---
title: "Keep the Aspidistra Flying"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 10 of 12
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-aspidistra-fp20181120/10/
cite: "George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, section 10. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-aspidistra-fp20181120/10/"
---

# Keep the Aspidistra Flying

*George Orwell*

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> _Title:_ Keep the Aspidistra Flying
_Date of first publication:_ 1936
_Author:_ George Orwell (1903-1950)
_Date first posted:_ Nov. 14, 2018
_Date last updated:_ Nov. 14, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20181120

> This ebook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross & the online
Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _Keep the_
                              _Aspidistra_
                                _Flying_

> 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_)
                      Copyright 1936 by Eric Blair

> [The end of _Keep the Aspidistra Flying_ by George Orwell]

## 10. X

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-aspidistra-fp20181120/10/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-aspidistra-fp20181120/10/#p-N

[¶0] Under ground, under ground! Down in the safe soft womb of earth, where
there is no getting of jobs or losing of jobs, no relatives or friends
to plague you, no hope, fear, ambition, honour, duty—no _duns_ of any
kind. That was where he wished to be.

[¶1] Yet it was not death, actual physical death, that he wished for. It was
a queer feeling that he had. It had been with him ever since that
morning when he had woken up in the police cell. The evil, mutinous mood
that comes after drunkenness seemed to have set into a habit. That
drunken night had marked a period in his life. It had dragged him
downward with strange suddenness. Before, he had fought against the
money-code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But
now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to
go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to
cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself—to _sink_, as
Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of
being _under ground_. He liked to think about the lost people, the
underground people, tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a
good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and
spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that
great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a
sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished
to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, _below_ ambition. It comforted him
somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and
on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself for ever.

[¶2] And in a way this job was what he wanted; at any rate, it was something
near what he wanted. Down there in Lambeth, in winter, in the murky
streets where the sepia-shadowed faces of tea-drunkards drifted through
the mist, you had a _submerged_ feeling. Down here you had no contact
with money or with culture. No highbrow customers to whom you had to act
the highbrow; no one who was capable of asking you, in that prying way
that prosperous people have, 'What are you, with your brains and
education, doing in a job like this?' You were just part of the slum,
and, like all slum-dwellers, taken for granted. The youths and girls and
draggled middle-aged women who came to the library scarcely even spotted
the fact that Gordon was an educated man. He was just 'the bloke at the
library', and practically one of themselves.

[¶3] The job itself, of course, was of inconceivable futility. You just sat
there, ten hours a day, six hours on Thursdays, handing out books,
registering them and receiving twopences. Between whiles there was
nothing to do except read. There was nothing worth watching in the
desolate street outside. The principal event of the day was when the
hearse drove up to the undertaker's establishment next door. This had a
faint interest for Gordon, because the dye was wearing off one of the
horses and it was assuming by degrees a curious purplish-brown shade.
Much of the time, when no customers came, he spent reading the
yellow-jacketed trash that the library contained. Books of that type you
could read at the rate of one an hour. And they were the kind of books
that suited him nowadays. It is real 'escape literature', that stuff in
the twopenny libraries. Nothing has ever been devised that puts less
strain on the intelligence; even a film, by comparison, demands a
certain effort. And so when a customer demanded a book of this category
or that, whether it was 'Sex' or 'Crime' or 'Wild West' or '_Ro_mance'
(always with the accent on the o), Gordon was ready with expert advice.

[¶4] Mr Cheeseman was not a bad person to work for, so long as you understood
that if you worked till the Day of Judgement you would never get a rise
of wages. Needless to say, he suspected Gordon of pinching the
till-money. After a week or two he devised a new system of booking, by
which he could tell how many books had been taken out and check this
with the day's takings. But it was still (he reflected) in Gordon's
power to issue books and make no record of them; and so the possibility
that Gordon might be cheating him of sixpence or even a shilling a day
continued to trouble him, like the pea under the princess's mattress.
Yet he was not absolutely unlikeable, in his sinister dwarfish way. In
the evenings, after he had shut the shop, when he came along to the
library to collect the day's takings, he would stay talking to Gordon
for a while and recounting with nosy chuckles any particularly astute
swindles that he had worked lately. From these conversations Gordon
pieced together Mr Cheeseman's history. He had been brought up in the
old-clothes trade, which was his spiritual vocation, so to speak, and
had inherited the bookshop from an uncle three years ago. At that time
it was one of those dreadful bookshops in which there are not even any
shelves, in which the books lie about in monstrous dusty piles with no
attempt at classification. It was frequented to some extent by
book-collectors, because there was occasionally a valuable book among
the piles of rubbish, but mainly it kept going by selling second-hand
paper-covered thrillers at twopence each. Over this dust-heap Mr
Cheeseman had presided, at first, with intense disgust. He loathed books
and had not yet grasped that there was money to be made out of them. He
was still keeping his old-clothes shop going by means of a deputy, and
intended to return to it as soon as he could get a good offer for the
bookshop. But presently it was borne in upon him that books, properly
handled, are worth money. As soon as he had made this discovery he
developed an astonishing flair for book-dealing. Within two years he had
worked his shop up till it was one of the best 'rare' bookshops of its
size in London. To him a book was as purely an article of merchandise as
a pair of second-hand trousers. He had never in his life _read_ a book
himself, nor could he conceive why anyone should want to do so. His
attitude towards the collectors who pored so lovingly over his rare
editions was that of a sexually cold prostitute towards her clientèle.
Yet he seemed to know by the mere feel of a book whether it was valuable
or not. His head was a perfect mine of auction-records and first-edition
dates, and he had a marvellous nose for a bargain. His favourite way of
acquiring stock was to buy up the libraries of people who had just died,
especially clergymen. Whenever a clergyman died Mr Cheeseman was on the
spot with the promptness of a vulture. Clergymen, he explained to
Gordon, so often have good libraries and ignorant widows. He lived over
the shop, was unmarried, of course, and had no amusements and seemingly
no friends. Gordon used sometimes to wonder what Mr Cheeseman did with
himself in the evenings, when he was not out snooping after bargains. He
had a mental picture of Mr Cheeseman sitting in a double-locked room,
with the shutters over the windows, counting piles of half-crowns and
bundles of pound notes which he stowed carefully away in cigarette-tins.

[¶5] Mr Cheeseman bullied Gordon and was on the lookout for an excuse to dock
his wages; yet he did not bear him any particular ill-will. Sometimes in
the evening when he came to the library he would produce a greasy packet
of Smith's Potato Crisps from his pocket, and, holding it out, say in
his clipped style:

[¶6] 'Hassome chips?'

[¶7] The packet was always grasped so firmly in his large hand that it was
impossible to extract more than two or three chips. But he meant it as a
friendly gesture.

[¶8] As for the place where Gordon lived, in Brewer's Yard, parallel to
Lambeth Cut on the south side, it was a filthy kip. His bed-sitting-room
was eight shillings a week and was just under the roof. With its sloping
ceiling—it was a room shaped like a wedge of cheese—and its skylight
window, it was the nearest thing to the proverbial poet's garret that he
had ever lived in. There was a large, low, broken-backed bed with a
ragged patchwork quilt and sheets that were changed once fortnightly; a
deal table ringed by dynasties of teapots; a rickety kitchen chair; a
tin basin for washing in; a gas-ring in the fender. The bare floorboards
had never been stained but were dark with dirt. In the cracks in the
pink wallpaper dwelt multitudes of bugs; however, this was winter and
they were torpid unless you over-warmed the room. You were expected to
make your own bed. Mrs Meakin, the landlady, theoretically 'did out' the
rooms daily, but four days out of five she found the stairs too much for
her. Nearly all the lodgers cooked their own squalid meals in their
bedrooms. There was no gas-stove, of course; just the gas-ring in the
fender, and, down two flights of stairs, a large evil-smelling sink
which was common to the whole house.

[¶9] In the garret adjoining Gordon's there lived a tall handsome old woman
who was not quite right in the head and whose face was often as black as
a Negro's from dirt. Gordon could never make out where the dirt came
from. It looked like coal dust. The children of the neighbourhood used
to shout 'Blackie!' after her as she stalked along the pavement like a
tragedy queen, talking to herself. On the floor below there was a woman
with a baby which cried, cried everlastingly; also a young couple who
used to have frightful quarrels and frightful reconciliations which you
could hear all over the house. On the ground floor a housepainter, his
wife and five children existed on the dole and an occasional odd job.
Mrs Meakin, the landlady, inhabited some burrow or other in the
basement. Gordon liked this house. It was all so different from Mrs
Wisbeach's. There was no mingy lower-middle-class decency here, no
feeling of being spied upon and disapproved of. So long as you paid your
rent you could do almost exactly as you liked; come home drunk and crawl
up the stairs, bring women in at all hours, lie in bed all day if you
wanted to. Mother Meakin was not the type to interfere. She was a
dishevelled, jelly-soft old creature with a figure like a cottage loaf.
People said that in her youth she had been no better than she ought, and
probably it was true. She had a loving manner towards anything in
trousers. Yet it seemed that traces of respectability lingered in her
breast. On the day when Gordon installed himself he heard her puffing
and struggling up the stairs, evidently bearing some burden. She knocked
softly on the door with her knee, or the place where her knee ought to
have been, and he let her in.

[¶10] ''Ere y'are, then,' she wheezed kindly as she came in with her arms
full. 'I knew as 'ow you'd like this. I likes all my lodgers to feel
comfortable-like. Lemme put it on the table for you. There! That makes
the room look a bit more 'omelike, don't it now?'

[¶11] It was an aspidistra. It gave him a bit of a twinge to see it. Even
here, in this final refuge! Hast thou found me, O mine enemy? But it was
a poor weedy specimen—indeed, it was obviously dying.

[¶12] In this place he could have been happy if only people would let him
alone. It was a place where you _could_ be happy, in a sluttish way. To
spend your days in meaningless mechanical work, work that could be
slovened through in a sort of coma; to come home and light the fire when
you had any coal (there were sixpenny bags at the grocer's) and get the
stuffy little attic warm; to sit over a squalid meal of bacon,
bread-and-marg. and tea, cooked over the gas-ring; to lie on the frowzy
bed, reading a thriller or doing the Brain Brighteners in _Tit Bits_
until the small hours; it was the kind of life he wanted. All his habits
had deteriorated rapidly. He never shaved more than three times a week
nowadays, and only washed the parts that showed. There were good public
baths near by, but he hardly went to them as often as once in a month.
He never made his bed properly, but just turned back the sheets, and
never washed his few crocks till all of them had been used twice over.
There was a film of dust on everything. In the fender there was always a
greasy frying-pan and a couple of plates coated with the remnants of
fried eggs. One night the bugs came out of one of the cracks and marched
across the ceiling two by two. He lay on his bed, his hands under his
head, watching them with interest. Without regret, almost intentionally,
he was letting himself go to pieces. At the bottom of all his feelings
there was a sulkiness, a _je m'en fous_ in the face of the world. Life
had beaten him; but you can still beat life by turning your face away.
Better to sink than rise. Down, down into the ghost-kingdom, the shadowy
world where shame, effort, decency do not exist!

[¶13] To sink! How easy it ought to be, since there are so few competitors!
But the strange thing is that often it is harder to sink than to rise.
There is always something that drags one upwards. After all, one is
never quite alone; there are always friends, lovers, relatives. Everyone
Gordon knew seemed to be writing him letters, pitying him or bullying
him. Aunt Angela had written, Uncle Walter had written, Rosemary had
written over and over again, Ravelston had written, Julia had written.
Even Flaxman had sent a line to wish him luck. Flaxman's wife had
forgiven him, and he was back at Peckham, in aspidistral bliss. Gordon
hated getting letters nowadays. They were a link with that other world
from which he was trying to escape.

[¶14] Even Ravelston had turned against him. That was after he had been to see
Gordon in his new lodgings. Until this visit he had not realised what
kind of neighbourhood Gordon was living in. As his taxi drew up at the
corner, in the Waterloo Road, a horde of ragged shock-haired boys came
swooping from nowhere, to fight round the taxi door like fish at a bait.
Three of them clung to the handle and hauled the door open
simultaneously. Their servile, dirty little faces, wild with hope, made
him feel sick. He flung some pennies among them and fled up the alley
without looking at them again. The narrow pavements were smeared with a
quantity of dogs' excrement that was surprising, seeing that there were
no dogs in sight. Down in the basement Mother Meakin was boiling a
haddock, and you could smell it half way up the stairs. In the attic
Ravelston sat on the rickety chair, with the ceiling sloping down just
behind his head. The fire was out and there was no light in the room
except four candles guttering in a saucer beside the aspidistra. Gordon
lay on the ragged bed, fully dressed but with no shoes on. He had
scarcely stirred when Ravelston came in. He just lay there, flat on his
back, sometimes smiling a little, as though there were some private joke
between himself and the ceiling. The room had already the stuffy
sweetish smell of rooms that have been lived in a long time and never
cleaned. There were dirty crocks lying about in the fender.

[¶15] 'Would you like a cup of tea?' Gordon said, without stirring.

[¶16] 'No, thanks awfully—no,' said Ravelston, a little too hastily.

[¶17] He had seen the brown-stained cups in the fender and the repulsive
common sink downstairs. Gordon knew quite well why Ravelston refused the
tea. The whole atmosphere of this place had given Ravelston a kind of
shock. That awful mixed smell of slops and haddock on the stairs! He
looked at Gordon, supine on the ragged bed. And, dash it, Gordon was a
gentleman! At another time he would have repudiated that thought; but in
this atmosphere pious humbug was impossible. All the class-instincts
which he believed himself not to possess rose in revolt. It was dreadful
to think of anyone with brains and refinement living in a place like
this. He wanted to tell Gordon to get out of it, pull himself together,
earn a decent income and live like a gentleman. But of course he didn't
say so. You can't say things like that. Gordon was aware of what was
going on inside Ravelston's head. It amused him, rather. He felt no
gratitude towards Ravelston for coming here and seeing him; on the other
hand, he was not ashamed of his surroundings as he would once have been.
There was a faint, amused malice in the way he spoke.

[¶18] 'You think I'm a BF, of course,' he remarked to the ceiling.

[¶19] 'No, I don't. Why should I?'

[¶20] 'Yes, you do. You think I'm a BF to stay in this filthy place instead of
getting a proper job. You think I ought to try for that job at the New
Albion.'

[¶21] 'No, dash it! I never thought that. I see your point absolutely. I told
you that before. I think you're perfectly right in principle.'

[¶22] 'And you think principles are all right so long as one doesn't go and
put them into practice.'

[¶23] 'No. But the question always is, when _is_ one putting them into
practice?'

[¶24] 'It's quite simple. I've made war on money. This is where it's led me.'

[¶25] Ravelston rubbed his nose, then shifted uneasily on his chair.

[¶26] 'The mistake you make, don't you see, is in thinking one can live in a
corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you
achieve by refusing to make money? You're trying to behave as though one
could stand right outside our economic system. But one can't. One's got
to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can't put things right
in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning.'

[¶27] Gordon waved a foot at the buggy ceiling.

[¶28] 'Of course this _is_ a hole-and-corner, I admit.'

[¶29] 'I didn't mean that,' said Ravelston, pained.

[¶30] 'But let's face facts. You think I ought to be looking about for a
_good_ job, don't you?'

[¶31] 'It depends on the job. I think you're quite right not to sell yourself
to that advertising agency. But it does seem rather a pity that you
should stay in that wretched job you're in at present. After all, you
_have_ got talents. You ought to be using them somehow.'

[¶32] 'There are my poems,' said Gordon, smiling at his private joke.

[¶33] Ravelston looked abashed. This remark silenced him. Of course, there
_were_ Gordon's poems. There was _London Pleasures_, for instance.
Ravelston knew, and Gordon knew, and each knew that the other knew, that
_London Pleasures_ would never be finished. Never again, probably, would
Gordon write a line of poetry; never, at least, while he remained in
this vile place, this blind-alley job and this defeated mood. He had
finished with all that. But this could not be said, as yet. The pretence
was still kept up that Gordon was a struggling poet—the conventional
poet-in-garret.

[¶34] It was not long before Ravelston rose to go. This smelly place oppressed
him, and it was increasingly obvious that Gordon did not want him here.
He moved hesitantly towards the door, pulling on his gloves, then came
back again, pulling off his left glove and flicking it against his leg.

[¶35] 'Look here, Gordon, you won't mind my saying it—this is a filthy place,
you know. This house, this street—everything,'

[¶36] 'I know. It's a pigsty. It suits me.'

[¶37] 'But do you _have_ to live in a place like this?'

[¶38] 'My dear chap, you know what my wages are. Thirty bob a week.'

[¶39] 'Yes, but——! Surely there _are_ better places? What rent are you
paying?'

[¶40] 'Eight bob.'

[¶41] 'Eight bob? You could get a fairly decent unfurnished room for that.
Something a bit better than this, anyway. Look here, why don't you take
an unfurnished place and let me lend you ten quid for furniture?'

[¶42] '"Lend" me ten quid! After all you've "lent" me already? _Give_ me ten
quid, you mean.'

[¶43] Ravelston gazed unhappily at the wall. Dash it, what a thing to say! He
said flatly:

[¶44] 'All right, if you like to put it like that. _Give_ you ten quid.'

[¶45] 'But as it happens, you see, I don't want it.'

[¶46] 'But dash it all! You might as well have a decent place to live in.'

[¶47] 'But I don't want a decent place. I want an indecent place. This one,
for instance.'

[¶48] 'But why? Why?'

[¶49] 'It's suited to my station,' said Gordon, turning his face to the wall.

[¶50] A few days later Ravelston wrote him a long, diffident sort of letter.
It reiterated most of what he had said in their conversation. Its
general effect was that Ravelston saw Gordon's point entirely, that
there was a lot of truth in what Gordon said, that Gordon was absolutely
right in principle, but——! It was the obvious, the inevitable 'but'.
Gordon did not answer. It was several months before he saw Ravelston
again. Ravelston made various attempts to get in touch with him. It was
a curious fact—rather a shameful fact from a Socialist's point of
view—that the thought of Gordon, who had brains and was of gentle
birth, lurking in that vile place and that almost menial job, worried
him more than the thought of ten thousand unemployed in Middlesbrough.
Several times, in hopes of cheering Gordon up, he wrote asking him to
send contributions to _Antichrist_. Gordon never answered. Their
friendship was at an end, it seemed to him. The evil time when he had
lived on Ravelston had spoiled everything. Charity kills friendship.

[¶51] And then there were Julia and Rosemary. They differed from Ravelston in
this, that they had no shyness about speaking their minds. They did not
say euphemistically that Gordon was 'right in principle'; they knew that
to refuse a 'good' job can never be right. Over and over again they
besought him to go back to the New Albion. The worst was that he had
both of them in pursuit of him together. Before this business they had
never met, but now Rosemary had got to know Julia somehow. They were in
feminine league against him. They used to get together and talk about
the 'maddening' way in which Gordon was behaving. It was the only thing
they had in common, their feminine rage against his 'maddening'
behaviour. Simultaneously and one after the other, by letter and by word
of mouth, they harried him. It was unbearable.

[¶52] Thank God, neither of them had seen his room at Mother Meakin's yet.
Rosemary might have endured it, but the sight of that filthy attic would
have been almost the death of Julia. They had been round to see him at
the library, Rosemary a number of times, Julia once, when she could make
a pretext to get away from the teashop. Even that was bad enough. It
dismayed them to see what a mean, dreary little place the library was.
The job at McKechnie's, though wretchedly paid, had not been the kind of
job that you need actually be ashamed of. It brought Gordon into touch
with cultivated people; seeing that he was a 'writer' himself, it might
conceivably 'lead to something'. But here, in a street that was almost a
slum, serving out yellow-jacketed trash at thirty bob a week—what hope
was there in a job like that? It was just a derelict's job, a
blind-alley job. Evening after evening, walking up and down the dreary
misty street after the library was shut, Gordon and Rosemary argued
about it and about. She kept on and on at him. _Would_ he go back to the
New Albion? _Why_ wouldn't he go back to the New Albion? He always told
her that the New Albion wouldn't take him back. After all, he hadn't
applied for the job and there was no knowing whether he could get it; he
preferred to keep it uncertain. There was something about him now that
dismayed and frightened her. He seemed to have changed and deteriorated
so suddenly. She divined, though he did not speak to her about it, that
desire of his to escape from all effort and all decency, to sink down,
down into the ultimate mud. It was not only from money but from life
itself that he was turning away. They did not argue now as they had
argued in the old days before Gordon had lost his job. In those days she
had not paid much attention to his preposterous theories. His tirades
against the money-morality had been a kind of joke between them. And it
had hardly seemed to matter that time was passing and that Gordon's
chance of earning a decent living was infinitely remote. She had still
thought of herself as a young girl and of the future as limitless. She
had watched him fling away two years of his life—two years of _her_
life, for that matter; and she would have felt it ungenerous to protest.

[¶53] But now she was growing frightened. Time's wingèd chariot was hurrying
near. When Gordon lost his job she had suddenly realised, with the sense
of making a startling discovery, that after all she was no longer very
young. Gordon's thirtieth birthday was past; her own was not far
distant. And what lay ahead of them? Gordon was sinking effortless into
grey, deadly failure. He seemed to _want_ to sink. What hope was there
that they could ever get married now? Gordon knew that she was right.
The situation was impossible. And so the thought, unspoken as yet, grew
gradually in both their minds that they would have to part—for good.

[¶54] One night they were to meet under the railway arches. It was a horrible
January night; no mist, for once, only a vile wind that screeched round
corners and flung dust and torn paper into your face. He waited for her,
a small slouching figure, shabby almost to raggedness, his hair blown
about by the wind. She was punctual, as usual. She ran towards him,
pulled his face down and kissed his cold cheek.

[¶55] 'Gordon, dear, how cold you are! Why did you come out without an
overcoat?'

[¶56] 'My overcoat's up the spout. I thought you knew.'

[¶57] 'Oh, dear! Yes.'

[¶58] She looked up at him, a small frown between her black brows. He looked
so haggard, so despondent, there in the ill-lit archway, his face full
of shadows. She wound her arm through his and pulled him out into the
light.

[¶59] 'Let's keep walking. It's too cold to stand about. I've got something
serious I want to say to you.'

[¶60] 'What?'

[¶61] 'I expect you'll be very angry with me.'

[¶62] 'What is it?'

[¶63] 'This afternoon I went and saw Mr Erskine. I asked leave to speak to him
for a few minutes.'

[¶64] He knew what was coming. He tried to free his arm from hers, but she
held on to it.

[¶65] 'Well?' he said sulkily.

[¶66] 'I spoke to him about you. I asked him if he'd take you back. Of course
he said trade was bad and they couldn't afford to take on new staff and
all that. But I reminded him of what he'd said to you, and he said, Yes,
he'd always thought you were very promising. And in the end he said he'd
be quite ready to find a job for you if you'd come back. So you see I
_was_ right. They _will_ give you the job.'

[¶67] He did not answer. She squeezed his arm. 'So _now_ what do you think
about it?' she said.

[¶68] 'You know what I think,' he said coldly.

[¶69] Secretly he was alarmed and angry. This was what he had been fearing. He
had known all along that she would do it sooner or later. It made the
issue more definite and his own blame clearer. He slouched on, his hands
still in his coat pockets, letting her cling to his arm but not looking
towards her.

[¶70] 'You're angry with me?' she said.

[¶71] 'No, I'm not. But I don't see why you had to do it—behind my back.'

[¶72] That wounded her. She had had to plead very hard before she had managed
to extort that promise from Mr Erskine. And it had needed all her
courage to beard the managing director in his den. She had been in
deadly fear that she might be sacked for doing it. But she wasn't going
to tell Gordon anything of that.

[¶73] 'I don't think you ought to say _behind your back_. After all, I was
only trying to help you.'

[¶74] 'How does it help me to get me the offer of a job I wouldn't touch with
a stick?'

[¶75] 'You mean you won't go back, even now?'

[¶76] 'Never.'

[¶77] 'Why?'

[¶78] '_Must_ we go into it again?' he said wearily.

[¶79] She squeezed his arm with all her strength and pulled him round, making
him face her. There was a kind of desperation in the way she clung to
him. She had made her last effort and it had failed. It was as though
she could feel him receding, fading away from her like a ghost.

[¶80] 'You'll break my heart if you go on like this,' she said.

[¶81] 'I wish you wouldn't trouble about me. It would be so much simpler if
you didn't.'

[¶82] 'But why do you have to throw your life away?'

[¶83] 'I tell you I can't help it. I've got to stick to my guns.'

[¶84] 'You know what this will mean?'

[¶85] With a chill at his heart, and yet with a feeling of resignation, even
of relief, he said: 'You mean we shall have to part—not see each other
again?'

[¶86] They had walked on, and now they emerged into the Westminster Bridge
Road. The wind met them with a scream, whirling at them a cloud of dust
that made both of them duck their heads. They halted again. Her small
face was full of lines, and the cold wind and the cold lamplight did not
improve it.

[¶87] 'You want to get rid of me,' he said.

[¶88] 'No. No. It's not exactly that.'

[¶89] 'But you feel we ought to part.'

[¶90] 'How can we go on like this?' she said desolately.

[¶91] 'It's difficult, I admit.'

[¶92] 'It's all so miserable, so hopeless! What can it ever lead to?'

[¶93] 'So you don't love me after all?' he said.

[¶94] 'I do, I do! You know I do.'

[¶95] 'In a way, perhaps. But not enough to go on loving me when it's certain
I'll never have the money to keep you. You'll have me as a husband, but
not as a lover. It's still a question of money, you see.'

[¶96] 'It is _not_ money, Gordon! It's _not_ that.'

[¶97] 'Yes, it's just money. There's been money between us from the start.
Money, always money!'

[¶98] The scene continued, but not for very much longer. Both of them were
shivering with cold. There is no emotion that matters greatly when one
is standing at a street corner in a biting wind. When finally they
parted it was with no irrevocable farewell. She simply said, 'I must get
back,' kissed him and ran across the road to the tram-stop. Mainly with
relief he watched her go. He could not stop now to ask himself whether
he loved her. Simply he wanted to get away—away from the windy street,
away from scenes and emotional demands, back in the frowzy solitude of
his attic. If there were tears in his eyes it was only from the cold of
the wind.

[¶99] With Julia it was almost worse. She asked him to go and see her one
evening. This was after she had heard, from Rosemary, of Mr Erskine's
offer of a job. The dreadful thing with Julia was that she understood
nothing, absolutely nothing, of his motives. All she understood was that
a 'good' job had been offered him and that he had refused it. She
implored him almost on her knees not to throw this chance away. And when
he told her that his mind was made up, she wept, actually wept. That was
dreadful. The poor goose-like girl, with streaks of grey in her hair,
weeping without grace or dignity in her little Drage-furnished
bed-sitting-room! This was the death of all her hopes. She had watched
the family go down and down, moneyless and childless, into grey
obscurity. Gordon alone had had it in him to succeed; and he, from mad
perverseness, would not. He knew what she was thinking; he had to induce
in himself a kind of brutality to stand firm. It was only because of
Rosemary and Julia that he cared. Ravelston did not matter, because
Ravelston understood. Aunt Angela and Uncle Walter, of course, were
bleating weakly at him in long, fatuous letters. But them he
disregarded.

[¶100] In desperation Julia asked him, what did he mean to _do_ now that he had
flung away his last chance of succeeding in life. He answered simply,
'My poems.' He had said the same to Rosemary and to Ravelston. With
Ravelston the answer had sufficed. Rosemary had no longer any belief in
his poems, but she would not say so. As for Julia, his poems had never
at any time meant anything to her. 'I don't see much sense in writing if
you can't make money out of it,' was what she had always said. And he
himself did not believe in his poems any longer. But he still struggled
to 'write', at least at times. Soon after he changed his lodgings he had
copied out onto clean sheets the completed portions of _London
Pleasures_—not quite four hundred lines, he discovered. Even the labour
of copying it out was a deadly bore. Yet he still worked on it
occasionally; cutting out a line here, altering another there, not
making or even expecting to make any progress. Before long the pages
were as they had been before, a scrawled, grimy labyrinth of words. He
used to carry the wad of grimy manuscript about with him in his pocket.
The feeling of it there upheld him a little; after all it was a kind of
achievement, demonstrable to himself though to nobody else. There it
was, sole product of two years—of a thousand hours' work, it might be.
He had no feeling for it any longer as a poem. The whole concept of
poetry was meaningless to him now. It was only that if _London
Pleasures_ were ever finished it would be something snatched from fate,
a thing created _outside_ the money-world. But he knew, far more clearly
than before, that it never would be finished. How was it possible that
any creative impulse should remain to him, in the life he was living
now? As time went on, even the desire to finish _London Pleasures_
vanished. He still carried the manuscript about in his pocket; but it
was only a gesture, a symbol of his private war. He had finished for
ever with that futile dream of being a 'writer'. After all, was not that
too a species of ambition? He wanted to get away from all that, _below_
all that. Down, down! Into the ghost-kingdom, out of the reach of hope,
out of the reach of fear! Under ground, under ground! That was where he
wished to be.

[¶101] Yet in a way it was not so easy. One night about nine he was lying on
his bed, with the ragged counterpane over his feet, his hands under his
head to keep them warm. The fire was out. The dust was thick on
everything. The aspidistra had died a week ago and was withering upright
in its pot. He slid a shoeless foot from under the counterpane, held it
up and looked at it. His sock was full of holes—there were more holes
than sock. So here he lay, Gordon Comstock, in a slum attic on a ragged
bed, with his feet sticking out of his socks, with one and fourpence in
the world, with three decades behind him and nothing, nothing
accomplished! Surely _now_ he was past redemption? Surely, try as they
would, they couldn't prise him out of a hole like this? He had wanted to
reach the mud—well, this was the mud, wasn't it?

[¶102] Yet he knew that it was not so. That other world, the world of money and
success, is always so strangely near. You don't escape it merely by
taking refuge in dirt and misery. He had been frightened as well as
angry when Rosemary told him about Mr Erskine's offer. It brought the
danger so close to him. A letter, a telephone message, and from this
squalor he could step straight back into the money-world—back to four
quid a week, back to effort and decency and slavery. Going to the devil
isn't so easy as it sounds. Sometimes your salvation hunts you down like
the Hound of Heaven.

[¶103] For a while he lay in an almost mindless state, gazing at the ceiling.
The utter futility of just lying there, dirty and cold, comforted him a
little. But presently he was roused by a light tap at the door. He did
not stir. It was Mother Meakin, presumably, though it did not sound like
her knock.

[¶104] 'Come in,' he said.

[¶105] The door opened. It was Rosemary.

[¶106] She stepped in, and then stopped as the dusty sweetish smell of the room
caught her. Even in the bad light of the lamp she could see the state of
filth the room was in—the litter of food and papers on the table, the
grate full of cold ashes, the foul crocks in the fender, the dead
aspidistra. As she came slowly towards the bed she pulled her hat off
and threw it onto the chair.

[¶107] '_What_ a place for you to live in!' she said.

[¶108] 'So you've come back?' he said.

[¶109] 'Yes.'

[¶110] He turned a little away from her, his arm over his face. 'Come back to
lecture me some more, I suppose?'

[¶111] 'No.'

[¶112] 'Then why?'

[¶113] 'Because——'

[¶114] She had knelt down beside the bed. She pulled his arm away, put her face
forward to kiss him, then drew back, surprised, and began to stroke the
hair over his temple with the tips of her fingers.

[¶115] 'Oh, Gordon!'

[¶116] 'What?'

[¶117] 'You've got grey in your hair!'

[¶118] 'Have I? Where?'

[¶119] 'Here—over the temple. There's quite a little patch of it. It must have
happened all of a sudden.'

[¶120] '"My golden locks time hath to silver turned,"' he said indifferently.

[¶121] 'So we're both going grey,' she said.

[¶122] She bent her head to show him the three white hairs on her crown. Then
she wriggled herself onto the bed beside him, put an arm under him,
pulled him towards her, covered his face with kisses. He let her do it.
He did not want this to happen—it was the very thing that he least
wanted. But she had wriggled herself beneath him; they were breast to
breast. Her body seemed to melt into his. By the expression of her face
he knew what had brought her here. After all, she was virgin. She did
not know what she was doing. It was magnanimity, pure magnanimity, that
moved her. His wretchedness had drawn her back to him. Simply because he
was penniless and a failure she had got to yield to him, even if it was
only once.

[¶123] 'I had to come back,' she said.

[¶124] 'Why?'

[¶125] 'I couldn't bear to think of you here alone. It seemed so awful, leaving
you like that.'

[¶126] 'You did quite right to leave me. You'd much better not have come back.
You know we can't ever get married.'

[¶127] 'I don't care. That isn't how one behaves to people one loves. I don't
care whether you marry me or not. I love you.'

[¶128] 'This isn't wise,' he said.

[¶129] 'I don't care. I wish I'd done it years ago.'

[¶130] 'We'd much better not.'

[¶131] 'Yes.'

[¶132] 'No.'

[¶133] 'Yes!'

[¶134] After all, she was too much for him. He had wanted her so long, and he
could not stop to weigh the consequences. So it was done at last,
without much pleasure, on Mother Meakin's dingy bed. Presently Rosemary
got up and rearranged her clothes. The room, though stuffy, was
dreadfully cold. They were both shivering a little. She pulled the
coverlet further over Gordon. He lay without stirring, his back turned
to her, his face hidden against his arm. She knelt down beside the bed,
took his other hand and laid it for a moment against her cheek. He
scarcely noticed her. Then she shut the door quietly behind her and
tiptoed down the bare, evil-smelling stairs. She felt dismayed,
disappointed and very cold.