in itself. This thought cheered him up a little.
He stuck the letter in an envelope and then went out and posted it at the post office on the corner, spending his last three halfpence on a penny stamp and a halfpenny stamp out of the slot machine.
V
'We're printing that poem of yours in next month's Antichrist,' said Ravelston from his first-floor window.
Gordon, on the pavement below, affected to have forgotten the poem Ravelston was speaking about; he remembered it intimately, of course, as he remembered all his poems.
'Which poem?' he said.
'The one about the dying prostitute. We thought it was rather successful.'
Gordon laughed a laugh of gratified conceit, and managed to pass it off as a laugh of sardonic amusement.
'Aha! A dying prostitute! That's rather what you might call one of my subjects. I'll do you one about an aspidistra next time.'
Ravelston's over-sensitive, boyish face, framed by nice dark-brown hair, drew back a little from the window.
'It's intolerably cold,' he said. 'You'd better come up and have some food, or something.'
'No, you come down. I've had dinner. Let's go to a pub and have some beer.'
'All right, then. Half a minute while I get my shoes on.'
They had been talking for some minutes, Gordon on the pavement, Ravelston leaning out of the window above. Gordon had announced his arrival not by knocking at the door but by throwing a pebble against the window pane. He never, if he could help it, set foot inside Ravelston's flat. There was something in the atmosphere of the flat that upset him and made him feel mean, dirty and out of place. It was so overwhelmingly, though unconsciously, upper-class. Only in the street or in a pub could he feel himself approximately Ravelston's equal. It would have astonished Ravelston to learn that his four-roomed flat, which he thought of as a poky little place, had this effect upon Gordon. To Ravelston, living in the wilds of Regent's Park was practically the same thing as living in the slums; he had chosen to live there, en bon socialiste, precisely as your social snob will live in a mews in Mayfair for the sake of the 'W1' on his notepaper. It was part of a lifelong attempt to escape from his own class and become, as it were, an honorary member of the proletariat. Like all such attempts, it was foredoomed to failure. No rich man ever succeeds in disguising himself as a poor man; for money, like murder, will out.
On the street door there was a brass plate inscribed:
P. W. H. Ravelston
ANTICHRIST
Ravelston lived on the first floor, and the editorial offices of Antichrist were downstairs. Antichrist was a middle- to highbrow monthly, Socialist in a vehement but ill-defined way. In general, it gave the impression of being edited by an ardent Nonconformist who had transferred his allegiance from God to Marx, and in doing so had got mixed up with a gang of vers libre poets. This was not really Ravelston's character; merely he was softer-hearted than an editor ought to be, and consequently was at the mercy of his contributors. Practically anything got printed in Antichrist if Ravelston suspected that its author was starving.
Ravelston appeared a moment later, hatless and pulling on a pair of gauntlet gloves. You could tell him at a glance for a rich young man. He wore the uniform of the moneyed intelligentsia; an old tweed coat—but it was one of those coats which have been made by a good tailor and grow more aristocratic as they grow older—very loose grey flannel bags, a grey pullover, much-worn brown shoes. He made a point of going everywhere, even to fashionable houses and expensive restaurants, in these clothes, just to show his contempt for upper-class conventions; he did not fully realise that it is only the upper classes who can do these things. Though he was a year older than Gordon he looked much younger. He was very tall, with a lean, wide-shouldered body and the typical lounging grace of the upper-class youth. But there was something curiously apologetic in his movements and in the expression of his face. He seemed always in the act of stepping out of somebody else's way. When expressing an opinion he would rub his nose with the back of his left forefinger. The truth was that in every moment of his life he was apologising, tacitly, for the largeness of his income. You could make him uncomfortable as easily by reminding him that he was rich as you could make Gordon by reminding him that he was poor.
'You've had dinner, I gather?' said Ravelston, in his rather Bloomsbury voice.
'Yes, ages ago. Haven't you?'
'Oh, yes, certainly. Oh, quite!'
It was twenty past eight and Gordon had had no food since midday. Neither had Ravelston. Gordon did not know that Ravelston was hungry, but Ravelston knew that Gordon was hungry, and Gordon knew that Ravelston knew it. Nevertheless, each saw good reason for pretending not to be hungry. They seldom or never had meals together. Gordon would not let Ravelston buy his meals for him, and for himself he could not afford to go to restaurants, not even to a Lyons or an ABC. This was Monday and he had five and ninepence left. He might afford a couple of pints at a pub, but not a proper meal. When he and Ravelston met it was always agreed, with silent manœuvrings, that they should do nothing that involved spending money, beyond the shilling or so one spends in a pub. In this way the fiction was kept up that there was no serious difference in their incomes.
Gordon sidled closer to Ravelston as they started down the pavement. He would have taken his arm, only of course one can't do that kind of thing. Beside Ravelston's taller, comelier figure he looked frail, fretful and miserably shabby. He adored Ravelston and was never quite at ease in his presence. Ravelston had not merely a charm of manner, but also a kind of fundamental decency, a graceful attitude to life, which Gordon scarcely encountered elsewhere. Undoubtedly it was bound up with the fact that Ravelston was rich. For money buys all virtues. Money suffereth long and is kind, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own. But in some ways Ravelston was not even like a moneyed person. The fatty degeneration of the spirit which goes with wealth had missed him, or he had escaped it by a conscious effort. Indeed his whole life was a struggle to escape it. It was for this reason that he gave up his time and a large part of his income to editing an unpopular Socialist monthly. And apart from Antichrist, money flowed from him in all directions. A tribe of cadgers ranging from poets to pavement-artists browsed upon him unceasingly. For himself he lived upon eight hundred a year or thereabouts. Even of this income he was acutely ashamed. It was not, he realised, exactly a proletarian income; but he had never learned to get along on less. Eight hundred a year was a minimum living wage to him, as two pounds a week was to Gordon.
'How is your work getting on?' said Ravelston presently.
'Oh, as usual. It's a drowsy kind of job. Swapping backchat with old hens about Hugh Walpole. I don't object to it.'
'I meant your own work—your writing. Is London Pleasures getting on all right?'
'Oh, Christ! Don't speak of it. It's turning my hair grey.'
'Isn't it going forward at all?'
'My books don't go forward. They go backward.'
Ravelston sighed. As editor of Antichrist, he was so used to encouraging despondent poets that it had become a second nature to him. He did not need telling why Gordon 'couldn't' write, and why all poets nowadays 'can't' write, and why when they do write it is something
