Ravelston pretended not to notice that they were staring at him. He lounged towards the bar, pulling off a glove to feel for the money in his pocket. ‘What’s yours?’ he said casually.
But Gordon had already shoved his way ahead and was tapping a shilling on the bar. Always pay for the first round of drinks! It was his point of honour. Ravelston made for the only vacant table. A navvy leaning on the bar turned on his elbow and gave him a long, insolent stare. ‘A —— toff!’ he was thinking. Gordon came back balancing two pint glasses of dark common ale. They were thick cheap glasses, thick as jam jars almost, and dim and greasy. A thin yellow froth was subsiding on the beer. The air was thick with gunpowdery tobacco-smoke. Ravelston caught sight of a well-filled spittoon near the bar and averted his eyes. It crossed his mind that this beer had been sucked up from some beetle-ridden cellar through yards of slimy tube, and that the glasses had never been washed in their lives, only rinsed in beery water. Gordon was very hungry. He could have done with some bread and cheese, but to order any would have been to betray the fact that he had had no dinner. He took a deep pull at his beer and lighted a cigarette, which made him forget his hunger a little. Ravelston also swallowed a mouthful or so and set the glass gingerly down. It was typical London beer, sickly and yet leaving a chemical after-taste. Ravelston thought of the wines of Burgundy. They went on arguing about Socialism.
‘You know, Gordon, it’s really time you started reading Marx,’ said Ravelston, less apologetically than usual, because the vile taste of the beer had annoyed him.
‘I’d sooner read Mrs Humphry Ward,’ said Gordon.
‘But don’t you see, your attitude is so unreasonable. You’re always tirading against Capitalism, and yet you won’t accept the only possible alternative. One can’t put things right in a hole-and-corner way. One’s got to accept either Capitalism or Socialism. There’s no way out of it.’
‘I tell you I can’t be bothered with Socialism. The very thought of it makes me yawn.’
‘But what’s your objection to Socialism, anyway?’
‘There’s only one objection to Socialism, and that is that nobody wants it.’
‘Oh, surely it’s rather absurd to say that!’
‘That’s to say, nobody who could see what Socialism would really mean.’
‘But what would Socialism mean, according to your idea of it?’
‘Oh! Some kind of Aldous Huxley Brave New World; only not so amusing. Four hours a day in a model factory, tightening up bolt number 6003. Rations served out in greaseproof paper at the communal kitchen. Community-hikes from Marx Hostel to Lenin Hostel and back. Free abortion-clinics on all the corners. All very well in its way, of course. Only we don’t want it.’
Ravelston sighed. Once a month, in Antichrist, he repudiated this version of Socialism. ‘Well, what do we want, then?’
‘God knows. All we know is what we don’t want. That’s what’s wrong with us nowadays. We’re stuck, like Buridan’s donkey. Only there are three alternatives instead of two, and all three of them make us spew. Socialism’s only one of them.’
‘And what are the other two?’
‘Oh, I suppose suicide and the Catholic Church.’
Ravelston smiled, anticlerically shocked. ‘The Catholic Church! Do you consider that an alternative?’
‘Well, it’s a standing temptation to the intelligentsia, isn’t it?’
‘Not what I should call the intelligentsia. Though there was Eliot, of course,’ Ravelston admitted.
‘And there’ll be plenty more, you bet. I dare say it’s fairly cosy under Mother Church’s wing. A bit insanitary, of course—but you’d feel safe there, anyway.’
Ravelston rubbed his nose reflectively. ‘It seems to me that’s only another form of suicide.’
‘In a way. But so’s Socialism. At least it’s a counsel of despair. But I couldn’t commit suicide, real suicide. It’s too meek and mild. I’m not going to give up my share of earth to anyone else. I’d want to do in a few of my enemies first.’
Ravelston smiled again. ‘And who are your enemies?’
‘Oh, anyone with over five hundred a year.’
A momentary uncomfortable silence fell. Ravelston’s income, after payment of income tax, was probably two thousand a year. This was the kind of thing Gordon was always saying. To cover the awkwardness of the moment, Ravelston took up his glass, steeled himself against the nauseous taste and swallowed about two-thirds of his beer—enough, at any rate, to give the impression that he had finished it.
‘Drink up!’ he said with would-be heartiness. ‘It’s time we had the other half of that.’
Gordon emptied his glass and let Ravelston take it. He did not mind letting Ravelston pay for the drinks now. He had paid the first round and honour was satisfied. Ravelston walked self-consciously to the bar. People began staring at him again as soon as he stood up. The navvy, still leaning against the bar over his untouched pot of beer, gazed at him with quiet insolence. Ravelston resolved that he would drink no more of this filthy common ale.
‘Two double whiskies, would you, please?’ he said apologetically.
The grim landlady stared. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Two double whiskies, please.’
‘No whisky ‘ere. We don’t sell spirits. Beer ‘ouse, we are.’
The navvy smiled flickeringly under his moustache. ‘—— ignorant toff!’ he was thinking. ‘Asking for whisky in a —— beer ‘ouse!’ Ravelston’s pale face flushed slightly. He had not known till this moment that some of the poorer pubs cannot afford a spirit licence.
‘Bass, then, would you? Two pint bottles of Bass.’
There were no pint bottles. They had to have four half pints. It was a very poor house. Gordon took a deep, satisfying swallow of Bass. More alcoholic than the draught beer, it fizzed and prickled in his throat, and because he was hungry it went a little to his head. He felt at once more philosophic and more self-pitiful. He had made up his mind not to begin belly-aching about his poverty; but now he was going to begin after all. He said abruptly:
‘This is all b——s that we’ve been talking.’
‘What’s all b——s?’
‘All this about Socialism and Capitalism and the state of the modern world and God knows what. I don’t give a —— for the state of the modern world. If the whole of England was starving except myself and the people I care about, I wouldn’t give a damn.’
‘Don’t you exaggerate just a little?’
‘No. All this talk we make—we’re only objectifying our own feelings. It’s all dictated by what we’ve got in our pockets. I go up and down London saying it’s a city of the dead, and our civilisation’s dying, and I wish war would break out, and God knows what; and all it means is that my wages are two quid a week and I wish they were five.’
Ravelston, once again reminded obliquely of his income, stroked his nose slowly with the knuckle of his left forefinger.
‘Of course, I’m with you up to a point. After all, it’s only what Marx said. Every ideology is a reflection of economic circumstances.’
‘Ah, but you only understand it out of Marx! You don’t know what it means to have to crawl along on two quid a week. It isn’t a question of hardship—it’s nothing so decent as hardship. It’s the bloody, sneaking, squalid meanness of it. Living alone for weeks on end because when you’ve no money you’ve no friends. Calling yourself a writer and never even producing anything because you’re always too washed out to write. It’s a sort of filthy sub-world one lives in. A sort of spiritual sewer.’
He had started now. They were never together long without Gordon beginning to talk in this strain. It was the vilest manners. It embarrassed Ravelston horribly. And yet somehow Gordon could not help it. He had got to retail his troubles to somebody, and Ravelston was the only person who understood. Poverty, like every other dirty wound, has got to be exposed occasionally. He began to talk in obscene detail of his life in Willowbed Road. He dilated on the smell of slops and cabbage, the clotted sauce-bottles in the dining-room, the vile food, the aspidistras. He described his furtive cups of tea and his trick of throwing the used tea-leaves down the WC. Ravelston, guilty and miserable, sat staring at his glass and revolving it slowly between his hands. Against his right breast he could feel, a square accusing shape, the pocket-book in which, as he knew, eight pound notes and two ten-bob notes nestled against his fat green cheque-book. How awful these details of poverty are! Not that what Gordon was describing was real poverty. It was at worst the fringe of poverty. But what of the real poor? What of the unemployed in Middlesbrough, seven in a room on twenty-five bob a week? When there are people living like that, how dare one walk the world with pound notes and cheque-books in one’s pocket?
‘It’s bloody,’ he murmured several times, impotently. In his heart he wondered—it was his invariable reaction—whether Gordon would accept a tenner if you offered to lend it to him.
They had another drink, which Ravelston again paid for, and went out into the street. It was almost time to part. Gordon never spent more than an hour or two with Ravelston. One’s contacts with rich people, like one’s visits to high altitudes, must always be brief. It was a moonless, starless night, with a damp wind blowing. The night air, the beer and the watery radiance of the lamps induced in Gordon a sort of dismal clarity. He perceived that it is quite impossible to explain to any rich person, even to anyone so decent as Ravelston, the essential bloodiness of poverty. For this reason it became all the more important to explain it. He said suddenly:
‘Have you read Chaucer’s Man of Lawe’s Tale?’
‘The Man of Lawe’s Tale? Not that I remember. What’s it about?’
‘I forget. I was thinking of the first six stanzas. Where he talks about poverty. The way it gives everyone the right to stamp on you! The way everyone wants to stamp on you! It makes people hate you, to know that you’ve no money. They insult you just for the pleasure of insulting you and knowing that you can’t hit back.’
Ravelston was pained. ‘Oh, no, surely not! People aren’t so bad as all that.’
‘Ah, but you don’t know the things that happen!’
Gordon did not want to be told that ‘people aren’t so bad’. He clung with a sort of painful joy to the notion that because he was poor everyone must want to insult him. It fitted in with his philosophy of life. And suddenly, with the feeling that he could not stop himself, he was talking of the thing that had been rankling in his mind for two days past—the snub he had had from the Dorings on Thursday. He poured the whole story out quite shamelessly. Ravelston was amazed. He could not understand what Gordon was making such a fuss about. To be disappointed at missing a beastly literary tea-party seemed to him absurd. He would not have gone to a literary tea-party if you had paid him. Like all rich people, he spent far more time in avoiding human society than in seeking it. He interrupted Gordon: