He did not answer. She squeezed his arm. ‘So now what do you think about it?’ she said.
‘You know what I think,’ he said coldly.
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.
‘You’re angry with me?’ she said.
‘No, I’m not. But I don’t see why you had to do it—behind my back.’
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.
‘I don’t think you ought to say behind your back. After all, I was only trying to help you.’
‘How does it help me to get me the offer of a job I wouldn’t touch with a stick?’
‘You mean you won’t go back, even now?’
‘Never.’
‘Why?’
‘Must we go into it again?’ he said wearily.
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.
‘You’ll break my heart if you go on like this,’ she said.
‘I wish you wouldn’t trouble about me. It would be so much simpler if you didn’t.’
‘But why do you have to throw your life away?’
‘I tell you I can’t help it. I’ve got to stick to my guns.’
‘You know what this will mean?’
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?’
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.
‘You want to get rid of me,’ he said.
‘No. No. It’s not exactly that.’
‘But you feel we ought to part.’
‘How can we go on like this?’ she said desolately.
‘It’s difficult, I admit.’
‘It’s all so miserable, so hopeless! What can it ever lead to?’
‘So you don’t love me after all?’ he said.
‘I do, I do! You know I do.’
‘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.’
‘It is not money, Gordon! It’s not that.’
‘Yes, it’s just money. There’s been money between us from the start. Money, always money!’
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.
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 perverse-ness, 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
‘Come in,’ he said.
The door opened. It was Rosemary.
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.
‘ What a place for you to live in!’ she said.
‘So you’ve come back?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
He turned a little away from her, his arm over his face. ‘Come back to lecture me some more, I suppose?’
‘No.’
‘Then why?’
‘Because——’
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.
‘Oh, Gordon!’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got grey in your hair!’
‘Have I? Where?’
‘Here-over the temple. There’s quite a little patch of it. It must have happened all of a sudden.’
‘ “My golden locks time hath to silver turned,” ’ he said indifferently.
‘So we’re both going grey,’ she said.
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.
‘I had to come back,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘I couldn’t bear to think of you here alone. It seemed so awful, leaving you like that.’
‘You did quite right to leave me. You’d much better not have come back. You know we can’t ever get married.’
‘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.’
‘This isn’t wise,’ he said.
‘I don’t care. I wish I’d done it years ago.’