Tono Bungay

How well I remember the first morning, a bright Sunday morning in early October, when I raided in upon Ewart!  I found my old schoolfellow in bed in a room over an oil-shop in a back street at the foot of Highgate Hill.  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 room presented itself as ample and interesting in detail and shabby with a quite commendable shabbiness.  I had an impression of brown walls—­they were papered with brown paper—­ of a long shelf along one side of the room, 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 some enameled ware that had been used for overnight cooking.  The oilcloth on the floor was streaked with a peculiar white dust.  Ewart himself was not in the first instance visible, but only a fourfold canvas screen at the end of the room from which shouts proceeded of “Come on!” then his wiry black hair, very much rumpled, and a staring red-brown eye and his stump of a nose came round the edge of this at a height of about three feet from the ground “It’s old Ponderevo!” he said, “the Early bird!  And he’s caught the worm!  By Jove, but it’s cold this morning!  Come round here and 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 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 now 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 facades 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?”