'But what do you mean by behaving like a woman, anyway?'
'I tell you every woman's the same when it comes to a thing like this. A woman despises a man who's dependent on her and sponges on her. She may say she doesn't, she may think she doesn't, but she does. She can't help it. If I let you pay for my meals you'd despise me.'
He had turned away. He knew how abominably he was behaving. But somehow he had got to say these things. The feeling that people—even Rosemary—must despise him for his poverty was too strong to be overcome. Only by rigid, jealous independence could he keep his self-respect. Rosemary was really distressed this time. She caught his arm and pulled him round, making him face her. With an insistent gesture, angrily and yet demanding to be loved, she pressed her breast against him.
'Gordon! I won't let you say such things. How can you say I'd ever despise you?'
'I tell you you couldn't help it if I let myself sponge on you.'
'Sponge on me! What expressions you do use! How is it sponging on me to let me pay for your supper just for once?'
He could feel the small breasts, firm and round, just beneath his own. She looked up at him, frowning and yet not far from tears. She thought him perverse, unreasonable, cruel. But her physical nearness distracted him. At this moment all he could remember was that in two years she had never yielded to him. She had starved him of the one thing that mattered. What was the good of pretending that she loved him when in the last essential she recoiled? He added with a kind of deadly joy:
'In a way you do despise me. Oh, yes, I know you're fond of me. But after all, you can't take me quite seriously. I'm a kind of joke to you. You're fond of me, and yet I'm not quite your equal—that's how you feel.'
It was what he had said before, but with this difference, that now he meant it, or said it as if he meant it. She cried out with tears in her voice:
'I don't, Gordon, I don't! You know I don't!'
'You do. That's why you won't sleep with me. Didn't I tell you that before?'
She looked up at him an instant longer, and then buried her face in his breast as suddenly as though ducking from a blow. It was because she had burst into tears. She wept against his breast, angry with him, hating him, and yet clinging to him like a child. It was the childish way in which she clung to him, as a mere male breast to weep on, that hurt him most. With a sort of self-hatred he remembered the other women who in just this same way had cried against his breast. It seemed the only thing he could do with women, to make them cry. With his arm round her shoulders he caressed her clumsily, trying to console her.
'You've gone and made me cry!' she whimpered in self-contempt.
'I'm sorry! Rosemary, dear one! Don't cry, please don't cry.'
'Gordon, dearest! Why do you have to be so beastly to me?'
'I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Sometimes I can't help it.'
'But why? Why?'
She had got over her crying. Rather more composed, she drew away from him and felt for something to wipe her eyes. Neither of them had a handkerchief. Impatiently, she wrung the tears out of her eyes with her knuckles.
'How silly we always are! Now, Gordon, be nice for once. Come along to the restaurant and have some supper and let me pay for it.'
'No.'
'Just this once. Never mind about the old money-business. Do it just to please me.'
'I tell you I can't do that kind of thing. I've got to keep my end up.'
'But what do you mean, keep your end up?'
'I've made war on money, and I've got to keep the rules. The first rule is never to take charity.'
'Charity! Oh, Gordon, I do think you're silly!'
She squeezed his ribs again. It was a sign of peace. She did not understand him, probably never would understand him; yet she accepted him as he was, hardly even protesting against his unreasonableness. As she put her face up to be kissed he noticed that her lips were salt. A tear had trickled here. He strained her against him. The hard defensive feeling had gone out of her body. She shut her eyes and sank against him and into him as though her bones had grown weak, and her lips parted and her small tongue sought for his. It was very seldom that she did that. And suddenly, as he felt her body yielding, he seemed to know with certainty that their struggle was ended. She was his now when he chose to take her. And yet perhaps she did not fully understand what it was that she was offering; it was simply an instinctive movement of generosity, a desire to reassure him—to smooth away that hateful feeling of being unlovable and unloved. She said nothing of this in words. It was the feeling of her body that seemed to say it. But even if this had been the time and the place he could not have taken her. At this moment he loved her but did not desire her. His desire could only return at some future time when there was no quarrel fresh in his mind and no consciousness of four and fourpence in his pocket to daunt him.
Presently they separated their mouths, though still clinging closely together.
'How stupid it is, the way we quarrel, isn't it, Gordon? When we meet so seldom.'
'I know. It's all my fault. I can't help it. Things rub me up. It's money at the bottom of it. Always money.'
'Oh, money! You let it worry you too much, Gordon.'
'Impossible. It's the only thing worth worrying about.'
'But, anyway, we will go out into the country next Sunday, won't we? To Burnham Beeches or somewhere. It would be so nice if we could.'
'Yes, I'd love to. We'll go early and be out all day. I'll raise the train fares somehow.'
'But you'll let me pay my own fare, won't you?'
'No, I'd rather I paid them. But we'll go, anyway.'
'And you really won't let me pay for your supper—just this once, just to show you trust me?'
'No, I can't. I'm sorry. I've told you why.'
'Oh, dear! I suppose we shall have to say good night. It's getting late.'
They stayed talking a long time, however, so long that Rosemary got no supper after all. She had to be back at her lodgings by eleven, or the she-dragons were angry. Gordon went up to the top of the Tottenham Court Road and took the tram. It was a penny cheaper than taking the bus. On the wooden seat upstairs he was wedged against a small dirty Scotchman who read the football finals and oozed beer. Gordon was very happy. Rosemary was going to be his mistress. Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over. To the music of the tram's booming he whispered the seven completed stanzas of his poem. Nine stanzas there would be in all. It was good. He believed in it and in himself. He was a poet. Gordon Comstock, author of Mice. Even in London Pleasures he once again believed.
He thought of Sunday. They were to meet at nine o'clock at Paddington Station. Ten bob or so it would cost; he would raise the money if he had to pawn his shirt. And she was going to become his mistress; this very Sunday, perhaps, if the right chance offered itself. Nothing had been said. Only, somehow, it was agreed between them.
Please God it kept fine on Sunday! It was deep winter now. What luck if it turned out one of those splendid windless days—one of those days that might almost be summer, when you can lie for hours on the dead bracken and never feel cold! But you don't get many days like that; a dozen at most in every winter. As likely as not it would rain. He wondered whether they would get a chance to do it after all. They had nowhere to go, except the open air. There are so many pairs of lovers in London with 'nowhere to go'; only the streets and the parks, where there is no privacy and it is always cold. It is not easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money. The 'never the time and the place' motif is not made enough of in novels.
VII