‘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 Corner Table 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 aeroplanes come. Zoom–bang! A few tons of T.N.T. to send our civilization 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 them. It is when he gets at you through your sense of decency that he finds you helpless.
The Bovex Ballad jungled 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.
He looked up and saw that he was passing a public library. A thought struck him. That baby. What did it mean, anyway, having a baby? What was it that was actually happening to Rosemary at this moment? He had only vague and general ideas of what pregnancy meant. No doubt they would have books in there that would tell him about it. He went in. The lending library was on the left. It was there that you had to ask for works of reference.
The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one–at least, no male person–ever consulted works of reference except in search of pornography. As soon as you approached she pierced you through and through with a flash of her pince-nez and let you know that your dirty secret was no secret from her. After all, all works of reference are pornographical, except perhaps Whitaker’s Almanack. You can put even the Oxford Dictionary to evil purposes by looking up words like — and —
Gordon knew her type at a glance, but he was too preoccupied to care.
‘Have you any book on gynaecology?’ he said.
‘Any what?’ demanded the young woman with a pince-nez flash of unmistakable triumph. As usual! Another male in search of dirt!
‘Well, any books on midwifery? About babies being born, and so forth.’
‘We don’t issue books of that description to the general public,’ said the young woman frostily.
‘I’m sorry–there’s a point I particularly want to look up.’
‘Are you a medical student?’
‘No.’
‘Then I don’t quite see what you want with books on midwifery.’
Curse the woman! Gordon thought. At another time he would have been afraid of her; at present, however, she merely bored him.
‘If you want to know, my wife’s going to have a baby. We neither of us know much about it. I want to see whether I can find out anything useful.’
The young woman did not believe him. He looked too shabby and worn, she decided, to be a newly married man. However, it was her job to lend out books, and she seldom actually refused them, except to children. You always got your book in the end, after you had been made to feel yourself a dirty swine.
With an aseptic air she led Gordon to a small table in the middle of the library and presented him with two fat books in brown covers. Thereafter she left him alone, but kept an eye on him from whatever part of the library she happened to be in. He could feel her pince-nez probing the back of his neck at long range, trying to decide from his demeanour whether he was really searching for information or merely picking out the dirty bits.
He opened one of the books and searched inexpertly through it. There were acres of close-printed text full of Latin words. That was no use. He wanted something simple–pictures, for choice. How long had this thing been going on? Six weeks–nine weeks, perhaps. Ah! This must be it.
He came on a print of a nine weeks’ foetus. It gave him a shock to see it, for he had not expected it to look in the least like that. It was a deformed, gnomelike thing, a sort of clumsy caricature of a human being, with a huge domed head as big as the rest of its body. In the middle of the great blank expanse of head there was a tiny button of an ear. The thing was in profile; its boneless arm was bent, and one hand, crude as a seal’s flipper, covered its face–fortunately, perhaps. Below were little skinny legs, twisted like a monkey’s with the toes turned in. It was a monstrous thing, and yet strangely human. It surprised him that they should begin looking human so soon. He had pictured something much more rudimentary; a mere blob of nucleus, like a bubble of frog-spawn. But it must be very tiny, of course. He looked at the dimensions marked below. Length 30 millimetres. About the
