'Of course, the trouble is, you see, that about half the young men in Europe are wishing the same thing.'
'Let's hope they are. Then perhaps it'll happen.'
'My dear old chap, no! Once is enough, surely.'
Gordon walked on, fretfully. 'This life we live nowadays! It's not life, it's stagnation, death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses, and the meaningless people inside them! Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.'
'But where you make your mistake, don't you see, is in talking as if all this was incurable. This is only something that's got to happen before the proletariat take over.'
'Oh, Socialism! Don't talk to me about Socialism.'
'You ought to read Marx, Gordon, you really ought. Then you'd realise that this is only a phase. It can't go on for ever.'
'Can't it? It feels as if it was going on for ever.'
'It's merely that we're at a bad moment. We've got to die before we can be reborn, if you take my meaning.'
'We're dying right enough. I don't see much signs of our being reborn.'
Ravelston rubbed his nose. 'Oh, well, we must have faith, I suppose. And hope.'
'We must have money, you mean,' said Gordon gloomily.
'Money?'
'It's the price of optimism. Give me five quid a week and I'd be a Socialist, I dare say.'
Ravelston looked away, discomfited. This money-business! Everywhere it came up against you! Gordon wished he had not said it. Money is the one thing you must never mention when you are with people richer than yourself. Or if you do, then it must be money in the abstract, money with a big 'M', not the actual concrete money that's in your pocket and isn't in mine. But the accursed subject drew him like a magnet. Sooner or later, especially when he had a few drinks inside him, he invariably began talking with self-pitiful detail about the bloodiness of life on two quid a week. Sometimes, from sheer nervous impulse to say the wrong thing, he would come out with some squalid confession—as, for instance, that he had been without tobacco for two days, or that his underclothes were in holes and his overcoat up the spout. But nothing of that sort should happen tonight, he resolved. They veered swiftly away from the subject of money and began talking in a more general way about Socialism. Ravelston had been trying for years to convert Gordon to Socialism, without even succeeding in interesting him in it. Presently they passed a low-looking pub on a corner in a side-street. A sour cloud of beer seemed to hang about it. The smell revolted Ravelston. He would have quickened his pace to get away from it. But Gordon paused, his nostrils tickled.
'Christ! I could do with a drink,' he said.
'So could I,' said Ravelston gallantly.
Gordon shoved open the door of the public bar, Ravelston following. Ravelston persuaded himself that he was fond of pubs, especially low-class pubs. Pubs are genuinely proletarian. In a pub you can meet the working class on equal terms—or that's the theory, anyway. But in practice Ravelston never went into a pub unless he was with somebody like Gordon, and he always felt like a fish out of water when he got there. A foul yet coldish air enveloped them. It was a filthy, smoky room, low-ceilinged, with a sawdusted floor and plain deal tables ringed by generations of beer-pots. In one corner four monstrous women with breasts the size of melons were sitting drinking porter and talking with bitter intensity about someone called Mrs Croop. The landlady, a tall grim woman with a black fringe, looking like the madame of a brothel, stood behind the bar, her powerful forearms folded, watching a game of darts which was going on between four labourers and a postman. You had to duck under the darts as you crossed the room. There was a moment's hush and people glanced inquisitively at Ravelston. He was so obviously a gentleman. They didn't see his type very often in the public bar.
Ravelston pretended not to notice that they were staring at him. He lounged towards the bar, pulling off a glove to feel for the money in his pocket. 'What's yours?' he said casually.
But Gordon had already shoved his way ahead and was tapping a shilling on the bar. Always pay for the first round of drinks! It was his point of honour. Ravelston made for the only vacant table. A navvy leaning on the bar turned on his elbow and gave him a long, insolent stare. 'A —— toff!' he was thinking. Gordon came back balancing two pint glasses of dark common ale. They were thick cheap glasses, thick as jam jars almost, and dim and greasy. A thin yellow froth was subsiding on the beer. The air was thick with gunpowdery tobacco-smoke. Ravelston caught sight of a well-filled spittoon near the bar and averted his eyes. It crossed his mind that this beer had been sucked up from some beetle-ridden cellar through yards of slimy tube, and that the glasses had never been washed in their lives, only rinsed in beery water. Gordon was very hungry. He could have done with some bread and cheese, but to order any would have been to betray the fact that he had had no dinner. He took a deep pull at his beer and lighted a cigarette, which made him forget his hunger a little. Ravelston also swallowed a mouthful or so and set the glass gingerly down. It was typical London beer, sickly and yet leaving a chemical after-taste. Ravelston thought of the wines of Burgundy. They went on arguing about Socialism.
'You know, Gordon, it's really time you started reading Marx,' said Ravelston, less apologetically than usual, because the vile taste of the beer had annoyed him.
'I'd sooner read Mrs Humphry Ward,' said Gordon.
'But don't you see, your attitude is so unreasonable. You're always tirading against Capitalism, and yet you won't accept the only possible alternative. One can't put things right in a hole-and-corner way. One's got to accept either Capitalism or Socialism. There's no way out of it.'
'I tell you I can't be bothered with Socialism. The very thought of it makes me yawn.'
'But what's your objection to Socialism, anyway?'
'There's only one objection to Socialism, and that is that nobody wants it.'
'Oh, surely it's rather absurd to say that!'
'That's to say, nobody who could see what Socialism would really mean.'
'But what would Socialism mean, according to your idea of it?'
'Oh! Some kind of Aldous Huxley Brave New World; only not so amusing. Four hours a day in a model factory, tightening up bolt number 6003. Rations served out in greaseproof paper at the communal kitchen. Community-hikes from Marx Hostel to Lenin Hostel and back. Free abortion-clinics on all the corners. All very well in its way, of course. Only we don't want it.'
Ravelston sighed. Once a month, in Antichrist, he repudiated this version of Socialism. 'Well, what do we want, then?'
'God knows. All we know is what we don't want. That's what's wrong with us nowadays. We're stuck, like Buridan's donkey. Only there are three alternatives instead of two, and all three of them make us spew. Socialism's only one of them.'
'And what are the other two?'
'Oh, I suppose suicide and the Catholic Church.'
Ravelston smiled, anticlerically shocked. 'The Catholic Church! Do you consider that an alternative?'
'Well, it's a standing temptation to the intelligentsia, isn't it?'
'Not what I should call the intelligentsia. Though there was Eliot, of course,' Ravelston admitted.
'And there'll be plenty more, you bet. I dare say it's fairly cosy under Mother Church's wing. A bit insanitary, of course—but you'd feel safe there, anyway.'
Ravelston rubbed his nose reflectively. 'It seems to me that's only another form of suicide.'
'In a way. But so's Socialism. At least it's a counsel of despair. But I couldn't commit suicide, real suicide.