enemy? But come here, Dora. Let’s have a look at you.
He seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful, rapacious
face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.
‘How about my present? ’ she demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.
Never mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here. Come closer.
Ah!
No. No use. Impossible. The will but not the way. The spirit is willing but the flesh is
weak. Try again. No. The booze, it must be. See Macbeth. One last try. No, no use. Not
this evening. I’m afraid.
All right, Dora, don’t you worry. You’ll get your two quid all right. We aren’t paying by
results.
He made a clumsy gesture. ‘Here, give us that bottle. That bottle off the dressing-table. ’
Dora brought it. Ah, that’s better. That at least doesn’t fail. With hands that had swollen
to monstrous size he up-ended the Chianti bottle. The wine flowed down his throat, bitter
and choking, and some of it went up his nose. It overwhelmed him. He was slipping,
sliding, falling off the bed. His head met the floor. His legs were still on the bed. For a
while he lay in this position. Is this the way to live? Down below the youthful voices
were still mournfully singing:
‘For tonight we’ll merry be, For tonight we’ll merry be, For tonight we’ll merry be-e-e —
Tomorrow we’ll be so-ober! ’
Chapter 9
And, by Jove, tomorrow we WERE sober!
Gordon emerged from some long, sickly dream to the consciousness that the books in the
lending library were the wrong way up. They were all lying on their sides. Moreover, for
some reason their backs had turned white — white and shiny, like porcelain.
He opened his eyes a little wider and moved an arm. Small rivulets of pain, seemingly
touched off by the movement, shot through his body at unexpected places — down the
calves of his legs, for instance, and up both sides of his head. He perceived that he was
lying on his side, with a hard smooth pillow under his cheek and a coarse blanket
scratching his chin and pushing its hairs into his mouth. Apart from the minor pains that
stabbed him every time he moved, there was a large, dull sort of pain which was not
localized but which seemed to hover all over him.
Suddenly he flung off the blanket and sat up. He was in a police cell. At this moment a
frightful spasm of nausea overcame him. Dimly perceiving a W. C. in the comer, he crept
towards it and was violently sick, three or four times.
After that, for several minutes, he was in agonizing pain. He could scarcely stand on his
feet, his head throbbed as though it were going to burst, and the light seemed like some
scalding white liquid pouring into his brain through the sockets of his eyes. He sat on the
bed holding his head between his hands. Presently, when some of the throbbing had died
down, he had another look about him. The cell measured about twelve feet long by six
wide and was very high. The walls were all of white porcelain bricks, horribly white and
clean.
He wondered dully how they cleaned as high up as the ceiling. Perhaps with a
hose, he reflected. At one end there was a little barred window, very high up, and at the
other end, over the door, an electric bulb let into the wall and protected by a stout grating.
The thing he was sitting on was not actually a bed, but a shelf with one blanket and a
canvas pillow. The door was of steel, painted green. In the door there was a little round
hole with a flap on the outside.
Having seen this much he lay down and pulled the blanket over him again. He had no
further curiosity about his surroundings. As to what had happened last night, he
remembered everything — at least, he remembered everything up to the time when he had
gone with Dora into the room with the aspidistra. God knew what had happened after
that. There had been some kind of bust-up and he had landed in the clink. He had no
notion of what he had done; it might be murder for all he kn ew. In any case he did not
care. He turned his face to the wall and pulled the blanket over his head to shut out the
light.
After a long time the spyhole in the door was pushed aside. Gordon managed to turn his
head round. His neck-muscles seemed to creak. Through the spyhole he could see a blue
eye and a semi-circle of pink chubby cheek.
“Ja do with a cup of tea? ’ a voice said.
Gordon sat up and instantly felt very sick again. He took his head between his hands and
groaned. The thought of a cup of hot tea appealed to him, but he knew it would make him
sick if it had sugar in it.
‘Please,’ he said.
The police constable opened a partition in the top half of the door and passed in a thick
white mug of tea. It had sugar in it. The constable was a solid rosy young man of about
twenty-five, with a kind face, white eyelashes, and a tremendous chest. It reminded
Gordon of the chest of a carthorse. He spoke with a good accent but with vulgar turns of
speech. For a minute or so he stood regarding Gordon.
‘You weren’t half bad last night,’ he said finally.
‘I’m bad now. ’
‘You was worse last night, though. What you go and hit the sergeant for? ’
‘Did I hit the sergeant? ’
‘Did you? Coo! He wasn’t half wild. He turns to me and he says — holding his ear he
was, like this — he says, “Now, if that man wasn’t too drunk to stand, I’d knock his block
off. ” It’s all gone down on your charge sheet. Drunk and disorderly. You’d only ha’ bin
drunk and incapable if you hadn’t of hit the sergeant. ’
‘Do you know what I shall get for this? ’
‘Five quid or fourteen days. You’ll go up before Mr Groom. Lucky for you it wasn’t Mr
Walker. He’d give you a month without the option, Mr Walker would. Very severe on the
drunks he is. Teetotaller. ’
Gordon had drunk some of the tea. It was nauseatingly sweet but its wannth made him
feel stronger. He gulped it down. At this moment a nasty, snarling sort of voice — the
sergeant whom Gordon had hit, no doubt — yelped from somewhere outside:
‘Take that man out and get him washed. Black Maria leaves at half past nine. ’
The constable hastened to open the cell door. As soon as Gordon stepped outside he felt
worse then ever. This was partly because it was much colder in the passage than in the
cell. He walked a step or two, and then suddenly his head was going round and round.
‘I’m going to be sick! ’ he cried. He was falling — he flung out a hand and stopped himself
against the wall. The constable’s strong arm went round him. Across the ann, as over a
rail, Gordon sagged, doubled up and limp. A jet of vomit burst from him. It was the tea,
of course. There was a gutter running along the stone floor. At the end of the passage the
moustachio’d sergeant, in tunic without a belt, stood with his hand on his hip, looking on
disgustedly.
‘Dirty little tyke,’ he muttered, and turned away.
‘Come on, old chap,’ said the constable. ‘You’ll be better in half a mo’. ’
He half led, half dragged Gordon to a big stone sink at the end of the passage and helped
him to strip to the waist. His gentleness was astonishing. He handled Gordon almost like
a nurse handling a child. Gordon had recovered enough strength to sluice himself with
the ice-cold water and rinse his mouth out. The constable gave him a torn towel to dry
himself with and then led him back to the cell.
‘Now you sit quiet till the Black Maria comes. And take my tip — when you go up to the
court, you plead guilty and say you won’t do it again. Mr Groom won’t be hard on you. ’
‘Where are my collar and tie? ’ said Gordon.
‘We took ‘em away last night. You’ll get ‘em back before you go up to court. We had a
bloke hung himself with his tie, once. ’
Gordon sat down on the bed. For a little while he occupied himself by calculating the
number of porcelain bricks in the walls, then sat with his elbows on his knees, his head
between his hands. He was still aching all over; he felt weak, cold, jaded, and, above all,
bored. He wished that boring business of going up to the court could be avoided
somehow. The thought of being put into some jolting vehicle and taken across London to
hang about in chilly cells and passages, and of having to answer questions and be lectured
by magistrates, bored him indescribably. All he wanted was to be left alone. But
presently there was the sound of several voices farther down the passage, and then of feet
approaching. The partition in the door was opened.
‘Couple of visitors for you,’ the constable said.
Gordon was bored by the very thought of visitors. Unwillingly he looked up, and saw
Flaxman and Ravelston looking in upon him. How they had got there together was a
mystery, but Gordon felt not the faintest curiosity about it. They bored him. He wished
they would go away.
‘Hullo, chappie! ’ said Flaxman.
‘YOU here? ’ said Gordon with a sort of weary offensiveness.
Ravelston looked miserable. He had been up since the very early morning, looking for
Gordon. This was the first time he had seen the interior of a police cell. His face shrank
with disgust as he looked at the chilly white-tiled place with its shameless W. C. in the
comer. But Flaxman was more accustomed to this kind of thing. He cocked a practised
eye at Gordon.
‘I’ve seen ‘em worse,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Give him a prairie oyster and he’d buck up
something wonderful. D’you know what your eyes look like, chappie? ’ he added to
Gordon. ‘They look as if they’d been taken out and poached. ’
‘I was drunk last night,’ said Gordon, his head between his hands.
‘I gathered something of the kind, old chappie. ’
‘Look here, Gordon,’ said Ravelston, ‘we came to bail you out, but it seems we’re too
late. They’re taking you up to court in a few minutes’ time. This is a bloody show. It’s a
pity you didn’t give them a false name when they brought you here last night. ’
‘Did I tell them my name? ’
‘You told them everything. I wish to God I hadn’t let you out of my sight. You slipped
out of that house somehow and into the street. ’
‘Wandering up and down Shaftesbury Avenue, drinking out of a bottle,’ said Flaxman
appreciatively. ‘But you oughtn’t to have hit the sergeant, old chappie! That was a bit of
bloody foolishness. And I don’t mind telling you Mother Wisbeach is on your track.
When your pal here came round this morning and told her you’d been for a night on the
tiles, she took on as if you’d done a bloody murder. ’
‘And look here, Gordon,’ said Ravelston.
There was the familiar note of discomfort in his face. It was something about money, as
usual. Gordon looked up. Ravelston was gazing into the distance.
‘Look here. ’
‘What? ’
‘About your fine. You’d better leave that to me. I’ll pay it. ’
‘No, you won’t. ’
‘My dear old chap! They’ll send you to jail if I don’t. ’
‘Oh, hell! I don’t care. ’
He did not care. At this moment he did not care if they sent him to prison for a year. Of
course he couldn’t pay his fine himself. He knew without even needing to look that he
had no money left. He would have given it all to Dora, or more probably she would have
pinched it. He lay down on the bed again and turned his back on the others. In the sulky,
sluggish state that he was in, his sole desire was to get rid of them. They made a few
more attempts to talk to him, but he would not answer, and presently they went away.
Flaxman’ s voice boomed cheerfully down the passage. He was giving Ravelston minute
instructions as to how to make a prairie oyster.
The rest of that day was very beastly. Beastly was the ride in the Black Maria, which,
inside, was like nothing so much as a miniature public lavatory, with tiny cubicles down
each side, into which you were locked and in which you had barely room to sit down.
Beastlier yet was the long wait in one of the cells adjoining the magistrate’s court. This
cell was an exact replica of the cell at the police station, even to having precisely the
same number of porcelain bricks. But it differed from the police station cell in being
repulsively dirty. It was cold, but the air was so fetid as to be almost unbreathable.
Prisoners were coming and going all the time. They would be thrust into the cell, taken
out after an hour or two to go up to the court, and then perhaps brought back again to wait
while the magistrate decided upon their sentence or fresh witnesses were sent for. There
were always five or six men in the cell, and there was nothing to sit on except the plank
bed. And the worst was that nearly all of them used the W. C. — there, publicly, in the tiny
cell. They could not help it. There was nowhere else to go. And the plug of the beastly
thing did not even pull properly.
Until the afternoon Gordon felt sick and weak. He had had no chance to shave, and his
face was hatefully scrubby. At first he merely sat on the comer of the plank bed, at the
end nearest the door, as far away from the W. C. as he could get, and took no notice of the
other prisoners. They bored and disgusted him; later, as his headache wore off, he
observed them with a faint interest. There was a professional burglar, a lean worried-
looking man with grey hair, who was in a terrible stew about what would happen to his
wife and kids if he were sent to jail. He had been arrested for ‘loitering with intent to
enter’ — a vague offence for which you generally get convicted if there are previous
convictions against you. He kept walking up and down, flicking the fingers of his right
hand with a curious nervous gesture, and exclaiming against the unfairness of it. There
was also a deaf mute who stank like a ferret, and a small middle-aged Jew with a fur-
collared overcoat, who had been buyer to a large firm of kosher butchers. He had bolted
with twenty-seven pounds, gone to Aberdeen, of all places, and spent the money on tarts.
He too had a grievance, for he said his case ought to have been tried in the rabbi’s court
instead of being turned over to the police. There was also a publican who had embezzled
his Christmas club money. He was a big, hearty, prosperous-looking man of about thirty-
five, with a loud red face and a loud blue overcoat — the sort of man who, if he were not a
publican, would be a bookie. His relatives had paid back the embezzled money, all except
twelve pounds, but the club members had decided to prosecute. There was something in
this man’s eyes that troubled Gordon. He carried everything off with a swagger, but all
the while there was that blank, staring look in his eyes; he would fall into a kind of
reverie at every gap in the conversation. It was somehow rather dreadful to see him.
There he was, still in his smart clothes, with the splendour of a publican’s life only a
month or two behind him; and now he was ruined, probably for ever. Like all London
publicans he was in the claw of the brewer, he would be sold up and his furniture and
fittings seized, and when he came out of jail he would never have a pub or a job again.
The morning wore on with dismal slowness. You were allowed to smoke — matches were
forbidden, but the constable on duty outside would give you a light through the trap in the
door. Nobody had any cigarettes except the publican, who had his pockets full of them
and distributed them freely. Prisoners came and went. A ragged dirty man who claimed to
be a coster ‘up’ for obstruction was put into the cell for half an hour. He talked a great
deal, but the others were deeply suspicious of him; when he was taken out again they all
declared he was a ‘split’. The police, it was said, often put a ‘split’ into the cells,
disguised as a prisoner, to pick up infonnation. Once there was great excitement when the
constable whispered through the trap that a murderer, or would-be murderer, was being
put into the cell next door. He was a youth of eighteen who had stabbed his ‘tart’ in the
belly, and she was not expected to live. Once the trap opened and the tired, pale face of a
clergyman looked in. He saw the burglar, said wearily, ‘YOU here again, Jones? ’ and
went away again.
to bed. ’
Dora caught Gordon’s other arm and hauled him out of reach as though he had been a
stolen handbag.
‘What bloody business is it of yours? ’ she cried ferociously.
‘You don’t want to insult these two ladies, I hope? ’ said Gordon.
Ravelston faltered, stepped back, rubbed his nose. It was a moment to be Finn; but
Ravelston had never in his life been firm. He looked from Dora to Gordon, from Gordon
to Barbara. That was fatal. Once he had looked them in the face he was lost. Oh, God!
What could he do? They were human beings — he couldn’t insult them. The same instinct
that sent his hand into his pocket at the very sight of a beggar made him helpless at this
moment. The poor, wretched girls! He hadn’t the heart to send them packing into the
night. Suddenly he realized that he would have to go through with this abominable
adventure into which Gordon had led him. For the first time in his life he was let in for
going home with a tart.
‘But dash it all! ’ he said feebly.
‘Allons-y,’ said Gordon.
The taximan had taken his direction at a nod from Dora. Gordon slumped into the corner
seat and seemed immediately to sink into some immense abyss from which he rose again
more gradually and with only partial consciousness of what he had been doing. He was
gliding smoothly through darkness starred with lights. Or were the lights moving and he
stationary? It was like being on the ocean bottom, among the luminous, gliding fishes.
The fancy returned to him that he was a damned soul in hell. The landscape in hell would
be just like this. Ravines of cold evil-coloured fire, with darkness all above. But in hell
there would be tonnent. Was this torment? He strove to classify his sensations. The
momentary lapse into unconsciousness had left him weak, sick, shaken; his forehead
seemed to be splitting. He put out a hand. It encountered a knee, a garter, and a small soft
hand which sought mechanically for his. He became aware that Ravelston, sitting
opposite, was tapping his toe urgently and nervously.
‘Gordon! Gordon! Wake up! ’
‘What? ’
‘Gordon! Oh, damn! Causons en francais. Qu’est-ce que tu as fait? Crois-tu que je veux
coucher avec une sale — oh, damnation! ’
‘Oo-parley-voo francey! ’ squealed the girls.
Gordon was mildly amused. Do Ravelston good, he thought. A parlour Socialist going
home with a tart! The first genuinely proletarian action of his life. As though aware of
this thought, Ravelston subsided into his comer in silent misery, sitting as far away from
Barbara as possible. The taxi drew up at a hotel in a side-street; a dreadful, shoddy, low
place it was. The ‘hotel’ sign over the door looked skew-eyed. The windows were almost
dark, but the sound of singing, boozy and dreary, trickled from within. Gordon staggered
out of the taxi and felt for Dora’s arm. Give us a hand, Dora. Mind the step. What ho!
A smallish, darkish, smelly hallway, lino-carpeted, mean, uncared-for, and somehow
impermanent. From a room somewhere on the left the singing swelled, mournful as a
church organ. A cross-eyed, evil-looking chambermaid appeared from nowhere. She and
Dora seemed to know one another. What a mug! No competition there. From the room on
the left a single voice took up the song with would-be facetious emphasis:
‘The man that kisses a pretty girl And goes and tells his mother, Ought to have his lips
cut off, Ought to — ’
It tailed away, full of the ineffable, undisguisable sadness of debauchery. A very young
voice it sounded. The voice of some poor boy who in his heart only wanted to be at home
with his mother and sisters, playing hunt-the-slipper. There was a party of young fools in
there, on the razzle with whisky and girls. The tune reminded Gordon. He turned to
Ravelston as he came in, Barbara following.
‘Where’s my Chianti? ’ he said.
Ravelston gave him the bottle. His face looked pale, harassed, hunted, almost. With
guilty restless movements he kept himself apart from Barbara. He could not touch her or
even look at her, and yet to escape was beyond him. His eyes sought Gordon’s. ‘For the
love of God can’t we get out of it somehow? ’ they signalled. Gordon frowned at him.
Stick it out! No flinching! He took Dora’s ann again. Come on, Dora! Now for those
stairs. Ah! Wait a moment.
Her arm round his waist, supporting him, Dora drew him aside. Down the darkish, smelly
stairs a young woman came mincingly, buttoning on a glove; after her a bald, middle-
aged man in evening clothes, black overcoat, and white silk muffler, his opera hat in his
hand. He walked past them with small mean mouth tightened, pretending not to see them.
A family man, by the guilty look in his eye. Gordon watched the gaslight gleam on the
back of his bald head. His predecessor. In the same bed, probably. The mantle of Elisha.
Now then, Dora, up we go! Ah, these stairs! Difficilis ascensus Averni. That’s right, here
we are! ‘Mind the step,’ said Dora. They were on the landing. Black and white lino like a
chessboard. White-painted doors. A smell of slops and a fainter smell of stale linen.
We this way, you that. At the other door Ravelston halted, his fingers on the handle. He
could not — no, he COULD not do it. He could not enter that dreadful room. For the last
time his eyes, like those of a dog about to be whipped, turned upon Gordon. ‘Must I,
must I? ’ his eyes said. Gordon eyed him sternly. Stick it out, Regulus! March to your
doom! Atqui sciebat quae sibi Barbara. It is a far, far more proletarian thing that you do.
And then with startling suddenness Ravelston’ s face cleared. An expression of relief,
almost of joy, stole over it. A wonderful thought had occurred to him. After all, you could
always pay the girl without actually doing anything! Thank God! He set his shoulders,
plucked up courage, went in. The door shut.
So here we are. A mean, dreadful room. Lino on the floor, gas-fire, huge double bed with
sheets vaguely dingy. Over the bed a framed coloured picture from La Vie Parisienne. A
mistake, that. Sometimes the originals don’t compare so well. And, by Jove! on the
bamboo table by the window, positively an aspidistra! Hast thou found me, O mine
enemy? But come here, Dora. Let’s have a look at you.
He seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful, rapacious
face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.
‘How about my present? ’ she demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.
Never mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here. Come closer.
Ah!
No. No use. Impossible. The will but not the way. The spirit is willing but the flesh is
weak. Try again. No. The booze, it must be. See Macbeth. One last try. No, no use. Not
this evening. I’m afraid.
All right, Dora, don’t you worry. You’ll get your two quid all right. We aren’t paying by
results.
He made a clumsy gesture. ‘Here, give us that bottle. That bottle off the dressing-table. ’
Dora brought it. Ah, that’s better. That at least doesn’t fail. With hands that had swollen
to monstrous size he up-ended the Chianti bottle. The wine flowed down his throat, bitter
and choking, and some of it went up his nose. It overwhelmed him. He was slipping,
sliding, falling off the bed. His head met the floor. His legs were still on the bed. For a
while he lay in this position. Is this the way to live? Down below the youthful voices
were still mournfully singing:
‘For tonight we’ll merry be, For tonight we’ll merry be, For tonight we’ll merry be-e-e —
Tomorrow we’ll be so-ober! ’
Chapter 9
And, by Jove, tomorrow we WERE sober!
Gordon emerged from some long, sickly dream to the consciousness that the books in the
lending library were the wrong way up. They were all lying on their sides. Moreover, for
some reason their backs had turned white — white and shiny, like porcelain.
He opened his eyes a little wider and moved an arm. Small rivulets of pain, seemingly
touched off by the movement, shot through his body at unexpected places — down the
calves of his legs, for instance, and up both sides of his head. He perceived that he was
lying on his side, with a hard smooth pillow under his cheek and a coarse blanket
scratching his chin and pushing its hairs into his mouth. Apart from the minor pains that
stabbed him every time he moved, there was a large, dull sort of pain which was not
localized but which seemed to hover all over him.
Suddenly he flung off the blanket and sat up. He was in a police cell. At this moment a
frightful spasm of nausea overcame him. Dimly perceiving a W. C. in the comer, he crept
towards it and was violently sick, three or four times.
After that, for several minutes, he was in agonizing pain. He could scarcely stand on his
feet, his head throbbed as though it were going to burst, and the light seemed like some
scalding white liquid pouring into his brain through the sockets of his eyes. He sat on the
bed holding his head between his hands. Presently, when some of the throbbing had died
down, he had another look about him. The cell measured about twelve feet long by six
wide and was very high. The walls were all of white porcelain bricks, horribly white and
clean.
He wondered dully how they cleaned as high up as the ceiling. Perhaps with a
hose, he reflected. At one end there was a little barred window, very high up, and at the
other end, over the door, an electric bulb let into the wall and protected by a stout grating.
The thing he was sitting on was not actually a bed, but a shelf with one blanket and a
canvas pillow. The door was of steel, painted green. In the door there was a little round
hole with a flap on the outside.
Having seen this much he lay down and pulled the blanket over him again. He had no
further curiosity about his surroundings. As to what had happened last night, he
remembered everything — at least, he remembered everything up to the time when he had
gone with Dora into the room with the aspidistra. God knew what had happened after
that. There had been some kind of bust-up and he had landed in the clink. He had no
notion of what he had done; it might be murder for all he kn ew. In any case he did not
care. He turned his face to the wall and pulled the blanket over his head to shut out the
light.
After a long time the spyhole in the door was pushed aside. Gordon managed to turn his
head round. His neck-muscles seemed to creak. Through the spyhole he could see a blue
eye and a semi-circle of pink chubby cheek.
“Ja do with a cup of tea? ’ a voice said.
Gordon sat up and instantly felt very sick again. He took his head between his hands and
groaned. The thought of a cup of hot tea appealed to him, but he knew it would make him
sick if it had sugar in it.
‘Please,’ he said.
The police constable opened a partition in the top half of the door and passed in a thick
white mug of tea. It had sugar in it. The constable was a solid rosy young man of about
twenty-five, with a kind face, white eyelashes, and a tremendous chest. It reminded
Gordon of the chest of a carthorse. He spoke with a good accent but with vulgar turns of
speech. For a minute or so he stood regarding Gordon.
‘You weren’t half bad last night,’ he said finally.
‘I’m bad now. ’
‘You was worse last night, though. What you go and hit the sergeant for? ’
‘Did I hit the sergeant? ’
‘Did you? Coo! He wasn’t half wild. He turns to me and he says — holding his ear he
was, like this — he says, “Now, if that man wasn’t too drunk to stand, I’d knock his block
off. ” It’s all gone down on your charge sheet. Drunk and disorderly. You’d only ha’ bin
drunk and incapable if you hadn’t of hit the sergeant. ’
‘Do you know what I shall get for this? ’
‘Five quid or fourteen days. You’ll go up before Mr Groom. Lucky for you it wasn’t Mr
Walker. He’d give you a month without the option, Mr Walker would. Very severe on the
drunks he is. Teetotaller. ’
Gordon had drunk some of the tea. It was nauseatingly sweet but its wannth made him
feel stronger. He gulped it down. At this moment a nasty, snarling sort of voice — the
sergeant whom Gordon had hit, no doubt — yelped from somewhere outside:
‘Take that man out and get him washed. Black Maria leaves at half past nine. ’
The constable hastened to open the cell door. As soon as Gordon stepped outside he felt
worse then ever. This was partly because it was much colder in the passage than in the
cell. He walked a step or two, and then suddenly his head was going round and round.
‘I’m going to be sick! ’ he cried. He was falling — he flung out a hand and stopped himself
against the wall. The constable’s strong arm went round him. Across the ann, as over a
rail, Gordon sagged, doubled up and limp. A jet of vomit burst from him. It was the tea,
of course. There was a gutter running along the stone floor. At the end of the passage the
moustachio’d sergeant, in tunic without a belt, stood with his hand on his hip, looking on
disgustedly.
‘Dirty little tyke,’ he muttered, and turned away.
‘Come on, old chap,’ said the constable. ‘You’ll be better in half a mo’. ’
He half led, half dragged Gordon to a big stone sink at the end of the passage and helped
him to strip to the waist. His gentleness was astonishing. He handled Gordon almost like
a nurse handling a child. Gordon had recovered enough strength to sluice himself with
the ice-cold water and rinse his mouth out. The constable gave him a torn towel to dry
himself with and then led him back to the cell.
‘Now you sit quiet till the Black Maria comes. And take my tip — when you go up to the
court, you plead guilty and say you won’t do it again. Mr Groom won’t be hard on you. ’
‘Where are my collar and tie? ’ said Gordon.
‘We took ‘em away last night. You’ll get ‘em back before you go up to court. We had a
bloke hung himself with his tie, once. ’
Gordon sat down on the bed. For a little while he occupied himself by calculating the
number of porcelain bricks in the walls, then sat with his elbows on his knees, his head
between his hands. He was still aching all over; he felt weak, cold, jaded, and, above all,
bored. He wished that boring business of going up to the court could be avoided
somehow. The thought of being put into some jolting vehicle and taken across London to
hang about in chilly cells and passages, and of having to answer questions and be lectured
by magistrates, bored him indescribably. All he wanted was to be left alone. But
presently there was the sound of several voices farther down the passage, and then of feet
approaching. The partition in the door was opened.
‘Couple of visitors for you,’ the constable said.
Gordon was bored by the very thought of visitors. Unwillingly he looked up, and saw
Flaxman and Ravelston looking in upon him. How they had got there together was a
mystery, but Gordon felt not the faintest curiosity about it. They bored him. He wished
they would go away.
‘Hullo, chappie! ’ said Flaxman.
‘YOU here? ’ said Gordon with a sort of weary offensiveness.
Ravelston looked miserable. He had been up since the very early morning, looking for
Gordon. This was the first time he had seen the interior of a police cell. His face shrank
with disgust as he looked at the chilly white-tiled place with its shameless W. C. in the
comer. But Flaxman was more accustomed to this kind of thing. He cocked a practised
eye at Gordon.
‘I’ve seen ‘em worse,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Give him a prairie oyster and he’d buck up
something wonderful. D’you know what your eyes look like, chappie? ’ he added to
Gordon. ‘They look as if they’d been taken out and poached. ’
‘I was drunk last night,’ said Gordon, his head between his hands.
‘I gathered something of the kind, old chappie. ’
‘Look here, Gordon,’ said Ravelston, ‘we came to bail you out, but it seems we’re too
late. They’re taking you up to court in a few minutes’ time. This is a bloody show. It’s a
pity you didn’t give them a false name when they brought you here last night. ’
‘Did I tell them my name? ’
‘You told them everything. I wish to God I hadn’t let you out of my sight. You slipped
out of that house somehow and into the street. ’
‘Wandering up and down Shaftesbury Avenue, drinking out of a bottle,’ said Flaxman
appreciatively. ‘But you oughtn’t to have hit the sergeant, old chappie! That was a bit of
bloody foolishness. And I don’t mind telling you Mother Wisbeach is on your track.
When your pal here came round this morning and told her you’d been for a night on the
tiles, she took on as if you’d done a bloody murder. ’
‘And look here, Gordon,’ said Ravelston.
There was the familiar note of discomfort in his face. It was something about money, as
usual. Gordon looked up. Ravelston was gazing into the distance.
‘Look here. ’
‘What? ’
‘About your fine. You’d better leave that to me. I’ll pay it. ’
‘No, you won’t. ’
‘My dear old chap! They’ll send you to jail if I don’t. ’
‘Oh, hell! I don’t care. ’
He did not care. At this moment he did not care if they sent him to prison for a year. Of
course he couldn’t pay his fine himself. He knew without even needing to look that he
had no money left. He would have given it all to Dora, or more probably she would have
pinched it. He lay down on the bed again and turned his back on the others. In the sulky,
sluggish state that he was in, his sole desire was to get rid of them. They made a few
more attempts to talk to him, but he would not answer, and presently they went away.
Flaxman’ s voice boomed cheerfully down the passage. He was giving Ravelston minute
instructions as to how to make a prairie oyster.
The rest of that day was very beastly. Beastly was the ride in the Black Maria, which,
inside, was like nothing so much as a miniature public lavatory, with tiny cubicles down
each side, into which you were locked and in which you had barely room to sit down.
Beastlier yet was the long wait in one of the cells adjoining the magistrate’s court. This
cell was an exact replica of the cell at the police station, even to having precisely the
same number of porcelain bricks. But it differed from the police station cell in being
repulsively dirty. It was cold, but the air was so fetid as to be almost unbreathable.
Prisoners were coming and going all the time. They would be thrust into the cell, taken
out after an hour or two to go up to the court, and then perhaps brought back again to wait
while the magistrate decided upon their sentence or fresh witnesses were sent for. There
were always five or six men in the cell, and there was nothing to sit on except the plank
bed. And the worst was that nearly all of them used the W. C. — there, publicly, in the tiny
cell. They could not help it. There was nowhere else to go. And the plug of the beastly
thing did not even pull properly.
Until the afternoon Gordon felt sick and weak. He had had no chance to shave, and his
face was hatefully scrubby. At first he merely sat on the comer of the plank bed, at the
end nearest the door, as far away from the W. C. as he could get, and took no notice of the
other prisoners. They bored and disgusted him; later, as his headache wore off, he
observed them with a faint interest. There was a professional burglar, a lean worried-
looking man with grey hair, who was in a terrible stew about what would happen to his
wife and kids if he were sent to jail. He had been arrested for ‘loitering with intent to
enter’ — a vague offence for which you generally get convicted if there are previous
convictions against you. He kept walking up and down, flicking the fingers of his right
hand with a curious nervous gesture, and exclaiming against the unfairness of it. There
was also a deaf mute who stank like a ferret, and a small middle-aged Jew with a fur-
collared overcoat, who had been buyer to a large firm of kosher butchers. He had bolted
with twenty-seven pounds, gone to Aberdeen, of all places, and spent the money on tarts.
He too had a grievance, for he said his case ought to have been tried in the rabbi’s court
instead of being turned over to the police. There was also a publican who had embezzled
his Christmas club money. He was a big, hearty, prosperous-looking man of about thirty-
five, with a loud red face and a loud blue overcoat — the sort of man who, if he were not a
publican, would be a bookie. His relatives had paid back the embezzled money, all except
twelve pounds, but the club members had decided to prosecute. There was something in
this man’s eyes that troubled Gordon. He carried everything off with a swagger, but all
the while there was that blank, staring look in his eyes; he would fall into a kind of
reverie at every gap in the conversation. It was somehow rather dreadful to see him.
There he was, still in his smart clothes, with the splendour of a publican’s life only a
month or two behind him; and now he was ruined, probably for ever. Like all London
publicans he was in the claw of the brewer, he would be sold up and his furniture and
fittings seized, and when he came out of jail he would never have a pub or a job again.
The morning wore on with dismal slowness. You were allowed to smoke — matches were
forbidden, but the constable on duty outside would give you a light through the trap in the
door. Nobody had any cigarettes except the publican, who had his pockets full of them
and distributed them freely. Prisoners came and went. A ragged dirty man who claimed to
be a coster ‘up’ for obstruction was put into the cell for half an hour. He talked a great
deal, but the others were deeply suspicious of him; when he was taken out again they all
declared he was a ‘split’. The police, it was said, often put a ‘split’ into the cells,
disguised as a prisoner, to pick up infonnation. Once there was great excitement when the
constable whispered through the trap that a murderer, or would-be murderer, was being
put into the cell next door. He was a youth of eighteen who had stabbed his ‘tart’ in the
belly, and she was not expected to live. Once the trap opened and the tired, pale face of a
clergyman looked in. He saw the burglar, said wearily, ‘YOU here again, Jones? ’ and
went away again.
