by H. G. Wells
CHAPTER THE FIRST
HOW I BECAME A LONDON STUDENT AND WENT ASTRAY
I came to live in London, as I shall tell you, when I was nearlytwenty-two. Wimblehurst dwindles in perspective, is now in this book alittle place far off, Bladesover no more than a small pinkish speckof frontage among the distant Kentish hills; the scene broadensout, becomes multitudinous and limitless, full of the sense of vastirrelevant movement. I do not remember my second coming to London as Ido my first, for my early impressions, save that an October memory ofsoftened amber sunshine stands out, amber sunshine falling on grey housefronts I know not where. That, and a sense of a large tranquillity.
I could fill a book, I think, with a more or less imaginary accountof how I came to apprehend London, how first in one aspect and then inanother it grew in my mind. Each day my accumulating impressions wereadded to and qualified and brought into relationship with new ones; theyfused inseparably with others that were purely personal and accidental.I find myself with a certain comprehensive perception of London,complete indeed, incurably indistinct in places and yet in some way awhole that began with my first visit and is still being mellowed andenriched.
London!
At first, no doubt, it was a chaos of streets and people and buildingsand reasonless going to and fro. I do not remember that I ever struggledvery steadily to understand it, or explored it with any but a personaland adventurous intention. Yet in time there has grown up in me a kindof theory of London; I do think I see lines of an ordered structure outof which it has grown, detected a process that is something more thana confusion of casual accidents though indeed it may be no more than aprocess of disease.
I said at the outset of my first book that I find in Bladesover theclue to all England. Well, I certainly imagine it is the clue to thestructure of London. There have been no revolutions no deliberaterestatements or abandonments of opinion in England since the days ofthe fine gentry, since 1688 or thereabouts, the days when Bladesover wasbuilt; there have been changes, dissolving forest replacing forest, ifyou will; but then it was that the broad lines of the English systemset firmly. And as I have gone to and fro in London in certain regionsconstantly the thought has recurred this is Bladesover House, thisanswers to Bladesover House. The fine gentry may have gone; they haveindeed largely gone, I think; rich merchants may have replaced them,financial adventurers or what not. That does not matter; the shape isstill Bladesover.
I am most reminded of Bladesover and Eastry by all those regions roundabout the West End parks; for example, estate parks, each more or lessin relation to a palace or group of great houses. The roads and backways of Mayfair and all about St. James's again, albeit perhaps of alater growth in point of time, were of the very spirit and architecturaltexture of the Bladesover passages and yards; they had the same smells,the space, the large cleanest and always going to and fro where onemet unmistakable Olympians and even more unmistakable valets, butlers,footmen in mufti. There were moments when I seemed to glimpse down areasthe white panelling, the very chintz of my mother's room again.
I could trace out now on a map what I would call the Great-House region;passing south-westward into Belgravia, becoming diffused and sporadicwestward, finding its last systematic outbreak round and about Regent'sPark. The Duke of Devonshire's place in Piccadilly, in all its insolentugliness, pleases me particularly; it is the quintessence of the thing;Apsley House is all in the manner of my theory, Park Lane has its quitetypical mansions, and they run along the border of the Green Park andSt. James's. And I struck out a truth one day in Cromwell Road quitesuddenly, as I looked over the Natural History Museum "By Jove," said I"but this is the little assemblage of cases of stuffed birds andanimals upon the Bladesover staircase grown enormous, and yonder as thecorresponding thing to the Bladesover curios and porcelain is the ArtMuseume and there in the little observatories in Exhibition Road is oldSir Cuthbert's Gregorian telescope that I hunted out in the storeroomand put together." And diving into the Art Museum under thisinspiration, I came to a little reading-room and found as I hadinferred, old brown books!
It was really a good piece of social comparative anatomy I did thatday; all these museums and libraries that are dotted over London betweenPiccadilly and West Kensington, and indeed the museum and librarymovement throughout the world, sprang from the elegant leisure of thegentlemen of taste. Theirs were the first libraries, the first housesof culture; by my rat-like raids into the Bladesover saloon I became,as it were, the last dwindled representative of such a man of lettersas Swift. But now these things have escaped out of the Great Housealtogether, and taken on a strange independent life of their own.
It is this idea of escaping parts from the seventeenth century system ofBladesover, of proliferating and overgrowing elements from the Estates,that to this day seems to me the best explanation, not simply of London,but of all England. England is a country of great Renascence landedgentlefolk who have been unconsciously outgrown and overgrown. Theproper shops for Bladesover custom were still to be found in RegentStreet and Bond Street in my early London days in those days theyhad been but lightly touched by the American's profaning hand--and inPiccadilly. I found the doctor's house of the country village or countrytown up and down Harley Street, multiplied but not otherwise different,and the family solicitor (by the hundred) further eastward in theabandoned houses of a previous generation of gentlepeople, and down inWestminster, behind Palladian fronts, the public offices shelteredin large Bladesoverish rooms and looked out on St. James's Park. TheParliament Houses of lords and gentlemen, the parliament house that washorrified when merchants and brewers came thrusting into it a hundredyears ago, stood out upon its terrace gathering the whole systemtogether into a head.
And the more I have paralleled these things with my Bladesover-Eastrymodel, the more evident it has become to me that the balance is not thesame, and the more evident is the presence of great new forces, blindforces of invasion, of growth. The railway termini on the north side ofLondon have been kept as remote as Eastry had kept the railway-stationfrom Wimblehurst, they stop on the very outskirts of the estates, butfrom the south, the South Eastern railway had butted its great stupidrusty iron head of Charing Cross station, that great head that camesmashing down in 1905--clean across the river, between Somerset Houseand Whitehall. The south side had no protecting estate. Factory chimneyssmoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly nothaving permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of allLondon east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of Londonport is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidlyexpanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward theclean clear social assurance of the West End. And south of this centralLondon, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round thenorthern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streetsof undistinguished houses, undistinguished industries, shabby families,second-rate shops, inexplicable people who in a once fashionable phrasedo not "exist." All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times,do suggest to this day, the unorganised, abundant substance of sometumorous growth-process, a process which indeed bursts all the outlinesof the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble comfortableCroydon, as tragic impoverished West Ham. To this day I ask myselfwill those masses ever become structural, will they indeed shapeinto anything new whatever, or is that cancerous image their true andultimate diagnosis?...
Moreover, together with this hypertrophy there is an immigration ofelements that have never understood and never will understand the greattradition, wedges of foreign settlement embedded in the heart of thisyeasty English expansion. One day I remember wandering eastward outof pure curiosity--it must have been in my early student days--anddiscovering a shabbily bright foreign quarter, shops displayingHebrew placards and weird, unfamiliar commodities and a concourse ofbright-eyed, eagle-nosed people talking some incomprehensible gibberishbetween the shops and the barrows. And soon I became quite familiar withthe devious, vicious, dirtily-pleasant ero
ticism of Soho. I found thosecrowded streets a vast relief from the dull grey exterior of Bromptonwhere I lodged and lived my daily life. In Soho, indeed, I got my firstinkling of the factor of replacement that is so important in both theEnglish and the American process.
Even in the West End, in Mayfair and the square, about Pall Mall, Ewartwas presently to remind me the face of the old aristocratic dignity wasfairer than its substance; here were actors and actresses, here moneylenders and Jews, here bold financial adventurers, and I thought of myuncle's frayed cuff as he pointed out this house in Park Lane andthat. That was so and so's who made a corner in borax, and that palacebelonged to that hero among modern adventurers, Barmentrude, who usedto be an I.D.B.,--an illicit diamond buyer that is to say. A city ofBladesovers, the capital of a kingdom of Bladesovers, all much shakenand many altogether in decay, parasitically occupied, insidiouslyreplaced by alien, unsympathetic and irresponsible elements; and witha ruling an adventitious and miscellaneous empire of a quarter of thisdaedal earth complex laws, intricate social necessities, disturbinginsatiable suggestions, followed from this. Such was the world intowhich I had come, into which I had in some way to thrust myself and fitmy problem, my temptations, my efforts, my patriotic instinct, all mymoral instincts, my physical appetites, my dreams and my sanity.
London! I came up to it, young and without advisers, ratherpriggish, rather dangerously open-minded and very open-eyed, and withsomething--it is, I think, the common gift of imaginative youth, and Iclaim it unblushingly--fine in me, finer than the world and seeking fineresponses. I did not want simply to live or simply to live happily orwell; I wanted to serve and do and make--with some nobility. It was inme. It is in half the youth of the world.
II
I had come to London as a scholar. I had taken the Vincent Bradleyscholarship of the Pharmaceutical Society, but I threw this up when Ifound that my work of the Science and Art Department in mathematics,physics and chemistry had given me one of the minor Technical BoardScholarships at the Consolidated Technical Schools at South Kensington.This latter was in mechanics and metallurgy; and I hesitated between thetwo. The Vincent Bradley gave me L70 a year and quite the best start-offa pharmaceutical chemist could have; the South Kensington thing wasworth about twenty-two shillings a week, and the prospects it openedwere vague. But it meant far more scientific work than the former, and Iwas still under the impulse of that great intellectual appetite that ispart of the adolescence of men of my type. Moreover it seemed to leadtowards engineering, in which I imagined--I imagine to this day--myparticular use is to be found. I took its greater uncertainty as a fairrisk. I came up very keen, not doubting that the really hard and steadyindustry that had carried me through Wimblehurst would go on still inthe new surroundings.
Only from the very first it didn't....
When I look back now at my Wimblehurst days, I still find myselfsurprised at the amount of steady grinding study, of strenuousself-discipline that I maintained throughout my apprenticeship. In manyways I think that time was the most honourable period in my life. I wishI could say with a certain mind that my motives in working so well werelarge and honourable too. To a certain extent they were so; there wasa fine sincere curiosity, a desire for the strength and power ofscientific knowledge and a passion for intellectual exercise; but Ido not think those forces alone would have kept me at it so grimlyand closely if Wimblehurst had not been so dull, so limited and soobservant. Directly I came into the London atmosphere, tasting freedom,tasting irresponsibility and the pull of new forces altogether, mydiscipline fell from me like a garment. Wimblehurst to a youngster in myposition offered no temptations worth counting, no interests to conflictwith study, no vices--such vices as it offered were coarsely stripped ofany imaginative glamourfull drunkenness, clumsy leering shameful lust,no social intercourse even to waste one's time, and on the other hand itwould minister greatly to the self-esteem of a conspicuously industriousstudent. One was marked as "clever," one played up to the part, andone's little accomplishment stood out finely in one's private reckoningagainst the sunlit small ignorance of that agreeable place. One wentwith an intent rush across the market square, one took one's exercisewith as dramatic a sense of an ordered day as an Oxford don, one burntthe midnight oil quite consciously at the rare respectful, benightedpasser-by. And one stood out finely in the local paper with one'sunapproachable yearly harvest of certificates. Thus I was not only agenuinely keen student, but also a little of a prig and poseur in thosedays--and the latter kept the former at it, as London made clear.
Moreover Wimblehurst had given me no outlet in any other direction.
But I did not realise all this when I came to London, did not perceivehow the change of atmosphere began at once to warp and distribute myenergies. In the first place I became invisible. If I idled for a day,no one except my fellow-students (who evidently had no awe for me)remarked it. No one saw my midnight taper; no one pointed me out as Icrossed the street as an astonishing intellectual phenomenon. In thenext place I became inconsiderable. In Wimblehurst I felt I stood forScience; nobody there seemed to have so much as I and to have it sofully and completely. In London I walked ignorant in an immensity, andit was clear that among my fellow-students from the midlands and thenorth I was ill-equipped and under-trained. With the utmost exertion Ishould only take a secondary position among them. And finally, in thethird place, I was distracted by voluminous new interests; London tookhold of me, and Science, which had been the universe, shrank back to thedimensions of tiresome little formulae compacted in a book. I came toLondon in late September, and it was a very different London fromthat great greyly-overcast, smoke-stained house-wilderness of my firstimpressions. I reached it by Victoria and not by Cannon Street, and itscentre was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber, blue-greyand tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal skies, a London ofhugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardensand labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces andartificial waters. I lodged near by in West Brompton at a house in alittle square.
So London faced me the second time, making me forget altogether for awhile the grey, drizzling city visage that had first looked upon me. Isettled down and went to and fro to my lectures and laboratory; inthe beginning I worked hard, and only slowly did the curiosity thatpresently possessed me to know more of this huge urban province arise,the desire to find something beyond mechanism that I could serve, someuse other than learning. With this was a growing sense of loneliness,a desire for adventure and intercourse. I found myself in the eveningsporing over a map of London I had bought, instead of copying out lecturenotes--and on Sundays I made explorations, taking omnibus rides east andwest and north and south, and to enlarging and broadening the sense ofgreat swarming hinterlands of humanity with whom I had no dealings, ofwhom I knew nothing....
The whole illimitable place teemed with suggestions of indefinite andsometimes outrageous possibility, of hidden but magnificent meanings.
It wasn't simply that I received a vast impression of space andmultitude and opportunity; intimate things also were suddenly draggedfrom neglected, veiled and darkened corners into an acute vividness ofperception. Close at hand in the big art museum I came for the firsttime upon the beauty of nudity, which I had hitherto held to be ashameful secret, flaunted and gloried in; I was made aware of beautyas not only permissible, but desirable and frequent and of a thousandhitherto unsuspected rich aspects of life. One night in a real rapture,I walked round the upper gallery of the Albert Hall and listened forthe first time to great music; I believe now that it was a rendering ofBeethoven's Ninth Symphony....
My apprehension of spaces and places was reinforced by a quickenedapprehension of persons. A constant stream of people passed by me,eyes met and challenged mine and passed--more and more I wanted then tostay--if I went eastward towards Piccadilly, women who seemed then to myboyish inexperience softly splendid and alluring, murmured to me asthey passed. Extraordinarily life unveiled. The very hoardings clamour
edstrangely at one's senses and curiosities. One bought pamphlets andpapers full of strange and daring ideas transcending one's boldest; inthe parks one heard men discussing the very existence of God, denyingthe rights of property, debating a hundred things that one dared notthink about in Wimblehurst. And after the ordinary overcast day, afterdull mornings, came twilight, and London lit up and became a thing ofwhite and yellow and red jewels of light and wonderful floods of goldenillumination and stupendous and unfathomable shadows--and there wereno longer any mean or shabby people--but a great mysterious movement ofunaccountable beings....
Always I was coming on the queerest new aspects. Late one Saturday nightI found myself one of a great slow-moving crowd between the blazingshops and the flaring barrows in the Harrow Road; I got intoconversation with two bold-eyed girls, bought them boxes of chocolate,made the acquaintance of father and mother and various younger brothersand sisters, sat in a public-house hilariously with them all, standingand being stood drinks, and left them in the small hours at the doorof "home," never to see them again. And once I was accosted onthe outskirts of a Salvation Army meeting in one of the parks by asilk-hatted young man of eager and serious discourse, who argued againstscepticism with me, invited me home to tea into a clean and cheerfulfamily of brothers and sisters and friends, and there I spentthe evening singing hymns to the harmonium (which reminded me ofhalf-forgotten Chatham), and wishing all the sisters were not soobviously engaged....
Then on the remote hill of this boundless city-world I found Ewart.
III
How well I remember the first morning, a bright Sunday morning in earlyOctober, when I raided in upon Ewart! I found my old schoolfellow inbed in a room over an oil-shop in a back street at the foot of HighgateHill. His landlady, a pleasant, dirty young woman with soft-brown eyes,brought down his message for me to come up; and up I went. The roompresented itself as ample and interesting in detail and shabby with aquite commendable shabbiness. I had an impression of brown walls--theywere papered with brown paper--of a long shelf along one side of theroom, with dusty plaster casts and a small cheap lay figure of a horse,of a table and something of grey wax partially covered with a cloth,and of scattered drawings. There was a gas stove in one corner, and someenameled ware that had been used for overnight cooking. The oilcloth onthe floor was streaked with a peculiar white dust. Ewart himself was notin the first instance visible, but only a fourfold canvas screen at theend of the room from which shouts proceeded of "Come on!" then his wiryblack hair, very much rumpled, and a staring red-brown eye and his stumpof a nose came round the edge of this at a height of about three feetfrom the ground "It's old Ponderevo!" he said, "the Early bird! And he'scaught the worm! By Jove, but it's cold this morning! Come round hereand sit on the bed!"
I walked round, wrung his hand, and we surveyed one another.
He was lying on a small wooden fold-up bed, the scanty covering of whichwas supplemented by an overcoat and an elderly but still cheerful pairof check trousers, and he was wearing pajamas of a virulent pink andgreen. His neck seemed longer and more stringy than it had been even inour schooldays, and his upper lip had a wiry black moustache. The restof his ruddy, knobby countenance, his erratic hair and his general hairyleanness had not even--to my perceptions grown.
"By Jove!" he said, "you've got quite decent-looking, Ponderevo! What doyou think of me?"
"You're all right. What are you doing here?"
"Art, my son--sculpture! And incidentally--" He hesitated. "I ply atrade. Will you hand me that pipe and those smoking things? So!You can't make coffee, eh? Well, try your hand. Cast down thisscreen--no--fold it up and so we'll go into the other room. I'll keepin bed all the same. The fire's a gas stove. Yes. Don't make it bang.too loud as you light it--I can't stand it this morning. You won't smoke... Well, it does me good to see you again, Ponderevo. Tell me whatyou're doing, and how you're getting on."
He directed me in the service of his simple hospitality, and presentlyI came back to his bed and sat down and smiled at him there, smokingcomfortably, with his hands under his head, surveying me.
"How's Life's Morning, Ponderevo? By Jove, it must be nearly six yearssince we met! They've got moustaches. We've fleshed ourselves a bit, eh?And you?"
I felt a pipe was becoming after all, and that lit, I gave him afavourable sketch of my career.
"Science! And you've worked like that! While I've been potting rounddoing odd jobs for stone-masons and people, and trying to get tosculpture. I've a sort of feeling that the chisel--I began withpainting, Ponderevo, and found I was colour-blind, colour-blindenough to stop it. I've drawn about and thought about--thought moreparticularly. I give myself three days a week as an art student, and therest of the time I've a sort of trade that keeps me. And we're stillin the beginning of things, young men starting. Do you remember theold times at Goudhurst, our doll's-house island, the Retreat of the TenThousand Young Holmes and the rabbits, eh? It's surprising, if you thinkof it, to find we are still young. And we used to talk of what we wouldbe, and we used to talk of love! I suppose you know all about that now,Ponderevo?"
I finished and hesitated on some vague foolish lie, "No," I said, alittle ashamed of the truth. "Do you? I've been too busy."
"I'm just beginning--just as we were then. Things happen."
He sucked at his pipe for a space and stared at the plaster cast of aflayed hand that hung on the wall.
"The fact is, Ponderevo, I'm beginning to find life a most extraordinaryqueer set-out; the things that pull one, the things that don't. Thewants--This business of sex. It's a net. No end to it, no way out of it,no sense in it. There are times when women take possession of me, whenmy mind is like a painted ceiling at Hampton Court with the pride ofthe flesh sprawling all over it. WHY?... And then again sometimes whenI have to encounter a woman, I am overwhelmed by a terror of tantalisingboredom--I fly, I hide, I do anything. You've got your scientificexplanations perhaps; what's Nature and the universe up to in thatmatter?"
"It's her way, I gather, of securing the continuity of the species."
"But it doesn't," said Ewart. "That's just it! No. I have succumbedto--dissipation--down the hill there. Euston Road way. And it was damnedugly and mean, and I hate having done it. And the continuity of thespecies--Lord!... And why does Nature make a man so infernally ready fordrinks? There's no sense in that anyhow." He sat up in bed, to put thisquestion with the greater earnestness. "And why has she given me a mostviolent desire towards sculpture and an equally violent desire to leaveoff work directly I begin it, eh?... Let's have some more coffee. I putit to you, these things puzzle me, Ponderevo. They dishearten me. Theykeep me in bed."
He had an air of having saved up these difficulties for me for sometime. He sat with his chin almost touching his knees, sucking at hispipe.
"That's what I mean," he went on, "when I say life is getting on to meas extraordinarily queer, I don't see my game, nor why I was invited.And I don't make anything of the world outside either. What do you makeof it?"
"London," I began. "It's--so enormous!"
"Isn't it! And it's all up to nothing. You find chaps keeping grocers'shops--why the DEVIL, Ponderevo, do they keep grocers' shops? Theyall do it very carefully, very steadily, very meanly. You find peoplerunning about and doing the most remarkable things being policemen, forexample, and burglars. They go about these businesses quite gravely andearnestly. I somehow--can't go about mine. Is there any sense in it atall--anywhere?"
"There must be sense in it," I said. "We're young."
"We're young--yes. But one must inquire. The grocer's a grocer because,I suppose, he sees he comes in there. Feels that on the whole it amountsto a call.... But the bother is I don't see where I come in at all. Doyou?"
"Where you come in?"
"No, where you come in."
"Not exactly, yet," I said. "I want to do some good in theworld--something--something effectual, before I die. I have a sort ofidea my scientific work--I don't know."
"Yes," he m
used. "And I've got a sort of idea my sculpture,--but now itis to come in and WHY,--I've no idea at all." He hugged his knees for aspace. "That's what puzzles me, Ponderevo, no end."
He became animated. "If you will look in that cupboard," he said,"you will find an old respectable looking roll on a plate and a knifesomewhere and a gallipot containing butter. You give them me and I'llmake my breakfast, and then if you don't mind watching me paddle aboutat my simple toilet I'll get up. Then we'll go for a walk and talk aboutthis affair of life further. And about Art and Literature and anythingelse that crops up on the way.... Yes, that's the gallipot. Cockroachgot in it? Chuck him out--damned interloper...."
So in the first five minutes of our talk, as I seem to remember itnow, old Ewart struck the note that ran through all that morning'sintercourse....
To me it was a most memorable talk because it opened out quite newhorizons of thought. I'd been working rather close and out of touchwith Ewart's free gesticulating way. He was pessimistic that day andsceptical to the very root of things. He made me feel clearly, whatI had not felt at all before, the general adventurousness of life,particularly of life at the stage we had reached, and also the absenceof definite objects, of any concerted purpose in the lives that weregoing on all round us. He made me feel, too, how ready I was to take upcommonplace assumptions. Just as I had always imagined that somewherein social arrangements there was certainly a Head-Master who wouldintervene if one went too far, so I had always had a sort of implicitbelief that in our England there were somewhere people who understoodwhat we were all, as a nation, about. That crumpled into his pit ofdoubt and vanished.
He brought out, sharply cut and certain, the immense effect ofpurposelessness in London that I was already indistinctly feeling. Wefound ourselves at last returning through Highgate Cemetery and WaterlowPark--and Ewart was talking.
"Look at it there," he said, stopping and pointing to the great vale ofLondon spreading wide and far. "It's like a sea--and we swim in it. Andat last down we go, and then up we come--washed up here." He swunghis arms to the long slopes about us, tombs and headstones in longperspectives, in limitless rows.
"We're young, Ponderevo, but sooner or later our whitened memories willwash up on one of these beaches, on some such beach as this. GeorgePonderevo, F.R.S., Sidney Ewart, R.I.P. Look at the rows of 'em!"
He paused. "Do you see that hand? The hand, I mean, pointing upward,on the top of a blunted obelisk. Yes. Well, that's what I do for aliving--when I'm not thinking, or drinking, or prowling, or making love,or pretending I'm trying to be a sculptor without either the moneyor the morals for a model. See? And I do those hearts afire and thosepensive angel guardians with the palm of peace. Damned well I do 'em anddamned cheap! I'm a sweated victim, Ponderevo..."
That was the way of it, anyhow. I drank deep of talk that day; we wentinto theology, into philosophy; I had my first glimpse of socialism. Ifelt as though I had been silent in a silence since I and he had parted.At the thought of socialism Ewart's moods changed for a time to a sortof energy. "After all, all this confounded vagueness might be altered.If you could get men to work together..."
It was a good talk that rambled through all the universe. I thought Iwas giving my mind refreshment, but indeed it was dissipation. All sortsof ideas, even now, carry me back as it were to a fountain-head, toWaterlow Park and my resuscitated Ewart. There stretches away southof us long garden slopes and white gravestones and the wide expanse ofLondon, and somewhere in the picture is a red old wall, sun-warmed, anda great blaze of Michaelmas daisies set off with late golden sunflowersand a drift of mottled, blood-red, fallen leaves. It was with me thatday as though I had lifted my head suddenly out of dull and immediatethings and looked at life altogether.... But it played the very devilwith the copying up of my arrears of notes to which I had vowed thelatter half of that day.
After that reunion Ewart and I met much and talked much, and in oursubsequent encounters his monologue was interrupted and I took my share.He had exercised me so greatly that I lay awake at nights thinkinghim over, and discoursed and answered him in my head as I went in themorning to the College. I am by nature a doer and only by the way acritic; his philosophical assertion of the incalculable vagueness oflife which fitted his natural indolence roused my more irritable andenergetic nature to active protests. "It's all so pointless," I said,"because people are slack and because it's in the ebb of an age. Butyou're a socialist. Well, let's bring that about! And there's a purpose.There you are!"
Ewart gave me all my first conceptions of socialism; in a little whileI was an enthusiastic socialist and he was a passive resister to thepractical exposition of the theories he had taught me. "We must joinsome organisation," I said. "We ought to do things.... We ought to goand speak at street corners. People don't know."
You must figure me a rather ill-dressed young man in a state of greatearnestness, standing up in that shabby studio of his and saying thesethings, perhaps with some gesticulations, and Ewart with a clay-smudgedface, dressed perhaps in a flannel shirt and trousers, with a pipe inhis mouth, squatting philosophically at a table, working at some chunkof clay that never got beyond suggestion.
"I wonder why one doesn't want to," he said.
It was only very slowly I came to gauge Ewart's real position in thescheme of things, to understand how deliberate and complete was thisdetachment of his from the moral condemnation and responsibilities thatplayed so fine a part in his talk. His was essentially the nature ofan artistic appreciator; he could find interest and beauty in endlessaspects of things that I marked as evil, or at least as not negotiable;and the impulse I had towards self-deception, to sustained andconsistent self-devotion, disturbed and detached and pointless as it wasat that time, he had indeed a sort of admiration for but no sympathy.Like many fantastic and ample talkers he was at bottom secretive, andhe gave me a series of little shocks of discovery throughout ourintercourse.
The first of these came in the realisation that he quite seriously meantto do nothing in the world at all towards reforming the evils he laidbare in so easy and dexterous a manner. The next came in the suddenappearance of a person called "Milly"--I've forgotten her surname--whomI found in his room one evening, simply attired in a blue wrap--therest of her costume behind the screen--smoking cigarettes and sharinga flagon of an amazingly cheap and self-assertive grocer's wine Ewartaffected, called "Canary Sack." "Hullo!" said Ewart, as I came in. "Thisis Milly, you know. She's been being a model--she IS a model really....(keep calm, Ponderevo!) Have some sack?"
Milly was a woman of thirty, perhaps, with a broad, rather pretty face,a placid disposition, a bad accent and delightful blond hair that wavedoff her head with an irrepressible variety of charm; and whenever Ewartspoke she beamed at him. Ewart was always sketching this hair of hersand embarking upon clay statuettes of her that were never finished. Shewas, I know now, a woman of the streets, whom Ewart had picked up inthe most casual manner, and who had fallen in love with him, but myinexperience in those days was too great for me to place her then, andEwart offered no elucidations. She came to him, he went to her, theytook holidays together in the country when certainly she sustained herfair share of their expenditure. I suspect him now even of taking moneyfrom her. Odd old Ewart! It was a relationship so alien to my orderlyconceptions of honour, to what I could imagine any friend of mine doing,that I really hardly saw it with it there under my nose. But I see itand I think I understand it now....
Before I fully grasped the discursive manner in which Ewart wascommitted to his particular way in life, I did, I say, as the broadconstructive ideas of socialism took hold of me, try to get him to workwith me in some definite fashion as a socialist.
"We ought to join on to other socialists," I said.
"They've got something."
"Let's go and look at some first."
After some pains we discovered the office of the Fabian Society, lurkingin a cellar in Clement's Inn; and we went and interviewed a ratherdiscouraging secretary who stood astraddle
in front of a fire andquestioned us severely and seemed to doubt the integrity of ourintentions profoundly. He advised us to attend the next open meeting inClifford's Inn and gave us the necessary data. We both contrived to getto the affair, and heard a discursive gritty paper on Trusts and one ofthe most inconclusive discussions you can imagine. Three-quarters ofthe speakers seemed under some jocular obsession which took the formof pretending to be conceited. It was a sort of family joke, and asstrangers to the family we did not like it.... As we came out throughthe narrow passage from Clifford's Inn to the Strand, Ewart suddenlypitched upon a wizened, spectacled little man in a vast felt hat and alarge orange tie.
"How many members are there in this Fabian Society of yours?" he asked.
The little man became at once defensive in his manner.
"About seven hundred," he said; "perhaps eight."
"Like--like the ones here?"
The little man gave a nervous self-satisfied laugh. "I suppose they'reup to sample," he said.
The little man dropped out of existence and we emerged upon the Strand.Ewart twisted his arm into a queerly eloquent gesture that gathered upall the tall facades of the banks, the business places, the projectingclock and towers of the Law Courts, the advertisements, the luminoussigns, into one social immensity, into a capitalistic system giganticand invincible.
"These socialists have no sense of proportion," he said. "What can youexpect of them?"
IV
Ewart, as the embodiment of talk, was certainly a leading factor in myconspicuous failure to go on studying. Social theory in its first crudeform of Democratic Socialism gripped my intelligence more and morepowerfully. I argued in the laboratory with the man who shared my benchuntil we quarreled and did not speak and also I fell in love.
The ferment of sex had been creeping into my being like a slowlyadvancing tide through all my Wimblehurst days, the stimulus of Londonwas like the rising of a wind out of the sea that brings the waves infast and high. Ewart had his share in that. More and more acutely andunmistakably did my perception of beauty, form and sound, my desirefor adventure, my desire for intercourse, converge on this central andcommanding business of the individual life. I had to get me a mate.
I began to fall in love faintly with girls I passed in the street,with women who sat before me in trains, with girl fellow-students,with ladies in passing carriages, with loiterers at the corners, withneat-handed waitresses in shops and tea-rooms, with pictures evenof girls and women. On my rare visits to the theatre I always becameexalted, and found the actresses and even the spectators about memysterious, attractive, creatures of deep interest and desire. I hada stronger and stronger sense that among these glancing, passingmultitudes there was somewhere one who was for me. And in spite of everyantagonistic force in the world, there was something in my very marrowthat insisted: "Stop! Look at this one! Think of her! Won't she do?This signifies--this before all things signifies! Stop! Why are youhurrying by? This may be the predestined person--before all others."
It is odd that I can't remember when first I saw Marion, who became mywife--whom I was to make wretched, who was to make me wretched, whowas to pluck that fine generalised possibility of love out of my earlymanhood and make it a personal conflict. I became aware of her as one ofa number of interesting attractive figures that moved about in my world,that glanced back at my eyes, that flitted by with a kind of avertedwatchfulness. I would meet her coming through the Art Museum, whichwas my short cut to the Brompton Road, or see her sitting, reading as Ithought, in one of the bays of the Education Library. But really, as Ifound out afterwards, she never read. She used to come there to eat abun in quiet. She was a very gracefully-moving figure of a girl then,very plainly dressed, with dark brown hair I remember, in a knot lowon her neck behind that confessed the pretty roundness of her headand harmonised with the admirable lines of ears and cheek, the graveserenity of mouth and brow.
She stood out among the other girls very distinctly because they dressedmore than she did, struck emphatic notes of colour, startled one bynovelties in hats and bows and things. I've always hated the rustle, thedisconcerting colour boundaries, the smart unnatural angles of women'sclothes. Her plain black dress gave her a starkness....
I do remember, though, how one afternoon I discovered the peculiarappeal of her form for me. I had been restless with my work and hadfinally slipped out of the Laboratory and come over to the Art Museumto lounge among the pictures. I came upon her in an odd corner of theSheepshanks gallery, intently copying something from a picture that hunghigh. I had just been in the gallery of casts from the antique, my mindwas all alive with my newly awakened sense of line, and there she stoodwith face upturned, her body drooping forward from the hips just alittle--memorably graceful--feminine.
After that I know I sought to see her, felt a distinctive emotion ather presence, began to imagine things about her. I no longer thoughtof generalised womanhood or of this casual person or that. I thought ofher.
An accident brought us together. I found myself one Monday morning in anomnibus staggering westward from Victoria--I was returning from a SundayI'd spent at Wimblehurst in response to a unique freak of hospitalityon the part of Mr. Mantell. She was the sole other inside passenger.And when the time came to pay her fare, she became an extremely scared,disconcerted and fumbling young woman; she had left her purse at home.
Luckily I had some money.
She looked at me with startled, troubled brown eyes; she permitted myproffered payment to the conductor with a certain ungraciousness thatseemed a part of her shyness, and then as she rose to go, she thanked mewith an obvious affectation of ease.
"Thank you so much," she said in a pleasant soft voice; and then lessgracefully, "Awfully kind of you, you know."
I fancy I made polite noises. But just then I wasn't disposed to becritical. I was full of the sense of her presence; her arm was stretchedout over me as she moved past me, the gracious slenderness of her bodywas near me. The words we used didn't seem very greatly to matter. I hadvague ideas of getting out with her--and I didn't.
That encounter, I have no doubt, exercised me enormously. I lay awakeat night rehearsing it, and wondering about the next phase of ourrelationship. That took the form of the return of my twopence. I wasin the Science Library, digging something out of the EncyclopediaBritannica, when she appeared beside me and placed on the open page anevidently premeditated thin envelope, bulgingly confessing the coinswithin.
"It was so very kind of you," she said, "the other day. I don't knowwhat I should have done, Mr.--"
I supplied my name. "I knew," I said, "you were a student here."
"Not exactly a student. I--"
"Well, anyhow, I knew you were here frequently. And I'm a student myselfat the Consolidated Technical Schools."
I plunged into autobiography and questionings, and so entangled her ina conversation that got a quality of intimacy through the fact that,out of deference to our fellow-readers, we were obliged to speak inundertones. And I have no doubt that in substance it was singularlybanal. Indeed I have an impression that all our early conversations wereincredibly banal. We met several times in a manner half-accidental, halffurtive and wholly awkward. Mentally I didn't take hold of her. I neverdid take hold of her mentally. Her talk, I now know all too clearly, wasshallow, pretentious, evasive. Only--even to this day--I don't rememberit as in any way vulgar. She was, I could see quite clearly, anxiousto overstate or conceal her real social status, a little desirous tobe taken for a student in the art school and a little ashamed that shewasn't. She came to the museum to "copy things," and this, I gathered,had something to do with some way of partially earning her living that Iwasn't to inquire into. I told her things about myself, vain things thatI felt might appeal to her, but that I learnt long afterwards made herthink me "conceited." We talked of books, but there she was very much onher guard and secretive, and rather more freely of pictures. She "liked"pictures. I think from the outset I appreciated and did not for a momentrese
nt that hers was a commonplace mind, that she was the unconsciouscustodian of something that had gripped my most intimate instinct, thatshe embodied the hope of a possibility, was the careless proprietor of aphysical quality that had turned my head like strong wine. I felt I hadto stick to our acquaintance, flat as it was. Presently we should getthrough these irrelevant exterior things, and come to the reality oflove beneath.
I saw her in dreams released, as it were, from herself, beautiful,worshipful, glowing. And sometimes when we were together, we would comeon silences through sheer lack of matter, and then my eyes would feaston her, and the silence seemed like the drawing back of a curtain--hersuperficial self. Odd, I confess. Odd, particularly, the enormous holdof certain things about her upon me, a certain slight rounded duskinessof skin, a certain perfection of modelling in her lips, her brow, acertain fine flow about the shoulders. She wasn't indeed beautifulto many people--these things are beyond explaining. She had manifestdefects of form and feature, and they didn't matter at all. Hercomplexion was bad, but I don't think it would have mattered if ithad been positively unwholesome. I had extraordinarily limited,extraordinarily painful, desires. I longed intolerably to kiss her lips.
V
The affair was immensely serious and commanding to me. I don't rememberthat in these earlier phases I had any thought of turning back atall. It was clear to me that she regarded me with an eye entirelymore critical than I had for her, that she didn't like my scholarlyuntidiness, my want of even the most commonplace style. "Why do youwear collars like that?" she said, and sent me in pursuit of gentlemanlyneckwear. I remember when she invited me a little abruptly one day tocome to tea at her home on the following Sunday and meet her fatherand mother and aunt, that I immediately doubted whether my hithertounsuspected best clothes would create the impression she desired me tomake on her belongings. I put off the encounter until the Sunday after,to get myself in order. I had a morning coat made and I bought a silkhat, and had my reward in the first glance of admiration she ever gaveme. I wonder how many of my sex are as preposterous. I was, you see,abandoning all my beliefs, my conventions unasked. I was forgettingmyself immensely. And there was a conscious shame in it all. Never aword--did I breathe to Ewart--to any living soul of what was going on.
Her father and mother and aunt struck me as the dismalest of people,and her home in Walham Green was chiefly notable for its black andamber tapestry carpets and curtains and table-cloths, and the age andirrelevance of its books, mostly books with faded gilt on the covers.The windows were fortified against the intrusive eye by cheap lacecurtains and an "art pot" upon an unstable octagonal table. Severalframed Art School drawings of Marion's, bearing official SouthKensington marks of approval, adorned the room, and there was a blackand gilt piano with a hymn-book on the top of it. There were drapedmirrors over all the mantels, and above the sideboard in the dining-roomin which we sat at tea was a portrait of her father, villainouslytruthful after the manner of such works. I couldn't see a trace of thebeauty I found in her in either parent, yet she somehow contrived to belike them both.
These people pretended in a way that reminded me of the Three GreatWomen in my mother's room, but they had not nearly so much socialknowledge and did not do it nearly so well. Also, I remarked, they didit with an eye on Marion. They had wanted to thank me, they said, forthe kindness to their daughter in the matter of the 'bus fare, and soaccounted for anything unusual in their invitation. They posed as simplegentlefolk, a little hostile to the rush and gadding-about of London,preferring a secluded and unpretentious quiet.
When Marion got out the white table-cloth from the sideboard-drawer fortea, a card bearing the word "APARTMENTS" fell to the floor. I picked itup and gave it to her before I realised from her quickened colour that Ishould not have seen it; that probably had been removed from the windowin honour of my coming.
Her father spoke once in a large remote way of he claims of businessengagements, and it was only long afterwards I realised that he was asupernumerary clerk in the Walham Green Gas Works and otherwise a usefulman at home. He was a large, loose, fattish man with unintelligent browneyes magnified by spectacles; he wore an ill-fitting frock-coat and apaper collar, and he showed me, as his great treasure and interest, alarge Bible which he had grangerised with photographs of pictures. Alsohe cultivated the little garden-yard behind the house, and he had asmall greenhouse with tomatoes. "I wish I 'ad 'eat," he said. "One cando such a lot with 'eat. But I suppose you can't 'ave everything youwant in this world."
Both he and Marion's mother treated her with a deference that struck meas the most natural thing in the world. Her own manner changed, becamemore authoritative and watchful, her shyness disappeared. She had takena line of her own I gathered, draped the mirror, got the second-handpiano, and broken her parents in.
Her mother must once have been a pretty woman; she had regular featuresand Marion's hair without its lustre, but she was thin and careworn.The aunt, Miss Ramboat, was a large, abnormally shy person very like herbrother, and I don't recall anything she said on this occasion.
To begin with there was a good deal of tension, Marion was frightfullynervous and every one was under the necessity of behaving in amysteriously unreal fashion until I plunged, became talkative and madea certain ease and interest. I told them of the schools, of my lodgings,of Wimblehurst and my apprenticeship days. "There's a lot of thisScience about nowadays," Mr. Ramboat reflected; "but I sometimes wondera bit what good it is?"
I was young enough to be led into what he called "a bit of adiscussion," which Marion truncated before our voices became undulyraised. "I dare say," she said, "there's much to be said on both sides."
I remember Marion's mother asked me what church I attended, and thatI replied evasively. After tea there was music and we sang hymns. Idoubted if I had a voice when this was proposed, but that was held to bea trivial objection, and I found sitting close beside the sweep ofhair from Marion's brow had many compensations. I discovered her mothersitting in the horsehair armchair and regarding us sentimentally. I wentfor a walk with Marion towards Putney Bridge, and then there was moresinging and a supper of cold bacon and pie, after which Mr. Ramboat andI smoked. During that walk, I remember, she told me the import of hersketchings and copyings in the museum. A cousin of a friend of hers whomshe spoke of as Smithie, had developed an original business in a sort oftea-gown garment which she called a Persian Robe, a plain sort of wrapwith a gaily embroidered yoke, and Marion went there and worked in thebusy times. In the times that weren't busy she designed novelties inyokes by an assiduous use of eyes and note-book in the museum, and wenthome and traced out the captured forms on the foundation material. "Idon't get much," said Marion, "but it's interesting, and in the busytimes we work all day. Of course the workgirls are dreadfully common,but we don't say much to them. And Smithie talks enough for ten."
I quite understood the workgirls were dreadfully common.
I don't remember that the Walham Green menage and the quality of thesepeople, nor the light they threw on Marion, detracted in the slightestdegree at that time from the intent resolve that held me to make hermine. I didn't like them. But I took them as part of the affair. Indeed,on the whole, I think they threw her up by an effect of contrast; shewas so obviously controlling them, so consciously superior to them.
More and more of my time did I give to this passion that possessed me. Ibegan to think chiefly of ways of pleasing Marion, of acts of devotion,of treats, of sumptuous presents for her, of appeals she wouldunderstand. If at times she was manifestly unintelligent, in herignorance became indisputable, I told myself her simple instincts wereworth all the education and intelligence in the world. And to this dayI think I wasn't really wrong about her. There was somethingextraordinarily fine about her, something simple and high, thatflickered in and out of her ignorance and commonness and limitationslike the tongue from the mouth of a snake....
One night I was privileged to meet her and bring her home from anentertainment at the Birkbeck Institu
te. We came back on the undergroundrailway and we travelled first-class--that being the highest classavailable. We were alone in the carriage, and for the first time Iventured to put my arm about her.
"You mustn't," she said feebly.
"I love you," I whispered suddenly with my heart beating wildly, drewher to me, drew all her beauty to me and kissed her cool and unresistinglips.
"Love me?" she said, struggling away from me, "Don't!" and then, as thetrain ran into a station, "You must tell no one.... I don't know.... Youshouldn't have done that...."
Then two other people got in with us and terminated my wooing for atime.
When we found ourselves alone together, walking towards Battersea, shehad decided to be offended. I parted from her unforgiven and terriblydistressed.
When we met again, she told me I must never say "that" again.
I had dreamt that to kiss her lips was ultimate satisfaction. But it wasindeed only the beginning of desires. I told her my one ambition was tomarry her.
"But," she said, "you're not in a position--What's the good of talkinglike that?"
I stared at her. "I mean to," I said.
"You can't," she answered. "It will be years"
"But I love you," I insisted.
I stood not a yard from the sweet lips I had kissed; I stood withinarm's length of the inanimate beauty I desired to quicken, and I sawopening between us a gulf of years, toil, waiting, disappointments andan immense uncertainty.
"I love you," I said. "Don't you love me?"
She looked me in the face with grave irresponsive eyes.
"I don't know," she said. "I LIKE you, of course.... One has to besensibl..."
I can remember now my sense of frustration by her unresilient reply.I should have perceived then that for her my ardour had no quickeningfire. But how was I to know? I had let myself come to want her, myimagination endowed her with infinite possibilities. I wanted her andwanted her, stupidly and instinctively....
"But," I said "Love--!"
"One has to be sensible," she replied. "I like going about with you.Can't we keep as we are?'"
VI
Well, you begin to understand my breakdown now, I have been copiousenough with these apologia. My work got more and more spiritless, mybehaviour degenerated, my punctuality declined; I was more and moreoutclassed in the steady grind by my fellow-students. Such supplies ofmoral energy as I still had at command shaped now in the direction ofserving Marion rather than science.
I fell away dreadfully, more and more I shirked and skulked; the humpedmen from the north, the pale men with thin, clenched minds, the intent,hard-breathing students I found against me, fell at last from keenrivalry to moral contempt. Even a girl got above me upon one of thelists. Then indeed I made it a point of honour to show by my publicdisregard of every rule that I really did not even pretend to try.
So one day I found myself sitting in a mood of considerable astonishmentin Kensington Gardens, reacting on a recent heated interview with theschool Registrar in which I had displayed more spirit than sense. I wasastonished chiefly at my stupendous falling away from all the militantideals of unflinching study I had brought up from Wimblehurst. I haddisplayed myself, as the Registrar put it, "an unmitigated rotter." Myfailure to get marks in the written examination had only been equalledby the insufficiency of my practical work.
"I ask you," the Registrar had said, "what will become of you when yourscholarship runs out?"
It certainly was an interesting question. What was going to become ofme?
It was clear there would be nothing for me in the schools as I had oncedared to hope; there seemed, indeed, scarcely anything in the worldexcept an illpaid assistantship in some provincial organized ScienceSchool or grammar school. I knew that for that sort of work, withouta degree or any qualification, one earned hardly a bare living and hadlittle leisure to struggle up to anything better. If only I had evenas little as fifty pounds I might hold out in London and take myB.Sc. degree, and quadruple my chances! My bitterness against my unclereturned at the thought. After all, he had some of my money still, orought to have. Why shouldn't I act within my rights, threaten to 'takeproceedings'? I meditated for a space on the idea, and then returned tothe Science Library and wrote him a very considerable and occasionallypungent letter.
That letter to my uncle was the nadir of my failure. Its remarkableconsequences, which ended my student days altogether, I will tell in thenext chapter.
I say "my failure." Yet there are times when I can even doubt whetherthat period was a failure at all, when I become defensively critical ofthose exacting courses I did not follow, the encyclopaedic processof scientific exhaustion from which I was distracted. My mind was notinactive, even if it fed on forbidden food. I did not learn what myprofessors and demonstrators had resolved I should learn, but I learntmany things. My mind learnt to swing wide and to swing by itself.
After all, those other fellows who took high places in the Collegeexaminations and were the professor's model boys haven't done soamazingly. Some are professors themselves, some technical experts; notone can show things done such as I, following my own interest, haveachieved. For I have built boats that smack across the water likewhiplashes; no one ever dreamt of such boats until I built them; and Ihave surprised three secrets that are more than technical discoveries,in the unexpected hiding-places of Nature. I have come nearer flyingthan any man has done. Could I have done as much if I had had a turn forobeying those rather mediocre professors at the college who proposedto train my mind? If I had been trained in research--that ridiculouscontradiction in terms--should I have done more than produce additionsto the existing store of little papers with blunted conclusions, ofwhich there are already too many? I see no sense in mock modesty uponthis matter. Even by the standards of worldly success I am, by the sideof my fellow-students, no failure. I had my F.R.S. by the time I wasthirty-seven, and if I am not very wealthy poverty is as far from me asthe Spanish Inquisition. Suppose I had stamped down on the head of mywandering curiosity, locked my imagination in a box just when it wantedto grow out to things, worked by so-and-so's excellent method andso-and-so's indications, where should I be now?
I may be all wrong in this. It may be I should be a far more efficientman than I am if I had cut off all those divergent expenditures ofenergy, plugged up my curiosity about society with more currentlyacceptable rubbish or other, abandoned Ewart, evaded Marion instead ofpursuing her, concentrated. But I don't believe it!
However, I certainly believed it completely and was filled with remorseon that afternoon when I sat dejectedly in Kensington Gardens andreviewed, in the light of the Registrar's pertinent questions my firsttwo years in London.
