Title: Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Author: George Orwell
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0200021.txt
Language:   English
Date first posted: January 2002
Date most recently updated: July 2002

This eBook was produced by: Don Lainson dlainson@sympatico.ca

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Title:      Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Author:     George Orwell





Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not
money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.  And
though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries,
and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could
remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing.  And though I
bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to
be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing.  Money
suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not
itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her
own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in
iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth
all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . .  And now
abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these
is money.

I Corinthians xiii (adapted)



1


The clock struck half past two.  In the little office at the back
of Mr McKechnie's bookshop, Gordon--Gordon Comstock, last member
of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten
already--lounged across the table, pushing a four-penny packet of
Player's Weights open and shut with his thumb.

The ding-dong of another, remoter clock--from the Prince of Wales,
the other side of the street--rippled the stagnant air.  Gordon
made an effort, sat upright, and stowed his packet of cigarettes
away in his inside pocket.  He was perishing for a smoke.  However,
there were only four cigarettes left.  Today was Wednesday and he
had no money coming to him till Friday.  It would be too bloody to
be without tobacco tonight as well as all tomorrow.

Bored in advance by tomorrow's tobaccoless hours, he got up and
moved towards the door--a small frail figure, with delicate bones
and fretful movements.  His coat was out at elbow in the right
sleeve and its middle button was missing; his ready-made flannel
trousers were stained and shapeless.  Even from above you could see
that his shoes needed resoling.

The money clinked in his trouser pocket as he got up.  He knew
the precise sum that was there.  Fivepence halfpenny--twopence
halfpenny and a Joey.  He paused, took out the miserable little
threepenny-bit, and looked at it.  Beastly, useless thing!  And
bloody fool to have taken it!  It had happened yesterday, when he
was buying cigarettes.  'Don't mind a threepenny-bit, do you, sir?'
the little bitch of a shop-girl had chirped.  And of course he had
let her give it him.  'Oh no, not at all!' he had said--fool,
bloody fool!

His heart sickened to think that he had only fivepence halfpenny in
the world, threepence of which couldn't even be spent.  Because how
can you buy anything with a threepenny-bit?  It isn't a coin, it's
the answer to a riddle.  You look such a fool when you take it out
of your pocket, unless it's in among a whole handful of other
coins.  'How much?' you say.  'Threepence,' the shop-girl says.
And then you feel all round your pocket and fish out that absurd
little thing, all by itself, sticking on the end of your finger
like a tiddley-wink.  The shop-girl sniffs.  She spots immediately
that it's your last threepence in the world.  You see her glance
quickly at it--she's wondering whether there's a piece of Christmas
pudding still sticking to it.  And you stalk out with your nose in
the air, and can't ever go to that shop again.  No!  We won't spend
our Joey.  Twopence halfpenny left--twopence halfpenny to last till
Friday.

This was the lonely after-dinner hour, when few or no customers
were to be expected.  He was alone with seven thousand books.  The
small dark room, smelling of dust and decayed paper, that gave on
the office, was filled to the brim with books, mostly aged and
unsaleable.  On the top shelves near the ceiling the quarto volumes
of extinct encyclopedias slumbered on their sides in piles like the
tiered coffins in common graves.  Gordon pushed aside the blue,
dust-sodden curtains that served as a doorway to the next room.
This, better lighted than the other, contained the lending library.
It was one of those 'twopenny no-deposit' libraries beloved of
book-pinchers.  No books in it except novels, of course.  And WHAT
novels!  But that too was a matter of course.

Eight hundred strong, the novels lined the room on three sides
ceiling-high, row upon row of gaudy oblong backs, as though the
walls had been built of many-coloured bricks laid upright.  They
were arranged alphabetically.  Arlen, Burroughs, Deeping, Dell,
Frankau, Galsworthy, Gibbs, Priestley, Sapper, Walpole.  Gordon
eyed them with inert hatred.  At this moment he hated all books,
and novels most of all.  Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-
baked trash massed together in one place.  Pudding, suet pudding.
Eight hundred slabs of pudding, walling him in--a vault of
puddingstone.  The thought was oppressive.  He moved on through the
open doorway into the front part of the shop.  In doing so, he
smoothed his hair.  It was an habitual movement.  After all, there
might be girls outside the glass door.  Gordon was not impressive
to look at.  He was just five feet seven inches high, and because
his hair was usually too long he gave the impression that his head
was a little too big for his body.  He was never quite unconscious
of his small stature.  When he knew that anyone was looking at him
he carried himself very upright, throwing a chest, with a you-be-
damned air which occasionally deceived simple people.

However, there was nobody outside.  The front room, unlike the rest
of the shop, was smart and expensive-looking, and it contained
about two thousand books, exclusive of those in the window.  On the
right there was a glass showcase in which children's books were
kept.  Gordon averted his eyes from a beastly Rackhamesque dust-
jacket; elvish children tripping Wendily through a bluebell glade.
He gazed out through the glass door.  A foul day, and the wind
rising.  The sky was leaden, the cobbles of the street were slimy.
It was St Andrew's day, the thirtieth of November.  McKechnie's
stood on a corner, on a sort of shapeless square where four streets
converged.  To the left, just within sight from the door, stood a
great elm-tree, leafless now, its multitudinous twigs making sepia-
coloured lace against the sky.  Opposite, next to the Prince of
Wales, were tall hoardings covered with ads for patent foods and
patent medicines.  A gallery of monstrous doll-faces--pink vacuous
faces, full of goofy optimism.  Q.T. Sauce, Truweet Breakfast
Crisps ('Kiddies clamour for their Breakfast Crisps'), Kangaroo
Burgundy, Vitamalt Chocolate, Bovex.  Of them all, the Bovex one
oppressed Gordon the most.  A spectacled rat-faced clerk, with
patent-leather hair, sitting at a cafe table grinning over a white
mug of Bovex.  'Corner Table enjoys his meal with Bovex', the
legend ran.

Gordon shortened the focus of his eyes.  From the dust-dulled pane
the reflection of his own face looked back at him.  Not a good
face.  Not thirty yet, but moth-eaten already.  Very pale, with
bitter, ineradicable lines.  What people call a 'good' forehead--
high, that is--but a small pointed chin, so that the face as a
whole was pear-shaped rather than oval.  Hair mouse-coloured and
unkempt, mouth unamiable, eyes hazel inclining to green.  He
lengthened the focus of his eyes again.  He hated mirrors nowadays.
Outside, all was bleak and wintry.  A tram, like a raucous swan of
steel, glided groaning over the cobbles, and in its wake the wind
swept a debris of trampled leaves.  The twigs of the elm-tree were
swirling, straining eastward.  The poster that advertised Q.T.
Sauce was torn at the edge; a ribbon of paper fluttered fitfully
like a tiny pennant.  In the side street too, to the right, the
naked poplars that lined the pavement bowed sharply as the wind
caught them.  A nasty raw wind.  There was a threatening note in it
as it swept over; the first growl of winter's anger.  Two lines of
a poem struggled for birth in Gordon's mind:

Sharply the something wind--for instance, threatening wind?  No,
better, menacing wind.  The menacing wind blows over--no, sweeps
over, say.

The something poplars--yielding poplars?  No, better, bending
poplars.  Assonance between bending and menacing?  No matter.  The
bending poplars, newly bare.  Good.


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


Good.  'Bare' is a sod to rhyme; however, there's always 'air',
which every poet since Chaucer has been struggling to find rhymes
for.  But the impulse died away in Gordon's mind.  He turned the
money over in his pocket.  Twopence halfpenny and a Joey--twopence
halfpenny.  His mind was sticky with boredom.  He couldn't cope
with rhymes and adjectives.  You can't, with only twopence
halfpenny in your pocket.

His eyes refocused themselves upon the posters opposite.  He had
his private reasons for hating them.  Mechanically he re-read their
slogans.  'Kangaroo Burgundy--the wine for Britons.'  'Asthma was
choking her!'  'Q.T. Sauce Keeps Hubby Smiling.'  'Hike all day on
a Slab of Vitamalt!'  'Curve Cut--the Smoke for Outdoor Men.'
'Kiddies clamour for their Breakfast Crisps.'  'Corner Table enjoys
his meal with Bovex.'

Ha!  A customer--potential, at any rate.  Gordon stiffened himself.
Standing by the door, you could get an oblique view out of the
front window without being seen yourself.  He looked the potential
customer over.

A decentish middle-aged man, black suit, bowler hat, umbrella, and
dispatch-case--provincial solicitor or Town Clerk--keeking at the
window with large pale-coloured eyes.  He wore a guilty look.
Gordon followed the direction of his eyes.  Ah!  So that was it!
He had nosed out those D. H. Lawrence first editions in the far
corner.  Pining for a bit of smut, of course.  He had heard of Lady
Chatterley afar off.  A bad face he had, Gordon thought.  Pale,
heavy, downy, with bad contours.  Welsh, by the look of him--
Nonconformist, anyway.  He had the regular Dissenting pouches round
the corners of his mouth.  At home, president of the local Purity
League or Seaside Vigilance Committee (rubber-soled slippers and
electric torch, spotting kissing couples along the beach parade),
and now up in town on the razzle.  Gordon wished he would come in.
Sell him a copy of Women in Love.  How it would disappoint him!

But no!  The Welsh solicitor had funked it.  He tucked his umbrella
under his arm and moved off with righteously turned backside.  But
doubtless tonight, when darkness hid his blushes, he'd slink into
one of the rubber-shops and buy High Jinks in a Parisian Convent,
by Sadie Blackeyes.

Gordon turned away from the door and back to the book-shelves.  In
the shelves to your left as you came out of the library the new and
nearly-new books were kept--a patch of bright colour that was meant
to catch the eye of anyone glancing through the glass door.  Their
sleek unspotted backs seemed to yearn at you from the shelves.
'Buy me, buy me!' they seemed to be saying.  Novels fresh from the
press--still unravished brides, pining for the paperknife to
deflower them--and review copies, like youthful widows, blooming
still though virgin no longer, and here and there, in sets of half
a dozen, those pathetic spinster-things, 'remainders', still
guarding hopefully their long preserv'd virginity.  Gordon turned
his eyes away from the 'remainders'.  They called up evil memories.
The single wretched little book that he himself had published, two
years ago, had sold exactly a hundred and fifty-three copies and
then been 'remaindered'; and even as a 'remainder' it hadn't sold.
He passed the new books by and paused in front of the shelves which
ran at right angles to them and which contained more second-hand
books.

Over to the right were shelves of poetry.  Those in front of him
were prose, a miscellaneous lot.  Upwards and downwards they were
graded, from clean and expensive at eye-level to cheap and dingy at
top and bottom.  In all book-shops there goes on a savage Darwinian
struggle in which the works of living men gravitate to eye-level
and the works of dead men go up or down--down to Gehenna or up to
the throne, but always away from any position where they will be
noticed.  Down in the bottom shelves the 'classics', the extinct
monsters of the Victorian age, were quietly rotting.  Scott,
Carlyle, Meredith, Ruskin, Pater, Stevenson--you could hardly read
the names upon their broad dowdy backs.  In the top shelves, almost
out of sight, slept the pudgy biographies of dukes.  Below those,
saleable still and therefore placed within reach, was 'religious'
literature--all sects and all creeds, lumped indiscriminately
together.  The World Beyond, by the author of Spirit Hands Have
Touched me.  Dean Farrar's Life of Christ.  Jesus the First
Rotarian.  Father Hilaire Chestnut's latest book of R. C.
propaganda.  Religion always sells provided it is soppy enough.
Below, exactly at eye-level, was the contemporary stuff.
Priestley's latest.  Dinky little books of reprinted 'middles'.
Cheer-up 'humour' from Herbert and Knox and Milne.  Some highbrow
stuff as well.  A novel or two by Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.
Smart pseudo-Strachey predigested biographies.  Snooty, refined
books on safe painters and safe poets by those moneyed young beasts
who glide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and from Cambridge
to the literary reviews.

Dull-eyed, he gazed at the wall of books.  He hated the whole lot
of them, old and new, highbrow and lowbrow, snooty and chirpy.  The
mere sight of them brought home to him his own sterility.  For here
was he, supposedly a 'writer', and he couldn't even 'write'!  It
wasn't merely a question of not getting published; it was that he
produced nothing, or next to nothing.  And all that tripe
cluttering the shelves--well, at any rate it existed; it was an
achievement of sorts.  Even the Dells and Deepings do at least turn
out their yearly acre of print.  But it was the snooty 'cultured'
kind of books that he hated the worst.  Books of criticism and
belles-lettres.  The kind of thing that those moneyed young beasts
from Cambridge write almost in their sleep--and that Gordon himself
might have written if he had had a little more money.  Money and
culture!  In a country like England you can no more be cultured
without money than you can join the Cavalry Club.  With the same
instinct that makes a child waggle a loose tooth, he took out a
snooty-looking volume--Some Aspects of the Italian Baroque--opened
it, read a paragraph, and shoved it back with mingled loathing and
envy.  That devastating omniscience!  That noxious, horn-spectacled
refinement!  And the money that such refinement means!  For after
all, what is there behind it, except money?  Money for the right
kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure
and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy.  Money writes books,
money sells them.  Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me
money, only money.

He jingled the coins in his pocket.  He was nearly thirty and had
accomplished nothing; only his miserable book of poems that had
fallen flatter than any pancake.  And ever since, for two whole
years, he had been struggling in the labyrinth of a dreadful book
that never got any further, and which, as he knew in his moments of
clarity, never would get any further.  It was the lack of money,
simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the power to 'write'.
He clung to that as to an article of faith.  Money, money, all is
money!  Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put
heart in you?  Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all
got to be paid for in hard cash.

Nevertheless, as he looked along the shelves he felt himself a
little comforted.  So many of the books were faded and unreadable.
After all, we're all in the same boat.  Memento mori.  For you and
for me and for the snooty young men from Cambridge, the same
oblivion waits--though doubtless it'll wait rather longer for those
snooty young men from Cambridge.  He looked at the time-dulled
'classics' near his feet.  Dead, all dead.  Carlyle and Ruskin and
Meredith and Stevenson--all are dead, God rot them.  He glanced
over their faded titles.  Collected Letters of Robert Louis
Stevenson.  Ha, ha!  That's good.  Collected Letters of Robert
Louis Stevenson!  Its top edge was black with dust.  Dust thou art,
to dust returnest.  Gordon kicked Stevenson's buckram backside.
Art there, old false-penny?  You're cold meat, if ever Scotchman
was.

Ping!  The shop bell.  Gordon turned round.  Two customers, for the
library.

A dejected, round-shouldered, lower-class woman, looking like a
draggled duck nosing among garbage, seeped in, fumbling with a rush
basket.  In her wake hopped a plump little sparrow of a woman, red-
cheeked, middle-middle class, carrying under her arm a copy of The
Forsyte Saga--title outwards, so that passers-by could spot her for
a high-brow.

Gordon had taken off his sour expression.  He greeted them with the
homey, family-doctor geniality reserved for library-subscribers.

'Good afternoon, Mrs Weaver.  Good afternoon, Mrs Penn.  What
terrible weather!'

'Shocking!' said Mrs Penn.

He stood aside to let them pass.  Mrs Weaver upset her rush basket
and spilled on to the floor a much-thumbed copy of Ethel M. Dell's
Silver Wedding.  Mrs Penn's bright bird-eye lighted upon it.
Behind Mrs Weaver's back she smiled up to Gordon, archly, as
highbrow to highbrow.  Dell!  The lowness of it!  The books these
lower classes read!  Understandingly, he smiled back.  They passed
into the library, highbrow to highbrow smiling.

Mrs Penn laid The Forsyte Saga on the table and turned her sparrow-
bosom upon Gordon.  She was always very affable to Gordon.  She
addressed him as Mister Comstock, shopwalker though he was, and
held literary conversations with him.  There was the free-masonry
of highbrows between them.

'I hope you enjoyed The Forsyte Saga, Mrs Penn?'

'What a perfectly MARVELLOUS achievement that book is, Mr Comstock!
Do you know that that makes the fourth time I've read it?  An epic,
a real epic!'

Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they
were in alphabetical order.

'I don't know what to 'ave this week, that I don't,' she mumbled
through untidy lips.  'My daughter she keeps on at me to 'ave a try
at Deeping.  She's great on Deeping, my daughter is.  But my son-
in-law, now, 'e's more for Burroughs.  I don't know, I'm sure.'

A spasm passed over Mrs Penn's face at the mention of Burroughs.
She turned her back markedly on Mrs Weaver.

'What I feel, Mr Comstock, is that there's something so BIG about
Galsworthy.  He's so broad, so universal, and yet at the same time
so thoroughly English in spirit, so HUMAN.  His books are real
HUMAN documents.'

'And Priestley, too,' said Gordon.  'I think Priestley's such an
awfully fine writer, don't you?'

'Oh, he is!  So big, so broad, so human!  And so essentially
English!'

Mrs Weaver pursed her lips.  Behind them were three isolated yellow
teeth.

'I think p'raps I can do better'n 'ave another Dell,' she said.
'You 'ave got some more Dells, 'aven't you?  I DO enjoy a good read
of Dell, I must say.  I says to my daughter, I says, "You can keep
your Deepings and your Burroughses.  Give me Dell," I says.'

Ding Dong Dell!  Dukes and dogwhips!  Mrs Penn's eye signalled
highbrow irony.  Gordon returned her signal.  Keep in with Mrs
Penn!  A good, steady customer.

'Oh, certainly, Mrs Weaver.  We've got a whole shelf by Ethel M.
Dell.  Would you like The Desire of his Life?  Or perhaps you've
read that.  Then what about The Alter of Honour?'

'I wonder whether you have Hugh Walpole's latest book?' said Mrs
Penn.  'I feel in the mood this week for something epic, something
BIG.  Now Walpole, you know, I consider a really GREAT writer, I
put him second only to Galsworthy.  There's something so BIG about
him.  And yet he's so human with it.'

'And so essentially English,' said Gordon.

'Oh, of course!  So essentially English!'

'I b'lieve I'll jest 'ave The Way of an Eagle over again,' said Mrs
Weaver finally.  'You don't never seem to get tired of The Way of
an Eagle, do you, now?'

'It's certainly astonishingly popular,' said Gordon, diplomatically,
his eye on Mrs Penn.

'Oh, asTONishingly!' echoed Mrs Penn, ironically, her eye on
Gordon.

He took their twopences and sent them happy away, Mrs Penn with
Walpole's Rogue Herries and Mrs Weaver with The Way of an Eagle.

Soon he had wandered back to the other room and towards the shelves
of poetry.  A melancholy fascination, those shelves had for him.
His own wretched book was there--skied, of course, high up among
the unsaleable.  Mice, by Gordon Comstock; a sneaky little foolscap
octavo, price three and sixpence but now reduced to a bob.  Of the
thirteen B.F.s who had reviewed it (and The Times Lit. Supp. had
declared that it showed 'exceptional promise') not one had seen the
none too subtle joke of that title.  And in the two years he had
been at McKechnie's bookshop, not a single customer, not a single
one, had ever taken Mice out of its shelf.

There were fifteen or twenty shelves of poetry.  Gordon regarded
them sourly.  Dud stuff, for the most part.  A little above eye-
level, already on their way to heaven and oblivion, were the poets
of yesteryear, the stars of his earlier youth.  Yeats, Davies,
Housman, Thomas, De la Mare, Hardy.  Dead stars.  Below them,
exactly at eye-level, were the squibs of the passing minute.
Eliot, Pound, Auden, Campbell, Day Lewis, Spender.  Very damp
squibs, that lot.  Dead stars above, damp squibs below.  Shall we
ever again get a writer worth reading?  But Lawrence was all right,
and Joyce even better before he went off his coconut.  And if we
did get a writer worth reading, should we know him when we saw him,
so choked as we are with trash?

Ping!  Shop bell.  Gordon turned.  Another customer.

A youth of twenty, cherry-lipped, with gilded hair, tripped
Nancifully in.  Moneyed, obviously.  He had the golden aura of
money.  He had been in the shop before.  Gordon assumed the
gentlemanly-servile mien reserved for new customers.  He repeated
the usual formula:

'Good afternoon.  Can I do anything for you?  Are you looking for
any particular book?'

'Oh, no, not weally.'  An R-less Nancy voice.  'May I just BWOWSE?
I simply couldn't wesist your fwont window.  I have such a tewwible
weakness for bookshops!  So I just floated in--tee-hee!'

Float out again, then, Nancy.  Gordon smiled a cultured smile, as
booklover to booklover.

'Oh, please do.  We like people to look round.  Are you interested
in poetry, by any chance?'

'Oh, of course!  I ADORE poetwy!'

Of course!  Mangy little snob.  There was a sub-artistic look about
his clothes.  Gordon slid a 'slim' red volume from the poetry
shelves.

'These are just out.  They might interest you, perhaps.  They're
translations--something rather out of the common.  Translations
from the Bulgarian.'

Very subtle, that.  Now leave him to himself.  That's the proper
way with customers.  Don't hustle them; let them browse for twenty
minutes or so; then they get ashamed and buy something.  Gordon
moved to the door, discreetly, keeping out of Nancy's way; yet
casually, one hand in his pocket, with the insouciant air proper to
a gentleman.

Outside, the slimy street looked grey and drear.  From somewhere
round the corner came the clatter of hooves, a cold hollow sound.
Caught by the wind, the dark columns of smoke from the chimneys
veered over and rolled flatly down the sloping roofs.  Ah!


Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over
The bending poplars, newly bare,
And the dark ribbons of the chimneys
Veer downward tumty tumty (something like 'murky') air.


Good.  But the impulse faded.  His eye fell again upon the ad-
posters across the street.

He almost wanted to laugh at them, they were so feeble, so dead-
alive, so unappetizing.  As though anybody could be tempted by
THOSE!  Like succubi with pimply backsides.  But they depressed him
all the same.  The money-stink, everywhere the money-stink.  He
stole a glance at the Nancy, who had drifted away from the poetry
shelves and taken out a large expensive book on the Russian ballet.
He was holding it delicately between his pink non-prehensile paws,
as a squirrel holds a nut, studying the photographs.  Gordon knew
his type.  The moneyed 'artistic' young man.  Not an artist
himself, exactly, but a hanger-on of the arts; frequenter of
studios, retailer of scandal.  A nice-looking boy, though, for all
his Nancitude.  The skin at the back of his neck was as silky-
smooth as the inside of a shell.  You can't have a skin like that
under five hundred a year.  A sort of charm he had, a glamour, like
all moneyed people.  Money and charm; who shall separate them?

Gordon thought of Ravelston, his charming, rich friend, editor of
Antichrist, of whom he was extravagantly fond, and whom he did not
see so often as once in a fortnight; and of Rosemary, his girl, who
loved him--adored him, so she said--and who, all the same, had
never slept with him.  Money, once again; all is money.  All human
relationships must be purchased with money.  If you have no money,
men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care
for you or love you the last little bit that matters.  And how
right they are, after all!  For, moneyless, you are unlovable.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels.  But then,
if I haven't money, I DON'T speak with the tongues of men and of
angels.

He looked again at the ad-posters.  He really hated them this time.
That Vitamalt one, for instance!  'Hike all day on a slab of
Vitamalt!'  A youthful couple, boy and girl, in clean-minded hiking
kit, their hair picturesquely tousled by the wind, climbing a stile
against a Sussex landscape.  That girl's face!  The awful bright
tomboy cheeriness of it!  The kind of girl who goes in for Plenty
of Clean Fun.  Windswept.  Tight khaki shorts but that doesn't mean
you can pinch her backside.  And next to them--Corner Table.
'Corner Table enjoys his meal with Bovex'.  Gordon examined the
thing with the intimacy of hatred.  The idiotic grinning face, like
the face of a self-satisfied rat, the slick black hair, the silly
spectacles.  Corner Table, heir of the ages; victor of Waterloo,
Corner Table, Modern man as his master want him to be.  A docile
little porker, sitting in the money-sty, drinking Bovex.

Faces passed, wind-yellowed.  A tram boomed across the square, and
the clock over the Prince of Wales struck three.  A couple of old
creatures, a tramp or a beggar and his wife, in long greasy
overcoats that reached almost to the ground, were shuffling towards
the shop.  Book-pinchers, by the look of them.  Better keep an eye
on the boxes outside.  The old man halted on the kerb a few yards
away while his wife came to the door.  She pushed it open and
looked up at Gordon, between grey strings of hair, with a sort of
hopeful malevolence.

'Ju buy books?' she demanded hoarsely.

'Sometimes.  It depends what books they are.'

'I gossome LOVELY books 'ere.'

She came in, shutting the door with a clang.  The Nancy glanced
over his shoulder distastefully and moved a step or two away, into
the corner.  The old woman had produced a greasy little sack from
under her overcoat.  She moved confidentially nearer to Gordon.
She smelt of very, very old breadcrusts.

'Will you 'ave 'em?' she said, clasping the neck of the sack.
'Only 'alf a crown the lot.'

'What are they?  Let me see them, please.'

'LOVELY books, they are,' she breathed, bending over to open the
sack and emitting a sudden very powerful whiff of breadcrusts.

''Ere!' she said, and thrust an armful of filthy-looking books
almost into Gordon's face.

They were an 1884 edition of Charlotte M. Yonge's novels, and had
the appearance of having been slept on for many years.  Gordon
stepped back, suddenly revolted.

'We can't possibly buy those,' he said shortly.

'Can't buy 'em?  WHY can't yer buy 'em?'

'Because they're no use to us.  We can't sell that kind of thing.'

'Wotcher make me take 'em out o' me bag for, then?' demanded the
old woman ferociously.

Gordon made a detour round her, to avoid the smell, and held the
door open, silently.  No use arguing.  You had people of this type
coming into the shop all day long.  The old woman made off,
mumbling, with malevolence in the hump of her shoulders, and joined
her husband.  He paused on the kerb to cough, so fruitily that you
could hear him through the door.  A clot of phlegm, like a little
white tongue, came slowly out between his lips and was ejected into
the gutter.  Then the two old creatures shuffled away, beetle-like
in the long greasy overcoats that hid everything except their feet.

Gordon watched them go.  They were just by-products.  The throw-
outs of the money-god.  All over London, by tens of thousands,
draggled old beasts of that description; creeping like unclean
beetles to the grave.

He gazed out at the graceless street.  At this moment it seemed to
him that in a street like this, in a town like this, every life
that is lived must be meaningless and intolerable.  The sense of
disintegration, of decay, that is endemic in our time, was strong
upon him.  Somehow it was mixed up with the ad-posters opposite.
He looked now with more seeing eyes at those grinning yard-wide
faces.  After all, there was more there than mere silliness, greed,
and vulgarity.  Corner Table grins at you, seemingly optimistic,
with a flash of false teeth.  But what is behind the grin?
Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of doom.  For can you not see, if
you know how to look, that behind that slick self-satisfaction, that
tittering fat-bellied triviality, there is nothing but a frightful
emptiness, a secret despair?  The great death-wish of the modern
world.  Suicide pacts.  Heads stuck in gas-ovens in lonely
maisonettes.  French letters and Amen Pills.  And the reverberations
of future wars.  Enemy aeroplanes flying over London; the deep
threatening hum of the propellers, the shattering thunder of the
bombs.  It is all written in Corner Table's face.

More customers coming.  Gordon stood back, gentlemanly-servile.

The door-bell clanged.  Two upper-middle-class ladies sailed
noisily in.  One pink and fruity, thirty-fivish, with voluptuous
bosom burgeoning from her coat of squirrel-skin, emitting a super-
feminine scent of Parma violets: the other middle-aged, tough, and
curried--India, presumably.  Close behind them a dark, grubby, shy
young man slipped through the doorway as apologetically as a cat.
He was one of the shop's best customers--a flitting, solitary
creature who was almost too shy to speak and who by some strange
manipulation kept himself always a day away from a shave.

Gordon repeated his formula:

'Good afternoon.  Can I do anything for you?  Are you looking for
any particular book?'

Fruity-face overwhelmed him with a smile, but curry-face decided to
treat the question as an impertinence.  Ignoring Gordon, she drew
fruity-face across to the shelves next to the new books where the
dog-books and cat-books were kept.  The two of them immediately
began taking books out of the shelves and talking loudly.  Curry-
face had the voice of a drill-sergeant.  She was no doubt a
colonel's wife, or widow.  The Nancy, still deep in the big book on
the Russian ballet, edged delicately away.  His face said that he
would leave the shop if his privacy were disturbed again.  The shy
young man had already found his way to the poetry shelves.  The two
ladies were fairly frequent visitors to the shop.  They always
wanted to see books about cats and dogs, but never actually bought
anything.  There were two whole shelves of dog-books and cat-books.
'Ladies' Corner,' old McKechnie called it.

Another customer arrived, for the library.  An ugly girl of twenty,
hatless, in a white overall, with a sallow, blithering, honest face
and powerful spectacles that distorted her eyes.  She was an
assistant at a chemist's shop.  Gordon put on his homey library
manner.  She smiled at him, and with a gait as clumsy as a bear's
followed him into the library.

'What kind of book would you like this time, Miss Weeks?'

'Well'--she clutched the front of her overall.  Her distorted,
black-treacle eyes beamed trustfully into his.  'Well, what I'd
REALLY like's a good hot-stuff love story.  You know--something
MODERN.'

'Something modern?  Something by Barbara Bedworthy for instance?
Have you read Almost a Virgin?'

'Oh no, not her.  She's too Deep.  I can't bear Deep books.  But I
want something--well, YOU know--MODERN.  Sex-problems and divorce
and all that.  YOU know.'

'Modern, but not Deep,' said Gordon, as lowbrow to lowbrow.

He ranged among the hot-stuff modern love-stories.  There were not
less than three hundred of them in the library.  From the front
room came the voices of the two upper-middle-class ladies, the one
fruity, the other curried, disputing about dogs.  They had taken
out one of the dog-books and were examining the photographs.
Fruity-voice enthused over the photograph of a Peke, the ickle
angel pet, wiv his gweat big Soulful eyes and his ickle black
nosie--oh, so ducky-duck!  But curry-voice--yes, undoubtedly a
colonel's widow--said Pekes were soppy.  Give her dogs with guts--
dogs that would fight, she said; she hated these soppy lapdogs, she
said.  'You have no Soul, Bedelia, no Soul,' said fruity-voice
plaintively.  The door-bell pinged again.  Gordon handed the
chemist's girl Seven Scarlet Nights and booked it on her ticket.
She took a shabby leather purse out of her overall pocket and paid
him twopence.

He went back to the front room.  The Nancy had put his book back in
the wrong shelf and vanished.  A lean, straight-nosed, brisk woman,
with sensible clothes and gold-rimmed pince-nez--schoolmarm
possibly, feminist certainly--came in and demanded Mrs Wharton-
Beverley's history of the suffrage movement.  With secret joy
Gordon told her that they hadn't got it.  She stabbed his male
incompetence with gimlet eyes and went out again.  The thin young
man stood apologetically in the corner, his face buried in D. H.
Lawrence's Collected Poems, like some long-legged bird with its
head buried under its wing.

Gordon waited by the door.  Outside, a shabby-genteel old man with
a strawberry nose and a khaki muffler round his throat was picking
over the books in the sixpenny box.  The two upper-middle-class
ladies suddenly departed, leaving a litter of open books on the
table.  Fruity-face cast reluctant backward glances at the dog-
books, but curry-face drew her away, resolute not to buy anything.
Gordon held the door open.  The two ladies sailed noisily out,
ignoring him.

He watched their fur-coated upper-middle-class backs go down the
street.  The old strawberry-nosed man was talking to himself as he
pawed over the books.  A bit wrong in the head, presumably.  He
would pinch something if he wasn't watched.  The wind blew colder,
drying the slime of the street.  Time to light up presently.
Caught by a swirl of air, the torn strip of paper on the Q. T.
Sauce advertisement fluttered sharply, like a piece of washing on
the line.  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
Torn posters flutter.


Not bad, not bad at all.  But he had no wish to go on--could not go
on, indeed.  He fingered the money in his pocket, not chinking it,
lest the shy young man should hear.  Twopence-halfpenny.  No
tobacco all tomorrow.  His bones ached.

A light sprang up in the Prince of Wales.  They would be swabbing
out the bar.  The old strawberry-nosed man was reading an Edgar
Wallace out of the twopenny box.  A tram boomed in the distance.
In the room upstairs Mr McKechnie, who seldom came down to the
shop, drowsed by the gas-fire, white-haired and white-bearded, with
snuff-box handy, over his calf-bound folio of Middleton's Travels
in the Levant.

The thin young man suddenly realized that he was alone and looked
up guiltily.  He was a habitue of bookshops, yet never stayed
longer than ten minutes in any one shop.  A passionate hunger for
books, and the fear of being a nuisance, were constantly at war in
him.  After ten minutes in any shop he would grow uneasy, feel
himself de trop, and take to flight, having bought something out of
sheer nervousness.  Without speaking he held out the copy of
Lawrence's poems and awkwardly extracted three florins from his
pocket.  In handing them to Gordon he dropped one.  Both dived for
it simultaneously; their heads bumped against one another.  The
young man stood back, blushing sallowly.

'I'll wrap it up for you,' said Gordon.

But the shy young man shook his head--he stammered so badly that he
never spoke when it was avoidable.  He clutched his book to him and
slipped out with the air of having committed some disgraceful
action.

Gordon was alone.  He wandered back to the door.  The strawberry-
nosed man glanced over his shoulder, caught Gordon's eye, and moved
off, foiled.  He had been on the point of slipping Edgar Wallace
into his pocket.  The clock over the Prince of Wales struck a
quarter past three.

Ding Dong!  A quarter past three.  Light up at half past.  Four and
three-quarter hours till closing time.  Five and a quarter hours
till supper.  Twopence halfpenny in pocket.  No tobacco tomorrow.

Suddenly a ravishing, irresistible desire to smoke came over
Gordon.  He had made up his mind not to smoke this afternoon.  He
had only four cigarettes left.  They must be saved for tonight,
when he intended to 'write'; for he could no more 'write' without
tobacco than without air.  Nevertheless, he had got to have a
smoke.  He took out his packet of Player's Weights and extracted
one of the dwarfish cigarettes.  It was sheer stupid indulgence; it
meant half an hour off tonight's 'writing' time.  But there was no
resisting it.  With a sort of shameful joy he sucked the soothing
smoke into his lungs.

The reflection of his own face looked back at him from the greyish
pane.  Gordon Comstock, author of MICE; en l'an trentiesme de son
eage, and moth-eaten already.  Only twenty-six teeth left.
However, Villon at the same age was poxed on his own showing.
Let's be thankful for small mercies.

He watched the ribbon of torn paper whirling, fluttering on the
Q. T. Sauce advertisement.  Our civilization is dying.  It MUST be
dying.  But it isn't going to die in its bed.  Presently the
aeroplanes are coming.  Zoom--whizz--crash!  The whole western
world going up in a roar of high explosives.

He looked at the darkening street, at the greyish reflection of his
face in the pane, at the shabby figures shuffling past.  Almost
involuntarily he repeated:


'C'est l'Ennui--l'oeil charge d'un pleur involontaire,
Il reve d'echafauds en fumant son houka!'


Money, money!  Corner Table!  The humming of the aeroplanes and the
crash of the bombs.

Gordon squinted up at the leaden sky.  Those aeroplanes are coming.
In imagination he saw them coming now; squadron after squadron,
innumerable, darkening the sky like clouds of gnats.  With his
tongue not quite against his teeth he made a buzzing, bluebottle-
on-the-window-pane sound to represent the humming of the
aeroplanes.  It was a sound which, at that moment, he ardently
desired to hear.



2


Gordon walked homeward against the rattling wind, which blew his
hair backward and gave him more of a 'good' forehead than ever.
His manner conveyed to the passers-by--at least, he hoped it did--
that if he wore no overcoat it was from pure caprice.  His overcoat
was up the spout for fifteen shillings, as a matter of fact.

Willowbed Road, NW, was not definitely slummy, only dingy and
depressing.  There were real slums hardly five minutes' walk away.
Tenement houses where families slept five in a bed, and, when one
of them died, slept every night with the corpse until it was
buried; alley-ways where girls of fifteen were deflowered by boys
of sixteen against leprous plaster walls.  But Willowbed Road
itself contrived to keep up a kind of mingy, lower-middle-class
decency.  There was even a dentist's brass plate on one of the
houses.  In quite two-thirds of them, amid the lace curtains of the
parlour window, there was a green card with 'Apartments' on it in
silver lettering, above the peeping foliage of an aspidistra.

Mrs Wisbeach, Gordon's landlady, specialized in 'single gentlemen'.
Bed-sitting-rooms, with gaslight laid on and find your own heating,
baths extra (there was a geyser), and meals in the tomb-dark
dining-room with the phalanx of clotted sauce-bottles in the middle
of the table.  Gordon, who came home for his midday dinner, paid
twenty-seven and six a week.

The gaslight shone yellow through the frosted transom above the
door of Number 31.  Gordon took out his key and fished about in the
keyhole--in that kind of house the key never quite fits the lock.
The darkish little hallway--in reality it was only a passage--smelt
of dishwater, cabbage, rag mats, and bedroom slops.  Gordon glanced
at the japanned tray on the hall-stand.  No letters, of course.  He
had told himself not to hope for a letter, and nevertheless had
continued to hope.  A stale feeling, not quite a pain, settled upon
his breast.  Rosemary might have written!  It was four days now
since she had written.  Moreover, there were a couple of poems that
he had sent out to magazines and had not yet had returned to him.
The one thing that made the evening bearable was to find a letter
waiting for him when he got home.  But he received very few
letters--four or five in a week at the very most.

On the left of the hall was the never-used parlour, then came the
staircase, and beyond that the passage ran down to the kitchen and
to the unapproachable lair inhabited by Mrs Wisbeach herself.  As
Gordon came in, the door at the end of the passage opened a foot or
so.  Mrs Wisbeach's face emerged, inspected him briefly but
suspiciously, and disappeared again.  It was quite impossible to
get in or out of the house, at any time before eleven at night,
without being scrutinized in this manner.  Just what Mrs Wisbeach
suspected you of it was hard to say; smuggling women into the
house, possibly.  She was one of those malignant respectable women
who keep lodging-houses.  Age about forty-five, stout but active,
with a pink, fine-featured, horribly observant face, beautifully
grey hair, and a permanent grievance.

Gordon halted at the foot of the narrow stairs.  Above, a coarse
rich voice was singing, 'Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?'  A very
fat man of thirty-eight or nine came round the angle of the stairs,
with the light dancing step peculiar to fat men, dressed in a smart
grey suit, yellow shoes, a rakish trilby hat, and a belted blue
overcoat of startling vulgarity.  This was Flaxman, the first-floor
lodger and travelling representative of the Queen of Sheba Toilet
Requisites Co.  He saluted Gordon with a lemon-coloured glove as he
came down.

'Hullo, chappie!' he said blithely.  (Flaxman called everyone
'chappie'.)  'How's life with you?'

'Bloody,' said Gordon shortly.

Flaxman had reached the bottom of the stairs.  He threw a roly-poly
arm affectionately round Gordon's shoulders.

'Cheer up, old man, cheer up!  You look like a bloody funeral.  I'm
off down to the Crichton.  Come on down and have a quick one.'

'I can't.  I've got to work.'

'Oh, hell!  Be matey, can't you?  What's the good of mooning about
up here?  Come on down to the Cri and we'll pinch the barmaid's
bum.'

Gordon wriggled free of Flaxman' s arm.  Like all small frail
people, he hated being touched.  Flaxman merely grinned, with the
typical fat man's good humour.  He was really horribly fat.  He
filled his trousers as though he had been melted and then poured
into them.  But of course, like other fat people, he never admitted
to being fat.  No fat person ever uses the word 'fat' if there is
any way of avoiding it.  'Stout' is the word they use--or, better
still, 'robust'.  A fat man is never so happy as when he is
describing himself as 'robust'.  Flaxman, at his first meeting with
Gordon, had been on the point of calling himself 'robust', but
something in Gordon's greenish eye had deterred him.  He compromised
on 'stout' instead.

'I do admit, chappie,' he said, 'to being--well, just a wee bit on
the stout side.  Nothing unwholesome, you know.'  He patted the
vague frontier between his belly and his chest.  'Good firm flesh.
I'm pretty nippy on my feet, as a matter of fact.  But--well, I
suppose you might call me STOUT.'

'Like Cortez,' Gordon suggested.

'Cortez?  Cortez?  Was that the chappie who was always wandering
about in the mountains in Mexico?'

'That's the fellow.  He was stout, but he had eagle eyes.'

'Ah?  Now that's funny.  Because the wife said something rather
like that to me once.  "George," she said, "you've got the most
wonderful eyes in the world.  You've got eyes just like an eagle,"
she said.  That would be before she married me, you'll understand.'

Flaxman was living apart from his wife at the moment.  A little
while back the Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. had
unexpectedly paid out a bonus of thirty pounds to all its
travellers, and at the same time Flaxman and two others had been
sent across to Paris to press the new Sexapeal Naturetint lipstick
on various French firms.  Flaxman had not thought it necessary to
mention the thirty pounds to his wife.  He had had the time of his
life on that Paris trip, of course.  Even now, three months
afterwards, his mouth watered when he spoke of it.  He used to
entertain Gordon with luscious descriptions.  Ten days in Paris
with thirty quid that wifie hadn't heard about!  Oh boy!  But
unfortunately there had been a leakage somewhere; Flaxman had got
home to find retribution awaiting him.  His wife had broken his
head with a cut-glass whisky decanter, a wedding present which they
had had for fourteen years, and then fled to her mother's house,
taking the children with her.  Hence Flaxman's exile in Willowbed
Road.  But he wasn't letting it worry him.  It would blow over, no
doubt; it had happened several times before.

Gordon made another attempt to get past Flaxman and escape up the
stairs.  The dreadful thing was that in his heart he was pining to
go with him.  He needed a drink so badly--the mere mention of the
Crichton Arms had made him feel thirsty.  But it was impossible, of
course; he had no money.  Flaxman put an arm across the stairs,
barring his way.  He was genuinely fond of Gordon.  He considered
him 'clever'--'cleverness', to him, being a kind of amiable lunacy.
Moreover, he detested being alone, even for so short a time as it
would take him to walk to the pub.

'Come on, chappie!' he urged.  'You want a Guinness to buck you up,
that's what you want.  You haven't seen the new girl they've got in
the saloon bar yet.  Oh, boy!  There's a peach for you!'

'So that's why you're all dolled up, is it?' said Gordon, looking
coldly at Flaxman's yellow gloves.

'You bet it is, chappie!  Coo, what a peach!  Ash blonde she is.
And she knows a thing or two, that girlie does.  I gave her a stick
of our Sexapeal Naturetint last night.  You ought to have seen her
wag her little bottom at me as she went past my table.  Does she
give me the palpitations?  Does she?  Oh, boy!'

Flaxman wriggled lascivously.  His tongue appeared between his
lips.  Then, suddenly pretending that Gordon was the ash-blonde
barmaid, he seized him by the waist and gave him a tender squeeze.
Gordon shoved him away.  For a moment the desire to go down to the
Crichton Arms was so ravishing that it almost overcame him.  Oh,
for a pint of beer!  He seemed almost to feel it going down his
throat.  If only he had had any money!  Even sevenpence for a pint.
But what was the use?  Twopence halfpenny in pocket.  You can't let
other people buy your drinks for you.

'Oh, leave me alone, for God's sake!' he said irritably, stepping
out of Flaxman's reach, and went up the stairs without looking
back.

Flaxman settled his hat on his head and made for the front door,
mildly offended.  Gordon reflected dully that it was always like
this nowadays.  He was for ever snubbing friendly advances.  Of
course it was money that was at the bottom of it, always money.
You can't be friendly, you can't even be civil, when you have no
money in your pocket.  A spasm of self-pity went through him.  His
heart yearned for the saloon bar at the Crichton; the lovely smell
of beer, the warmth and bright lights, the cheery voices, the
clatter of glasses on the beer-wet bar.  Money, money!  He went on,
up the dark evil-smelling stairs.  The thought of his cold lonely
bedroom at the top of the house was like a doom before him.

On the second floor lived Lorenheim, a dark, meagre, lizard-like
creature of uncertain age and race, who made about thirty-five
shillings a week by touting vacuum-cleaners.  Gordon always went
very hurriedly past Lorenheim's door.  Lorenheim was one of those
people who have not a single friend in the world and who are
devoured by a lust for company.  His loneliness was so deadly that
if you so much as slowed your pace outside his door he was liable
to pounce out upon you and half drag, half wheedle you in to listen
to interminable paranoiac tales of girls he had seduced and
employers he had scored off.  And his room was more cold and
squalid than even a lodging-house bedroom has any right to be.
There were always half-eaten bits of bread and margarine lying
about everywhere.  The only other lodger in the house was an
engineer of some kind, employed on nightwork.  Gordon only saw him
occasionally--a massive man with a grim, discoloured face, who wore
a bowler hat indoors and out.

In the familiar darkness of his room, Gordon felt for the gas-jet
and lighted it.  The room was medium-sized, not big enough to be
curtained into two, but too big to be sufficiently warmed by one
defective oil lamp.  It had the sort of furniture you expect in a
top floor back.  White-quilted single-bed; brown lino floor-
covering; wash-hand-stand with jug and basin of that cheap white
ware which you can never see without thinking of chamberpots.  On
the window-sill there was a sickly aspidistra in a green-glazed
pot.

Up against this, under the window, there was a kitchen table with
an inkstained green cloth.  This was Gordon's 'writing' table.  It
was only after a bitter struggle that he had induced Mrs Wisbeach
to give him a kitchen table instead of the bamboo 'occasional'
table--a mere stand for the aspidistra--which she considered proper
for a top floor back.  And even now there was endless nagging
because Gordon would never allow his table to be 'tidied up'.  The
table was in a permanent mess.  It was almost covered with a muddle
of papers, perhaps two hundred sheets of sermon paper, grimy and
dog-eared, and all written on and crossed out and written on again--
a sort of sordid labyrinth of papers to which only Gordon possessed
the key.  There was a film of dust over everything, and there were
several foul little trays containing tobacco ash and the twisted
stubs of cigarettes.  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 burn 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 Com-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 alarm clock--
Shakespeare in the Everyman edition, Sherlock Holmes, Villon's
poems, Roderick Random, Les Fleurs du Mal, 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 Lyons' 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.



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 Scotchification 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 chunk 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-corner 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.  The aspidistra, flower of
England!  It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion
and the unicorn.  There will be no revolution in England while
there are aspidistras in the windows.

He did not hate and despise his relatives now--or not so much, at
any rate.  They still depressed him greatly--those poor old
withering aunts and uncles, of whom two or three had already died,
his father, worn out and spiritless, his mother, faded, nervy, and
'delicate' (her lungs were none too strong), Julia, already, at
one-and-twenty, a dutiful, resigned drudge who worked twelve hours
a day and never had a decent frock.  But he grasped now what was
the matter with them.  It was not MERELY the lack of money.  It was
rather that, having no money, they still lived mentally in the
money-world--the world in which money is virtue and poverty is
crime.  It was not poverty but the down-dragging of RESPECTABLE
poverty that had done for them.  They had accepted the money-code,
and by that code they were failures.  They had never had the sense
to lash out and just LIVE, money or no money, as the lower classes
do.  How right the lower classes are!  Hats off to the factory lad
who with fourpence in the world puts his girl in the family way!
At least he's got blood and not money in his veins.

Gordon thought it all out, in the naive selfish manner of a boy.
There are two ways to live, he decided.  You can be rich, or you
can deliberately refuse to be rich.  You can possess money, or you
can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail
to get it.  He took it for granted that he himself would never be
able to make money.  It hardly even occurred to him that he might
have talents which could be turned to account.  That was what his
schoolmasters had done for him; they had rubbed it into him that he
was a seditious little nuisance and not likely to 'succeed' in
life.  He accepted this.  Very well, then, he would refuse the
whole business of 'succeeding'; he would make it his especial
purpose NOT to 'succeed'.  Better to reign in hell than serve in
heaven; better to serve in hell than serve in heaven, for that
matter.  Already, at sixteen, he knew which side he was on.  He was
AGAINST the money-god and all his swinish priesthood.  He had
declared war on money; but secretly, of course.

It was when he was seventeen that his father died, leaving about
two hundred pounds.  Julia had been at work for some years now.
During 1918 and 1919 she had worked in a Government office, and
after that she took a course of cookery and got a job in a nasty,
ladylike little teashop near Earl's Court Underground Station.  She
worked a seventy-two hour week and was given her lunch and tea and
twenty-five shillings; out of this she contributed twelve shillings
a week, often more, to the household expenses.  Obviously the best
thing to do, now that Mr Comstock was dead, would have been to take
Gordon away from school, find him a job, and let Julia have the two
hundred pounds to set up a teashop of her own.  But here the
habitual Comstock folly about money stepped in.  Neither Julia nor
her mother would hear of Gordon leaving school.  With the strange
idealistic snobbishness of the middle classes, they were willing to
go to the workhouse sooner than let Gordon leave school before the
statutory age of eighteen.  The two hundred pounds, or more than
half of it, must be used in completing Gordon's 'education'.
Gordon let them do it.  He had declared war on money but that did
not prevent him from being damnably selfish.  Of course he dreaded
this business of going to work.  What boy wouldn't dread it?  Pen-
pushing in some filthy office--God!  His uncles and aunts were
already talking dismally about 'getting Gordon settled in life'.
They saw everything in terms of 'good' jobs.  Young Smith had got
such a 'good' job in a bank, and young Jones had got such a 'good'
job in an insurance office.  It made him sick to hear them.  They
seemed to want to see every young man in England nailed down in the
coffin of a 'good' job.

Meanwhile, money had got to be earned.  Before her marriage
Gordon's mother had been a music teacher, and even since then she
had taken pupils, sporadically, when the family were in lower water
than usual.  She now decided that she would start giving lessons
again.  It was fairly easy to get pupils in the suburbs--they were
living in Acton--and with the music fees and Julia's contribution
they could probably 'manage' for the next year or two.  But the
state of Mrs Comstock's lungs was now something more than
'delicate'.  The doctor who had attended her husband before his
death had put his stethoscope to her chest and looked serious.  He
had told her to take care of herself, keep warm, eat nourishing
food, and, above all, avoid fatigue.  The fidgeting, tiring job of
giving piano lessons was, of course, the worst possible thing for
her.  Gordon knew nothing of this.  Julia knew, however.  It was a
secret between the two women, carefully kept from Gordon.

A year went by.  Gordon spent it rather miserably, more and more
embarrassed by his shabby clothes and lack of pocket-money, which
made girls an object of terror to him.  However, the New Age
accepted one of his poems that year.  Meanwhile, his mother sat on
comfortless piano stools in draughty drawing-rooms, giving lessons
at two shillings an hour.  And then Gordon left school, and fat
interfering Uncle Walter, who had business connexions in a small
way, came forward and said that a friend of a friend of his could
get Gordon ever such a 'good' job in the accounts department of a
red lead firm.  It was really a splendid job--a wonderful opening
for a young man.  If Gordon buckled to work in the right spirit he
might be a Big Pot one of these days.  Gordon's soul squirmed.
Suddenly, as weak people do, he stiffened, and, to the horror of
the whole family, refused even to try for the job.

There were fearful rows, of course.  They could not understand him.
It seemed to them a kind of blasphemy to refuse such a 'good' job
when you got the chance of it.  He kept reiterating that he didn't
want THAT KIND of job.  Then what DID he want? they all demanded.
He wanted to 'write', he told them sullenly.  But how could he
possibly make a living by 'writing'? they demanded again.  And of
course he couldn't answer.  At the back of his mind was the idea
that he could somehow live by writing poetry; but that was too
absurd even to be mentioned.  But at any rate, he wasn't going into
business, into the money-world.  He would have a job, but not a
'good' job.  None of them had the vaguest idea what he meant.  His
mother wept, even Julia 'went for' him, and all round him there
were uncles and aunts (he still had six or seven of them left)
feebly volleying and incompetently thundering.  And after three
days a dreadful thing happened.  In the middle of supper his mother
was seized by a violent fit of coughing, put her hand to her
breast, fell forward, and began bleeding at the mouth.

Gordon was terrified.  His mother did not die, as it happened, but
she looked deathly as they carried her upstairs.  Gordon rushed for
the doctor.  For several days his mother lay at death's door.  It
was the draughty drawing-rooms and the trudging to and fro in all
weathers that had done it.  Gordon hung helplessly about the house,
a dreadful feeling of guilt mingling with his misery.  He did not
exactly know but he half divined, that his mother had killed
herself in order to pay his school fees.  After this he could not
go on opposing her any longer.  He went to Uncle Walter and told
him that he would take that job in the red lead firm, if they would
give it him.  So Uncle Walter spoke to his friend, and the friend
spoke to his friend, and Gordon was sent for and interviewed by an
old gentleman with badly fitting false teeth, and finally was given
a job, on probation.  He started on twenty-five bob a week.  And
with this firm he remained six years.

They moved away from Acton and took a flat in a desolate red block
of flats somewhere in the Paddington district.  Mrs Comstock had
brought her piano, and when she had got some of her strength back
she gave occasional lessons.  Gordon's wages were gradually raised,
and the three of them 'managed', more or less.  It was Julia and
Mrs Comstock who did most of the 'managing'.  Gordon still had a
boy's selfishness about money.  At the office he got on not
absolutely badly.  It was said of him that he was worth his wages
but wasn't the type that Makes Good.  In a way the utter contempt
that he had for his work made things easier for him.  He could put
up with this meaningless office-life, because he never for an
instant thought of it as permanent.  Somehow, sometime, God knew
how or when, he was going to break free of it.  After all, there
was always his 'writing'.  Some day, perhaps, he might be able to
make a living of sorts by 'writing'; and you'd feel you were free
of the money-stink if you were a 'writer', would you not?  The
types he saw all round him, especially the older men, made him
squirm.  That was what it meant to worship the money-god!  To
settle down, to Make Good, to sell your soul for a villa and an
aspidistra!  To turn into the typical little bowler-hatted sneak--
Strube's 'little man'--the little docile cit who slips home by the
six-fifteen to a supper of cottage pie and stewed tinned pears,
half an hour's listening-in to the B. B. C. Symphony Concert, and
then perhaps a spot of licit sexual intercourse if his wife 'feels
in the mood'!  What a fate!  No, it isn't like that that one was
meant to live.  One's got to get right out of it, out of the money-
stink.  It was a kind of plot that he was nursing.  He was as
though dedicated to this war against money.  But it was still a
secret.  The people at the office never suspected him of unorthodox
ideas.  They never even found out that he wrote poetry--not that
there was much to find out, for in six years he had less than
twenty poems printed in the magazines.  To look at, he was just the
same as any other City clerk--just a soldier in the strap-hanging
army that sways eastward at morning, westward at night in the
carriages of the Underground.

He was twenty-four when his mother died.  The family was breaking
up.  Only four of the older generation of Comstocks were left now--
Aunt Angela, Aunt Charlotte, Uncle Walter, and another uncle who
died a year later.  Gordon and Julia gave up the flat.  Gordon took
a furnished room in Doughty Street (he felt vaguely literary,
living in Bloomsbury), and Julia moved to Earl's Court, to be near
the shop.  Julia was nearly thirty now, and looked much older.  She
was thinner than ever, though healthy enough, and there was grey in
her hair.  She still worked twelve hours a day, and in six years
her wages had only risen by ten shillings a week.  The horribly
ladylike lady who kept the teashop was a semi-friend as well as an
employer, and thus could sweat and bully Julia to the tune of
'dearest' and 'darling'.  Four months after his mother's death
Gordon suddenly walked out of his job.  He gave the firm no
reasons.  They imagined that he was going to 'better himself', and--
luckily, as it turned out--gave him quite good references.  He had
not even thought of looking for another job.  He wanted to burn his
boats.  From now on he would breathe free air, free of the money-
stink.  He had not consciously waited for his mother to die before
doing this; still, it was his mother's death that had nerved him to
it.

Of course there was another and more desolating row in what was
left of the family.  They thought Gordon must have gone mad.  Over
and over again he tried, quite vainly, to explain to them why he
would not yield himself to the servitude of a 'good' job.  'But
what are you going to live on?  What are you going to live on?' was
what they all wailed at him.  He refused to think seriously about
it.  Of course, he still harboured the notion that he could make a
living of sorts by 'writing'.  By this time he had got to know
Ravelston, editor of Antichrist, and Ravelston, besides printing
his poems, managed to get him books to review occasionally.  His
literary prospects were not so bleak as they had been six years
ago.  But still, it was not the desire to 'write' that was his real
motive.  To get out of the money-world--that was what he wanted.
Vaguely he looked forward to some kind of moneyless, anchorite
existence.  He had a feeling that if you genuinely despise money
you can keep going somehow, like the birds of the air.  He forgot
that the birds of the air don't pay room-rent.  The poet starving
in a garret--but starving, somehow, not uncomfortably--that was his
vision of himself.

The next seven months were devastating.  They scared him and almost
broke his spirit.  He learned what it means to live for weeks on
end on bread and margarine, to try to 'write' when you are half
starved, to pawn your clothes, to sneak trembling up the stairs
when you owe three weeks' rent and your landlady is listening for
you.  Moreover, in those seven months he wrote practically nothing.
The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought.  He grasped,
as though it were a new discovery, that you do not escape from
money merely by being moneyless.  On the contrary, you are the
hopeless slave of money until you have enough of it to live on--a
'competence', as the beastly middle-class phrase goes.  Finally he
was turned out of his room, after a vulgar row.  He was three days
and four nights in the street.  It was bloody.  Three mornings, on
the advice of another man he met on the Embankment, he spent in
Billingsgate, helping to shove fish-barrows up the twisty little
hills from Billingsgate into Eastcheap.  'Twopence an up' was what
you got, and the work knocked hell out of your thigh muscles.
There were crowds of people on the same job, and you had to wait
your turn; you were lucky if you made eighteen-pence between four
in the morning and nine.  After three days of it Gordon gave up.
What was the use?  He was beaten.  There was nothing for it but to
go back to his family, borrow some money, and find another job.

But now, of course, there was no job to be had.  For months he
lived by cadging on the family.  Julia kept him going till the last
penny of her tiny savings was gone.  It was abominable.  Here was
the outcome of all his fine attitudes!  He had renounced ambition,
made war on money, and all it led to was cadging from his sister!
And Julia, he knew, felt his failure far more than she felt the
loss of her savings.  She had had such hopes of Gordon.  He alone
of all the Comstocks had had it in him to 'succeed'.  Even now she
believed that somehow, some day, he was going to retrieve the
family fortunes.  He was so 'clever'--surely he could make money if
he tried!  For two whole months Gordon stayed with Aunt Angela in
her little house at Highgate--poor, faded, mummified Aunt Angela,
who even for herself had barely enough to eat.  All this time he
searched desperately for work.  Uncle Walter could not help him.
His influence in the business world, never large, was now
practically nil.  At last, however, in a quite unexpected way, the
luck turned.  A friend of a friend of Julia's employer's brother
managed to get Gordon a job in the accounts department of the New
Albion Publicity Company.

The New Albion was one of those publicity firms which have sprung
up everywhere since the War--the fungi, as you might say, that
sprout from a decaying capitalism.  It was a smallish rising firm
and took every class of publicity it could get.  It designed a
certain number of large-scale posters for oatmeal stout, self-
raising flour, and so forth, but its main line was millinery and
cosmetic advertisements in the women's illustrated papers, besides
minor ads in twopenny weeklies, such as Whiterose Pills for Female
Disorders, Your Horoscope Cast by Professor Raratongo, The Seven
Secrets of Venus, New Hope for the Ruptured, Earn Five Pounds a
Week in your Spare Time, and Cyprolax Hair Lotion Banishes all
Unpleasant Intruders.  There was a large staff of commercial
artists, of course.  It was here that Gordon first made the
acquaintance of Rosemary.  She was in the 'studio' and helped to
design fashion plates.  It was a long time before he actually spoke
to her.  At first he knew her merely as a remote personage, small,
dark, with swift movements, distinctly attractive but rather
intimidating.  When they passed one another in the corridors she
eyed him ironically, as though she knew all about him and
considered him a bit of a joke; nevertheless she seemed to look at
him a little oftener than was necessary.  He had nothing to do with
her side of the business.  He was in the accounts department, a
mere clerk on three quid a week.

The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so
completely modern in spirit.  There was hardly a soul in the firm
who was not perfectly well aware that publicity--advertising--is
the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced.  In the red
lead firm there had still lingered certain notions of commercial
honour and usefulness.  But such things would have been laughed at
in the New Albion.  Most of the employees were the hard-boiled,
Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is
sacred, except money.  They had their cynical code worked out.  The
public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a
swill-bucket.  And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final
naivete, the blind worship of the money-god.  Gordon studied them
unobtrusively.  As before, he did his work passably well and his
fellow-employees looked down on him.  Nothing had changed in his
inner mind.  He still despised and repudiated the money-code.
Somehow, sooner or later, he was going to escape from it; even now,
after his first fiasco, he still plotted to escape.  He was IN the
money world, but not OF it.  As for the types about him, the little
bowler-hatted worms who never turned, and the go-getters, the
American business-college gutter-crawlers, they rather amused him
than not.  He liked studying their slavish keep-your-job mentality.
He was the chiel amang them takin' notes.

One day a curious thing happened.  Somebody chanced to see a poem
of Gordon's in a magazine, and put it about that they 'had a poet
in the office'.  Of course Gordon was laughed at, not ill-
naturedly, by the other clerks.  They nicknamed him 'the bard' from
that day forth.  But though amused, they were also faintly
contemptuous.  It confirmed all their ideas about Gordon.  A fellow
who wrote poetry wasn't exactly the type to Make Good.  But the
thing had an unexpected sequel.  About the time when the clerks
grew tired of chaffing Gordon, Mr Erskine, the managing director,
who had hitherto taken only the minimum notice of him, sent for him
and interviewed him.

Mr Erskine was a large, slow-moving man with a broad, healthy,
expressionless face.  From his appearance and the slowness of his
speech you would have guessed with confidence that he had something
to do with either agriculture or cattle-breeding.  His wits were as
slow as his movements, and he was the kind of man who never hears
of anything until everybody else has stopped talking about it.  How
such a man came to be in charge of an advertising agency, only the
strange gods of capitalism know.  But he was quite a likeable
person.  He had not that sniffish, buttoned-up spirit that usually
goes with an ability to make money.  And in a way his fat-
wittedness stood him in good stead.  Being insensible to popular
prejudice, he could assess people on their merits; consequently, he
was rather good at choosing talented employees.  The news that
Gordon had written poems, so far from shocking him, vaguely
impressed him.  They wanted literary talents in the New Albion.
Having sent for Gordon, he studied him in a somnolent, sidelong way
and asked him a number of inconclusive questions.  He never
listened to Gordon's answers, but punctuated his questions with a
noise that sounded like 'Hm, hm, hm.'  Wrote poetry, did he?  Oh
yes?  Hm.  And had it printed in the papers?  Hm, hm.  Suppose they
paid you for that kind of thing?  Not much, eh?  No, suppose not.
Hm, hm.  Poetry?  Hm.  A bit difficult, that must be.  Getting the
lines the same length, and all that.  Hm, hm.  Write anything else?
Stories, and so forth?  Hm.  Oh yes?  Very interesting.  Hm!

Then, without further questions, he promoted Gordon to a special
post as secretary--in effect, apprentice--to Mr Clew, the New
Albion's head copywriter.  Like every other advertising agency, the
New Albion was constantly in search of copywriters with a touch of
imagination.  It is a curious fact, but it is much easier to find
competent draughtsmen than to find people who can think of slogans
like 'Q. T. Sauce keeps Hubby Smiling' and 'Kiddies clamour for
their Breakfast Crisps'.  Gordon's wages were not raised for the
moment, but the firm had their eye on him.  With luck he might be a
full-fledged copywriter in a year's time.  It was an unmistakable
chance to Make Good.

For six months he was working with Mr Clew.  Mr Clew was a harassed
man of about forty, with wiry hair into which he often plunged his
fingers.  He worked in a stuffy little office whose walls were
entirely papered with his past triumphs in the form of posters.  He
took Gordon under his wing in a friendly way, showed him the ropes,
and was even ready to listen to his suggestions.  At that time they
were working on a line of magazine ads for April Dew, the great new
deodorant which the Queen of Sheba Toilet Requisites Co. (this was
Flaxman's firm, curiously enough) were putting on the market.
Gordon started on the job with secret loathing.  But now there was
a quite unexpected development.  It was that Gordon showed, almost
from the start, a remarkable talent for copywriting.  He could
compose an ad as though he had been born to it.  The vivid phrase
that sticks and rankles, the neat little para. that packs a world
of lies into a hundred words--they came to him almost unsought.  He
had always had a gift for words, but this was the first time he had
used it successfully.  Mr Clew thought him very promising.  Gordon
watched his own development, first with surprise, then with
amusement, and finally with a kind of horror.  THIS, then, was what
he was coming to!  Writing lies to tickle the money out of fools'
pockets!  There was a beastly irony, too, in the fact that he, who
wanted to be a 'writer', should score his sole success in writing
ads for deodorants.  However, that was less unusual than he
imagined.  Most copywriters, they say, are novelists manques; or is
it the other way about?

The Queen of Sheba were very pleased with their ads.  Mr Erskine
also was pleased.  Gordon's wages were raised by ten shillings a
week.  And it was now that Gordon grew frightened.  Money was
getting him after all.  He was sliding down, down, into the money-
sty.  A little more and he would be stuck in it for life.  It is
queer how these things happen.  You set your face against success,
you swear never to Make Good--you honestly believe that you
couldn't Make Good even if you wanted to; and then something
happens along, some mere chance, and you find yourself Making Good
almost automatically.  He saw that now or never was the time to
escape.  He had got to get out of it--out of the money-world,
irrevocably, before he was too far involved.

But this time he wasn't going to be starved into submission.  He
went to Ravelston and asked his help.  He told him that he wanted
some kind of job; not a 'good' job, but a job that would keep his
body without wholly buying his soul.  Ravelston understood
perfectly.  The distinction between a job and a 'good' job did not
have to be explained to him; nor did he point out to Gordon the
folly of what he was doing.  That was the great thing about
Ravelston.  He could always see another person's point of view.  It
was having money that did it, no doubt; for the rich can afford to
be intelligent.  Moreover, being rich himself, he could find jobs
for other people.  After only a fortnight he told Gordon of
something that might suit him.  A Mr McKechnie, a rather
dilapidated second-hand bookseller with whom Ravelston dealt
occasionally, was looking for an assistant.  He did not want a
trained assistant who would expect full wages; he wanted somebody
who looked like a gentleman and could talk about books--somebody to
impress the more bookish customers.  It was the very reverse of a
'good' job.  The hours were long, the pay was wretched--two pounds
a week--and there was no chance of advancement.  It was a blind-
alley job.  And, of course, a blind-alley job was the very thing
Gordon was looking for.  He went and saw Mr McKechnie, a sleepy,
benign old Scotchman with a red nose and a white beard stained by
snuff, and was taken on without demur.  At this time, too, his
volume of poems, Mice, was going to press.  The seventh publisher
to whom he had sent it had accepted it.  Gordon did not know that
this was Ravelston's doing.  Ravelston was a personal friend of the
publisher.  He was always arranging this kind of thing, stealthily,
for obscure poets.  Gordon thought the future was opening before
him.  He was a made man--or, by Smilesian, aspidistral standards,
UNmade.

He gave a month's notice at the office.  It was a painful business
altogether.  Julia, of course, was more distressed than ever at
this second abandonment of a 'good' job.  By this time Gordon had
got to know Rosemary.  She did not try to prevent him from throwing
up his job.  It was against her code to interfere--'You've got to
live your own life,' was always her attitude.  But she did not in
the least understand why he was doing it.  The thing that most
upset him, curiously enough, was his interview with Mr Erskine.  Mr
Erskine was genuinely kind.  He did not want Gordon to leave the
firm, and said so frankly.  With a sort of elephantine politeness
he refrained from calling Gordon a young fool.  He did, however,
ask him why he was leaving.  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.



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 torn 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