The Essential Works of George Orwell. George Orwell

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СКАЧАТЬ of the ages; victor of Waterloo, Roland Butta, Modern man as his masters want him to be. A docile little porker, sitting in the money-sty, drinking Bovex.

      Faces passed, wind-yellowed. A tram boomed across the square, and the clock over the Prince of Wales struck three. A couple of old creatures, a tramp or beggar and his wife, in long greasy overcoats that reached almost to the ground, were shuffling towards the shop. Book-pinchers, by the look of them. Better keep an eye on the boxes outside. The old man halted on the kerb a few yards away while his wife came to the door. She pushed it open and looked up at Gordon, between grey strings of hair, with a sort of hopeful malevolence.

      'Ju buy books?' she demanded hoarsely.

      'Sometimes. It depends what books they are.'

      'I gossome lovely books 'ere.'

      She came in, shutting the door with a clang. The Nancy glanced over his shoulder distastefully and moved a step or two away, into the corner. The old woman had produced a greasy little sack from under her overcoat. She moved confidentially nearer to Gordon. She smelt of very, very old breadcrusts.

      'Will you 'ave 'em?' she said, clasping the neck of the sack. 'Only 'alf a crown the lot.'

      'What are they? Let me see them, please.'

      'Lovely books, they are,' she breathed, bending over to open the sack and emitting a sudden very powerful whiff of breadcrusts.

      'Ere!' she said, and thrust an armful of filthy-looking books almost into Gordon's face.

      They were an 1884 edition of Charlotte M. Yonge's novels, and had the appearance of having been slept on for many years. Gordon stepped back, suddenly revolted.

      'We can't possibly buy those,' he said shortly.

      'Can't buy 'em? Why can't yer buy 'em?'

      'Because they're no use to us. We can't sell that kind of thing.'

      'Wotcher make me take 'em out o' me bag for, then?' demanded the old woman ferociously.

      Gordon made a detour round her, to avoid the smell, and held the door open, silently. No use arguing. You had people of this type coming into the shop all day long. The old woman made off, mumbling, with malevolence in the hump of her shoulders, and joined her husband. He paused on the kerb to cough, so fruitily that you could hear him through the door. A clot of phlegm, like a little white tongue, came slowly out between his lips and was ejected into the gutter. Then the two old creatures shuffled away, beetle-like in the long greasy overcoats that hid everything except their feet.

      Gordon watched them go. They were just by-products. The throw-outs of the money-god. All over London, by tens of thousands, draggled old beasts of that description; creeping like unclean beetles to the grave.

      He gazed out at the graceless street. At this moment it seemed to him that in a street like this, in a town like this, every life that is lived must be meaningless and intolerable. The sense of disintegration, of decay, that is endemic in our time, was strong upon him. Somehow it was mixed up with the ad-posters opposite. He looked now with more seeing eyes at those grinning yard-wide faces. After all, there was more there than mere silliness, greed and vulgarity. Roland Butta grins at you, seemingly optimistic, with a flash of false teeth. But what is behind the grin? Desolation, emptiness, prophecies of doom. For can you not see, if you know how to look, that behind that slick self-satisfaction, that tittering fat-bellied triviality, there is nothing but a frightful emptiness, a secret despair? The great death-wish of the modern world. Suicide pacts. Heads stuck in gas-ovens in lonely maisonettes. French letters and Amen Pills. And the reverberations of future wars. Enemy aeroplanes flying over London; the deep threatening hum of the propellers, the shattering thunder of the bombs. It is all written in Roland Butta's face.

      More customers coming. Gordon stood back, gentlemanly-servile.

      The door-bell clanged. Two upper-middle-class ladies sailed noisily in. One pink and fruity, thirty-fivish, with voluptuous bosom burgeoning from her coat of squirrel-skin, emitting a super-feminine scent of Parma violets; the other middle-aged, tough and curried—India, presumably. Close behind them a dark, grubby, shy young man slipped through the doorway as apologetically as a cat. He was one of the shop's best customers—a flitting, solitary creature who was almost too shy to speak and who by some strange manipulation kept himself always a day away from a shave.

      Gordon repeated his formula:

      'Good afternoon. Can I do anything for you? Are you looking for any particular book?'

      Fruity-face overwhelmed him with a smile, but curry-face decided to treat the question as an impertinence. Ignoring Gordon, she drew fruity-face across to the shelves next the new books where the dog-books and cat-books were kept. The two of them immediately began taking books out of the shelves and talking loudly. Curry-face had the voice of a drill-sergeant. She was no doubt a colonel's wife, or widow. The Nancy, still deep in the big book on the Russian ballet, edged delicately away. His face said that he would leave the shop if his privacy were disturbed again. The shy young man had already found his way to the poetry shelves. The two ladies were fairly frequent visitors to the shop. They always wanted to see books about cats and dogs, but never actually bought anything. There were two whole shelves of dog-books and cat-books. 'Ladies' Corner', old McKechnie called it.

      Another customer arrived, for the library. An ugly girl of twenty, hatless, in a white overall, with a sallow, blithering, honest face and powerful spectacles that distorted her eyes. She was assistant at a chemist's shop. Gordon put on his homey library manner. She smiled at him, and with a gait as clumsy as a bear's followed him into the library.

      'What kind of book would you like this time, Miss Weeks?'

      'Well'—she clutched the front of her overall. Her distorted, black-treacle eyes beamed trustfully into his. 'Well, what I'd really like's a good hot-stuff love story. You know—something modern.'

      'Something modern? Something by Barbara Bedworthy, for instance? Have you read Almost a Virgin?'

      'Oh no, not her. She's too Deep. I can't bear Deep books. But I want something—well, you know—modern. Sex-problems and divorce and all that. You know.'

      'Modern, but not Deep,' said Gordon, as lowbrow to lowbrow.

      He ranged among the hot-stuff modern love-stories. There were not less than three hundred of them in the library. From the front room came the voices of the two upper-middle-class ladies, the one fruity, the other curried, disputing about dogs. They had taken out one of the dog-books and were examining the photographs. Fruity-voice enthused over the photograph of a Peke, the ickle angel pet, wiv his gweat big Soulful eyes and his ickle black nosie—oh, so ducky-duck! But curry-voice—yes, undoubtedly a colonel's widow—said Pekes were soppy. Give her dogs with guts—dogs that would fight, she said; she hated these soppy lapdogs, she said. 'You have no Soul, Bedelia, no Soul,' said fruity-voice plaintively. The doorbell pinged again. Gordon handed the chemist's girl Seven Scarlet Nights and booked it on her ticket. She took a shabby leather purse out of her overall pocket and paid him twopence.

      He went back to the front room. The Nancy had put his book back in the wrong shelf and vanished. A lean, straight-nosed, brisk woman, with sensible clothes and gold-rimmed pince-nez—schoolmarm possibly, feminist certainly—came in and demanded Mrs Wharton-Beverley's history of the suffrage movement. With secret joy Gordon told her that they hadn't got it. She stabbed his male incompetence with gimlet eyes and went out again. The thin young man stood apologetically in the corner, his face buried in D. H. Lawrence's Collected Poems, like some long-legged bird with its СКАЧАТЬ