Keep the Aspidistra Flying

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

  Gordon had been three months at the library now. The stupid slovenly routine did not irk him. The library had swelled to a thousand ‘assorted titles’ and was bringing Mr Cheeseman a pound a week clear profit, so Mr Cheeseman was happy after his fashion. He was, nevertheless, nurturing a secret grudge against Gordon. Gordon had been sold to him, so to speak, as a drunkard. He had expected Gordon to get drunk and miss a day’s work at least once, thus giving a sufficient pretext for docking his wages; but Gordon had failed to get drunk. Queerly enough, he had no impulse to drink nowadays. He would have gone without beer even if he could have afforded it. Tea seemed a better poison. All his desires and discontents had dwindled. He was better off on thirty bob a week than he had been previously on two pounds. The thirty bob covered, without too much stretching, his rent, cigarettes, a washing bill of about a shilling a week, a little fuel, and his meals, which consisted almost entirely of bacon, bread-and-marg. and tea, and cost about two bob a day, gas included. Sometimes he even had sixpence over for a seat at a cheap but lousy picture-house in the Westminster Bridge Road. He still carried the grimy manuscript of London Pleasures to and fro in his pocket, but it was from mere force of habit; he had dropped even the pretence of working. All his evenings were spent in the same way. There in the remote frowzy attic, by the fire if there was any coal left, in bed if there wasn’t, with teapot and cigarettes hantly, reading, always reading. He read nothing nowadays except twopenny weekly papers. Tit Bits, Answers, Peg’s Paper, The Gem, The Magnet, Home Notes, The Girl’s Own Paper—they were all the same. He used to get them a dozen at a time from the shop. Mr Cheeseman had great dusty stacks of them, left over from his uncle’s day and used for wrapping paper. Some of them were as much as twenty years old.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  ‘A baby? Oh, Christ!’

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

  ‘Are you sure?’

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

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

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

  ‘Damn! Here comes somebody.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘What way?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  When they had gone he came back to Rosemary’s chair. He stood behind her, took hold of her small firm shoulders, then slid a hand inside her coat and felt the warmth of her breast. He liked the strong springy feeling of her body; he liked to think that down there, a guarded seed, his baby was growing. She put a hand up and caressed the hand that was on her breast, but did not speak. She was waiting for him to decide.

  ‘If I marry you I shall have to turn respectable,’ he said musingly.

  ‘Could you?’ she said with a touch of her old manner.

  ‘I mean I shall have to get a proper job—go back to the New Albion. I suppose they’d take me back.’

  He felt her grow very still and knew that she had been waiting for this. Yet she was determined to play fair. She was not going to bully him or cajole him.

  ‘I never said I wanted you to do that. I want you to marry me—yes, because of the baby. But it doesn’t follow you’ve got to keep me.’

  ‘There’s no sense in marrying if I can’t keep you. Suppose I married you when I was like I am at present—no money and no proper job? What would you do then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d go on working as long as I could. And afterwards, when the baby got too obvious—well, I suppose I’d have to go home to father and mother.’

  ‘That would be jolly for you, wouldn’t it? But you were so anxious for me to go back to the New Albion before. You haven’t changed your mind?’

  ‘I’ve thought things over. I know you’d hate to be tied to a regular job. I don’t blame you. You’ve got your own life to live.’

  He thought it over a little while longer. ‘It comes down to this. Either I marry you and go back to the New Albion, or you go to one of those filthy doctors and get yourself messed about for five pounds.’

  At that she twisted herself out of his grasp and stood up facing him. His blunt words had upset her. They had made the issue clearer and uglier than before.

  ‘Oh, why did you say that?’

  ‘Well, those are the alternatives.’

  ‘I’d never thought of it like that. I came here meaning to be fair. And now it sounds as if I was trying to bully you into it—trying to play on your feelings by threatening to get rid of the baby. A sort of beastly blackmail.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I was only stating facts.’

  Her face was full of lines, the black brows drawn together. But she had sworn to herself that she would not make a scene. He could guess what this meant to her. He had never met her people, but he could imagine them. He had some notion of what it might mean to go back to a country town with an illegitimate baby; or, what was almost as bad, with a husband who couldn’t keep you. But she was going to play fair. No blackmail! She drew a sharp inward breath, taking a decision.

  ‘All right, then, I’m not going to hold that over your head. It’s too mean. Marry me or don’t marry me, just as you like. But I’ll have the baby, anyway.’

  ‘You’d do that? Really?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  He took her in his arms. Her coat had come open, her body was warm against him. He thought he would be a thousand kinds of fool if he let her go. Yet the alternative was impossible, and he did not see it any less clearly because he held her in his arms.

  ‘Of course, you’d like me to go back to the New Albion,’ he said.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. Not if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Yes, you would. After all, it’s natural. You want to see me earning a decent income again. In a. good job, with four pounds a week and an aspidistra in the window. Wouldn’t you, now? Own up.’

  ‘All right, then-yes, I would. But it’s only something I’d like to see happening; I’m not going to make you do it. I’d just hate you to do it if you didn’t really want to. I want you to feel free.’

  ‘Really and truly free?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know what that means? Supposing I decided to leave you and the baby in the lurch?’

  ‘Well—if you really wanted to. You’re free—quite free.’

  After a little while she went away. Later in the evening or tomorrow he would let her know what he decided. Of course it was not absolutely certain that the New Albion would give him a job even if he asked them; but presumably they would, considering what Mr Erskine had said. Gordon tried to think and could not. There seemed to be more customers than usual this afternoon. It maddened him to have to bounce out of his chair every time he had sat down and deal with some fresh influx of fools demanding crime-stories and sex-stories and romances. Suddenly, about six o’clock, he turned out the lights, locked up the library and went out. He had got to be alone. The library was not due to shut for two hours yet. God knew what Mr Cheeseman would say when he found out. He might even give Gordon the sack. Gordon did not care.

  He turned westward, up Lambeth Cut. It was a dull sort of evening, not cold. There was muck underfoot, white lights, and hawkers screaming. He had got to think this thing out, and he could think better walking. But it was so hard, so hard! Back to the New Albion, or leave Rosemary in the lurch; there was no other alternative. It was no use thinking, for instance, that he might find some ‘good’ job which would offend his sense of decency a bit less. There aren’t so many ‘good’ jobs waiting for moth-eaten people of thirty. The New Albion was the only chance he had or ever would have.

  At the corner, on the Westminster Bridge Road, he paused a moment. There were some posters opposite, livid in the lamplight. A monstrous one, ten feet high at least, advertised Bovex. The Bovex people had dropped Roland Butta and got on to a new tack. They were running a series of four-line poems—Bovex Ballads, they were called. There was a picture of a horribly eupeptic family, with grinning ham-pink faces, sitting at breakfast; underneath, in blatant lettering:

  Why should you be thin and white?

  And have that washed-out feeling?

  Just take hot Bovex every night—

  Invigorating—healing!

  Gordon gazed at the thing. He drank in its puling silliness. God, what trash! ‘Invigorating—healing!’ The weak incompetence of it! It hadn’t even the vigorous badness of the slogans that really stick. Just soppy, lifeless drivel. It would have been almost pathetic in its feebleness if one hadn’t reflected that all over London and all over every town in England that poster was plastered, rotting the minds of men. He looked up and down the graceless street. Yes, war is coming soon. You can’t doubt it when you see the Bovex ads. The electric drills in our streets presage the rattle of the machine guns. Only a little while before the aero
planes come. Zoom—bang! A few tons of TNT to send our civilisation back to hell where it belongs.

  He crossed the road and walked on, southward. A curious thought had struck him. He did not any longer want that war to happen. It was the first time in months—years, perhaps—that he had thought of it and not wanted it.

  If he went back to the New Albion, in a month’s time he might be writing Bovex Ballads himself. To go back to that! Any ‘good’ job was bad enough; but to be mixed up in that! Christ! Of course he oughtn’t to go back. It was just a question of having the guts to stand firm. But what about Rosemary? He thought of the kind of life she would live at home, in her parents’ house, with a baby and no money; and of the news running through that monstrous family that Rosemary had married some awful rotter who couldn’t even keep her. She would have the whole lot of them nagging at her together. Besides, there was the baby to think about. The money-god is so cunning. If he only baited his traps with yachts and race-horses, tarts and champagne, how easy it would be to dodge him. It is when he gets at you through your sense of decency that he finds you helpless.

  The Bovex Ballad jingled in Gordon’s head. He ought to stand firm. He had made war on money—he ought to stick it out. After all, hitherto he had stuck it out, after a fashion. He looked back over his life. No use deceiving himself. It had been a dreadful life—lonely, squalid, futile. He had lived thirty years and achieved nothing except misery. But that was what he had chosen. It was what he wanted, even now. He wanted to sink down, down into the muck where money does not rule. But this baby-business had upset everything. It was a pretty banal predicament, after all. Private vices, public virtues—the dilemma is as old as the world.