The Complete Novels Of George Orwell (145 page)

But how absurd that even now, in the era of central heating and tinned peaches, a thousand so-called poets are still writing in the same strain! For what difference does spring or winter or any other time of year make to the average civilized person nowadays? In a town like London the most striking seasonal change, apart from the mere change of temperature, is in the things you see lying about on the pavement. In late winter is is mainly cabbage leaves. In July you tread on cherry stones, in November on burnt-out fireworks. Towards Christmas the orange peel grows thicker. It was a different matter in the Middle Ages. There was some sense in writing poems about spring when spring meant fresh meat and green vegetables after months of frowsting in some windowless hut on a diet of salt fish and mouldy bread.

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 near 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 handy, 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
ro
mance. 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 flesh. 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 dreadul 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 halfnaked 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 this 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.’