He was lying on a small wooden fold-up bed, the scanty covering of
which was supplemented by an overcoat and an elderly but still cheerful
pair of check trousers, and he was wearing pajamas of a virulent pink
and green. His neck seemed longer and more stringy than it had been
even in our schooldays, and his upper lip had a wiry black moustache.
The rest of his ruddy, knobby countenance, his erratic hair and his
general hairy leanness had not even—to my perceptions grown.
“By Jove!” he said, “you’ve got quite decent-looking, Ponderevo! What
do you think of me?”
“You’re all right. What are you doing here?”
“Art, my son—sculpture! And incidentally—” He hesitated. “I ply a
trade. Will you hand me that pipe and those smoking things? So! You
can’t make coffee, eh? Well, try your hand. Cast down this
screen—no—fold it up and so we’ll go into the other room. I’ll keep in
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 what you’re
doing, and how you’re getting on.”
He directed me in the service of his simple hospitality, and presently
I came back to his bed and sat down and smiled at him there, smoking
comfortably, with his hands under his head, surveying me.
“How’s Life’s Morning, Ponderevo? By Jove, it must be nearly six years
since 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 a
favourable sketch of my career.
“Science! And you’ve worked like that! While I’ve been potting round
doing odd jobs for stone-masons and people, and trying to get to
sculpture. I’ve a sort of feeling that the chisel—I began with
painting, Ponderevo, and found I was colour-blind, colour-blind enough
to stop it. I’ve drawn about and thought about—thought more
particularly. I give myself three days a week as an art student, and
the rest of the time I’ve a sort of trade that keeps me. And we’re
still in the beginning of things, young men starting. Do you remember
the old times at Goudhurst, our doll’s-house island, the Retreat of the
Ten Thousand Young Holmes and the rabbits, eh? It’s surprising, if you
think of it, to find we are still young. And we used to talk of what we
would be, 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, a
little 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 a
flayed hand that hung on the wall.
“The fact is, Ponderevo, I’m beginning to find life a most
extraordinary queer set-out; the things that pull one, the things that
don’t. The wants—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, when my mind is like a painted ceiling at Hampton Court with the
pride of the flesh sprawling all over it. _Why>?_... And then again
sometimes when I have to encounter a woman, I am overwhelmed by a
terror of tantalising boredom—I fly, I hide, I do anything. You’ve got
your scientific explanations perhaps; what’s Nature and the universe up
to in that matter?”
“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 succumbed
to—dissipation—down the hill there. Euston Road way. And it was damned
ugly and mean, and I hate having done it. And the continuity of the
species—Lord!... And why does Nature make a man so infernally ready for
drinks? There’s no sense in that anyhow.” He sat up in bed, to put this
question with the greater earnestness. “And why has she given me a most
violent desire towards sculpture and an equally violent desire to leave
off work directly I begin it, eh?... Let’s have some more coffee. I put
it to you, these things puzzle me, Ponderevo. They dishearten me. They
keep me in bed.”
He had an air of having saved up these difficulties for me for some
time. He sat with his chin almost touching his knees, sucking at his
pipe.
“That’s what I mean,” he went on, “when I say life is getting on to me
as 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_
make of 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? They all
do it very carefully, very steadily, very meanly. You find people
running about and doing the most remarkable things being policemen, for
example, and burglars. They go about these businesses quite gravely and
earnestly. I somehow—can’t go about mine. Is there any sense in it at
all—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
amounts to a call.... But the bother is I don’t see where I come in at
all. Do you?”
“Where _you_ come in?”
“No, where _you _come in.”
“Not exactly, yet,” I said. “I want to do some good in the
world—something—something effectual, before I die. I have a sort of
idea my scientific work—I don’t know.”
“Yes,” he mused. “And I’ve got a sort of idea my sculpture,—but _how_
it is to come in and _why_,—I’ve no idea at all.” He hugged his knees
for a space. “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 knife
somewhere and a gallipot containing butter. You give them me and I’ll
make my breakfast, and then if you don’t mind watching me paddle about
at my simple toilet I’ll get up. Then we’ll go for a walk and talk
about this affair of life further. And about Art and Literature and
anything else that crops up on the way.... Yes, that’s the gallipot.
Cockroach got in it? Chuck him out—damned interloper....”
So in the first five minutes of our talk, as I seem to remember it now,
old Ewart struck the note that ran through all that morning’s
intercourse....
To me it was a most memorable talk because it opened out quite new
horizons of thought. I’d been working rather close and out of touch
with Ewart’s free gesticulating way. He was pessimistic that day and
sceptical to the very root of things. He made me feel clearly, what I
had not felt at all before, the general adventurousness of life,
particularly of life at the stage we had reached, and also the absence
of definite objects, of any concerted purpose in the lives that were
going on all round us. He made me feel, too, how ready I was to take up
commonplace assumptions. Just as I had always imagined that somewhere
in social arrangements there was certainly a Head-Master who would
intervene if one went too far, so I had always had a sort of implicit
belief that in our England there were somewhere people who understood
what we were all, as a nation, about. That crumpled into his pit of
doubt and vanished.
He brought out, sharply cut and certain, the immense effect of
purposelessness in London that I was already indistinctly feeling. We
found ourselves at last returning through Highgate Cemetery and
Waterlow Park—and Ewart was talking.
“Look at it there,” he said, stopping and pointing to the great vale of
London spreading wide and far. “It’s like a sea—and we swim in it. And
at last down we go, and then up we come—washed up here.” He swung his
arms to the long slopes about us, tombs and headstones in long
perspectives, in limitless rows.
“We’re young, Ponderevo, but sooner or later our whitened memories will
wash up on one of these beaches, on some such beach as this. George
Ponderevo, 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 a
living—when I’m not thinking, or drinking, or prowling, or making love,
or pretending I’m trying to be a sculptor without either the money or
the morals for a model. See? And I do those hearts afire and those
pensive angel guardians with the palm of peace. Damned well I do ’em
and damned cheap! I’m a sweated victim, Ponderevo...”
That was the way of it, anyhow. I drank deep of talk that day; we went
into theology, into philosophy; I had my first glimpse of socialism. I
felt 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 sort of 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 I
was giving my mind refreshment, but indeed it was dissipation. All
sorts of ideas, even now, carry me back as it were to a fountain-head,
to Waterlow Park and my resuscitated Ewart. There stretches away south
of us long garden slopes and white gravestones and the wide expanse of
London, and somewhere in the picture is a red old wall, sun-warmed, and
a great blaze of Michaelmas daisies set off with late golden sunflowers
and a drift of mottled, blood-red, fallen leaves. It was with me that
day as though I had lifted my head suddenly out of dull and immediate
things and looked at life altogether.... But it played the very devil
with the copying up of my arrears of notes to which I had vowed the
latter half of that day.
After that reunion Ewart and I met much and talked much, and in our
subsequent encounters his monologue was interrupted and I took my
share. He had exercised me so greatly that I lay awake at nights
thinking him over, and discoursed and answered him in my head as I went
in the morning to the College. I am by nature a doer and only by the
way a critic; his philosophical assertion of the incalculable vagueness
of life which fitted his natural indolence roused my more irritable and
energetic 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. But
you’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 while
I was an enthusiastic socialist and he was a passive resister to the
practical exposition of the theories he had taught me. “We must join
some organisation,” I said. “We ought to do things.... We ought to go
and speak at street corners. People don’t know.”
You must figure me a rather ill-dressed young man in a state of great
earnestness, standing up in that shabby studio of his and saying these
things, perhaps with some gesticulations, and Ewart with a clay-smudged
face, dressed perhaps in a flannel shirt and trousers, with a pipe in
his mouth, squatting philosophically at a table, working at some chunk
of 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 the
scheme of things, to understand how deliberate and complete was this
detachment of his from the moral condemnation and responsibilities that
played so fine a part in his talk. His was essentially the nature of an
artistic appreciator; he could find interest and beauty in endless
aspects of things that I marked as evil, or at least as not negotiable;
and the impulse I had towards self-deception, to sustained and
consistent self-devotion, disturbed and detached and pointless as it
was at that time, he had indeed a sort of admiration for but no
sympathy. Like many fantastic and ample talkers he was at bottom
secretive, and he gave me a series of little shocks of discovery
throughout our intercourse.
The first of these came in the realisation that he quite seriously
meant to do nothing in the world at all towards reforming the evils he
laid bare in so easy and dexterous a manner. The next came in the
sudden appearance of a person called “Milly”—I’ve forgotten her
surname—whom I found in his room one evening, simply attired in a blue
wrap—the rest of her costume behind the screen—smoking cigarettes and
sharing a flagon of an amazingly cheap and self-assertive grocer’s wine
Ewart affected, called “Canary Sack.” “Hullo!” said Ewart, as I came
in. “This is 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 waved
off her head with an irrepressible variety of charm; and whenever Ewart
spoke she beamed at him. Ewart was always sketching this hair of hers
and embarking upon clay statuettes of her that were never finished. She
was, I know now, a woman of the streets, whom Ewart had picked up in
the most casual manner, and who had fallen in love with him, but my
inexperience in those days was too great for me to place her then, and
Ewart offered no elucidations. She came to him, he went to her, they
took holidays together in the country when certainly she sustained her
fair share of their expenditure. I suspect him now even of taking money
from her. Odd old Ewart! It was a relationship so alien to my orderly
conceptions 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 it and I think I understand it now....
Before I fully grasped the discursive manner in which Ewart was
committed to his particular way in life, I did, I say, as the broad
constructive ideas of socialism took hold of me, try to get him to work
with 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,
lurking in a cellar in Clement’s Inn; and we went and interviewed a
rather discouraging secretary who stood astraddle in front of a fire
and questioned us severely and seemed to doubt the integrity of our
intentions profoundly. He advised us to attend the next open meeting in
Clifford’s Inn and gave us the necessary data. We both contrived to get
to the affair, and heard a discursive gritty paper on Trusts and one of
the most inconclusive discussions you can imagine. Three-quarters of
the speakers seemed under some jocular obsession which took the form of
pretending to be conceited. It was a sort of family joke, and as
strangers to the family we did not like it.... As we came out through
the narrow passage from Clifford’s Inn to the Strand, Ewart suddenly
pitched upon a wizened, spectacled little man in a vast felt hat and a
large 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’re
up 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 up
all the tall façades of the banks, the business places, the projecting
clock and towers of the Law Courts, the advertisements, the luminous
signs, into one social immensity, into a capitalistic system gigantic
and invincible.
“These socialists have no sense of proportion,” he said. “What can you
expect of them?”