He had not the smallest
intention
of doing any more work.
Orwell - Keep the Apidistra Flying
Except for a few books on the mantelpiece, this table, with its mess of papers,
was the sole mark Gordon’s personality had left on the room.
It was beastly cold. Gordon thought he would light the oil lamp. He lifted it — it felt very
light; the spare oil can also was empty — no oil till Friday. He applied a match; a dull
yellow flame crept unwillingly round the wick. It might bum for a couple of hours, with
any luck. As Gordon threw away the match his eye fell upon the aspidistra in its grass-
green pot. It was a peculiarly mangy specimen. It had only seven leaves and never
seemed to put forth any new ones. Gordon had a sort of secret feud with the aspidistra.
Many a time he had furtively attempted to kill it — starving it of water, grinding hot
cigarette-ends against its stem, even mixing salt with its earth. But the beastly things are
practically immortal. In almost any circumstances they can preserve a wilting, diseased
existence. Gordon stood up and deliberately wiped his kerosiny fingers on the aspidistra
leaves.
At this moment Mrs Wisbeach’s voice rang shrewishly up the stairs:
‘Mister Corn-stock! ’
Gordon went to the door. ‘Yes? ’ he called down.
‘Your supper’s been waiting for you this ten minutes. Why can’t you come down and
have it, ‘stead of keeping me waiting for the washing up? ’
Gordon went down. The dining-room was on the first floor, at the back, opposite
Flaxman’s room. It was a cold, close-smelling room, twilit even at midday. There were
more aspidistras in it than Gordon had ever accurately counted. They were all over the
place — on the sideboard, on the floor, on ‘occasional’ tables; in the window there was a
sort of florist’s stand of them, blocking out the light. In the half-darkness, with aspidistras
all about you, you had the feeling of being in some sunless aquarium amid the dreary
foliage of water-flowers. Gordon’s supper was set out, waiting for him, in the circle of
white light that the cracked gas-jet cast upon the table cloth. He sat down with his back to
the fireplace (there was an aspidistra in the grate instead of a fire) and ate his plate of cold
beef and his two slices of crumbly white bread, with Canadian butter, mousetrap cheese
and Pan Yan pickle, and drank a glass of cold but musty water.
When he went back to his room the oil lamp had got going, more or less. It was hot
enough to boil a kettle by, he thought. And now for the great event of the evening — his
illicit cup of tea. He made himself a cup of tea almost every night, in the deadliest
secrecy. Mrs Wisbeach refused to give her lodgers tea with their supper, because she
‘couldn’t be bothered with hotting up extra water’, but at the same time making tea in
your bedroom was strictly forbidden. Gordon looked with disgust at the muddled papers
on the table. He told himself defiantly that he wasn’t going to do any work tonight. He
would have a cup of tea and smoke up his remaining cigarettes, and read King Lear or
Sherlock Holmes. His books were on the mantelpiece beside the alann clock —
Shakespeare in the Everyman edition, Sherlock Holmes, Villon’s poems, Roderick
Random, Les Fleurs du Mai, a pile of French novels. But he read nothing nowadays,
except Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes. Meanwhile, that cup of tea.
Gordon went to the door, pushed it ajar, and listened. No sound of Mrs Wisbeach. You
had to be very careful; she was quite capable of sneaking upstairs and catching you in the
act. This tea-making was the major household offence, next to bringing a woman in.
Quietly he bolted the door, dragged his cheap suitcase from under the bed, and unlocked
it. From it he extracted a sixpenny Woolworth’s kettle, a packet of Fyons’ tea, a tin of
condensed milk, a tea-pot, and a cup. They were all packed in newspaper to prevent them
from chinking.
He had his regular procedure for making tea. First he half filled the kettle with water
from the jug and set it on the oil stove. Then he knelt down and spread out a piece of
newspaper. Yesterday’s tea-leaves were still in the pot, of course. He shook them out on
to the newspaper, cleaned out the pot with his thumb and folded the leaves into a bundle.
Presently he would smuggle them downstairs. That was always the most risky part —
getting rid of the used tea-leaves. It was like the difficulty murderers have in disposing of
the body. As for the cup, he always washed it in his hand basin in the morning. A squalid
business. It sickened him, sometimes. It was queer how furtively you had to live in Mrs
Wisbeach’ s house. You had the feeling that she was always watching you; and indeed,
she was given to tiptoeing up and downstairs at all hours, in hope of catching the lodgers
up to mischief. It was one of those houses where you cannot even go to the W. C. in peace
because of the feeling that somebody is listening to you.
Gordon unbolted the door again and listened intently. No one stirring. Ah! A clatter of
crockery far below. Mrs Wisbeach was washing up the supper things. Probably safe to go
down, then.
He tiptoed down, clutching the damp bundle of tea-leaves against his breast. The W. C.
was on the second floor. At the angle of the stairs he halted, listened a moment longer.
Ah! Another clatter of crockery.
All clear! Gordon Comstock, poet (‘of exceptional promise’. The Times Lit. Supp. had
said), hurriedly slipped into the W. C. , flung his tea-leaves down the waste-pipe, and
pulled the plug. Then he hurried back to his room, rebolted the door, and, with
precautions against noise, brewed himself a fresh pot of tea.
The room was passably warm by now. The tea and a cigarette worked their short-lived
magic. He began to feel a little less bored and angry. Should he do a spot of work after
all? He ought to work, of course. He always hated himself afterwards when he had
wasted a whole evening. Half unwillingly, he shoved his chair up to the table. It needed
an effort even to disturb that frightful jungle of papers. He pulled a few grimy sheets
towards him, spread them out, and looked at them. God, what a mess! Written on, scored
out, written over, scored out again, till they were like poor old hacked cancer-patients
after twenty operations. But the handwriting, where it was not crossed out, was delicate
and ‘scholarly’. With pain and trouble Gordon had acquired that ‘scholarly’ hand, so
different from the beastly copper-plate they had taught him at school.
Perhaps he WOULD work; for a little while, anyway. He rummaged in the litter of
papers. Where was that passage he had been working on yesterday? The poem was an
immensely long one — that is, it was going to be immensely long when it was finished —
two thousand lines or so, in rhyme royal, describing a day in London. London Pleasures,
its name was. It was a huge, ambitious project — the kind of thing that should only be
undertaken by people with endless leisure. Gordon had not grasped that fact when he
began the poem; he grasped it now, however. How light-heartedly he had begun it, two
years ago! When he had chucked up everything and descended into the slime of poverty,
the conception of this poem had been at least a part of his motive. He had felt so certain,
then, that he was equal to it. But somehow, almost from the start, London Pleasures had
gone wrong. It was too big for him, that was the truth. It had never really progressed, it
had simply fallen apart into a series of fragments. And out of two years’ work that was all
that he had to show — just fragments, incomplete in themselves and impossible to join
together. On every one of those sheets of paper there was some hacked scrap of verse
which had been written and rewritten and rewritten over intervals of months. There were
not five hundred lines that you could say were definitely finished. And he had lost the
power to add to it any longer; he could only tinker with this passage or that, groping now
here, now there, in its confusion. It was no longer a thing that he created, it was merely a
nightmare with which he struggled.
For the rest, in two whole years he had produced nothing except a handful of short
poems — perhaps a score in all. It was so rarely that he could attain the peace of mind in
which poetry, or prose for that matter, has got to be written. The times when he ‘could
not’ work grew commoner and commoner. Of all types of human being, only the artist
takes it upon him to say that he ‘cannot’ work. But it is quite true; there ARE times when
one cannot work. Money again, always money! Lack of money means discomfort, means
squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of
failure — above all, it means loneliness. How can you be anything but lonely on two quid
a week? And in loneliness no decent book was ever written. It was quite certain that
London Pleasures would never be the poem he had conceived — it was quite certain,
indeed, that it would never even be finished. And in the moments when he faced facts
Gordon himself was aware of this.
Yet all the same, and all the more for that very reason, he went on with it. It was
something to cling to. It was a way of hitting back at his poverty and his loneliness. And
after all, there were times when the mood of creation returned, or seemed to return. It
returned tonight, for just a little while — just as long as it takes to smoke two cigarettes.
With smoke tickling his lungs, he abstracted himself from the mean and actual world. He
drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written. The gas-jet sang soothing
overhead. Words became vivid and momentous things. A couplet, written a year ago and
left as unfinished, caught his eye with a note of doubt. He repeated it to himself, over and
over. It was wrong, somehow. It had seemed all right, a year ago; now, on the other hand,
it seemed subtly vulgar. He rummaged among the sheets of foolscap till he found one that
had nothing written on the back, turned it over, wrote the couplet out anew, wrote a
dozen different versions of it, repeated each of them over and over to himself. Finally
there was none that satisfied him. The couplet would have to go. It was cheap and vulgar.
He found the original sheet of paper and scored the couplet out with thick lines. And in
doing this there was a sense of achievement, of time not wasted, as though the destruction
of much labour were in some way an act of creation.
Suddenly a double knock deep below made the whole house rattle. Gordon started. His
mind fled upwards from the abyss. The post! London Pleasures was forgotten.
His heart fluttered. Perhaps Rosemary HAD written. Besides, there were those two
poems he had sent to the magazines. One of them, indeed, he had almost given up as lost;
he had sent it to an American paper, the Californian Review, months ago. Probably they
wouldn’t even bother to send it back. But the other was with an English paper, the
Primrose Quarterly. He had wild hopes of that one. The Primrose Quarterly was one of
those poisonous literary papers in which the fashionable Nancy Boy and the professional
Roman Catholic walk bras dessus, bras dessous. It was also by a long way the most
influential literary paper in England. You were a made man once you had had a poem in
it. In his heart Gordon knew that the Primrose Quarterly would never print his poems. He
wasn’t up to their standard. Still, miracles sometimes happen; or, if not miracles,
accidents. After all, they’d had his poem six weeks. Would they keep it six weeks if they
didn’t mean to accept it? He tried to quell the insane hope. But at the worst there was a
chance that Rosemary had written. It was four whole days since she had written. She
wouldn’t do it, perhaps, if she knew how it disappointed him. Her letters — long, ill-spelt
letters, full of absurd jokes and protestations of love for him — meant far more to him than
she could ever understand. They were a reminder that there was still somebody in the
world who cared for him. They even made up for the times when some beast had sent
back one of his poems; and, as a matter of fact, the magazines always did send back his
poems, except Antichrist, whose editor, Ravelston, was his personal friend.
There was a shuffling below. It was always some minutes before Mrs Wisbeach brought
the letters upstairs. She liked to paw them about, feel them to see how thick they were,
read their postmarks, hold them up to the light and speculate on their contents, before
yielding them to their rightful owners. She exercised a sort of droit du seigneur over
letters. Coming to her house, they were, she felt, at least partially hers. If you had gone to
the front door and collected your own letters she would have resented it bitterly. On the
other hand, she also resented the labour of carrying them upstairs. You would hear her
footsteps very slowly ascending, and then, if there was a letter for you, there would be
loud aggrieved breathing on the landing — this to let you know that you had put Mrs
Wisbeach out of breath by dragging her up all those stairs. Finally, with a little impatient
grunt, the letters would be shoved under your door.
Mrs Wisbeach was coming up the stairs. Gordon listened. The footsteps paused on the
first floor. A letter for Flaxman. They ascended, paused again on the second floor. A
letter for the engineer. Gordon’s heart beat painfully. A letter, please God, a letter! More
footsteps. Ascending or descending? They were coming nearer, surely! Ah, no, no! The
sound grew fainter. She was going down again. The footsteps died away. No letters.
He took up his pen again. It was a quite futile gesture. She hadn’t written after all! The
little beast!
He had not the smallest intention of doing any more work. Indeed, he could
not. The disappointment had taken all the heart out of him. Only five minutes ago his
poem had still seemed to him a living thing; now he knew it unmistakably for the
worthless tripe that it was. With a kind of nervous disgust he bundled the scattered sheets
together, stacked them in an untidy heap, and dumped them on the other side of the table,
under the aspidistra. He could not even bear to look at them any longer.
He got up. It was too early to go to bed; at least, he was not in the mood for it. He pined
for a bit of amusement — something cheap and easy. A seat in the pictures, cigarettes,
beer. Useless! No money to pay for any of them. He would read King Lear and forget this
filthy century. Finally, however, it was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that he took
from the mantelpiece. Sherlock Holmes was his favourite of all books, because he knew
it by heart. The oil in the lamp was giving out and it was getting beastly cold. Gordon
dragged the quilt from his bed, wrapped it round his legs, and sat down to read. His right
elbow on the table, his hands under his coat to keep them warm, he read through ‘The
Adventure of the Speckled Band. ’ The little gas-mantle sighed above, the circular flame
of the oil lamp burned low, a thin bracket of fire, giving out no more heat than a candle.
Down in Mrs Wisbeach’s lair the clock struck half past ten. You could always hear it
striking at night. Ping-ping, ping-ping — a note of doom! The ticking of the alarm clock
on the mantelpiece became audible to Gordon again, bringing with it the consciousness of
the sinister passage of time. He looked about him. Another evening wasted. Hours, days,
years slipping by. Night after night, always the same. The lonely room, the womanless
bed; dust, cigarette ash, the aspidistra leaves. And he was thirty, nearly. In sheer self-
punishment he dragged forth a wad of London Pleasures, spread out the grimy sheets, and
looked at them as one looks at a skull for a memento mori. London Pleasures, by Gordon
Comstock, author of Mice. His magnum opus. The fruit (fruit, indeed! ) of two years’
work — that labyrinthine mess of words! And tonight’s achievement — two lines crossed
out; two lines backward instead of forward.
The lamp made a sound like a tiny hiccup and went out. With an effort Gordon stood up
and flung the quilt back on to his bed. Better get to bed, perhaps, before it got any colder.
He wandered over towards the bed. But wait. Work tomorrow. Wind the clock, set the
alarm. Nothing accomplished, nothing done, has earned a night’s repose.
It was some time before he could find the energy to undress. For a quarter of an hour,
perhaps, he lay on the bed fully dressed, his hands under his head. There was a crack on
the ceiling that resembled the map of Australia. Gordon contrived to work off his shoes
and socks without sitting up. He held up one foot and looked at it. A smallish, delicate
foot. Ineffectual, like his hands. Also, it was very dirty. It was nearly ten days since he
had a bath. Becoming ashamed of the dirtiness of his feet, he sagged into a sitting
position and undressed himself, throwing his clothes on to the floor. Then he turned out
the gas and slid between the sheets, shuddering, for he was naked. He always slept naked.
His last suit of pyjamas had gone west more than a year ago.
The clock downstairs struck eleven. As the first coldness of the sheets wore off, Gordon’s
mind went back to the poem he had begun that afternoon. He repeated in a whisper the
single stanza that was finished:
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And dark
ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward; flicked by whips of air, Torn posters flutter.
The octosyllables flicked to and fro. Click-click, click-click! The awful, mechanical
emptiness of it appalled him. It was like some futile little machine ticking over. Rhyme to
rhyme, click-click, click-click. Like the nodding of a clock-work doll. Poetry! The last
futility. He lay awake, aware of his own futility, of his thirty years, of the blind alley into
which he had led his life.
The clock struck twelve. Gordon had stretched his legs out straight. The bed had grown
warm and comfortable. The upturned beam of a car, somewhere in the street parallel to
Willowbed Road, penetrated the blind and threw into silhouette a leaf of the aspidistra,
shaped like Agamemnon’s sword.
Chapter 3
‘Gordon Comstock’ was a pretty bloody name, but then Gordon came from a pretty
bloody family. The ‘Gordon’ part of it was Scotch, of course. The prevalence of such
names nowadays is merely a part of the Scotch ification of England that has been going
on these last fifty years. ‘Gordon’, ‘Colin’, ‘Malcolm’, ‘Donald’ — these are the gifts of
Scotland to the world, along with golf, whisky, porridge, and the works of Barrie and
Stevenson.
The Comstocks belonged to the most dismal of all classes, the middle-middle class, the
landless gentry. In their miserable poverty they had not even the snobbish consolation of
regarding themselves as an ‘old’ family fallen on evil days, for they were not an ‘old’
family at all, merely one of those families which rose on the wave of Victorian prosperity
and then sank again faster than the wave itself. They had had at most fifty years of
comparative wealth, corresponding with the lifetime of Gordon’s grandfather, Samuel
Comstock — Gran’pa Comstock, as Gordon was taught to call him, though the old man
died four years before he was born.
Gran’pa Comstock was one of those people who even from the grave exert a powerful
influence. In life he was a tough old scoundrel. He plundered the proletariat and the
foreigner of fifty thousand pounds, he built himself a red brick mansion as durable as a
pyramid, and he begot twelve children, of whom eleven survived. Finally he died quite
suddenly, of a cerebral haemorrhage. In Kensal Green his children placed over him a
monolith with the following inscription:
IN EVER LOVING MEMORY OF
SAMUEL EZEKIEL COMSTOCK,
A FAITHFUL HUSBAND, A TENDER FATHER AND
AN UPRIGHT AND GODLY MAN,
WHO WAS BORN ON 9 JULY 1828, AND
DEPARTED THIS LIFE 5 SEPTEMBER 1901,
THIS STONE IS ERECTED BY
HIS SORROWING CHILDREN.
HE SLEEPS IN THE ARMS OF JESUS.
No need to repeat the blasphemous comments which everyone who had known Gran’pa
Comstock made on that last sentence. But it is worth pointing out that the chu nk of
granite on which it was inscribed weighed close on five tons and was quite certainly put
there with the intention, though not the conscious intention, of making sure that Gran’pa
Comstock shouldn’t get up from underneath it. If you want to know what a dead man’s
relatives really think of him, a good rough test is the weight of his tombstone.
The Comstocks, as Gordon knew them, were a peculiarly dull, shabby, dead-alive,
ineffectual family. They lacked vitality to an extent that was surprising. That was
Gran’pa Comstock’s doing, of course. By the time when he died all his children were
grown up and some of them were middle-aged, and he had long ago succeeded in
crushing out of them any spirit they might ever have possessed. He had lain upon them as
a garden roller lies upon daisies, and there was no chance of their flattened personalities
ever expanding again. One and all they turned out listless, gutless, unsuccessful sort of
people. None of the boys had proper professions, because Gran’pa Comstock had been at
the greatest pains to drive all of them into professions for which they were totally
unsuited. Only one of them — John, Gordon’s father — had even braved Gran’pa
Comstock to the extent of getting married during the latter’s lifetime. It was impossible to
imagine any of them making any sort of mark in the world, or creating anything, or
destroying anything, or being happy, or vividly unhappy, or fully alive, or even earning a
decent income. They just drifted along in an atmosphere of semi-genteel failure. They
were one of those depressing families, so common among the middle-middle classes, in
which NOTHING EVER HAPPENS.
From his earliest childhood Gordon’s relatives had depressed him horribly. When he was
a little boy he still had great numbers of uncles and aunts living. They were all more or
less alike — grey, shabby, joyless people, all rather sickly in health and all perpetually
harassed by money-worries which fizzled along without ever reaching the sensational
explosion of bankruptcy. It was noticeable even then that they had lost all impulse to
reproduce themselves. Really vital people, whether they have money or whether they
haven’t, multiply almost as automatically as animals. Gran’pa Comstock, for instance,
himself one of a litter of twelve, had produced eleven progeny. Yet all those eleven
produced only two progeny between them, and those two — Gordon and his sister Julia —
had produced, by 1934, not even one. Gordon, last of the Comstocks, was born in 1905,
an unintended child; and thereafter, in thirty long, long years, there was not a single birth
in the family, only deaths. And not only in the matter of marrying and begetting, but in
every possible way, NOTHING EVER HAPPENED in the Comstock family. Every one
of them seemed doomed, as though by a curse, to a dismal, shabby, hole-and-comer
existence. None of them ever DID anything. They were the kind of people who in every
conceivable activity, even if it is only getting on to a bus, are automatically elbowed
away from the heart of things. All of them, of course, were hopeless fools about money.
Gran’pa Comstock had finally divided his money among them more or less equally, so
that each received, after the sale of the red-brick mansion, round about five thousand
pounds. And no sooner was Gran’pa Comstock underground than they began to fritter
their money away. None of them had the guts to lose it in sensational ways such as
squandering it on women or at the races; they simply dribbled it away and dribbled it
away, the women in silly investments and the men in futile little business ventures that
petered out after a year or two, leaving a net loss. More than half of them went unmarried
to their graves. Some of the women did make rather undesirable middle-aged marriages
after their father was dead, but the men, because of their incapacity to earn a proper
living, were the kind who ‘can’t afford’ to marry. None of them, except Gordon’s Aunt
Angela, ever had so much as a home to call their own; they were the kind of people who
live in godless ‘rooms’ and tomb-like boarding-houses. And year after year they died off
and died off, of dingy but expensive little diseases that swallowed up the last penny of
their capital. One of the women, Gordon’s Aunt Charlotte, wandered off into the Mental
Home at Clapham in 1916. The Mental Homes of England, how chock-a-block they
stand! And it is above all derelict spinsters of the middle-classes who keep them going.
By 1934 only three of that generation survived; Aunt Charlotte already mentioned, and
Aunt Angela, who by some happy chance had been induced to buy a house and a tiny
annuity in 1912, and Uncle Walter, who dingily existed on the few hundred pounds that
were left out of his five thousand and by running short-lived ‘agencies’ for this and that.
Gordon grew up in the atmosphere of cut-down clothes and stewed neck of mutton. His
father, like the other Comstocks, was a depressed and therefore depressing person, but he
had some brains and a slight literary turn. And seeing that his mind was of the literary
type and he had a shrinking horror of anything to do with figures, it had seemed only
natural to Gran’pa Comstock to make him into a chartered accountant. So he practised,
ineffectually, as a chartered accountant, and was always buying his way into partnerships
which were dissolved after a year or two, and his income fluctuated, sometimes rising to
five hundred a year and sometimes falling to two hundred, but always with a tendency to
decrease. He died in 1922, aged only fifty-six, but worn out — he had suffered from a
kidney disease for a long time past.
Since the Comstocks were genteel as well as shabby, it was considered necessary to
waste huge sums on Gordon’s ‘education’. What a fearful thing it is, this incubus of
‘education’! It means that in order to send his son to the right kind of school (that is, a
public school or an imitation of one) a middle-class man is obliged to live for years on
end in a style that would be scorned by a jobbing plumber. Gordon was sent to wretched,
pretentious schools whose fees were round about 120 pounds a year. Even these fees, of
course, meant fearful sacrifices at home. Meanwhile Julia, who was five years older than
he, received as nearly as possible no education at all. She was, indeed, sent to one or two
poor, dingy little boarding schools, but she was ‘taken away’ for good when she was
sixteen. Gordon was ‘the boy’ and Julia was ‘the girl’, and it seemed natural to everyone
that ‘the girl’ should be sacrificed to ‘the boy’. Moreover, it had early been decided in the
family that Gordon was ‘clever’. Gordon, with his wonderful ‘cleverness’, was to win
scholarships, make a brilliant success in life, and retrieve the family fortunes — that was
the theory, and no one believed in it more firmly than Julia. Julia was a tall, ungainly girl,
much taller than Gordon, with a thin face and a neck just a little too long — one of those
girls who even at their most youthful remind one irresistibly of a goose. But her nature
was simple and affectionate. She was a self-effacing, home-keeping, ironing, darning,
and mending kind of girl, a natural spinster-soul. Even at sixteen she had ‘old maid’
written all over her. She idolized Gordon. All through his childhood she watched over
him, nursed him, spoiled him, went in rags so that he might have the right clothes to go to
school in, saved up her wretched pocket-money to buy him Christmas presents and
birthday presents. And of course he repaid her, as soon as he was old enough, by
despising her because she was not pretty and not ‘clever’.
Even at the third-rate schools to which Gordon was sent nearly all the boys were richer
than himself They soon found out his poverty, of course, and gave him hell because of it.
Probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school among
children richer than itself. A child conscious of poverty will suffer snobbish agonies such
as a grown-up person can scarcely imagine. In those days, especially at his preparatory
school, Gordon’s life had been one long conspiracy to keep his end up and pretend that
his parents were richer than they were. Ah, the humiliations of those days! That awful
business, for instance, at the beginning of each term, when you had to ‘give in’ to the
headmaster, publicly, the money you had brought back with you; and the contemptuous,
cruel sniggers from the other boys when you didn’t ‘give in’ ten bob or more. And the
time when the others found out that Gordon was wearing a ready-made suit which had
cost thirty-five shillings! The times that Gordon dreaded most of all were when his
parents came down to see him. Gordon, in those days still a believer, used actually to
pray that his parents wouldn’t come down to school. His father, especially, was the kind
of father you couldn’t help being ashamed of; a cadaverous, despondent man, with a bad
stoop, his clothes dismally shabby and hopelessly out of date. He carried about with him
an atmosphere of failure, worry, and boredom. And he had such a dreadful habit, when he
was saying good-bye, of tipping Gordon half a crown right in front of the other boys, so
that everyone could see that it was only half a crown and not, as it ought to have been, ten
bob! Even twenty years afterwards the memory of that school made Gordon shudder.
The first effect of all this was to give him a crawling reverence for money. In those days
he actually hated his poverty-stricken relatives — his father and mother, Julia, everybody.
He hated them for their dingy homes, their dowdiness, their joyless attitude to life, their
endless worrying and groaning over threepences and sixpences. By far the commonest
phrase in the Comstock household was, ‘We can’t afford it. ’ In those days he longed for
money as only a child can long. Why SHOULDN’T one have decent clothes and plenty
of sweets and go to the pictures as often as one wanted to? He blamed his parents for
their poverty as though they had been poor on purpose. Why couldn’t they be like other
boys’ parents? They PREFERRED being poor, it seemed to him. That is how a child’s
mind works.
But as he grew older he grew — not less unreasonable, exactly, but unreasonable in a
different way. By this time he had found his feet at school and was less violently
oppressed. He never was very successful at school — he did no work and won no
scholarships — but he managed to develop his brain along the lines that suited it. He read
the books which the headmaster denounced from the pulpit, and developed unorthodox
opinions about the C. of E. , patriotism, and the Old Boys’ tie. Also he began writing
poetry. He even, after a year or two, began to send poems to the Athenaeum, the New
Age, and the Weekly Westminster; but they were invariably rejected. Of course there
were other boys of similar type with whom he associated. Every public school has its
small self-conscious intelligentsia. And at that moment, in the years just after the War,
England was so full of revolutionary opinion that even the public schools were infected
by it. The young, even those who had been too young to fight, were in a bad temper with
their elders, as well they might be; practically everyone with any brains at all was for the
moment a revolutionary. Meanwhile the old — those over sixty, say — were running in
circles like hens, squawking about ‘subversive ideas’. Gordon and his friends had quite
an exciting time with their ‘subversive ideas’. For a whole year they ran an unofficial
monthly paper called the Bolshevik, duplicated with a jellygraph. It advocated Socialism,
free love, the dismemberment of the British Empire, the abolition of the Army and Navy,
and so on and so forth. It was great fun. Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At
that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.
In a crude, boyish way, he had begun to get the hang of this money-business. At an
earlier age than most people he grasped that ALL modern commerce is a swindle.
Curiously enough, it was the advertisements in the Underground stations that first
brought it home to him. He little knew, as the biographers say, that he himself would one
day have a job in an advertising firm. But there was more to it than the mere fact that
business is a swindle. What he realized, and more clearly as time went on, was that
money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion — the
only really FELT religion — that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and
evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly
significant phrase, to MAKE GOOD. The decalogue has been reduced to two
commandments. One for the employers — the elect, the money-priesthood as it were —
‘Thou shalt make money’; the other for the employed — the slaves and underlings — ‘Thou
shalt not lose thy job. ’ It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to
his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that.
was the sole mark Gordon’s personality had left on the room.
It was beastly cold. Gordon thought he would light the oil lamp. He lifted it — it felt very
light; the spare oil can also was empty — no oil till Friday. He applied a match; a dull
yellow flame crept unwillingly round the wick. It might bum for a couple of hours, with
any luck. As Gordon threw away the match his eye fell upon the aspidistra in its grass-
green pot. It was a peculiarly mangy specimen. It had only seven leaves and never
seemed to put forth any new ones. Gordon had a sort of secret feud with the aspidistra.
Many a time he had furtively attempted to kill it — starving it of water, grinding hot
cigarette-ends against its stem, even mixing salt with its earth. But the beastly things are
practically immortal. In almost any circumstances they can preserve a wilting, diseased
existence. Gordon stood up and deliberately wiped his kerosiny fingers on the aspidistra
leaves.
At this moment Mrs Wisbeach’s voice rang shrewishly up the stairs:
‘Mister Corn-stock! ’
Gordon went to the door. ‘Yes? ’ he called down.
‘Your supper’s been waiting for you this ten minutes. Why can’t you come down and
have it, ‘stead of keeping me waiting for the washing up? ’
Gordon went down. The dining-room was on the first floor, at the back, opposite
Flaxman’s room. It was a cold, close-smelling room, twilit even at midday. There were
more aspidistras in it than Gordon had ever accurately counted. They were all over the
place — on the sideboard, on the floor, on ‘occasional’ tables; in the window there was a
sort of florist’s stand of them, blocking out the light. In the half-darkness, with aspidistras
all about you, you had the feeling of being in some sunless aquarium amid the dreary
foliage of water-flowers. Gordon’s supper was set out, waiting for him, in the circle of
white light that the cracked gas-jet cast upon the table cloth. He sat down with his back to
the fireplace (there was an aspidistra in the grate instead of a fire) and ate his plate of cold
beef and his two slices of crumbly white bread, with Canadian butter, mousetrap cheese
and Pan Yan pickle, and drank a glass of cold but musty water.
When he went back to his room the oil lamp had got going, more or less. It was hot
enough to boil a kettle by, he thought. And now for the great event of the evening — his
illicit cup of tea. He made himself a cup of tea almost every night, in the deadliest
secrecy. Mrs Wisbeach refused to give her lodgers tea with their supper, because she
‘couldn’t be bothered with hotting up extra water’, but at the same time making tea in
your bedroom was strictly forbidden. Gordon looked with disgust at the muddled papers
on the table. He told himself defiantly that he wasn’t going to do any work tonight. He
would have a cup of tea and smoke up his remaining cigarettes, and read King Lear or
Sherlock Holmes. His books were on the mantelpiece beside the alann clock —
Shakespeare in the Everyman edition, Sherlock Holmes, Villon’s poems, Roderick
Random, Les Fleurs du Mai, a pile of French novels. But he read nothing nowadays,
except Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes. Meanwhile, that cup of tea.
Gordon went to the door, pushed it ajar, and listened. No sound of Mrs Wisbeach. You
had to be very careful; she was quite capable of sneaking upstairs and catching you in the
act. This tea-making was the major household offence, next to bringing a woman in.
Quietly he bolted the door, dragged his cheap suitcase from under the bed, and unlocked
it. From it he extracted a sixpenny Woolworth’s kettle, a packet of Fyons’ tea, a tin of
condensed milk, a tea-pot, and a cup. They were all packed in newspaper to prevent them
from chinking.
He had his regular procedure for making tea. First he half filled the kettle with water
from the jug and set it on the oil stove. Then he knelt down and spread out a piece of
newspaper. Yesterday’s tea-leaves were still in the pot, of course. He shook them out on
to the newspaper, cleaned out the pot with his thumb and folded the leaves into a bundle.
Presently he would smuggle them downstairs. That was always the most risky part —
getting rid of the used tea-leaves. It was like the difficulty murderers have in disposing of
the body. As for the cup, he always washed it in his hand basin in the morning. A squalid
business. It sickened him, sometimes. It was queer how furtively you had to live in Mrs
Wisbeach’ s house. You had the feeling that she was always watching you; and indeed,
she was given to tiptoeing up and downstairs at all hours, in hope of catching the lodgers
up to mischief. It was one of those houses where you cannot even go to the W. C. in peace
because of the feeling that somebody is listening to you.
Gordon unbolted the door again and listened intently. No one stirring. Ah! A clatter of
crockery far below. Mrs Wisbeach was washing up the supper things. Probably safe to go
down, then.
He tiptoed down, clutching the damp bundle of tea-leaves against his breast. The W. C.
was on the second floor. At the angle of the stairs he halted, listened a moment longer.
Ah! Another clatter of crockery.
All clear! Gordon Comstock, poet (‘of exceptional promise’. The Times Lit. Supp. had
said), hurriedly slipped into the W. C. , flung his tea-leaves down the waste-pipe, and
pulled the plug. Then he hurried back to his room, rebolted the door, and, with
precautions against noise, brewed himself a fresh pot of tea.
The room was passably warm by now. The tea and a cigarette worked their short-lived
magic. He began to feel a little less bored and angry. Should he do a spot of work after
all? He ought to work, of course. He always hated himself afterwards when he had
wasted a whole evening. Half unwillingly, he shoved his chair up to the table. It needed
an effort even to disturb that frightful jungle of papers. He pulled a few grimy sheets
towards him, spread them out, and looked at them. God, what a mess! Written on, scored
out, written over, scored out again, till they were like poor old hacked cancer-patients
after twenty operations. But the handwriting, where it was not crossed out, was delicate
and ‘scholarly’. With pain and trouble Gordon had acquired that ‘scholarly’ hand, so
different from the beastly copper-plate they had taught him at school.
Perhaps he WOULD work; for a little while, anyway. He rummaged in the litter of
papers. Where was that passage he had been working on yesterday? The poem was an
immensely long one — that is, it was going to be immensely long when it was finished —
two thousand lines or so, in rhyme royal, describing a day in London. London Pleasures,
its name was. It was a huge, ambitious project — the kind of thing that should only be
undertaken by people with endless leisure. Gordon had not grasped that fact when he
began the poem; he grasped it now, however. How light-heartedly he had begun it, two
years ago! When he had chucked up everything and descended into the slime of poverty,
the conception of this poem had been at least a part of his motive. He had felt so certain,
then, that he was equal to it. But somehow, almost from the start, London Pleasures had
gone wrong. It was too big for him, that was the truth. It had never really progressed, it
had simply fallen apart into a series of fragments. And out of two years’ work that was all
that he had to show — just fragments, incomplete in themselves and impossible to join
together. On every one of those sheets of paper there was some hacked scrap of verse
which had been written and rewritten and rewritten over intervals of months. There were
not five hundred lines that you could say were definitely finished. And he had lost the
power to add to it any longer; he could only tinker with this passage or that, groping now
here, now there, in its confusion. It was no longer a thing that he created, it was merely a
nightmare with which he struggled.
For the rest, in two whole years he had produced nothing except a handful of short
poems — perhaps a score in all. It was so rarely that he could attain the peace of mind in
which poetry, or prose for that matter, has got to be written. The times when he ‘could
not’ work grew commoner and commoner. Of all types of human being, only the artist
takes it upon him to say that he ‘cannot’ work. But it is quite true; there ARE times when
one cannot work. Money again, always money! Lack of money means discomfort, means
squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of
failure — above all, it means loneliness. How can you be anything but lonely on two quid
a week? And in loneliness no decent book was ever written. It was quite certain that
London Pleasures would never be the poem he had conceived — it was quite certain,
indeed, that it would never even be finished. And in the moments when he faced facts
Gordon himself was aware of this.
Yet all the same, and all the more for that very reason, he went on with it. It was
something to cling to. It was a way of hitting back at his poverty and his loneliness. And
after all, there were times when the mood of creation returned, or seemed to return. It
returned tonight, for just a little while — just as long as it takes to smoke two cigarettes.
With smoke tickling his lungs, he abstracted himself from the mean and actual world. He
drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written. The gas-jet sang soothing
overhead. Words became vivid and momentous things. A couplet, written a year ago and
left as unfinished, caught his eye with a note of doubt. He repeated it to himself, over and
over. It was wrong, somehow. It had seemed all right, a year ago; now, on the other hand,
it seemed subtly vulgar. He rummaged among the sheets of foolscap till he found one that
had nothing written on the back, turned it over, wrote the couplet out anew, wrote a
dozen different versions of it, repeated each of them over and over to himself. Finally
there was none that satisfied him. The couplet would have to go. It was cheap and vulgar.
He found the original sheet of paper and scored the couplet out with thick lines. And in
doing this there was a sense of achievement, of time not wasted, as though the destruction
of much labour were in some way an act of creation.
Suddenly a double knock deep below made the whole house rattle. Gordon started. His
mind fled upwards from the abyss. The post! London Pleasures was forgotten.
His heart fluttered. Perhaps Rosemary HAD written. Besides, there were those two
poems he had sent to the magazines. One of them, indeed, he had almost given up as lost;
he had sent it to an American paper, the Californian Review, months ago. Probably they
wouldn’t even bother to send it back. But the other was with an English paper, the
Primrose Quarterly. He had wild hopes of that one. The Primrose Quarterly was one of
those poisonous literary papers in which the fashionable Nancy Boy and the professional
Roman Catholic walk bras dessus, bras dessous. It was also by a long way the most
influential literary paper in England. You were a made man once you had had a poem in
it. In his heart Gordon knew that the Primrose Quarterly would never print his poems. He
wasn’t up to their standard. Still, miracles sometimes happen; or, if not miracles,
accidents. After all, they’d had his poem six weeks. Would they keep it six weeks if they
didn’t mean to accept it? He tried to quell the insane hope. But at the worst there was a
chance that Rosemary had written. It was four whole days since she had written. She
wouldn’t do it, perhaps, if she knew how it disappointed him. Her letters — long, ill-spelt
letters, full of absurd jokes and protestations of love for him — meant far more to him than
she could ever understand. They were a reminder that there was still somebody in the
world who cared for him. They even made up for the times when some beast had sent
back one of his poems; and, as a matter of fact, the magazines always did send back his
poems, except Antichrist, whose editor, Ravelston, was his personal friend.
There was a shuffling below. It was always some minutes before Mrs Wisbeach brought
the letters upstairs. She liked to paw them about, feel them to see how thick they were,
read their postmarks, hold them up to the light and speculate on their contents, before
yielding them to their rightful owners. She exercised a sort of droit du seigneur over
letters. Coming to her house, they were, she felt, at least partially hers. If you had gone to
the front door and collected your own letters she would have resented it bitterly. On the
other hand, she also resented the labour of carrying them upstairs. You would hear her
footsteps very slowly ascending, and then, if there was a letter for you, there would be
loud aggrieved breathing on the landing — this to let you know that you had put Mrs
Wisbeach out of breath by dragging her up all those stairs. Finally, with a little impatient
grunt, the letters would be shoved under your door.
Mrs Wisbeach was coming up the stairs. Gordon listened. The footsteps paused on the
first floor. A letter for Flaxman. They ascended, paused again on the second floor. A
letter for the engineer. Gordon’s heart beat painfully. A letter, please God, a letter! More
footsteps. Ascending or descending? They were coming nearer, surely! Ah, no, no! The
sound grew fainter. She was going down again. The footsteps died away. No letters.
He took up his pen again. It was a quite futile gesture. She hadn’t written after all! The
little beast!
He had not the smallest intention of doing any more work. Indeed, he could
not. The disappointment had taken all the heart out of him. Only five minutes ago his
poem had still seemed to him a living thing; now he knew it unmistakably for the
worthless tripe that it was. With a kind of nervous disgust he bundled the scattered sheets
together, stacked them in an untidy heap, and dumped them on the other side of the table,
under the aspidistra. He could not even bear to look at them any longer.
He got up. It was too early to go to bed; at least, he was not in the mood for it. He pined
for a bit of amusement — something cheap and easy. A seat in the pictures, cigarettes,
beer. Useless! No money to pay for any of them. He would read King Lear and forget this
filthy century. Finally, however, it was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes that he took
from the mantelpiece. Sherlock Holmes was his favourite of all books, because he knew
it by heart. The oil in the lamp was giving out and it was getting beastly cold. Gordon
dragged the quilt from his bed, wrapped it round his legs, and sat down to read. His right
elbow on the table, his hands under his coat to keep them warm, he read through ‘The
Adventure of the Speckled Band. ’ The little gas-mantle sighed above, the circular flame
of the oil lamp burned low, a thin bracket of fire, giving out no more heat than a candle.
Down in Mrs Wisbeach’s lair the clock struck half past ten. You could always hear it
striking at night. Ping-ping, ping-ping — a note of doom! The ticking of the alarm clock
on the mantelpiece became audible to Gordon again, bringing with it the consciousness of
the sinister passage of time. He looked about him. Another evening wasted. Hours, days,
years slipping by. Night after night, always the same. The lonely room, the womanless
bed; dust, cigarette ash, the aspidistra leaves. And he was thirty, nearly. In sheer self-
punishment he dragged forth a wad of London Pleasures, spread out the grimy sheets, and
looked at them as one looks at a skull for a memento mori. London Pleasures, by Gordon
Comstock, author of Mice. His magnum opus. The fruit (fruit, indeed! ) of two years’
work — that labyrinthine mess of words! And tonight’s achievement — two lines crossed
out; two lines backward instead of forward.
The lamp made a sound like a tiny hiccup and went out. With an effort Gordon stood up
and flung the quilt back on to his bed. Better get to bed, perhaps, before it got any colder.
He wandered over towards the bed. But wait. Work tomorrow. Wind the clock, set the
alarm. Nothing accomplished, nothing done, has earned a night’s repose.
It was some time before he could find the energy to undress. For a quarter of an hour,
perhaps, he lay on the bed fully dressed, his hands under his head. There was a crack on
the ceiling that resembled the map of Australia. Gordon contrived to work off his shoes
and socks without sitting up. He held up one foot and looked at it. A smallish, delicate
foot. Ineffectual, like his hands. Also, it was very dirty. It was nearly ten days since he
had a bath. Becoming ashamed of the dirtiness of his feet, he sagged into a sitting
position and undressed himself, throwing his clothes on to the floor. Then he turned out
the gas and slid between the sheets, shuddering, for he was naked. He always slept naked.
His last suit of pyjamas had gone west more than a year ago.
The clock downstairs struck eleven. As the first coldness of the sheets wore off, Gordon’s
mind went back to the poem he had begun that afternoon. He repeated in a whisper the
single stanza that was finished:
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The bending poplars, newly bare, And dark
ribbons of the chimneys Veer downward; flicked by whips of air, Torn posters flutter.
The octosyllables flicked to and fro. Click-click, click-click! The awful, mechanical
emptiness of it appalled him. It was like some futile little machine ticking over. Rhyme to
rhyme, click-click, click-click. Like the nodding of a clock-work doll. Poetry! The last
futility. He lay awake, aware of his own futility, of his thirty years, of the blind alley into
which he had led his life.
The clock struck twelve. Gordon had stretched his legs out straight. The bed had grown
warm and comfortable. The upturned beam of a car, somewhere in the street parallel to
Willowbed Road, penetrated the blind and threw into silhouette a leaf of the aspidistra,
shaped like Agamemnon’s sword.
Chapter 3
‘Gordon Comstock’ was a pretty bloody name, but then Gordon came from a pretty
bloody family. The ‘Gordon’ part of it was Scotch, of course. The prevalence of such
names nowadays is merely a part of the Scotch ification of England that has been going
on these last fifty years. ‘Gordon’, ‘Colin’, ‘Malcolm’, ‘Donald’ — these are the gifts of
Scotland to the world, along with golf, whisky, porridge, and the works of Barrie and
Stevenson.
The Comstocks belonged to the most dismal of all classes, the middle-middle class, the
landless gentry. In their miserable poverty they had not even the snobbish consolation of
regarding themselves as an ‘old’ family fallen on evil days, for they were not an ‘old’
family at all, merely one of those families which rose on the wave of Victorian prosperity
and then sank again faster than the wave itself. They had had at most fifty years of
comparative wealth, corresponding with the lifetime of Gordon’s grandfather, Samuel
Comstock — Gran’pa Comstock, as Gordon was taught to call him, though the old man
died four years before he was born.
Gran’pa Comstock was one of those people who even from the grave exert a powerful
influence. In life he was a tough old scoundrel. He plundered the proletariat and the
foreigner of fifty thousand pounds, he built himself a red brick mansion as durable as a
pyramid, and he begot twelve children, of whom eleven survived. Finally he died quite
suddenly, of a cerebral haemorrhage. In Kensal Green his children placed over him a
monolith with the following inscription:
IN EVER LOVING MEMORY OF
SAMUEL EZEKIEL COMSTOCK,
A FAITHFUL HUSBAND, A TENDER FATHER AND
AN UPRIGHT AND GODLY MAN,
WHO WAS BORN ON 9 JULY 1828, AND
DEPARTED THIS LIFE 5 SEPTEMBER 1901,
THIS STONE IS ERECTED BY
HIS SORROWING CHILDREN.
HE SLEEPS IN THE ARMS OF JESUS.
No need to repeat the blasphemous comments which everyone who had known Gran’pa
Comstock made on that last sentence. But it is worth pointing out that the chu nk of
granite on which it was inscribed weighed close on five tons and was quite certainly put
there with the intention, though not the conscious intention, of making sure that Gran’pa
Comstock shouldn’t get up from underneath it. If you want to know what a dead man’s
relatives really think of him, a good rough test is the weight of his tombstone.
The Comstocks, as Gordon knew them, were a peculiarly dull, shabby, dead-alive,
ineffectual family. They lacked vitality to an extent that was surprising. That was
Gran’pa Comstock’s doing, of course. By the time when he died all his children were
grown up and some of them were middle-aged, and he had long ago succeeded in
crushing out of them any spirit they might ever have possessed. He had lain upon them as
a garden roller lies upon daisies, and there was no chance of their flattened personalities
ever expanding again. One and all they turned out listless, gutless, unsuccessful sort of
people. None of the boys had proper professions, because Gran’pa Comstock had been at
the greatest pains to drive all of them into professions for which they were totally
unsuited. Only one of them — John, Gordon’s father — had even braved Gran’pa
Comstock to the extent of getting married during the latter’s lifetime. It was impossible to
imagine any of them making any sort of mark in the world, or creating anything, or
destroying anything, or being happy, or vividly unhappy, or fully alive, or even earning a
decent income. They just drifted along in an atmosphere of semi-genteel failure. They
were one of those depressing families, so common among the middle-middle classes, in
which NOTHING EVER HAPPENS.
From his earliest childhood Gordon’s relatives had depressed him horribly. When he was
a little boy he still had great numbers of uncles and aunts living. They were all more or
less alike — grey, shabby, joyless people, all rather sickly in health and all perpetually
harassed by money-worries which fizzled along without ever reaching the sensational
explosion of bankruptcy. It was noticeable even then that they had lost all impulse to
reproduce themselves. Really vital people, whether they have money or whether they
haven’t, multiply almost as automatically as animals. Gran’pa Comstock, for instance,
himself one of a litter of twelve, had produced eleven progeny. Yet all those eleven
produced only two progeny between them, and those two — Gordon and his sister Julia —
had produced, by 1934, not even one. Gordon, last of the Comstocks, was born in 1905,
an unintended child; and thereafter, in thirty long, long years, there was not a single birth
in the family, only deaths. And not only in the matter of marrying and begetting, but in
every possible way, NOTHING EVER HAPPENED in the Comstock family. Every one
of them seemed doomed, as though by a curse, to a dismal, shabby, hole-and-comer
existence. None of them ever DID anything. They were the kind of people who in every
conceivable activity, even if it is only getting on to a bus, are automatically elbowed
away from the heart of things. All of them, of course, were hopeless fools about money.
Gran’pa Comstock had finally divided his money among them more or less equally, so
that each received, after the sale of the red-brick mansion, round about five thousand
pounds. And no sooner was Gran’pa Comstock underground than they began to fritter
their money away. None of them had the guts to lose it in sensational ways such as
squandering it on women or at the races; they simply dribbled it away and dribbled it
away, the women in silly investments and the men in futile little business ventures that
petered out after a year or two, leaving a net loss. More than half of them went unmarried
to their graves. Some of the women did make rather undesirable middle-aged marriages
after their father was dead, but the men, because of their incapacity to earn a proper
living, were the kind who ‘can’t afford’ to marry. None of them, except Gordon’s Aunt
Angela, ever had so much as a home to call their own; they were the kind of people who
live in godless ‘rooms’ and tomb-like boarding-houses. And year after year they died off
and died off, of dingy but expensive little diseases that swallowed up the last penny of
their capital. One of the women, Gordon’s Aunt Charlotte, wandered off into the Mental
Home at Clapham in 1916. The Mental Homes of England, how chock-a-block they
stand! And it is above all derelict spinsters of the middle-classes who keep them going.
By 1934 only three of that generation survived; Aunt Charlotte already mentioned, and
Aunt Angela, who by some happy chance had been induced to buy a house and a tiny
annuity in 1912, and Uncle Walter, who dingily existed on the few hundred pounds that
were left out of his five thousand and by running short-lived ‘agencies’ for this and that.
Gordon grew up in the atmosphere of cut-down clothes and stewed neck of mutton. His
father, like the other Comstocks, was a depressed and therefore depressing person, but he
had some brains and a slight literary turn. And seeing that his mind was of the literary
type and he had a shrinking horror of anything to do with figures, it had seemed only
natural to Gran’pa Comstock to make him into a chartered accountant. So he practised,
ineffectually, as a chartered accountant, and was always buying his way into partnerships
which were dissolved after a year or two, and his income fluctuated, sometimes rising to
five hundred a year and sometimes falling to two hundred, but always with a tendency to
decrease. He died in 1922, aged only fifty-six, but worn out — he had suffered from a
kidney disease for a long time past.
Since the Comstocks were genteel as well as shabby, it was considered necessary to
waste huge sums on Gordon’s ‘education’. What a fearful thing it is, this incubus of
‘education’! It means that in order to send his son to the right kind of school (that is, a
public school or an imitation of one) a middle-class man is obliged to live for years on
end in a style that would be scorned by a jobbing plumber. Gordon was sent to wretched,
pretentious schools whose fees were round about 120 pounds a year. Even these fees, of
course, meant fearful sacrifices at home. Meanwhile Julia, who was five years older than
he, received as nearly as possible no education at all. She was, indeed, sent to one or two
poor, dingy little boarding schools, but she was ‘taken away’ for good when she was
sixteen. Gordon was ‘the boy’ and Julia was ‘the girl’, and it seemed natural to everyone
that ‘the girl’ should be sacrificed to ‘the boy’. Moreover, it had early been decided in the
family that Gordon was ‘clever’. Gordon, with his wonderful ‘cleverness’, was to win
scholarships, make a brilliant success in life, and retrieve the family fortunes — that was
the theory, and no one believed in it more firmly than Julia. Julia was a tall, ungainly girl,
much taller than Gordon, with a thin face and a neck just a little too long — one of those
girls who even at their most youthful remind one irresistibly of a goose. But her nature
was simple and affectionate. She was a self-effacing, home-keeping, ironing, darning,
and mending kind of girl, a natural spinster-soul. Even at sixteen she had ‘old maid’
written all over her. She idolized Gordon. All through his childhood she watched over
him, nursed him, spoiled him, went in rags so that he might have the right clothes to go to
school in, saved up her wretched pocket-money to buy him Christmas presents and
birthday presents. And of course he repaid her, as soon as he was old enough, by
despising her because she was not pretty and not ‘clever’.
Even at the third-rate schools to which Gordon was sent nearly all the boys were richer
than himself They soon found out his poverty, of course, and gave him hell because of it.
Probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school among
children richer than itself. A child conscious of poverty will suffer snobbish agonies such
as a grown-up person can scarcely imagine. In those days, especially at his preparatory
school, Gordon’s life had been one long conspiracy to keep his end up and pretend that
his parents were richer than they were. Ah, the humiliations of those days! That awful
business, for instance, at the beginning of each term, when you had to ‘give in’ to the
headmaster, publicly, the money you had brought back with you; and the contemptuous,
cruel sniggers from the other boys when you didn’t ‘give in’ ten bob or more. And the
time when the others found out that Gordon was wearing a ready-made suit which had
cost thirty-five shillings! The times that Gordon dreaded most of all were when his
parents came down to see him. Gordon, in those days still a believer, used actually to
pray that his parents wouldn’t come down to school. His father, especially, was the kind
of father you couldn’t help being ashamed of; a cadaverous, despondent man, with a bad
stoop, his clothes dismally shabby and hopelessly out of date. He carried about with him
an atmosphere of failure, worry, and boredom. And he had such a dreadful habit, when he
was saying good-bye, of tipping Gordon half a crown right in front of the other boys, so
that everyone could see that it was only half a crown and not, as it ought to have been, ten
bob! Even twenty years afterwards the memory of that school made Gordon shudder.
The first effect of all this was to give him a crawling reverence for money. In those days
he actually hated his poverty-stricken relatives — his father and mother, Julia, everybody.
He hated them for their dingy homes, their dowdiness, their joyless attitude to life, their
endless worrying and groaning over threepences and sixpences. By far the commonest
phrase in the Comstock household was, ‘We can’t afford it. ’ In those days he longed for
money as only a child can long. Why SHOULDN’T one have decent clothes and plenty
of sweets and go to the pictures as often as one wanted to? He blamed his parents for
their poverty as though they had been poor on purpose. Why couldn’t they be like other
boys’ parents? They PREFERRED being poor, it seemed to him. That is how a child’s
mind works.
But as he grew older he grew — not less unreasonable, exactly, but unreasonable in a
different way. By this time he had found his feet at school and was less violently
oppressed. He never was very successful at school — he did no work and won no
scholarships — but he managed to develop his brain along the lines that suited it. He read
the books which the headmaster denounced from the pulpit, and developed unorthodox
opinions about the C. of E. , patriotism, and the Old Boys’ tie. Also he began writing
poetry. He even, after a year or two, began to send poems to the Athenaeum, the New
Age, and the Weekly Westminster; but they were invariably rejected. Of course there
were other boys of similar type with whom he associated. Every public school has its
small self-conscious intelligentsia. And at that moment, in the years just after the War,
England was so full of revolutionary opinion that even the public schools were infected
by it. The young, even those who had been too young to fight, were in a bad temper with
their elders, as well they might be; practically everyone with any brains at all was for the
moment a revolutionary. Meanwhile the old — those over sixty, say — were running in
circles like hens, squawking about ‘subversive ideas’. Gordon and his friends had quite
an exciting time with their ‘subversive ideas’. For a whole year they ran an unofficial
monthly paper called the Bolshevik, duplicated with a jellygraph. It advocated Socialism,
free love, the dismemberment of the British Empire, the abolition of the Army and Navy,
and so on and so forth. It was great fun. Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At
that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.
In a crude, boyish way, he had begun to get the hang of this money-business. At an
earlier age than most people he grasped that ALL modern commerce is a swindle.
Curiously enough, it was the advertisements in the Underground stations that first
brought it home to him. He little knew, as the biographers say, that he himself would one
day have a job in an advertising firm. But there was more to it than the mere fact that
business is a swindle. What he realized, and more clearly as time went on, was that
money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion — the
only really FELT religion — that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and
evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly
significant phrase, to MAKE GOOD. The decalogue has been reduced to two
commandments. One for the employers — the elect, the money-priesthood as it were —
‘Thou shalt make money’; the other for the employed — the slaves and underlings — ‘Thou
shalt not lose thy job. ’ It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to
his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that.
