Fifty Orwell Essays

by George Orwell

murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to

  his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of

  background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which

  make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer. Most of

  the crimes mentioned above have a touch of this atmosphere, and in three

  cases, including the one I referred to but did not name, the story

  approximates to the one I have outlined.

  Now compare the Cleft Chin Murder. There is no depth of feeling in it. It

  was almost chance that the two people concerned committed that particular

  murder, and it was only by good luck that they did not commit several

  others. The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of the

  dance-halls and the false values of the American film. The two culprits

  were an eighteen-year-old ex-waitress named Elizabeth Jones, and an

  American army deserter, posing as an officer, named Karl Hulten. They

  were only together for six days, and it seems doubtful whether, until

  they were arrested, they even learned one another's true names. They met

  casually in a teashop, and that night went out for a ride in a stolen

  army truck. Jones described herself as a strip-tease artist, which was

  not strictly true (she had given one unsuccessful performance in this

  line); and declared that she wanted to do something dangerous, "like

  being a gun-moll." Hulten described himself as a big-time Chicago

  gangster, which was also untrue. They met a girl bicycling along the

  road, and to show how tough he was Hulten ran over her with his truck,

  after which the pair robbed her of the few shillings that were on her. On

  another occasion they knocked out a girl to whom they had offered a lift,

  took her coat and handbag and threw her into a river. Finally, in the

  most wanton way, they murdered a taxi-driver who happened to have �8 in

  his pocket. Soon afterwards they parted. Hulten was caught because he had

  foolishly kept the dead man's car, and Jones made spontaneous confessions

  to the police. In court each prisoner incriminated the other. In between

  crimes, both of them seem to have behaved with the utmost callousness:

  they spent the dead taxi-driver's �8 at the dog races.

  Judging from her letters, the girl's case has a certain amount of

  psychological interest, but this murder probably captured the headlines

  because it provided distraction amid the doodle-bugs and the anxieties of

  the Battle of France. Jones and Hulten committed their murder to the tune

  of V1, and were convicted to the tune of V2. There was also considerable

  excitement because--as has become usual in England--the man was

  sentenced to death and the girl to imprisonment. According to Mr.

  Raymond, the reprieving of Jones caused widespread indignation and

  streams of telegrams to the Home Secretary: in her native town, "SHE

  SHOULD HANG" was chalked on the walls beside pictures of a figure

  dangling from a gallows. Considering that only ten women have been hanged

  in Britain this century, and that the practice has gone out largely

  because of popular feeling against it, it is difficult not to feel that

  this clamour to hang an eighteen-year-old girl was due partly to the

  brutalizing effects of war. Indeed, the whole meaningless story, with its

  atmosphere of dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and

  stolen cars, belongs essentially to a war period.

  Perhaps it is significant that the most talked-of English murder of

  recent years should have been committed by an American and an English

  girl who had become partly Americanized. But it is difficult to believe

  that this case will be so long remembered as the old domestic poisoning

  dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy

  did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong

  emotions behind them.

  HOW THE POOR DIE

  In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the H�pital X, in the fifteenth

  ARRONDISSEMENT of Paris. The clerks put me through the usual third-degree

  at the reception desk, and indeed I was kept answering questions for some

  twenty minutes before they would let me in. If you have ever had to fill

  up forms in a Latin country you will know the kind of questions I mean.

  For some days past I had been unequal to translating Reaumur into

  Fahrenheit, but I know that my temperature was round about 103, and by

  the end of the interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. At

  my back a resigned little knot of patients, carrying bundles done up in

  coloured handkerchiefs, waited their turn to be questioned.

  After the questioning came the bath--a compulsory routine for all

  newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse. My clothes

  were taken away from me, and after I had sat shivering for some minutes

  in five inches of warm water I was given a linen nightshirt and a short

  blue flannel dressing-gown--no slippers, they had none big enough for

  me, they said--and led out into the open air. This was a night in

  February and I was suffering from pneumonia. The ward we were going to

  was 200 yards away and it seemed that to get to it you had to cross the

  hospital grounds. Someone stumbled in front of me with a lantern. The

  gravel path was frosty underfoot, and the wind whipped the nightshirt

  round my bare calves. When we got into the ward I was aware of a strange

  feeling of familiarity whose origin I did not succeed in pinning down

  till later in the night. It was a long, rather low, ill-lit room, full of

  murmuring voices and with three rows of beds surprisingly close together.

  There was a foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish. As I lay down I saw on a

  bed nearly opposite me a small, round-shouldered, sandy-haired man

  sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange

  operation on him. First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen

  small glasses like wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside

  each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man's

  back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after

  some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something

  called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical

  text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those

  things they do to horses.

  The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched

  this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain amount of

  amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came

  across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying

  the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few

  feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an

  animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two

  men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital

  before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without

  speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only

  put on six glasses in my case, but after doing s
o they scarified the

  blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a

  dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated,

  disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I

  reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit

  of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice,

  seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses

  had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as

  tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward

  in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic

  grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice

  was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied

  for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don't

  happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is

  severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes

  this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you

  can't get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the

  last five minutes, I noted, a sort of numbness supervenes. After the

  poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust

  beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of

  my knowledge this was the only night of my life--I mean the only night

  spent in bed--in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

  During my first hour in the H�pital X I had had a whole series of

  different and contradictory treatments, but this was misleading, for in

  general you got very little treatment at all, either good or bad, unless

  you were ill in some interesting and instructive way. At five in the

  morning the nurses came round, woke the patients and took their

  temperatures, but did not wash them. If you were well enough you washed

  yourself, otherwise you depended on the kindness of some walking patient.

  It was generally patients, too, who carried the bed bottles and die grim

  bedpan, nicknamed LA CASSEROLE. At eight breakfast arrived, called

  army-fashion LA SOUPE. It was soup, too, a thin vegetable soup with slimy

  hunks of bread floating about in it. Later in the day the tall, solemn,

  black-bearded doctor made his rounds, with an INTERNE and a troop of

  students following at his heels, but there were about sixty of us in the

  ward and it was evident that he had other wards to attend to as well.

  There were many beds past which he walked day after day, sometimes

  followed by imploring cries. On the other hand if you had some disease

  with which the students wanted to familiarize themselves you got plenty

  of attention of a kind. I myself, with an exceptionally fine specimen of

  a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as many as a dozen students queuing up

  to listen to my chest. It was a very queer feeling--queer, I mean,

  because of their intense interest in learning their job, together with a

  seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings. It is

  strange to relate, but sometimes as some young student stepped forward to

  take his turn at manipulating you he would be actually tremulous with

  excitement, like a boy who has at last got his hands on some expensive

  piece of machinery. And then ear after ear--ears of young men, of girls,

  of negroes--pressed against your back, relays of fingers solemnly but

  clumsily tapping, and not from any one of them did you get a word of

  conversation or a look direct in your face. As a non-paying patient, in

  the uniform nightshirt, you were primarily A SPECIMEN, a thing I did not

  resent but could never quite get used to.

  After some days I grew well enough to sit up and study the surrounding

  patients. The stuffy room, with its narrow beds so close together that

  you could easily touch your neighbour's hand, had every sort of disease

  in it except, I suppose, acutely infectious cases. My right-hand

  neighbour was a little red-haired cobbler with one leg shorter than the

  other, who used to announce the death of any other patient (this happened

  a number of times, and my neighbour was always the first to hear of it)

  by whistling to me, exclaiming "NUM�RO 43!" (or whatever it was) and

  flinging his arms above his head. This man had not much wrong with him,

  but in most of the other beds within my angle of vision some squalid

  tragedy or some plain horror was being enacted. In the bed that was foot

  to foot with mine there lay, until he died (I didn't see him die--they

  moved him to another bed), a little weazened man who was suffering from I

  do not know what disease, but something that made his whole body so

  intensely sensitive that any movement from side to side, sometimes even

  the weight of the bedclothes, would make him shout out with pain. His

  worst suffering was when he urinated, which he did with the greatest

  difficulty. A nurse would bring him the bed bottle and then for a long

  time stand beside his bed, whistling, as grooms are said to do with

  horses, until at last with an agonized shriek of "Je fissel" he would get

  started. In the bed next to him the sandy-haired man whom I had seen

  being cupped used to cough up blood-streaked mucus at all hours. My

  left-hand neighbour was a tall, flaccid-looking young man who used

  periodically to have a tube inserted into his back and astonishing

  quantities of frothy liquid drawn off from some part of his body. In the

  bed beyond that a veteran of the war of 1870 was dying, a handsome old

  man with a white imperial, round whose bed, at all hours when visiting

  was allowed, four elderly female relatives dressed all in black sat

  exactly like crows, obviously scheming for some pitiful legacy. In the

  bed opposite me in the farther row was an old bald-headed man with

  drooping moustaches and greatly swollen face and body, who was suffering

  from some disease that made him urinate almost incessantly. A huge glass

  receptacle stood always beside his bed. One day his wife and daughter

  came to visit him. At sight of them the old man's bloated face lit up

  with a smile of surprising sweetness, and as his daughter, a pretty girl

  of about twenty, approached the bed I saw that his hand was slowly

  working its way from under the bedclothes. I seemed to see in advance the

  gesture that was coming--the girl kneeling beside the bed, the old man's

  hand laid on her head in his dying blessing. But no, he merely handed her

  the bed bottle, which she promptly took from him and emptied into the

  receptacle.

  About a dozen beds away from me was Num�ro 57--I think that was his

  number--a cirrhosis-of-the-liver case. Everyone in the ward knew him by

  sight because he was sometimes the subject of a medical lecture. On two

  afternoons a week the tall, grave doctor would lecture in the ward to a

  party of students, and on more than one occasion old NUM�RO 57 was

  wheeled in on a sort of trolley into the middle of the ward, where the

  doctor would roll back his nightshirt, dilate with his fingers a huge

  flabby protruberance on the man's belly--the diseased liver,
I

  suppose--and explain solemnly that this was a disease attributable to

  alcoholism, commoner in the wine-drinking countries. As usual he neither

  spoke to his patient nor gave him a smile, a nod or any kind of

  recognition. While he talked, very grave and upright, he would hold the

  wasted body beneath his two hands, sometimes giving it a gentle roll to

  and fro, in just the attitude of a woman handling a rolling-pin. Not

  that NUM�RO 57 minded this kind of thing. Obviously he was an old

  hospital inmate, a regular exhibit at lectures, his liver long since

  marked down for a bottle in some pathological museum. Utterly

  uninterested in what was said about him, he would lie with his

  colourless eyes gazing at nothing, while the doctor showed him off like

  a piece of antique china. He was a man of about sixty, astonishingly

  shrunken. His face, pale as vellum, had shrunken away till it seemed no

  bigger than a doll's.

  One morning my cobbler neighbour woke me up plucking at my pillow before

  the nurses arrived. "NUM�RO 57!"--he flung his arms above his head.

  There was a light in the ward, enough to see by. I could see old NUM�RO

  57 lying crumpled up on his side, his face sticking out over the side of

  the bed, and towards me. He had died some rime during the night, nobody

  knew when. When the nurses came they received the news of his death

  indifferently and went about their work. After a long time, an hour or

  more, two other nurses marched in abreast like soldiers, with a great

  clumping of sabots, and knotted the corpse up in the sheets, but it was

  not removed till some time later. Meanwhile, in the better light, I had

  had time for a good look at NUM�RO 57. Indeed I lay on my side to look at

  him. Curiously enough he was the first dead European I had seen. I had

  seen dead men before, but always Asiatics and usually people who had died

  violent deaths. NUM�RO 57's eyes were still open, his mouth also open,

  his small face contorted into an expression of agony. What most impressed

  me, however, was the whiteness of his face. It had been pale before, but

  now it was little darker than die sheets. As I gazed at the tiny,

  screwed-up face it struck me that this disgusting piece of refuse,

  waiting to be carted away and dumped on a slab in the dissecting room,

  was an example of "natural" death, one of the things you pray for in the

  Litany. There you are, then, I thought, that's what is waiting for you,

  twenty, thirty, forty years hence: that is how the lucky ones die, the

  ones who live to be old. One wants to live, of course, indeed one only

  stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think now, as I thought

  then, that it's better to die violently and not too old. People talk

  about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even

  approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? "Natural" death,

  almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful. Even at

  that, it makes a difference if you can achieve it in your own home and

  not in a public institution. This poor old wretch who had just flickered

  out like a candle-end was not even important enough to have anyone

  watching by his deathbed. He was merely a number, then a "subject" for

  the students' scalpels. And the sordid publicity of dying in such a

  place! In the H�pital X the beds were very close together and there were

  no screens. Fancy, for instance, dying like the little man whose bed was

  for a while foot to foot with mine, the one who cried out when the

  bedclothes touched him! I dare say "JE PISSE!" were his last recorded

  words. Perhaps the dying don't bother about such things--that at least

  would be the standard answer: nevertheless dying people are often more or

  less normal in their minds till within a day or so of the end.

  In the public wards of a hospital you see horrors that you don't seem to

  meet with among people who manage to die in their own homes, as though