No More Learning

’


‘This afternoon I went and saw Mr Erskine. I asked leave to speak to him for a few
minutes. ’

He knew what was coming. He tried to free his arm from hers, but she held on to it.


‘Well? ’ he said sulkily.



‘I spoke to him about you. I asked him if he’d take you back. Of course he said trade was
bad and they couldn’t afford to take on new staff and all that. But I reminded him of what
he’d said to you, and he said, Yes, he’d always thought you were very promising. And in
the end he said he’d be quite ready to find a job for you if you’d come back. So you see I
WAS right. They WILL give you the job. ’

He did not answer. She squeezed his arm. ‘So NOW what do you think about it? ’ she
said.

‘You know what I think,’ he said coldly.

Secretly he was alarmed and angry. This was what he had been fearing. He had known all
along that she would do it sooner or later. It made the issue more definite and his own
blame clearer. He slouched on, his hands still in his coat pockets, letting her cling to his
ann but not looking towards her.

‘You’re angry with me? ’ she said.

‘No, I’m not. But I don’t see why you had to do it — behind my back. ’

That wounded her. She had had to plead very hard before she had managed to extort that
promise from Mr Erskine. And it had needed all her courage to beard the managing
director in his den. She had been in deadly fear that she might be sacked for doing it. But
she wasn’t going to tell Gordon anything of that.

‘I don’t think you ought to say BEHIND YOUR BACK. After all, I was only trying to
help you. ’

‘How does it help me to get the offer of a job I wouldn’t touch with a stick? ’

‘You mean you won’t go back, even now? ’

‘Never. ’

‘Why? ’


‘MUST we go into it again? ’ he said wearily.



She squeezed his arm with all her strength and pulled him round, making him face her.
There was a kind of desperation in the way she clung to him. She had made her last effort
and it had failed. It was as though she could feel him receding, fading away from her like
a ghost.

‘You’ll break my heart if you go on like this,’ she said.

‘I wish you wouldn’t trouble about me. It would be so much simpler if you didn’t. ’

‘But why do you have to throw your life away? ’

‘I tell you I can’t help it. I’ve got to stick to my guns. ’

‘You know what this will mean? ’

With a chill at his heart, and yet with a feeling of resignation, even of relief, he said:
‘You mean we shall have to part — not see each other again? ’

They had walked on, and now they emerged into the Westminster Bridge Road. The wind
met them with a scream, whirling at them a cloud of dust that made both of them duck
their heads. They halted again. Her small face was full of lines, and the cold wind and the
cold lamplight did not improve it.

‘You want to get rid of me,’ he said.

‘No. No. It’s not exactly that. ’

‘But you feel we ought to part. ’

‘How can we go on like this? ’ she said desolately.

‘It’s difficult, I admit. ’

‘It’s all so miserable, so hopeless! What can it ever lead to? ’


‘So you don’t love me after all? ’ he said.



‘I do, I do! You know I do. ’


‘In a way, perhaps. But not enough to go on loving me when it’s certain I’ll never have
the money to keep you. You’ll have me as a husband, but not as a lover. It’s still a
question of money, you see. ’

‘It is NOT money, Gordon! It’s NOT that. ’

‘Yes, it’s just money. There’s been money between us from the start. Money, always
money! ’

The scene continued, but not for very much longer. Both of them were shivering with
cold. There is no emotion that matters greatly when one is standing at a street corner in a
biting wind. When finally they parted it was with no irrevocable farewell. She simply
said, ‘I must get back,’ kissed him, and ran across the road to the tram-stop. Mainly with
relief he watched her go. He could not stop now to ask himself whether he loved her.
Simply he wanted to get away — away from the windy street, away from scenes and
emotional demands, back in the frowzy solitude of his attic. If there were tears in his eyes
it was only from the cold of the wind.

With Julia it was almost worse. She asked him to go and see her one evening. This was
after she had heard, from Rosemary, of Mr Erksine’s offer of a job. The dreadful thing
with Julia was that she understood nothing, absolutely nothing, of his motives. All she
understood was that a ‘good’ job had been offered him and that he had refused it. She
implored him almost on her knees not to throw this chance away. And when he told her
that his mind was made up, she wept, actually wept. That was dreadful. The poor goose-
like girl, with streaks of grey in her hair, weeping without grace or dignity in her little
Drage-furnished bed-sitting room! This was the death of all her hopes. She had watched
the family go down and down, moneyless and childless, into grey obscurity. Gordon
alone had had it in him to succeed; and he, from mad perverseness, would not. He knew
what she was thinking; he had to induce in himself a kind of brutality to stand firm. It
was only because of Rosemary and Julia that he cared. Ravelston did not matter, because
Ravelston understood. Aunt Angela and Uncle Walter, of course, were bleating weakly at
him in long, fatuous letters. But them he disregarded.



In desperation Julia asked him, what did he mean to DO now that he had flung away his
last chance of succeeding in life. He answered simply, ‘My poems. ’ He had said the same
to Rosemary and to Ravelston. With Ravelston the answer had sufficed. Rosemary had
no longer any belief in his poems, but she would not say so. As for Julia, his poems had
never at any time meant anything to her. ‘I don’t see much sense in writing if you can’t
make money out of it,’ was what she had always said. And he himself did not believe in
his poems any longer. But he still struggled to ‘write’, at least at times. Soon after he
changed his lodgings he had copied out on to clean sheets the completed portions of
London Pleasures — not quite four hundred lines, he discovered. Even the labour of
copying it out was a deadly bore. Yet he still worked on it occasionally; cutting out a line
here, altering another there, not making or even expecting to make any progress. Before
long the pages were as they had been before, a scrawled, grimy labyrinth of words. He
used to carry the wad of grimy manuscript about with him in his pocket. The feeling of it
there upheld him a little; after all it was a kind of achievement, demonstrable to himself
though to nobody else. There it was, sole product of two years — of a thousand hours’
work, it might be. He had no feeling for it any longer as a poem. The whole concept of
poetry was meaningless to him now. It was only that if London Pleasures were ever
finished it would be something snatched from fate, a thing created OUTSIDE the money-
world. But he knew, far more clearly than before, that it never would be finished. How
was it possible that any creative impulse should remain to him, in the life he was living
now? As time went on, even the desire to finish London Pleasures vanished. He still
carried the manuscript about in his pocket; but it was only a gesture, a symbol of his
private war. He had finished for ever with that futile dream of being a ‘writer’. After all,
was not that too a species of ambition? He wanted to get away from all that, BELOW all
that. Down, down! Into the ghost-kingdom, out of the reach of hope, out of the reach of
fear! Under ground, under ground! That was where he wished to be.

Yet in a way it was not so easy. One night about nine he was lying on his bed, with the
ragged counterpane over his feet, his hands under his head to keep them wann. The fire
was out. The dust was thick on everything. The aspidistra had died a week ago and was
withering upright in its pot. He slid a shoeless foot from under the counterpane, held it
up, and looked at it. His sock was full of holes — there were more holes than sock. So here
he lay, Gordon Comstock, in a slum attic on a ragged bed, with his feet sticking out of his
socks, with one and fourpence in the world, with three decades behind him and nothing,



nothing accomplished! Surely NOW he was past redemption? Surely, try as they would,
they couldn’t prise him out of a hole like this? He had wanted to reach the mud — well,
this was the mud, wasn’t it?

Yet he knew that it was not so. That other world, the world of money and success, is
always so strangely near. You don’t escape it merely by taking refuge in dirt and misery.
He had been frightened as well as angry when Rosemary told him about Mr Erskine’s
offer. It brought the danger so close to him. A letter, a telephone message, and from this
squalor he could step straight back into the money-world — back to four quid a week,
back to effort and decency and slavery. Going to the devil isn’t so easy as it sounds.
Sometimes your salvation hunts you down like the Hound of Heaven.

For a while he lay in an almost mindless state, gazing at the ceiling. The utter futility of
just lying there, dirty and cold, comforted him a little. But presently he was roused by a
light tap at the door. He did not stir. It was Mother Meakin, presumably, though it did not
sound like her knock.

‘Come in,’ he said.

The door opened. It was Rosemary.

She stepped in, and then stopped as the dusty sweetish smell of the room caught her.
Even in the bad light of the lamp she could see the state of filth the room was in — the
litter of food and papers on the table, the grate full of cold ashes, the foul crocks in the
fender, the dead aspidistra. As she came slowly towards the bed she pulled her hat off and
threw it on to the chair.

‘WHAT a place for you to live in! ’ she said.

‘So you’ve come back? ’ he said.

‘Yes. ’

He turned a little away from her, his arm over his face. ‘Come back to lecture me some
more, I suppose? ’



‘No. ’


‘Then why? ’

‘Because — ’

She had knelt down beside the bed. She pulled his arm away, put her face forward to kiss
him, then drew back, surprised, and began to stroke the hair over his temple with the tips
of her fingers.

‘Oh, Gordon! ’

‘What? ’

‘You’ve got grey in your hair! ’

‘Have I? Where? ’

‘Here — over the temple. There’s quite a little patch of it. It must have happened all of a
sudden. ’

“‘My golden locks time hath to silver turned,”’ he said indifferently.

‘So we’re both going grey,’ she said.

She bent her head to show him the three white hairs on her crown. Then she wriggled
herself on to the bed beside him, put an arm under him, pulled him towards her, covered
his face with kisses. He let her do it. He did not want this to happen — it was the very
thing that he least wanted. But she had wriggled herself beneath him; they were breast to
breast. Her body seemed to melt into his. By the expression of her face he knew what had
brought her here. After all, she was virgin. She did not know what she was doing. It was
magnanimity, pure magnanimity, that moved her. His wretchedness had drawn her back
to him. Simply because he was penniless and a failure she had got to yield to him, even if
it was only once.


‘I had to come back,’ she said.



‘Why?
’


‘I couldn’t bear to think of you here alone. It seemed so awful, leaving you like that. ’

‘You did quite right to leave me. You’d much better not have come back. You know we
can’t ever get married. ’

‘I don’t care. That isn’t how one behaves to people one loves. I don’t care whether you
marry me or not. I love you. ’

‘This isn’t wise,’ he said.

‘I don’t care. I wish I’d done it years ago. ’

‘We’d much better not. ’

‘Yes. ’

‘No. ’


‘Yes! ’


After all, she was too much for him. He had wanted her so long, and he could not stop to
weigh the consequences. So it was done at last, without much pleasure, on Mother
Meakin’s dingy bed. Presently Rosemary got up and rearranged her clothes. The room,
though stuffy, was dreadfully cold. They were both shivering a little. She pulled the
coverlet further over Gordon. He lay without stirring, his back turned to her, his face
hidden against his arm. She knelt down beside the bed, took his other hand, and laid it for
a moment against her cheek. He scarcely noticed her. Then she shut the door quietly
behind her and tiptoed down the bare, evil-smelling stairs. She felt dismayed,
disappointed, and very cold.



Chapter 11

Spring, spring! Bytuene Mershe ant Averil, when spray biginneth to spring! When shaws
be sheene and swards full fayre, and leaves both large and longe! When the hounds of
spring are on winter’s traces, in the spring time, the only pretty ring time, when the birds
do sing, hey-ding-a-ding ding, cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-wee, ta-witta-woo! And so on and so
on and so on. See almost any poet between the Bronze Age and 1805.

But how absurd that even now, in the era of central heating and tinned peaches, a
thousand so-called poets are still writing in the same strain! For what difference does
spring or winter or any other time of year make to the average civilized person
nowadays? In a town like London the most striking seasonal change, apart from the mere
change of temperature, is in the things you see lying about on the pavement. In late
winter it is mainly cabbage leaves. In July you tread on cherry stones, in November on
bumt-out fireworks. Towards Christmas the orange peel grows thicker. It was a different
matter in the Middle Ages. There was some sense in writing poems about spring when
spring meant fresh meat and green vegetables after months of frowsting in some
windowless hut on a diet of salt fish and mouldy bread.

If it was spring Gordon failed to notice it. March in Lambeth did not remind you of
Persephone. The days grew longer, there were vile dusty winds and sometimes in the sky
patches of harsh blue appeared. Probably there were a few sooty buds on the trees if you
cared to look for them. The aspidistra, it turned out, had not died after all; the withered
leaves had dropped off it, but it was putting forth a couple of dull green shoots near its
base.

Gordon had been three months at the library now. The stupid slovenly routine did not irk
him. The library had swelled to a thousand ‘assorted titles’ and was bringing Mr
Cheeseman a pound a week clear profit, so Mr Cheeseman was happy after his fashion.
He was, nevertheless, nurturing a secret grudge against Gordon. Gordon had been sold to
him, so to speak, as a drunkard. He had expected Gordon to get drunk and miss a day’s
work at least once, thus giving a sufficient pretext for docking his wages; but Gordon had
failed to get drunk. Queerly enough, he had no impulse to drink nowadays. He would
have gone without beer even if he could have afforded it. Tea seemed a better poison. All
his desires and discontents had dwindled. He was better off on thirty bob a week than he



had been previously on two pounds. The thirty bob covered, without too much stretching,
his rent, cigarettes, a washing bill of about a shilling a week, a little fuel, and his meals,
which consisted almost entirely of bacon, bread-and-marg, and tea, and cost about two
bob a day, gas included. Sometimes he even had sixpence over for a seat at a cheap but
lousy picture-house near the Westminster Bridge Road. He still carried the grimy
manuscript of London Pleasures to and fro in his pocket, but it was from mere force of
habit; he had dropped even the pretence of working. All his evenings were spent in the
same way. There in the remote frowzy attic, by the fire if there was any coal left, in bed if
there wasn’t, with teapot and cigarettes handy, reading, always reading. He read nothing
nowadays except twopenny weekly papers. Tit Bits, Answers, Peg’s Paper, The Gem,
The Magnet, Home Notes, The Girl’s Own Paper — they were all the same. He used to get
them a dozen at a time from the shop. Mr Cheeseman had great dusty stacks of them, left
over from his uncle’s day and used for wrapping paper. Some of them were as much as
twenty years old.

He had not seen Rosemary for weeks past. She had written a number of times and then,
for some reason, abruptly stopped writing. Ravelston had written once, asking him to
contribute an article on twopenny libraries to Antichrist. Julia had sent a desolate little
letter, giving family news. Aunt Angela had had bad colds all the winter, and Uncle
Walter was complaining of bladder trouble. Gordon did not answer any of their letters.
He would have forgotten their existence if he could. They and their affection were only
an encumbrance. He would not be free, free to sink down into the ultimate mud, till he
had cut his li nk s with all of them, even with Rosemary.

One afternoon he was choosing a book for a tow-headed factory girl, when someone he
only saw out of the corner of his eye came into the library and hesitated just inside the
door.

‘What kind of book did you want? ’ he asked the factory girl.

‘Oo — jest a kind of a ROmance, please. ’

Gordon selected a ROmance. As he turned, his heart bounded violently. The person who
had just come in was Rosemary. She did not make any sign, but stood waiting, pale, and
worried-looking, with something ominous in her appearance.



He sat down to enter the book on the girl’s ticket, but his hands had begun trembling so
that he could hardly do it. He pressed the rubber stamp in the wrong place. The girl
trailed out, peeping into the book as she went. Rosemary was watching Gordon’s face. It
was a long time since she had seen him by daylight, and she was struck by the change in
him. He was shabby to the point of raggedness, his face had grown much thinner and had
the dingy, greyish pallor of people who live on bread and margarine. He looked much
older — thirty-five at the least. But Rosemary herself did not look quite as usual. She had
lost her gay trim bearing, and her clothes had the appearance of having been thrown on in
a hurry. It was obvious that there was something wrong.

He shut the door after the factory girl. ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ he began.

‘I had to come. I got away from the studio at lunch time. I told them I was ill. ’

‘You don’t look well. Here, you’d better sit down. ’

There was only one chair in the library. He brought it out from behind the desk and was
moving towards her, rather vaguely, to offer some kind of caress. Rosemary did not sit
down, but laid her small hand, from which she had removed the glove, on the top rung of
the chair-back. By the pressure of her lingers he could see how agitated she was.

‘Gordon, I’ve a most awful thing to tell you. It’s happened after all. ’

‘What’s happened? ’

‘I’m going to have a baby. ’

‘A baby? Oh, Christ! ’

He stopped short. For a moment he felt as though someone had struck him a violent blow
under the ribs. He asked the usual fatuous question:

‘Are you sure? ’


‘Absolutely. It’s been weeks now. If you knew the time I’ve had! I kept hoping and
hoping — I took some pills — oh, it was too beastly! ’



‘A baby! Oh, God, what fools we were! As though we couldn’t have foreseen it! ’

‘I know. I suppose it was my fault. I — ’

‘Damn! Here comes somebody. ’

The door-bell ping’d. A fat, freckled woman with an ugly under- lip came in at a rolling
gait and demanded ‘Something with a murder in it. ’ Rosemary had sat down and was
twisting her glove round and round her fingers. The fat woman was exacting. Each book
that Gordon offered her she refused on the ground that she had ‘had it already’ or that it
‘looked dry’. The deadly news that Rosemary had brought had unnerved Gordon. His
heart pounding, his entrails constricted, he had to pull out book after book and assure the
fat woman that this was the very book she was looking for. At last, after nearly ten
minutes, he managed to fob her off with something which she said grudgingly she ‘didn’t
think she’d had before’.

He turned back to Rosemary. ‘Well, what the devil are we going to do about it? ’ he said
as soon as the door had shut.

‘I don’t see what I can do. If I have this baby I’ll lose my job, of course. But it isn’t only
that I’m worrying about. It’s my people finding out. My mother — oh, dear! It simply
doesn’t bear thinking of. ’

‘Ah, your people! I hadn’t thought of them. One’s people! What a cursed incubus they
are! ’

‘MY people are all right. They’ve always been good to me. But it’s different with a thing
like this. ’

He took a pace or two up and down. Though the news had scared him he had not really
grasped it as yet. The thought of a baby, his baby, growing in her womb had awoken in
him no emotion except dismay. He did not think of the baby as a living creature; it was a
disaster pure and simple. And already he saw where it was going to lead.


‘We shall have to get married, I suppose,’ he said flatly.



‘Well, shall we? That’s what I came here to ask you. ’


‘But I suppose you want me to marry you, don’t you? ’

‘Not unless YOU want to. I’m not going to tie you down. I know it’s against your ideas
to marry. You must decide for yourself. ’

‘But we’ve no alternative — if you’re really going to have this baby. ’

‘Not necessarily. That’s what you’ve got to decide. Because after all there IS another
way. ’

‘What way? ’

‘Oh, YOU know. A girl at the studio gave me an address. A friend of hers had it done for
only five pounds. ’

That pulled him up. For the first time he grasped, with the only kind of knowledge that
matters, what they were really talking about. The words ‘a baby’ took on a new
significance. They did not mean any longer a mere abstract disaster, they meant a bud of
flesh, a bit of himself, down there in her belly, alive and growing. His eyes met hers.
They had a strange moment of sympathy such as they had never had before. For a
moment he did feel that in some mysterious way they were one flesh. Though they were
feet apart he felt as though they were joined together — as though some invisible living
cord stretched from her entrails to his. He knew then that it was a dreadful thing they
were contemplating — a blasphemy, if that word had any meaning. Yet if it had been put
otherwise he might not have recoiled from it. It was the squalid detail of the five pounds
that brought it home.

‘No fear! ’ he said. ‘Whatever happens we’re not going to do THAT. It’s disgusting. ’

‘I know it is. But I can’t have the baby without being married. ’

‘No! If that’s the alternative I’ll marry you. I’d sooner cut my right hand off than do a
thing like that. ’



Ping! went the door-bell. Two ugly louts in cheap bright blue suits, and a girl with a fit of
the giggles, came in. One of the youths asked with a sort of sheepish boldness for
‘something with a kick in it — something smutty’. Silently, Gordon indicated the shelves
where the ‘sex’ books were kept. There were hundreds of them in the library. They had
titles like Secrets of Paris and The Man She Trusted; on their tattered yellow jackets were
pictures of half-naked girls lying on divans with men in dinner-jackets standing over
them. The stories inside, however, were painfully harmless. The two youths and the girl
ranged among them, sniggering over the pictures on their covers, the girl letting out little
squeals and pretending to be shocked. They disgusted Gordon so much that he turned his
back on them till they had chosen their books.