II

I had come to London as a scholar. I had taken the Vincent Bradley

scholarship of the Pharmaceutical Society, but I threw this up when I

found that my work of the Science and Art Department in mathematics,

physics and chemistry had given me one of the minor Technical Board

Scholarships at the Consolidated Technical Schools at South Kensington.

This latter was in mechanics and metallurgy; and I hesitated between

the two. The Vincent Bradley gave me £70 a year and quite the best

start-off a pharmaceutical chemist could have; the South Kensington

thing was worth about twenty-two shillings a week, and the prospects it

opened were vague. But it meant far more scientific work than the

former, and I was still under the impulse of that great intellectual

appetite that is part of the adolescence of men of my type. Moreover it

seemed to lead towards engineering, in which I imagined—I imagine to

this day—my particular use is to be found. I took its greater

uncertainty as a fair risk. I came up very keen, not doubting that the

really hard and steady industry that had carried me through Wimblehurst

would go on still in the new surroundings.

Only from the very first it didn’t....

When I look back now at my Wimblehurst days, I still find myself

surprised at the amount of steady grinding study, of strenuous

self-discipline that I maintained throughout my apprenticeship. In many

ways I think that time was the most honourable period in my life. I

wish I could say with a certain mind that my motives in working so well

were large and honourable too. To a certain extent they were so; there

was a fine sincere curiosity, a desire for the strength and power of

scientific knowledge and a passion for intellectual exercise; but I do

not think those forces alone would have kept me at it so grimly and

closely if Wimblehurst had not been so dull, so limited and so

observant. Directly I came into the London atmosphere, tasting freedom,

tasting irresponsibility and the pull of new forces altogether, my

discipline fell from me like a garment. Wimblehurst to a youngster in

my position offered no temptations worth counting, no interests to

conflict with study, no vices—such vices as it offered were coarsely

stripped of any imaginative glamourfull drunkenness, clumsy leering

shameful lust, no social intercourse even to waste one’s time, and on

the other hand it would minister greatly to the self-esteem of a

conspicuously industrious student. One was marked as “clever,” one

played up to the part, and one’s little accomplishment stood out finely

in one’s private reckoning against the sunlit small ignorance of that

agreeable place. One went with an intent rush across the market square,

one took one’s exercise with as dramatic a sense of an ordered day as

an Oxford don, one burnt the midnight oil quite consciously at the rare

respectful, benighted passer-by. And one stood out finely in the local

paper with one’s unapproachable yearly harvest of certificates. Thus I

was not only a genuinely keen student, but also a little of a prig and

poseur in those days—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 perceive

how the change of atmosphere began at once to warp and distribute my

energies. 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 I

crossed the street as an astonishing intellectual phenomenon. In the

next place I became inconsiderable. In Wimblehurst I felt I stood for

Science; nobody there seemed to have so much as I and to have it so

fully and completely. In London I walked ignorant in an immensity, and

it was clear that among my fellow-students from the midlands and the

north I was ill-equipped and under-trained. With the utmost exertion I

should only take a secondary position among them. And finally, in the

third place, I was distracted by voluminous new interests; London took

hold of me, and Science, which had been the universe, shrank back to

the dimensions of tiresome little formulae compacted in a book. I came

to London in late September, and it was a very different London from

that great greyly-overcast, smoke-stained house-wilderness of my first

impressions. I reached it by Victoria and not by Cannon Street, and its

centre was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber, blue-grey and

tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal skies, a London of

hugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardens

and labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and

artificial waters. I lodged near by in West Brompton at a house in a

little square.

So London faced me the second time, making me forget altogether for a

while the grey, drizzling city visage that had first looked upon me. I

settled down and went to and fro to my lectures and laboratory; in the

beginning I worked hard, and only slowly did the curiosity that

presently possessed me to know more of this huge urban province arise,

the desire to find something beyond mechanism that I could serve, some

use other than learning. With this was a growing sense of loneliness, a

desire for adventure and intercourse. I found myself in the evenings

poring over a map of London I had bought, instead of copying out

lecture notes—and on Sundays I made explorations, taking omnibus rides

east and west and north and south, and to enlarging and broadening the

sense of great swarming hinterlands of humanity with whom I had no

dealings, of whom I knew nothing....

The whole illimitable place teemed with suggestions of indefinite and

sometimes outrageous possibility, of hidden but magnificent meanings.

It wasn’t simply that I received a vast impression of space and

multitude and opportunity; intimate things also were suddenly dragged

from neglected, veiled and darkened corners into an acute vividness of

perception. Close at hand in the big art museum I came for the first

time upon the beauty of nudity, which I had hitherto held to be a

shameful secret, flaunted and gloried in; I was made aware of beauty as

not only permissible, but desirable and frequent and of a thousand

hitherto unsuspected rich aspects of life. One night in a real rapture,

I walked round the upper gallery of the Albert Hall and listened for

the first time to great music; I believe now that it was a rendering of

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony....

My apprehension of spaces and places was reinforced by a quickened

apprehension of persons. A constant stream of people passed by me, eyes

met and challenged mine and passed—more and more I wanted then to

stay—if I went eastward towards Piccadilly, women who seemed then to my

boyish inexperience softly splendid and alluring, murmured to me as

they passed. Extraordinarily life unveiled. The very hoardings

clamoured strangely at one’s senses and curiosities. One bought

pamphlets and papers full of strange and daring ideas transcending

one’s boldest; in the parks one heard men discussing the very existence

of God, denying the rights of property, debating a hundred things that

one dared not think about in Wimblehurst. And after the ordinary

overcast day, after dull mornings, came twilight, and London lit up and

became a thing of white and yellow and red jewels of light and

wonderful floods of golden illumination and stupendous and unfathomable

shadows—and there were no longer any mean or shabby people—but a great

mysterious movement of unaccountable beings....

Always I was coming on the queerest new aspects. Late one Saturday

night I found myself one of a great slow-moving crowd between the

blazing shops and the flaring barrows in the Harrow Road; I got into

conversation with two bold-eyed girls, bought them boxes of chocolate,

made the acquaintance of father and mother and various younger brothers

and sisters, sat in a public-house hilariously with them all, standing

and being stood drinks, and left them in the small hours at the door of

“home,” never to see them again. And once I was accosted on the

outskirts of a Salvation Army meeting in one of the parks by a

silk-hatted young man of eager and serious discourse, who argued

against scepticism with me, invited me home to tea into a clean and

cheerful family of brothers and sisters and friends, and there I spent

the evening singing hymns to the harmonium (which reminded me of

half-forgotten Chatham), and wishing all the sisters were not so

obviously engaged....

Then on the remote hill of this boundless city-world I found Ewart.