Keep the Aspidistra Flying

  But intermittently he was going over in his mind the things he had said to Ravelston. He stuck to everything he had said. The humiliation of poverty! That’s what they can’t understand and won’t understand. Not hardship—you don’t suffer hardship on two quid a week, and if you did it wouldn’t matter—but just humiliation, the awful, bloody humiliation. The way it gives everyone the right to stamp on you. The way everyone wants to stamp on you. Ravelston wouldn’t believe it. He had too much decency, that was why. He thought you could be poor and still be treated like a human being. But Gordon knew better. He went into the house repeating to himself that he knew better.

  There was a letter waiting for him on the hall tray. His heart jumped. All letters excited him nowadays. He went up the stairs three at a time, shut himself in and lit the gas. The letter was from Doring.

  DEAR COMSTOCK,—What a pity you didn’t turn up on Saturday. There were some people I wanted you to meet. We did tell you it was Saturday and not Thursday this time, didn’t we? My wife says she’s certain she told you. Anyway, we’re having another party on the twenty-third, a sort of before-Christmas party, about the same time. Won’t you come then? Don’t forget the date this time.

  Yours

  PAUL DORING.

  A painful convulsion happened below Gordon’s ribs. So Doring was pretending that it was all a mistake—was pretending not to have insulted him! True, he could not actually have gone there on Saturday, because on Saturday he had to be at the shop; still, it was the intention that counted.

  His heart sickened as he re-read the words ‘Some people I wanted you to meet.’ Just like his bloody luck! He thought of the people he might have met—editors of highbrow magazines, for instance. They might have given him books to review or asked to see his poems or Lord knew what. For a moment he was dreadfully tempted to believe that Doring had spoken the truth. Perhaps after all they had told him it was Saturday and not Thursday. Perhaps if he searched his memory he might remember about it—might even find the letter itself lying about among his muddle of papers. But no! He wouldn’t think of it. He fought down the temptation. The Dorings had insulted him on purpose. He was poor, therefore they had insulted him. If you are poor, people will insult you. It was his creed. Stick to it!

  He went across to the table, tearing Doring’s letter into small bits. The aspidistra stood in its pot, dull green, ailing, pathetic in its sickly ugliness. As he sat down, he pulled it towards him and looked at it meditatively. There was the intimacy of hatred between the aspidistra and him. ‘I’ll beat you yet, you b——,’ he whispered to the dusty leaves.

  Then he rummaged among his papers until he found a clean sheet, took his pen and wrote in his small, neat hand, right in the middle of the sheet:

  DEAR DORING,—With reference to your letter: Go and —— yourself.

  Yours truly

  GORDON COMSTOCK.

  He stuck it into an envelope, addressed it and at once went out to get stamps from the slot machine. Post it tonight: these things look different in the morning. He dropped it into the pillar-box. So there was another friend gone west.

  VI

  THIS WOMAN BUSINESS! What a bore it is! What a pity we can’t cut it right out, or at least be like the animals—minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hens’ backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind. He hardly even notices his hens any longer; he ignores them, or simply pecks them if they come too near his food. He is not called upon to support his offspring, either. Lucky pheasant! How different from the lord of creation, always on the hop between his memory and his conscience!

  Tonight Gordon wasn’t even pretending to do any work. He had gone out again immediately after supper. He walked southward, rather slowly, thinking about women. It was a mild, misty night, more like autumn than winter. This was Tuesday and he had four and fourpence left. He could go down to the Crichton if he chose. Doubtless Flaxman and his pals were already boozing there. But the Crichton, which had seemed like paradise when he had no money, bored and disgusted him when it was in his power to go there. He hated the stale, beery place, and the sights, sounds, smells, all so blatantly and offensively male. There were no women there; only the barmaid with her lewd smile which seemed to promise everything and promised nothing.

  Women, women! The mist that hung motionless in the air turned the passers-by into ghosts at twenty yards’ distance; but in the little pools of light about the lamp-posts there were glimpses of girls’ faces. He thought of Rosemary, of women in general, and of Rosemary again. All afternoon he had been thinking of her. It was with a kind of resentment that he thought of her small, strong body, which he had never yet seen naked. How damned unfair it is that we are filled to the brim with these tormenting desires and then forbidden to satisfy them! Why should one, merely because one has no money, be deprived of that? It seems so natural, so necessary, so much a part of the inalienable rights of a human being. As he walked down the dark street, through the cold yet languorous air, there was a strangely hopeful feeling in his breast. He half believed that somewhere ahead in the darkness a woman’s body was waiting for him. But also he knew that no woman was waiting, not even Rosemary. It was eight days now since she had even written to him. The little beast! Eight whole days without writing! When she knew how much her letters meant to him! How manifest it was that she didn’t care for him any longer, that he was merely a nuisance to her with his poverty and his shabbiness and his everlasting pestering of her to say she loved him! Very likely she would never write again. She was sick of him—sick of him because he had no money. What else could you expect? He had no hold over her. No money, therefore no hold. In the last resort, what holds a woman to a man, except money?

  A girl came down the pavement alone. He passed her in the light of the lamp-post. A working-class girl, eighteen years old it might be, hatless, with wildrose face. She turned her head quickly when she saw him looking at her. She dreaded to meet his eyes. Beneath the thin silky raincoat she was wearing, belted at the waist, her youthful flanks showed supple and trim. He could have turned and followed her, almost. But what was the use? She’d only run away or call a policeman. My golden locks time hath to silver turned, he thought. He was thirty and moth-eaten. What woman worth having would ever look at him again?

  This woman business! Perhaps you’d feel differently about it if you were married? But he had taken an oath against marriage long ago. Marriage is only a trap set for you by the money-god. You grab the bait; snap goes the trap; and there you are, chained by the leg to some ‘good’ job till they cart you to Kensal Green. And what a life! Licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra. Pram-pushing and sneaky adulteries. And the wife finding you out and breaking the cut-glass whisky decanter over your head.

  Nevertheless he perceived that in a way it is necessary to marry. If marriage is bad, the alternative is worse. For a moment he wished that he were married; he pined for the difficulty of it, the reality, the pain. And marriage must be indissoluble, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, till death do you part. The old Christian ideal—marriage tempered by adultery. Commit adultery if you must, but at any rate have the decency to call it adultery. None of that American soulmate slop. Have your fun and then sneak home, juice of the forbidden fruit dripping from your whiskers, and take the consequences. Cut-glass whisky decanters broken over your head, nagging, burnt meals, children crying, clash and thunder of embattled mothers-in-law. Better that, perhaps, than horrible freedom? You’d know, at least, that it was real life that you were living.

  But anyway, how can you marry on two quid a week? Money, money, always money! The devil of it is, that outside marriage, no decent relationship with a woman is possible. His mind moved backwards, over his ten years of adult life. The faces of women flowed through his memory. Ten or a dozen of them there had been. Tarts, also. Comme au long d’un cadavre
un cadavre étendu. And even when they were not tarts it had been squalid, always squalid. Always it had started in a sort of cold-blooded wilfulness and ended in some mean, callous desertion. That, too, was money. Without money, you can’t be straightforward in your dealings with women. For without money, you can’t pick and choose, you’ve got to take what women you can get; and then, necessarily, you’ve got to break free of them. Constancy, like all other virtues, has got to be paid for in money. And the mere fact that he had rebelled against the money code and wouldn’t settle down in the prison of a ‘good’ job—a thing no woman will ever understand—had brought a quality of impermanence, of deception, into all his affairs with women. Abjuring money, he ought to have abjured women too. Serve the money-god, or do without women—those are the only alternatives. And both were equally impossible.

  From the side-street just ahead, a shaft of white light cut through the mist, and there was a bellowing of street hawkers. It was Luton Road, where they have the open-air market two evenings a week. Gordon turned to his left, into the market. He often came this way. The street was so crowded that you could only with difficulty thread your way down the cabbage-littered alley between the stalls. In the glare of hanging electric bulbs, the stuff on the stalls glowed with fine lurid colours—hacked, crimson chunks of meat, piles of oranges and green and white broccoli, stiff, glassy-eyed rabbits, live eels looping in enamel troughs, plucked fowls hanging in rows, sticking out their naked breasts like guardsmen naked on parade. Gordon’s spirits revived a little. He liked the noise, the bustle, the vitality. Whenever you see a street-market you know that there’s hope for England yet. But even here he felt his solitude. Girls were thronging everywhere, in knots of four or five, prowling desirously about the stalls of cheap underwear and swapping backchat and screams of laughter with the youths who followed them. None had eyes for Gordon. He walked among them as though invisible, save that their bodies avoided him when he passed them. Ah, look there! Involuntarily he paused. Over a pile of art-silk undies on a stall, three girls were bending, intent, their faces close together—three youthful faces, flower-like in the harsh light, clustering side by side like a truss of blossom on a Sweet William or phlox. His heart stirred. No eyes for him, of course! One girl looked up. Ah! Hurriedly, with an offended air, she looked away again. A delicate flush like a wash of aquarelle flooded her face. The hard, sexual stare in his eyes had frightened her. They flee from me that sometime did me seek! He walked on. If only Rosemary were here! He forgave her now for not writing to him. He could forgive her anything, if only she were here. He knew now how much she meant to him, because she alone of all women in the world was willing to save him from the humiliation of his loneliness.

  At this moment he looked up, and saw something that made his heart jump. He changed the focus of his eyes abruptly. For a moment he thought he was imagining it. But no! It was Rosemary!

  She was coming down the alley between the stalls, twenty or thirty yards away. It was as though his desire had called her into being. She had not seen him yet. She came towards him, a small debonair figure, picking her way nimbly through the crowd and the muck underfoot, her face scarcely visible because of a flat black hat which she wore cocked down over her eyes like a Harrow boy’s straw hat. He started towards her and called her name.

  ‘Rosemary! Hi, Rosemary!’

  A blue-aproned man thumbing codfish on a stall turned to stare at him. Rosemary did not hear him because of the din. He called again.

  ‘Rosemary! I say, Rosemary!’

  They were only a few yards apart now. She started and looked up.

  ‘Gordon! What are you doing here?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was coming to see you.’

  ‘But how did you know I was here?’

  ‘I didn’t. I always come this way. I get out of the tube at Camden Town.’

  Rosemary sometimes came to see Gordon at Willow-bed Road. Mrs Wisbeach would inform him sourly that ‘there was a young woman to see him’, and he would come downstairs and they would go out for a walk in the streets. Rosemary was never allowed indoors, not even into the hall. That was a rule of the house. You would have thought ‘young women’ were plague-rats by the way Mrs Wisbeach spoke of them. Gordon took Rosemary by the upper arm and made to pull her against him.

  ‘Rosemary! Oh, what a joy to see you again! I was so vilely lonely. Why didn’t you come before?’

  She shook off his hand and stepped back out of his reach. Under her slanting hat-brim she gave him a glance that was intended to be angry.

  ‘Let me go, now! I’m very angry with you. I very nearly didn’t come after that beastly letter you sent me.’

  ‘What beastly letter?’

  ‘You know very well.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Oh, well, let’s get out of this. Somewhere where we can talk. This way.’

  He took her arm, but she shook him off again, continuing, however, to walk at his side. Her steps were quicker and shorter than his. And walking beside him she had the appearance of something extremely small, nimble and young, as though he had had some lively little animal, a squirrel for instance, frisking at his side. In reality she was not very much smaller than Gordon, and only a few months younger. But no one would ever have described Rosemary as a spinster of nearly thirty, which in fact she was. She was a strong, agile girl, with stiff black hair, a small triangular face and very pronounced eyebrows. It was one of those small, peaky faces, full of character, which one sees in sixteenth-century portraits. The first time you saw her take her hat off you got a surprise, for on her crown three white hairs glittered among the black ones like silver wires. It was typical of Rosemary that she never bothered to pull the white hairs out. She still thought of herself as a very young girl, and so did everybody else. Yet if you looked closely the marks of time were plain enough on her face.

  Gordon walked more boldly with Rosemary at his side. He was proud of her. People were looking at her, and therefore at him as well. He was no longer invisible to women. As always, Rosemary was rather nicely dressed. It was a mystery how she did it on four pounds a week. He liked particularly the hat she was wearing—one of those flat felt hats which were then coming into fashion and which caricatured a clergyman’s shovel hat. There was something essentially frivolous about it. In some way difficult to be described, the angle at which it was cocked forward harmonised appealingly with the curve of Rosemary’s behind.

  ‘I like your hat,’ he said.

  In spite of herself, a small smile flickered at the corner of her mouth.

  ‘It is rather nice,’ she said, giving the hat a little pat with her hand.

  She was still pretending to be angry, however. She took care that their bodies should not touch. As soon as they had reached the end of the stalls and were in the main street she stopped and faced him sombrely.

  ‘What do you mean by writing me letters like that?’ she said.

  ‘Letters like what?’

  ‘Saying I’d broken your heart.’

  ‘So you have.’

  ‘It looks like it, doesn’t it!’

  ‘I don’t know. It certainly feels like it.’

  The words were spoken half jokingly, and yet they made her look more closely at him—at his pale, wasted face, his uncut hair, his general down-at-heel, neglected appearance. Her heart softened instantly, and yet she frowned. Why won’t he take care of himself? was the thought in her mind. They had moved closer together. He took her by the shoulders. She let him do it, and, putting her small arms round him, squeezed him very hard, partly in affection, partly in exasperation.

  ‘Gordon, you are a miserable creature!’ she said.

  ‘Why am I a miserable creature?’

  ‘Why can’t you look after yourself properly? You’re a perfect scarecrow. Look at these awful old clothes you’re wearing!’

  ‘They’re suited to my station. One can’t dress decently on two quid a week, you know.’

  ‘But surely
there’s no need to go about looking like a rag-bag? Look at this button on your coat, broken in half!’

  She fingered the broken button, and then suddenly lifted his discoloured Woolworth’s tie aside. In some feminine way she had divined that he had no buttons on his shirt.

  ‘Yes, again! Not a single button. You are awful, Gordon!’

  ‘I tell you I can’t be bothered with things like that. I’ve got a soul above buttons.’

  ‘But why not give them to me and let me sew them on for you? And, oh, Gordon! You haven’t even shaved today. How absolutely beastly of you. You might at least take the trouble to shave every morning.’

  ‘I can’t afford to shave every morning,’ he said perversely.

  ‘What do you mean, Gordon? It doesn’t cost money to shave, does it?’

  ‘Yes, it does. Everything costs money. Cleanness, decency, energy, self-respect—everything. It’s all money. Haven’t I told you that a million times?’

  She squeezed his ribs again—she was surprisingly strong—and frowned up at him, studying his face as a mother looks at some peevish child of which she is unreasonably fond.

  ‘What a fool I am!’ she said.

  ‘In what way a fool?’

  ‘Because I’m so fond of you.’

  ‘Are you fond of me?’

  ‘Of course I am. You know I am. I adore you. It’s idiotic of me.’

  ‘Then come somewhere where it’s dark. I want to kiss you.’