No More Learning

Somehow, Gordon could not bring
himself to avoid answering or to say — the only thing Mr Erskine would have
understood — that he was going after a better-paid job. He blurted out shamefacedly that
he ‘didn’t think business suited him’ and that he ‘wanted to go in for writing’. Mr Erskine
was noncommittal. Writing, eh? Hm. Much money in that sort of thing nowadays? Not
much, eh? Hm. No, suppose not. Hm. Gordon, feeling and looking ridiculous, mumbled
that he had ‘got a book just coming out’. A book of poems, he added with difficulty in
pronouncing the word. Mr Erskine regarded him sidelong before remarking:

‘Poetry, eh? Hm. Poetry? Make a living out of that sort of thing, do you think? ’

‘Well — not a living, exactly. But it would help. ’

‘Hm — well! You know best, I expect. If you want a job any time, come back to us. I dare
say we could find room for you. We can do with your sort here. Don’t forget. ’

Gordon left with a hateful feeling of having behaved perversely and ungratefully. But he
had got to do it; he had got to get out of the money- world. It was queer. All over England
young men were eating their hearts out for lack of jobs, and here was he, Gordon, to
whom the very word ‘job’ was faintly nauseous, having jobs thrust unwanted upon him.
It was an example of the fact that you can get anything in this world if you genuinely
don’t want it. Moreover, Mr Erskine’s words stuck in his mind. Probably he had meant
what he said. Probably there WOULD be a job waiting for Gordon if he chose to go back.
So his boats were only half burned. The New Albion was a doom before him as well as
behind.

But how happy had he been, just at first, in Mr McKechnie’s bookshop! For a little
while — a very little while — he had the illusion of being really out of the money- world. Of
course the book-trade was a swindle, like all other trades; but how different a swindle!
Here was no hustling and Making Good, no gutter-crawling. No go-getter could put up



for ten minutes with the stagnant air of the book-trade. As for the work, it was very
simple. It was mainly a question of being in the shop ten hours a day. Mr McKechnie
wasn’t a bad old stick. He was a Scotchman, of course, but Scottish is as Scottish does.
At any rate he was reasonably free from avarice — his most distinctive trait seemed to be
laziness. He was also a teetotaller and belonged to some Nonconformist sect or other, but
this did not affect Gordon. Gordon had been at the shop about a month when Mice was
published. No less than thirteen papers reviewed it! And The Times Lit. Supp. said that it
showed ‘exceptional promise’. It was not till months later that he realized what a
hopeless failure Mice had really been.

And it was only now, when he was down to two quid a week and had practically cut
himself off from the prospect of earning more, that he grasped the real nature of the battle
he was fighting. The devil of it is that the glow of renunciation never lasts. Life on two
quid a week ceases to be a heroic gesture and becomes a dingy habit. Failure is as great a
swindle as success. He had thrown up his ‘good’ job and renounced ‘good’ jobs for ever.
Well, that was necessary. He did not want to go back on it. But it was no use pretending
that because his poverty was self-imposed he had escaped the ills that poverty drags in its
train. It was not a question of hardship. You don’t suffer real physical hardship on two
quid a week, and if you did it wouldn’t matter. It is in the brain and the soul that lack of
money damages you. Mental deadness, spiritual squalor — they seem to descend upon you
inescapably when your income drops below a certain point. Faith, hope, money — only a
saint could have the first two without having the third.

He was growing more mature. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. He had reached
the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing. The
spectacle of his surviving relatives depressed him more and more. As he grew older he
felt himself more akin to them. That was the way he was going! A few years more, and
he would be like that, just like that! He felt this even with Julia, whom he saw oftener
than his uncle and aunt. In spite of various resolves never to do it again, he still borrowed
money off Julia periodically. Julia’s hair was greying fast; there was a deep line scored
down each of her thin red cheeks. She had settled her life into a routine in which she was
not unhappy. There was her work at the shop, her ‘sewing’ at nights in her Earl’s Court
bed-sitting-room (second floor, back, nine bob a week unfurnished), her occasional
forgatherings with spinster friends as lonely as herself. It was the typical submerged life



of the penniless unmarried woman; she accepted it, hardly realizing that her destiny could
ever have been different. Yet in her way she suffered, more for Gordon than for herself.
The gradual decay of the family, the way they had died off and died off and left nothing
behind, was a sort of tragedy in her mind. Money, money! ‘None of us ever seems to
make any money! ’ was her perpetual lament. And of them all, Gordon alone had had the
chance to make money; and Gordon had chosen not to. He was sinking effortless into the
same rut of poverty as the others. After the first row was over, she was too decent to ‘go
for’ him again because he had thrown up his job at the New Albion. But his motives were
quite meaningless to her. In her wordless feminine way she knew that the sin against
money is the ultimate sin.

And as for Aunt Angela and Uncle Walter — oh dear, oh dear! What a couple! It made
Gordon feel ten years older every time he looked at them.

Uncle Walter, for example. Uncle Walter was very depressing. He was sixty-seven, and
what with his various ‘agencies’ and the dwindling remnants of his patrimony his income
might have been nearly three pounds a week. He had a tiny little cabin of an office off
Cursitor Street, and he lived in a very cheap boarding-house in Holland Park. That was
quite according to precedent; all the Comstock men drifted naturally into boarding-
houses. When you looked at poor old uncle, with his large tremulous belly, his bronchitic
voice, his broad, pale, timidly pompous face, rather like Sargent’ s portrait of Henry
James, his entirely hairless head, his pale, pouchy eyes, and his ever-drooping moustache,
to which he tried vainly to give an upward twirl — when you looked at him, you found it
totally impossible to believe that he had ever been young. Was it conceivable that such a
being had ever felt life tingle in his veins? Had he ever climbed a tree, taken a header off
a springboard, or been in love? Had he ever had a brain in working order? Even back in
the early nineties, when he was arithmetically young, had he ever made any kind of stab
at life? A few furtive half-hearted frolics, perhaps. A few whiskies in dull bars, a visit or
two to the Empire promenade, a little whoring on the Q. T. ; the sort of dingy, drabby
fornications that you can imagine happening between Egyptian mummies after the
museum is closed for the night. And after that the long, long quiet years of business
failure, loneliness, and stagnation in godless boarding-houses.



And yet uncle in his old age was probably not unhappy. He had one hobby of never-
failing interest, and that was his diseases. He suffered, by his own account, from every
disease in the medical dictionary, and was never weary of talking about them. Indeed, it
seemed to Gordon that none of the people in his uncle’s boarding-house — he had been
there occasionally — ever did talk about anything except their diseases. All over the
darkish drawing-room, ageing, discoloured people sat about in couples, discussing
symptoms. Their conversation was like the dripping of stalactite to stalagmite. Drip, drip.
‘How is your lumbago? ’ says stalactite to stalagmite. ‘I find my Kruschen Salts are doing
me good,’ says stalagmite to stalactite. Drip, drip, drip.

And then there was Aunt Angela, aged sixty-nine. Gordon tried not even to think of Aunt
Angela oftener than he could help.

Poor, dear, good, kind, depressing Aunt Angela!

Poor, shrivelled, parchment-yellow, skin-and-bone Aunt Angela! There in her miserable
little semi-detached house in Highgate — Briarbrae, its name was — there in her palace in
the northern mountains, there dwelleth she, Angela the Ever-virgin, of whom no man
either living or among the shades can say truly that upon her lips he hath pressed the dear
caresses of a lover. All alone she dwelleth, and all day long she fareth to and fro, and in
her hand is the feather-mop fashioned from the tail feathers of the contumacious turkey,
and with it she polisheth the dark-leaved aspidistras and flicketh the hated dust from the
resplendent never-to-be-used Crown Derby china tea-service. And ever and anon she
comforteth her dear heart with draughts of the dark brown tea, both Flowery Orange and
Pekoe Points, which the small-bearded sons of Coromandel have ferried to her across the
wine-dark sea. Poor, dear, good, kind, but on the whole unloveable Aunt Angela! Her
annuity was ninety-eight pounds a year (thirty-eight bob a week, but she retained a
middle-class habit of thinking of her income as a yearly and not weekly thing), and out of
that, twelve and sixpence a week went on house rates. She would probably have starved
occasionally if Julia had not smuggled her packets of cakes and bread and butter from the
shop — always, of course, presented as ‘Just a few little things that it seemed a pity to
throw away’, with the solemn pretence that Aunt Angela didn’t really need them.



Yet she too had her pleasures, poor old aunty. She had become a great novel-reader in her
old age, the public library being only ten minutes’ walk from Briarbrae. During his
lifetime, on some whim or other, Gran’pa Comstock had forbidden his daughters to read
novels. Consequently, having only begun to read novels in 1902, Aunt Angela was
always a couple of decades behind the current mode in fiction. But she plodded along in
the rear, faint yet pursuing. In the nineteen-hundreds she was still reading Rhoda
Broughton and Mrs Henry Wood. In the War years she discovered Hall Caine and Mrs
Humphry Ward. In the nineteen-twenties she was reading Silas Hocking and H. Seton
Merriman, and by the nineteen-thirties she had almost, but not quite, caught up with W.
B. Maxwell and William J. Locke. Further she would never get. As for the post-War
novelists, she had heard of them afar off, with their immorality and their blasphemies and
their devastating ‘cleverness’. But she would never live to read them. Walpole we know,
and Hichens we read, but Hemingway, who are you?

Well, this was 1934, and that was what was left of the Comstock family. Uncle Walter,
with his ‘agencies’ and his diseases. Aunt Angela, dusting the Crown Derby china tea-
service in Briarbrae. Aunt Charlotte, still preserving a vague vegetable existence in the
Mental Home. Julia, working a seventy-two-hour week and doing her ‘sewing’ at nights
by the tiny gas-fire in her bedsitting-room. Gordon, nearly thirty, earning two quid a
week in a fool’s job, and struggling, as the sole demonstrable object of his existence, with
a dreadful book that never got any further.

Possibly there were some other, more distantly related Comstocks, for Gran’pa Comstock
had been one of a family of twelve. But if any survived they had grown rich and lost
touch with their poor relations; for money is thicker than blood. As for Gordon’s branch
of the family, the combined income of the five of them, allowing for the lump sum that
had been paid down when Aunt Charlotte entered the Mental Home, might have been six
hundred a year. Their combined ages were two hundred and sixty-three years. None of
them had ever been out of England, fought in a war, been in prison, ridden a horse,
travelled in an aeroplane, got married, or given birth to a child. There seemed no reason
why they should not continue in the same style until they died. Year in, year out,
NOTHING EVER HAPPENED in the Comstock family.



Chapter 4


Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare.

As a matter of fact, though, there was not a breath of wind that afternoon. It was almost
as mild as spring. Gordon repeated to himself the poem he had begun yesterday, in a
cadenced whisper, simply for the pleasure of the sound of it. He was pleased with the
poem at this moment. It was a good poem — or would be when it was finished, anyway.
He had forgotten that last night it had almost made him sick.

The plane trees brooded motionless, dimmed by faint wreaths of mist. A tram boomed in
the valley far below. Gordon walked up Malkin Hill, rustling instep-deep through the dry,
drifted leaves. All down the pavement they were strewn, crinkly and golden, like the
rustling flakes of some American breakfast cereal; as though the queen of Brobdingnag
had upset her packet of Truweet Breakfast Crisps down the hillside.

Jolly, the windless winter days! Best time of all the year — or so Gordon thought at this
moment. He was as happy as you can be when you haven’t smoked all day and have only
three-halfpence and a Joey in the world. This was Thursday, early-closing day and
Gordon’s afternoon off. He was going to the house of Paul Doring, the critic, who lived
in Coleridge Grove and gave literary tea-parties.

It had taken him an hour or more to get himself ready. Social life is so complicated when
your income is two quid a week. He had had a painful shave in cold water immediately
after dinner. He had put on his best suit — three years old but just passable when he
remembered to press the trousers under his mattress. He had turned his collar inside out
and tied his tie so that the tom place didn’t show. With the point of a match he had
scraped enough blacking from the tin to polish his shoes. He had even borrowed a needle
from Lorenheim and darned his socks — a tedious job, but better than inking the places
where your ankle shows through. Also he had procured an empty Gold Flake packet and
put into it a single cigarette extracted from the penny-in- the-slot-machine. That was just
for the look of the thing. You can’t, of course, go to other people’s houses with NO



cigarettes. But if you have even one it’s all right, because when people see one cigarette
in a packet they assume that the packet has been full. It is fairly easy to pass the thing off
as an accident.

‘Have a cigarette? ’ you say casually to someone.

‘Oh— thanks. ’

You push the packet open and then register surprise. ‘Hell! I’m down to my last. And I
could have sworn I had a full packet. ’

‘Oh, I won’t take your last. Have one of MINE,’ says the other.

‘Oh — thanks. ’

And after that, of course, your host and hostess press cigarettes upon you. But you must
have ONE cigarette, just for honour’s sake.

Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over. He would finish that poem presently. He could
finish it whenever he chose. It was queer, how the mere prospect of going to a literary
tea-party bucked him up. When your income is two quid a week you at least aren’t jaded
by too much human contact.
Even to see the inside of somebody else’s house is a kind of
treat. A padded armchair under your bum, and tea and cigarettes and the smell of
women — you leam to appreciate such things when you are starved of them. In practice,
though, Doring’s parties never in the least resembled what Gordon looked forward to.
Those wonderful, witty, erudite conversations that he imagined beforehand — they never
happened or began to happen. Indeed there was never anything that could properly be
called conversation at all; only the stupid clacking that goes on at parties everywhere, in
Hampstead or Hong Kong. No one really worth meeting ever came to Doring’s parties.
Doring was such a very mangy lion himself that his followers were hardly even worthy to
be called jackals. Quite half of them were those hen-witted middle-aged women who
have lately escaped from good Christian homes and are trying to be literary. The star
exhibits were troops of bright young things who dropped in for half an hour, fonned
circles of their own, and talked sniggeringly about the other bright young things to whom
they referred by nicknames. For the most part Gordon found himself hanging about on



the edges of conversations. Doring was kind in a slapdash way and introduced him to
everybody as ‘Gordon Comstock — YOU know; the poet. He wrote that dashed clever
book of poems called Mice. YOU know. ’ But Gordon had never yet encountered
anybody who DID know. The bright young things summed him up at a glance and
ignored him. He was thirtyish, moth-eaten, and obviously penniless. And yet, in spite of
the invariable disappointment, how eagerly he looked forward to those literary tea-
parties! They were a break in his loneliness, anyway. That is the devilish thing about
poverty, the ever-recurrent thing — loneliness. Day after day with never an intelligent
person to talk to; night after night back to your godless room, always alone. Perhaps it
sounds rather fun if you are rich and sought-after; but how different it is when you do it
from necessity!

Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over. A stream of cars hummed easily up the hill.
Gordon eyed them without envy. Who wants a car, anyway? The pink doll-faces of
upper-class women gazed at him through the car window. Bloody nit-witted lapdogs.
Pampered bitches dozing on their chains. Better the lone wolf than the cringing dogs. He
thought of the Tube stations at early morning. The black hordes of clerks scurrying
underground like ants into a hole; swarms of little ant-like men, each with dispatch-case
in right hand, newspaper in left hand, and the fear of the sack like a maggot in his heart.
How it eats at them, that secret fear! Especially on winter days, when they hear the
menace of the wind. Winter, the sack, the workhouse, the Embankment benches! Ah!

Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And the dark
ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward; flicked by whips of air, Tom posters flutter;
Coldly sound The boom of trains and the rattle of hooves, And the clerks who hurry to
the station Look, shuddering, over the eastern rooves, Thinking —

What do they think? Winter’s coming. Is my job safe? The sack means the workhouse.
Circumcise ye your foreskins, saith the Lord. Suck the blacking off the boss’s boots. Yes!

Thinking each one, ‘Here comes the winter! Please God I keep my job this year! ’ And
bleakly, as the cold strikes through Their entrails like an icy spear, They think —

‘Think’ again. No matter. What do they think? Money, money! Rent, rates, taxes, school
bills, season tickets, boots for the children. And the life insurance policy and the skivvy’s



wages. And, my God, suppose the wife gets in the family way again! And did I laugh
loud enough when the boss made that joke yesterday? And the next instalment on the
vacuum cleaner.

Neatly, taking a pleasure in his neatness, with the sensation of dropping piece after piece
of a jigsaw puzzle into place, he fashioned another stanza:

They think of rent, rates, season tickets, Insurance, coal, the skivvy’s wages, Boots,
school bills, and the next instalment Upon the two twin beds from Drage’s.

Not bad, not bad at all. Finish it presently. Four or five more stanzas. Ravelston would
print it.

A starling sat in the naked boughs of a plane tree, crooning self-pitifully as starlings do
on wann winter days when they believe spring is in the air. At the foot of the tree a huge
sandy cat sat motionless, mouth open, gazing upwards with rapt desire, plainly expecting
that the starling would drop into its mouth. Gordon repeated to himself the four finished
stanzas of his poem. It was GOOD. Why had he thought last night that it was mechanical,
weak, and empty? He was a poet. He walked more upright, arrogantly almost, with the
pride of a poet. Gordon Comstock, author of Mice. ‘Of exceptional promise,’ The Times
Lit. Supp. had said. Author also of London Pleasures. For that too would be finished
quite soon. He knew now that he could finish it when he chose. Why had he ever
despaired of it? Three months it might take; soon enough to come out in the summer. In
his mind’s eye he saw the ‘slim’ white buckram shape of London Pleasures; the excellent
paper, the wide margins, the good Caslon type, the refined dust-jacket, and the reviews in
all the best papers. ‘An outstanding achievement’ — The Times Lit. Supp. ‘A welcome
relief from the Sitwell school’ — Scrutiny.

Coleridge Grove was a damp, shadowy, secluded road, a blind alley and therefore void of
traffic. Literary associations of the wrong kind (Coleridge was rumoured to have lived
there for six weeks in the summer of 1821) hung heavy upon it. You could not look at its
antique decaying houses, standing back from the road in dank gardens under heavy trees,
without feeling an atmosphere of outmoded ‘culture’ envelop you. In some of those
houses, undoubtedly, Browning Societies still flourished, and ladies in art serge sat at the
feet of extinct poets talking about Swinburne and Walter Pater. In spring the gardens



were sprinkled with purple and yellow crocuses, and later with harebells, springing up in
little Wendy rings among the anaemic grass; and even the trees, it seemed to Gordon,
played up to their environment and twisted themselves into whimsy Rackhamesque
attitudes. It was queer that a prosperous hack critic like Paul Doring should live in such a
place. For Doring was an astonishingly bad critic. He reviewed novels for the Sunday
Post and discovered the great English novel with Walpolean regularity once a fortnight.
You would have expected him to live in a flat on Hyde Park Corner. Perhaps it was a
kind of penance that he had imposed upon himself, as though by living in the refined
discomfort of Coleridge Grove he propitiated the injured gods of literature.

Gordon came round the corner, turning over in his mind a line from London Pleasures.
And then suddenly he stopped short. There was something wrong about the look of the
Dorings’ gate. What was it? Ah, of course! There were no cars waiting outside.

He paused, walked on a step or two, and stopped again, like a dog that smells danger. It
was all wrong. There OUGHT to be some cars. There were always quite a lot of people at
the Dorings’ parties, and half of them came in cars. Why had nobody else arrived? Could
he be too early? But no! They had said half past three and it was at least twenty to four.

He hastened towards the gate. Already he felt practically sure that the party HAD been
put off. A chill like the shadow of a cloud had fallen across him. Suppose the Dorings
weren’t at home! Suppose the party had been put off! And this thought, though it
dismayed him, did not strike him as in the least improbable. It was his special bugbear,
the especial childish dread he carried about with him, to be invited to people’s houses and
then find them not at home. Even when there was no doubt about the invitation he always
half expected that there would be some hitch or other. He was never quite certain of his
welcome. He took it for granted that people would snub him and forget about him. Why
not, indeed? He had no money. When you have no money your life is one long series of
snubs.

He swung the iron gate open. It creaked with a lonely sound. The dank mossy path was
bordered with chu nk s of some Rackhamesque pinkish stone. Gordon inspected the house-
front narrowly. He was so used to this kind of thing. He had developed a sort of Sherlock
Holmes technique for finding out whether a house was inhabited or not. Ah! Not much



doubt about it this time. The house had a deserted look. No smoke coming from the
chimneys, no windows lighted. It must be getting darkish indoors — surely they would
have lighted the lamps? And there was not a single footmark on the steps; that settled it.
Nevertheless with a sort of desperate hope he tugged at the bell. An old-fashioned wire
bell, of course. In Coleridge Grove it would have been considered low and unliterary to
have an electric bell.

Clang, clang, clang! went the bell.

Gordon’s last hope vanished. No mistaking the hollow clangour of a bell echoing through
an empty house. He seized the handle again and gave it a wrench that almost broke the
wire. A frightful, clamorous peal answered him. But it was useless, quite useless. Not a
foot stirred within. Even the servants were out. At this moment he became aware of a lace
cap, some dark hair, and a pair of youthful eyes regarding him furtively from the
basement of the house next door. It was a servant-girl who had come out to see what all
the noise was about. She caught his eye and gazed into the middle distance. He looked a
fool and knew it. One always does look a fool when one rings the bell of an empty house.
And suddenly it came to him that that girl knew all about him — knew that the party had
been put off and that everyone except Gordon had been told of it — knew that it was
because he had no money that he wasn’t worth the trouble of telling. SHE knew. Servants
always know.

He turned and made for the gate. Under the servant’s eye he had to stroll casually away,
as though this were a small disappointment that scarcely mattered. But he was trembling
so with anger that it was difficult to control his movements. The sods! The bloody sods!
To have played a trick like that on him! To have invited him, and then changed the day
and not even bothered to tell him! There might be other explanations — he just refused to
think of them. The sods, the bloody sods! His eye fell upon one of the Rackhamesque
chu nk s of stone. How he’d love to pick that thing up and bash it through the window! He
grasped the rusty gate-bar so hard that he hurt his hand and almost tore it. The physical
pain did him good. It counteracted the agony at his heart. It was not merely that he had
been cheated of an evening spent in human company, though that was much. It was the
feeling of helplessness, of insignificance, of being set aside, ignored — a creature not
worth worrying about. They’d changed the day and hadn’t even bothered to tell him. Told



everybody else, but not him. That’s how people treat you when you’ve no money! Just
wantonly, cold-bloodedly insult you. It was likely enough, indeed, that the Dorings’ had
honestly forgotten, meaning no harm; it was even possible that he himself had mistaken
the date. But no! He wouldn’t think of it. The Dorings’ had done it on purpose. Of
COURSE they had done it on purpose! Just hadn’t troubled to tell him, because he had no
money and consequently didn’t matter. The sods!

He walked rapidly away. There was a sharp pain in his breast. Human contact, human
voices! But what was the good of wishing? He’d have to spend the evening alone, as
usual. His friends were so few and lived so far away. Rosemary would still be at work;
besides, she lived at the back of beyond, in West Kensington, in a women’s hostel
guarded by female dragons. Ravelston lived nearer, in the Regent’s Park district. But
Ravelston was a rich man and had many engagements; the chances were always against
his being at home. Gordon could not even ring him up, because he hadn’t the necessary
two pennies; only three halfpence and the Joey. Besides, how could he go and see
Ravelston when he had no money? Ravelston would be sure to say ‘Let’s go to a pub,’ or
something! He couldn’t let Ravelston pay for his drinks. His friendship with Ravelston
was only possible on the understanding that he paid his share of everything.

He took out his single cigarette and lighted it. It gave him no pleasure to smoke, walking
fast; it was a mere reckless gesture. He did not take much notice of where he was going.
All he wanted was to tire himself, to walk and walk till the stupid physical fatigue had
obliterated the Dorings’ snub. He moved roughly southward — through the wastes of
Camden Town, down Tottenham Court Road. It had been dark for some time now. He
crossed Oxford Street, threaded through Covent Garden, found himself in the Strand, and
crossed the river by Waterloo Bridge. With night the cold had descended. As he walked
his anger grew less violent, but his mood could not fundamentally improve. There was a
thought that kept haunting him — a thought from which he fled, but which was not to be
escaped. It was the thought of his poems. His empty, silly, futile poems! How could he
ever have believed in them?