Keep the Aspidistra Flying

by George Orwell

  ‘Where’s my Chianti?’ he said.

  Ravelston gave him the bottle. His face looked pale, harassed, hunted, almost. With guilty restless movements he kept himself apart from Barbara. He could not touch her or even look at her, and yet to escape was beyond him. His eyes sought Gordon’s. ‘For the love of God can’t we get out of it somehow?’ they signalled. Gordon frowned at him. Stick it out! No flinching! He took Dora’s arm again. Come on, Dora! Now for those stairs. Ah! Wait a moment.

  Her arm round his waist, supporting him, Dora drew him aside. Down the darkish, smelly stairs a young woman came mincingly, buttoning on a glove; after her a bald, middle-aged man in evening clothes, black overcoat and white silk muffler, his opera hat in his hand. He walked past them with small mean mouth tightened, pretending not to see them. A family man, by the guilty look in his eye. Gordon watched the gas-light gleam on the back of his bald head. His predecessor. In the same bed, probably. The mantle of Elisha. Now then, Dora, up we go! Ah, these stairs! Difficilis ascensus Averni. That’s right, here we are! ‘Mind the step,’ said Dora. They were on the landing. Black and white lino like a chessboard. White-painted doors. A smell of slops and a fainter smell of stale linen.

  We this way, you that. At the other door Ravelston halted, his fingers on the handle. He could not—no, he could not do it. He could not enter that dreadful room. For the last time his eyes, like those of a dog about to be whipped, turned upon Gordon. ‘Must I, must I?’ his eyes said. Gordon eyed him sternly. Stick it out, Regulus! March to your doom! Atqui sciebat quae sibi Barbara. It is a far, far more proletarian thing that you do. And then with startling suddenness Ravelston’s face cleared. An expression of relief, almost of joy, stole over it. A wonderful thought had occurred to him. After all, you could always pay the girl without actually doing anything! Thank God! He set his shoulders, plucked up courage, went in. The door shut.

  So here we are. A mean, dreadful room. Lino on the floor, gas-fire, huge double bed with sheets vaguely dingy. Over the bed a framed coloured picture from La Vie Parisienne. A mistake, that. Sometimes the originals don’t compare so well. And, by Jove! on the bamboo table by the window, positively an aspidistra! Hast thou found me, O mine enemy? But come here, Dora. Let’s have a look at you.

  He seemed to be lying on the bed. He could not see very well. Her youthful, rapacious face, with blackened eyebrows, leaned over him as he sprawled there.

  ‘How about my present?’ she demanded, half wheedling, half menacing.

  Never mind that now. To work! Come here. Not a bad mouth. Come here. Come closer. Ah!

  No. No use. Impossible. The will but not the way. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Try again. No. The booze, it must be. See Macbeth. One last try. No, no use. Not this evening, I’m afraid.

  All right, Dora, don’t you worry. You’ll get your two quid all right. We aren’t paying by results.

  He made a clumsy gesture. ‘Here, give us that bottle. That bottle off the dressing-table.’

  Dora brought it. Ah, that’s better. That at least doesn’t fail. With hands that had swollen to monstrous size he upended the Chianti bottle. The wine flowed down his throat, bitter and choking, and some of it went up his nose. It overwhelmed him. He was slipping, sliding, falling off the bed. His head met the floor. His legs were still on the bed. For a while he lay in this position. Is this the way to live? Down below the youthful voices were still mournfully singing:

  ‘For tonight we’ll merry be,

  For tonight we’ll merry be,

  For tonight we’ll merry be-e-e—

  Tomorrow we’ll be so-ober!’

  IX

  AND, BY JOVE, tomorrow we were sober!

  Gordon emerged from some long, sickly dream to the consciousness that the books in the lending library were the wrong way up. They were all lying on their sides. Moreover, for some reason their backs had turned white-white and shiny, like porcelain.

  He opened his eyes a little wider and moved an arm. Small rivulets of pain, seemingly touched off by the movement, shot through his body at unexpected places—down the calves of his legs, for instance, and up both sides of his head. He perceived that he was lying on his side, with a hard smooth pillow under his cheek and a coarse blanket scratching his chin and pushing its hairs into his mouth. Apart from the minor pains that stabbed him every time he moved, there was a large, dull sort of pain which was not localised but which seemed to hover all over him.

  Suddenly he flung off the blanket and sat up. He was in a police cell. At this moment a frightful spasm of nausea overcame him. Dimly perceiving a WC in the corner, he crept towards it and was violently sick, three or four times.

  After that, for several minutes, he was in agonising pain. He could scarcely stand on his feet, his head throbbed as though it were going to burst, and the light seemed like some scalding white liquid pouring into his brain through the sockets of his eyes. He sat on the bed holding his head between his hands. Presently, when some of the throbbing had died down, he had another look about him. The cell measured about twelve feet long by six wide and was very high. The walls were all of white porcelain bricks, horribly white and clean. He wondered dully how they cleaned as high up as the ceiling. Perhaps with a hose, he reflected. At one end there was a little barred window, very high up, and at the other end, over the door, an electric bulb let into the wall and protected by a stout grating. The thing he was sitting on was not actually a bed, but a shelf with one blanket and a canvas pillow. The door was of steel, painted green. In the door there was a little round hole with a flap on the outside.

  Having seen this much he lay down and pulled the blanket over him again. He had no further curiosity about his surroundings. As to what had happened last night, he remembered everything—at least, he remembered everything up to the time when he had gone with Dora into the room with the aspidistra. God knew what had happened after that. There had been some kind of bust-up and he had landed in the clink. He had no notion of what he had done; it might be murder for all he knew. In any case he did not care. He turned his face to the wall and pulled the blanket over his head to shut out the light.

  After a long time the spy hole in the door was pushed aside. Gordon managed to turn his head round. His neck-muscles seemed to creak. Through the spy hole he could see a blue eye and a semi-circle of pink chubby cheek.

  ‘’Ja do with a cup of tea?’ a voice said.

  Gordon sat up and instantly felt very sick again. He took his head between his hands and groaned. The thought of a cup of hot tea appealed to him, but he knew it would make him sick if it had sugar in it.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  The police constable opened a partition in the top half of the door and passed in a thick white mug of tea. It had sugar in it. The constable was a solid rosy young man of about twenty-five, with a kind face, white eye-lashes and a tremendous chest. It reminded Gordon of the chest of a carthorse. He spoke with a good accent but with vulgar turns of speech. For a minute or so he stood regarding Gordon.

  ‘You weren’t half bad last night,’ he said finally.

  ‘I’m bad now.’

  ‘You was worse last night, though. What you go and hit the sergeant for?’

  ‘Did I hit the sergeant?’

  ‘Did you? Coo! He wasn’t half wild. He turns to me and he says—holding his ear he was, like this—he says, “Now, if that man wasn’t too drunk to stand, I’d knock his block off.” It’s all gone down on your charge sheet. Drunk and disorderly. You’d only ha’ bin drunk and incapable if you hadn’t of hit the sergeant.’

  ‘Do you know what I shall get for this?’

  ‘Five quid or fourteen days. You’ll go up before Mr Croom. Lucky for you it wasn’t Mr Walker. He’d give you a month without the option, Mr Walker would. Very severe on the drunks he is. Teetotaller.’

  Gordon had drunk some of the tea. It was nauseatingly sweet but its warmth made him feel stronger. He gulped it down. At this moment a nasty, snarling sort of
voice—the sergeant whom Gordon had hit, no doubt—yelped from somewhere outside:

  ‘Take that man out and get him washed. Black Maria leaves at half past nine.’

  The constable hastened to open the cell door. As soon as Gordon stepped outside he felt worse than ever. This was partly because it was much colder in the passage than in the cell. He walked a step or two, and then suddenly his head was going round and round. ‘I’m going to be sick!’ he cried. He was falling—he flung out a hand and stopped himself against the wall. The constable’s strong arm went round him. Across the arm, as over a rail, Gordon sagged, doubled up and limp. A jet of vomit burst from him. It was the tea, of course. There was a gutter running along the stone floor. At the end of the passage the moustachio’d sergeant, in tunic without a belt, stood with his hand on his hip, looking on disgustedly.

  ‘Dirty little tyke,’ he muttered, and turned away.

  ‘Come on, old chap,’ said the constable. ‘You’ll be better in half a mo’.’

  He half led, half dragged Gordon to a big stone sink at the end of the passage and helped him to strip to the waist. His gentleness was astonishing. He handled Gordon almost like a nurse handling a child. Gordon had recovered enough strength to sluice himself with the ice-cold water and rinse his mouth out. The constable gave him a torn towel to dry himself with and then led him back to the cell.

  ‘Now you sit quiet till the Black Maria comes. And take my tip—when you go up to the court, you plead guilty and say you won’t do it again. Mr Croom won’t be hard on you.’

  ‘Where are my collar and tie?’ said Gordon.

  ‘We took ’em away last night. You’ll get ’em back before you go up to court. We had a bloke hung himself with his tie, once.’

  Gordon sat down on the bed. For a little while he occupied himself by calculating the number of porcelain bricks in the walls, then sat with his elbows on his knees, his head between his hands. He was still aching all over; he felt weak, cold, jaded and, above all, bored. He wished that boring business of going up to the court could be avoided somehow. The thought of being put into some jolting vehicle and taken across London to hang about in chilly cells and passages, and of having to answer questions and be lectured by magistrates, bored him indescribably. All he wanted was to be left alone. But presently there was the sound of several voices further down the passage, and then of feet approaching. The partition in the door was opened.

  ‘Couple of visitors for you,’ the constable said.

  Gordon was bored by the very thought of visitors. Unwillingly he looked up, and saw Flaxman and Ravelston looking in upon him. How they had got there together was a mystery, but Gordon felt not the faintest curiosity about it. They bored him. He wished they would go away.

  ‘Hullo, chappie!’ said Flaxman.

  ‘You here?’ said Gordon with a sort of weary offensiveness.

  Ravelston looked miserable. He had been up since the very early morning, looking for Gordon. This was the first time he had seen the interior of a police cell. His face shrank with disgust as he looked at the chilly white-tiled place with its shameless WC in the corner. But Flaxman was more accustomed to this kind of thing. He cocked a practised eye at Gordon.

  ‘I’ve seen ’em worse,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Give him a prairie oyster and he’d buck up something wonderful. D’ you know what your eyes look like, chappie?’ he added to Gordon. ‘They look as if they’d been taken out and poached.’

  ‘I was drunk last night,’ said Gordon, his head between his hands.

  ‘I gathered something of the kind, old chappie.’

  ‘Look here, Gordon,’ said Ravelston, ‘we came to bail you out, but it seems we’re too late. They’re taking you up to court in a few minutes’ time. This is a bloody show. It’s a pity you didn’t give them a false name when they brought you here last night.’

  ‘Did I tell them my name?’

  ‘You told them everything. I wish to God I hadn’t let you out of my sight. You slipped out of that house somehow and into the street.’

  ‘Wandering up and down Shaftesbury Avenue, drinking out of a bottle,’ said Flaxman appreciatively. ‘But you oughtn’t to have hit the sergeant, old chappie! That was a bit of bloody foolishness. And I don’t mind telling you Mother Wisbeach is on your track. When your pal here came round this morning and told her you’d been for a night on the tiles, she took on as if you’d done a bloody murder.’

  ‘And look here, Gordon,’ said Ravelston.

  There was the familiar note of discomfort in his face. It was something about money, as usual. Gordon looked up. Ravelston was gazing into the distance.

  ‘Look here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About your fine. You’d better leave that to me. I’ll pay it.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘My dear old chap! They’ll send you to jail if I don’t.’

  ‘Oh, hell! I don’t care.’

  He did not care. At this moment he did not care if they sent him to prison for a year. Of course he couldn’t pay his fine himself. He knew without even needing to look that he had no money left. He would have given it all to Dora, or more probably she would have pinched it. He lay down on the bed again and turned his back on the others. In the sulky, sluggish state that he was in, his sole desire was to get rid of them. They made a few more attempts to talk to him, but he would not answer, and presently they went away. Flaxman’s voice boomed cheerfully down the passage. He was giving Ravelston minute instructions as to how to make a prairie oyster.

  The rest of that day was very beastly. Beastly was the ride in the Black Maria, which, inside, was like nothing so much as a miniature public lavatory, with tiny cubicles down each side, into which you were locked and in which you had barely room to sit down. Beastlier yet was the long wait in one of the cells adjoining the magistrate’s court. This cell was an exact replica of the cell at the police station, even to having precisely the same number of porcelain bricks. But it differed from the police-station cell in being repulsively dirty. It was cold, but the air was so fetid as to be almost unbreathable. Prisoners were coming and going all the time. They would be thrust into the cell, taken out after an hour or two to go up to the court, and then perhaps brought back again to wait while the magistrate decided upon their sentence or fresh witnesses were sent for. There were always five or six men in the cell, and there was nothing to sit on except the plank bed. And the worst was that nearly all of them used the wc—there, publicly, in the tiny cell. They could not help it. There was nowhere else to go. And the plug of the beastly thing did not even pull properly.

  Until the afternoon Gordon felt sick and weak. He had had no chance to shave, and his face was hatefully scrubby. At first he merely sat on the corner of the plank bed, at the end nearest the door, as far away from the we as he could get, and took no notice of the other prisoners. They bored and disgusted him; later, as his headache wore off, he observed them with a faint interest. There was a professional burglar, a lean worried-looking man with grey hair, who was in a terrible stew about what would happen to his wife and kids if he were sent to jail. He had been arrested for ‘loitering with intent to enter’—a vague offence for which you generally get convicted if there are previous convictions against you. He kept walking up and down, flicking the fingers of his right hand with a curious nervous gesture, and exclaiming against the unfairness of it. There was also a deaf mute who stank like a ferret, and a small middle-aged Jew with a fur-collared overcoat, who had been buyer to a large firm of kosher butchers. He had bolted with twenty-seven pounds, gone to Aberdeen, of all places, and spent the money on tarts. He too had a grievance, for he said his case ought to have been tried in the rabbi’s court instead of being turned over to the police. There was also a publican who had embezzled his Christmas club money. He was a big, hearty, prosperous-looking man of about thirty-five, with a loud red face and a loud blue overcoat—the sort of man who, if he were not a publican, would be a bookie. His relatives had paid
back the embezzled money, all except twelve pounds, but the club members had decided to prosecute. There was something in this man’s eyes that troubled Gordon. He carried everything off with a swagger, but all the while there was that blank, staring look in his eyes; he would fall into a kind of reverie at every gap in the conversation. It was somehow rather dreadful to see him. There he was, still in his smart clothes, with the splendour of a publican’s life only a month or two behind him; and now he was ruined, probably for ever. Like all London publicans he was in the claw of the brewer, he would be sold up and his furniture and fittings seized, and when he came out of jail he would never have a pub or a job again.

  The morning wore on with dismal slowness. You were allowed to smoke—matches were forbidden, but the constable on duty outside would give you a light through the trap in the door. Nobody had any cigarettes except the publican, who had his pockets full of them and distributed them freely. Prisoners came and went. A ragged dirty man who claimed to be a coster ‘up’ for obstruction was put into the cell for half an hour. He talked a great deal, but the others were deeply suspicious of him; when he was taken out again they all declared he was a ‘split’. The police, it was said, often put a ‘split’ into the cells, disguised as a prisoner, to pick up information. Once there was great excitement when the constable whispered through the trap that a murderer, or would-be murderer, was being put into the cell next door. He was a youth of eighteen who had stabbed his ‘tart’ in the belly, and she was not expected to live. Once the trap opened and the tired, pale face of a clergyman looked in. He saw the burglar, said wearily, ‘You here again, Jones?’ and went away again. Dinner, so-called, was served out at about twelve o’clock. All you got was a cup of tea and two slices of bread and marg. You could have food sent in, though, if you could pay for it. The publican had a good dinner sent in in covered dishes; but he had no appetite for it, and gave most of it away. Ravelston was still hanging about the court, waiting for Gordon’s case to come on, but he did not know the ropes well enough to have food sent in to Gordon. Presently the burglar and the publican were taken away, sentenced, and brought back to wait till the Black Maria should take them off to jail. They each got nine months. The publican questioned the burglar about what prison was like. There was a conversation of unspeakable obscenity about the lack of women there.