Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / Tono-Bungay Book 2 Chapter 1 - Parts 1-3

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Tono-Bungay Book 2 Chapter 1 - Parts 1-3 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Book second chapter, first parts one to three of Tono Bungay.
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Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
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Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by William Tomco. Tono Bungay
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Speaker 1: by H. G. Wells, Book second chapter, first parts one
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Speaker 1: to three, Book the Second The Rise of Tono Bungay,
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Speaker 1: Chapter the first. How I became a London student and
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Speaker 1: went astray. I came to live in London, as I
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Speaker 1: shall tell you, when I was nearly twenty two. Wimblehurst
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Speaker 1: dwindles in perspective, is now in this book a little
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Speaker 1: place far off blades over no more than a small
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Speaker 1: pink aspect of frontage among the distant Kentish hills. The
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Speaker 1: scene broadens out, becomes multitudinous and limitless, full of the
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Speaker 1: sense of vast, irrelevant movement. I do not remember my
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Speaker 1: second coming to London as I do my first. For
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Speaker 1: my early impressions save that an October memory of softened
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Speaker 1: amber sunshine stands out, amber sunshine falling on gray house
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Speaker 1: fronts I know not where that and a sense of
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Speaker 1: a large tranquility I could fill a book I think
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Speaker 1: with a more or less imaginary account of how I
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Speaker 1: came to apprehend London, how first in one aspect and
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Speaker 1: then in another, it grew in my mind. Each day
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Speaker 1: my accumulating impressions were added to and qualified, and brought
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Speaker 1: into relationship with new ones. They fused inseparably with others
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Speaker 1: that were purely personal and accidental. I find myself with
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Speaker 1: a certain comprehensive perception of London, complete, indeed incurably indistinct
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Speaker 1: in places, and yet in some way a whole that
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Speaker 1: began with my first visit and is still being mellowed
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Speaker 1: and enriched London. At first, no doubt, it was a
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Speaker 1: chaos of streets and people and buildings, and reasonless going
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Speaker 1: to and fro. I do not remember that I ever
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Speaker 1: struggled very steadily to understand it, or explored it with
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Speaker 1: any but a personal and adventurous intention. Yet in time
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Speaker 1: there has grown up in me a kind of theory
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Speaker 1: of London. I do think I see lines of an
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Speaker 1: ordered structure out of which it has grown detected, a
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Speaker 1: process that is something more than a confusion of casual accidents,
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Speaker 1: though indeed it may be no more than a process
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Speaker 1: of disease. I said at the outset of my first
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Speaker 1: book that I find in Bladesover the clue to all England. Well,
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Speaker 1: I certainly imagine it is the clue to the structure
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Speaker 1: of London. There have been no revolutions, no deliberate restatements
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Speaker 1: or abandonments of opinion in England since the days of
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Speaker 1: the fine gentry. Since sixteen eighty eight or thereabouts, the
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Speaker 1: days when Bladesover was built. There have been changes, dissolving forest,
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Speaker 1: replacing forest, if you will. But then it was that
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Speaker 1: the broad lines of the English system set firmly. And
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Speaker 1: as I have gone to and fro in London, in
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Speaker 1: certain regions constantly the thought has recurred, This is bladesover House.
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Speaker 1: This answers to Bladesover House. The fine gentry may have gone,
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Speaker 1: they have indeed largely gone. I think rich merchants may
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Speaker 1: have replaced them, financial adventurers or what not. That does
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Speaker 1: not matter. The shape is still Bladesover. I am most
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Speaker 1: reminded of Bladesover and Eastree by all those regions round
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Speaker 1: about the West End Parks, for example, estate parks, each
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Speaker 1: more or less in relation to a palace or group
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Speaker 1: of great houses. The roads and backways of Mayfair, and
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Speaker 1: all about Saint James again, albeit perhaps of a later
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Speaker 1: growth in point of time, were of the very spirit
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Speaker 1: and architectural texture of the over passages and yards. They
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Speaker 1: had the same smells, the space, the large, cleanest, and
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Speaker 1: always going to and fro where one met unmistakable Olympians
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Speaker 1: and even more unmistakable Valets Butler's footmen. In Mufti there
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Speaker 1: were moments when I seemed to glimpse down areas of
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Speaker 1: the white paneling, the very chintz of my mother's room. Again.
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Speaker 1: I could trace out now on a map what I
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Speaker 1: would call the Great House Region, passing southwestward into Belgravia,
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Speaker 1: becoming diffused and sporadic westward, finding its last systematic outbreak
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Speaker 1: round and about Region's Park. The Duke of Devonshire's place
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Speaker 1: in Piccadilly and all its insolent ugliness pleases me particularly.
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Speaker 1: It is the quintessence of the thing. Apsley House is
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Speaker 1: all in the manner of my theory. Park Lane has
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Speaker 1: its quite typical mansions, and they run along the border
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Speaker 1: of the Green Park and Saint James and I struck
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Speaker 1: out on a truth one day in cross Lum Road,
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Speaker 1: quite suddenly as I looked over the Natural History Museum
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Speaker 1: by Jove, said I, but this is the little assemblage
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Speaker 1: of cases of stuff, birds and animals upon the bladesover staircase,
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Speaker 1: grown enormous and yonder. As a corresponding thing to the
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Speaker 1: bladesover curios and porcelain is the Art Museum. And there
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Speaker 1: in the little observatories and exhibition road is old Sir
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Speaker 1: Cuthbert's Gregorian telescope that I hunted out in the storeroom
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Speaker 1: and put together. And diving into the Art Museum under
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Speaker 1: this inspiration, I came to a little reading room and found,
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Speaker 1: as I had inferred old brown books, it was really
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Speaker 1: a good piece of social comparative anatomy. I did that
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Speaker 1: day all these museums and libraries that are dotted over
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Speaker 1: London between Piccadilly and West Kensington. And indeed the museum
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Speaker 1: and library movement throughout the world sprang from the elegant
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Speaker 1: leisure of the gentleman of taste. Theirs were the first libraries,
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Speaker 1: the first houses of culture. By my rat like raids
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Speaker 1: into the bladesover saloon, I became, as it were, the
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Speaker 1: last dwindled representative of such a man of letters as
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Speaker 1: swift but now these things have escaped out of the
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Speaker 1: Great House altogether and taken on a strange, independent life
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Speaker 1: of their own. It is this idea of escaping parts
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Speaker 1: from the seventeenth century system of bladesover of proliferating and
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Speaker 1: overgrowing elements from the estates, that to this day seems
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Speaker 1: to me the best explanation not simply of London, but
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Speaker 1: of all England. England is a country of great Renaissance
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Speaker 1: landed gentlefolk who have been unconsciously outgrown and overgrown. The
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Speaker 1: proper shops for bladesover custom were still to be found
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Speaker 1: in Regent Street and Bond Street in my early London days.
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Speaker 1: In those days they had been but lightly touched by
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Speaker 1: the American's profaning hand. And in Piccadilly I found the
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Speaker 1: doctor's house of the country village or country town up
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Speaker 1: and down Harley Street, multiplied but not otherwise different, and
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Speaker 1: the family solicitor by the hundred Further eastward in the
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Speaker 1: abandoned houses of a previous generation of gentle people, and
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Speaker 1: down in Westminster, behind Platian fronts, the public offices sheltered
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Speaker 1: in large blades overish rooms and looked out on Saint
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Speaker 1: James's Park, the Parliament Houses of lords and gentlemen, the
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Speaker 1: Parliament House that was horrified when merchants and brewers came
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Speaker 1: thrusting into it a hundred years ago, stood out upon
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Speaker 1: its terrace, gathering the whole system together into a head.
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Speaker 1: And the more I have paralleled these things with my
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Speaker 1: blades over Eastream Model, the more evident it has become
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Speaker 1: to me that the balance is not the same. And
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Speaker 1: the more evident is the presence of great new forces,
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Speaker 1: blind forces of invasion of growth. The railway termini on
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Speaker 1: the north side of London have been kept as remote
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Speaker 1: as East Tree had kept the railway station from Wimblehurst.
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Speaker 1: They stopped on the very outskirts of the estates. But
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Speaker 1: from the south the Southeastern Railway had budded its great, stupid,
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Speaker 1: rusty iron head of charing Cross Station, that great head
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Speaker 1: that came smashing down in nineteen o five clean across
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Speaker 1: the river between Somerset House and Whitehall. The south side
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Speaker 1: had no protecting estate. Factory chimneys smoke right over against
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Speaker 1: Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and
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Speaker 1: the holy effect of industrial London, and of all London
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Speaker 1: east of Temple Bar and of the huge, dingy immensity
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Speaker 1: of London Port is to me of something disproportionately large,
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Speaker 1: something morbidly expanded without plan or intention, dark and sinister.
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Speaker 1: Toward the clean, clear social assurance of the West End.
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Speaker 1: And south of this central London, southeast, southwest, far west, northwest,
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Speaker 1: all round the northern hills are similar disproportionate growths, less
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Speaker 1: streets of undistinguished houses, undistinguished industries, shabby families, second rate shops,
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Speaker 1: inexplicable people who, in a once fashionable phrase, do not exist.
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Speaker 1: All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times
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Speaker 1: do suggest to this day the unorganized, abundant substance of
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Speaker 1: some tumorous growth process, a process which indeed bursts all
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Speaker 1: the outlines of the affected carcass and protrudes such masses
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Speaker 1: as ignoble, comfortable Croydon, as tragic, impoverished west Ham. To
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Speaker 1: this day I ask myself will those masses ever become structural,
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Speaker 1: Will they indeed shape into anything new whatever? Or is
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Speaker 1: that cancerous image their true and ultimate diagnosis. Moreover, together
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Speaker 1: with this hypertrophy, there is an emigration of elements that
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Speaker 1: have never understood and never will understand, the great tradition
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Speaker 1: is a foreign settlement embedded in the heart of this
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Speaker 1: yeasty English expansion. One day I remember wandering eastward out
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Speaker 1: of pure curiosity and must have been in my early
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Speaker 1: student days, and discovering a shabbily bright foreign quarter, shops
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Speaker 1: displaying Hebrew placards and weird, unfamiliar commodities, and a concourse
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Speaker 1: of bright eyed, eagle nosed people talking some incomprehensible gibberish
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Speaker 1: between the shops and the barrows. And soon I became
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Speaker 1: quite familiar with the devious, vicious, dirtily pleasant eroticism of Soho.
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Speaker 1: I found those crowded streets a vast relief from the dull,
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Speaker 1: gray exterior of Brompton, where I lodged and lived my
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Speaker 1: daily life. In Soho, indeed, I got my first inkling
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Speaker 1: of the factor of replacement that is so important in
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Speaker 1: both the English and the American process. Even in the
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Speaker 1: West End, in Mayfair and the square about pell mell
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Speaker 1: Eward was presently to remind me the face of the
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Speaker 1: old aristocratic dignity with fairer than its substance. Here were
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Speaker 1: actors and actresses, here, money lenders and Jews, here bold
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Speaker 1: financial adventurers, And I thought of my uncle's freight cuff,
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Speaker 1: as he pointed out this house in park Lane, and
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Speaker 1: that that was so and So's who made a corner
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Speaker 1: in Baraks, and that palace belonged to that hero among
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Speaker 1: modern adventurers Barmintrude, who used to be in I d
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Speaker 1: b an illicit diamond buyer, that is to say, the
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Speaker 1: city of bladesovers the capital of a kingdom of bladesovers
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Speaker 1: all much shaken, and many altogether in decay, parasitically occupied,
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Speaker 1: insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic and irresponsible elements, and with
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Speaker 1: a ruling an adventitious and miscellaneous empire of a quarter
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Speaker 1: of this deedal earth. Complex laws, intricate social necessities, disturbing,
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Speaker 1: insatiable suggestions followed from this. Such was the world into
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Speaker 1: which I had come, into which I had in some
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Speaker 1: way to thrust myself and fit my problem, my temptations,
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Speaker 1: my efforts, my patriotic instinct, all my moral instincts, my
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Speaker 1: physical appetites, my dreams, and my sanity London. I came
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Speaker 1: up to it young and without advisers, rather priggish, rather
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Speaker 1: dangerously open minded, and very open eyed, and with something.
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Speaker 1: It is I think the common gift of imaginative youth,
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Speaker 1: and I claim it unblushingly fine in me, finer than
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Speaker 1: the world, and seeking fine responses. I did not want
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Speaker 1: simply to live, or simply to live happily or well.
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Speaker 1: I wanted to serve, and do and make with some nobility.
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Speaker 1: It was in me, it is in half the youth
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Speaker 1: of the world. Two. I had come to London as
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Speaker 1: a scholar. I had taken the Vincent Bradley's scholarship of
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Speaker 1: the Pharmaceutical Society, but I threw this up when I
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Speaker 1: found that my work of the Science and Art Department
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Speaker 1: in mathematics, physics and chemistry had given me one of
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Speaker 1: the minor technical board scholarships at the consolidated Technical schools
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Speaker 1: at South Kensington. This latter was in mechanics and metallurgy,
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Speaker 1: and I hesitated between the two. The Vincent Bradley gave
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Speaker 1: me seventy pounds a year and quite the best start
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Speaker 1: off a pharmaceutical chemist could have. The South Kensington thing
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Speaker 1: was worth about twenty two shillings a week, and the
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Speaker 1: prospects it opened were vague, but it meant far more
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Speaker 1: scientific work than the former, and I was still under
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Speaker 1: the impulse of that great intellectual appetite that as part
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Speaker 1: of the adolescence of men of my type. Moreover, it
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Speaker 1: seemed to lead towards engineering in which I imagined, I imagined
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Speaker 1: to this day my particular use is to be found.
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Speaker 1: I took its greater uncertainty as a fair risk. I
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Speaker 1: came up very keen, not doubting that the really hard
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Speaker 1: and steady industry that had carried me through Wimblehurst would
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Speaker 1: go on still in the new surroundings. Only from the
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Speaker 1: very first it didn't. When I look back now at
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Speaker 1: my Wimblehurst days, I still find myself surprised at the
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Speaker 1: amount of steady, grinding study, of strenuous self discipline that
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Speaker 1: I maintained throughout my apprenticeship. In many ways, I think
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Speaker 1: that time was the most honorable period in my life.
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Speaker 1: I wish I could say with a certain mind that
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Speaker 1: my motives and working so well were large and honorable too.
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Speaker 1: To a certain extent they were so. There was a fine,
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Speaker 1: sincere curiosity, a desire for the strength and power of
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Speaker 1: scientific knowledge, and a passion for intellectual exercise. But I
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Speaker 1: do not think those forces alone would have kept me
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Speaker 1: at it so grimly and closely. If Wimblehurst had not
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Speaker 1: been so dull, so limited, and so observant. Directly, I
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Speaker 1: came into the London atmosphere tasting freedom, tasting irresponsibility, and
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Speaker 1: the pull of new forces. Altogether by discipline fell from
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Speaker 1: me like a garment. Wimblehurst, to a youngster in my position,
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Speaker 1: offered no temptations worth counting, no interests to conflict with study,
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Speaker 1: no vices. Such vices as it offered were coarsely stripped
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Speaker 1: of any imaginative glamorful drunkenness, clumsy leering, shameful lust, no
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Speaker 1: social intercourse even to waste one's time. And on the
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Speaker 1: other hand, it would minister greatly to the self esteem
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Speaker 1: of a conspicuously industrious student. One was marked as clever,
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Speaker 1: One played up to the part, and one's little accomplishment
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Speaker 1: stood out finely in one's private reckoning against the sunlit
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Speaker 1: small ignorance of that agreeable place, One went with an
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Speaker 1: intent rush across the market square. One took one's exercise
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Speaker 1: with as dramatic a sense of an ordered day as
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Speaker 1: an Oxford don. One burnt the midnight oil quite consciously
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Speaker 1: at the rare, respectable, benighted passer by, and one stood
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Speaker 1: out finally in the local paper with one's unapproachable yearly
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Speaker 1: harvest of certificates. Thus I was not only a genuinely
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Speaker 1: keen student, but also a little of a prig and
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Speaker 1: Poziere in those days, and the latter kept the former
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Speaker 1: at it, as London made clear. Moreover, Wimblehurst had given
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Speaker 1: me no outlet in any other direction. But I did
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Speaker 1: not realize all this when I came to London, did
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Speaker 1: not perceive how the change of atmosphere began at once
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Speaker 1: to warp and distribute my energies. In the first place,
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Speaker 1: I became invisible. If I idled for a day. No
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Speaker 1: one except my fellow students, who evidently had no awe
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Speaker 1: for me, remarked it. No one saw my midnight taper,
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Speaker 1: no one pointed me out as I crossed the street,
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Speaker 1: as an astonishing intellectual phenomenon. In the next place, I
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Speaker 1: became inconsiderable. In Wimblehurst, I felt I stood for science.
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Speaker 1: Nobody there seemed to have so much as I, and
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Speaker 1: to have it so fully and completely. In London, I
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Speaker 1: walked ignorant in an immensity, and it was clear that
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Speaker 1: among my fellow students from the Midlands and the North,
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Speaker 1: I was ill equipped and under trained. With the utmost exertion,
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Speaker 1: I should only take a secondary position among them. And finally,
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Speaker 1: in the third place, I was distracted by voluminous new interests.
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Speaker 1: London took hold of me, and science, which had been
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Speaker 1: the universe, shrank back to the dimensions of tiresome little
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Speaker 1: formulae compacted in a book. I came to London in
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Speaker 1: late September, and it was a very different London from
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Speaker 1: that great, greyly overcast, smoke stained house wilderness of my
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Speaker 1: first impressions. I reached it by Victoria and not by
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Speaker 1: Cannon Street, and its center was now in Exhibition Road.
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Speaker 1: It shone pale, amber, blue, gray, and tenderly spacious and
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Speaker 1: fine under clear autumnal skies. A London of hugely handsome
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Speaker 1: buildings and vistas and distances, A London of gardens and
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Speaker 1: labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and
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Speaker 1: artificial waters. I lodged near by in West Brompton, at
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Speaker 1: a house in a little square. So London faced me
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Speaker 1: the second time, making me forget altogether for a while,
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Speaker 1: the gray, drizzling city visage that had first looked upon me.
18:34
Speaker 1: I settled down and went to and fro to my
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Speaker 1: lectures and laboratory. In the beginning I worked hard, and
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Speaker 1: only slowly did the curiosity that presently possessed me to
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Speaker 1: know more of this huge urban province arise the desire
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Speaker 1: to find something beyond mechanism, that I could serve some
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Speaker 1: use other than learning. With this was a growing sense
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Speaker 1: of loneliness, a desire for adventure and intercourse. I found
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Speaker 1: myself in the evenings pouring over a map of London
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Speaker 1: I had bought instead of copying out lecture notes, and
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Speaker 1: on Sundays I made explorations, taking omnibus rides east and
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Speaker 1: west and north and south, and to enlarging and broadening
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Speaker 1: the sense of great swarming hinterlands of humanity with whom
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Speaker 1: I had no dealings of whom I knew nothing. The
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Speaker 1: whole illimitable place teemed with suggestions of indefinite and sometimes
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Speaker 1: outrageous possibility, of hidden but magnificent meanings. It wasn't simply
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Speaker 1: that I received a vast impression of space and multitude
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Speaker 1: and opportunity. Intimate things also were suddenly dragged from neglected,
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Speaker 1: veiled and darkened corners into an acute vividness of perception
19:48
Speaker 1: close at hand. In the Big Art Museum, I came
19:52
Speaker 1: for the first time upon the beauty of nudity, which
19:55
Speaker 1: I had hitherto held to be a shameful secret, flaunted
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Speaker 1: and gloried in it, was made aware of beauty as
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Speaker 1: not only permissible, but desirable and frequent, and of a
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Speaker 1: thousand hitherto unsuspected rich aspects of life. One night, in
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Speaker 1: a real rapture, I walked round the upper gallery of
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Speaker 1: the Albert Hall and listened for the first time to
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Speaker 1: great music. I believe now that it was a rendering
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Speaker 1: of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. My apprehension of spaces and places
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Speaker 1: was reinforced by a quickened apprehension of persons. A constant
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Speaker 1: stream of people passed by me, eyes met and challenged mine,
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Speaker 1: and passed more and more. I wanted then to stay
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Speaker 1: if I went eastward towards Piccadilly. Women who seemed then
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Speaker 1: to my boyish inexperience, softly splendid and alluring, murmured to
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Speaker 1: me as they passed. Extraordinarily, life unveiled, the very hoardings
20:51
Speaker 1: clamored strangely at one's senses and curiosities. One bought pamphlets
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Speaker 1: and papers full of strange and daring ideas, transcending on
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Speaker 1: one's boldest. In the parks, one heard men discussing the
21:03
Speaker 1: very existence of God, denying the rights of property, debating
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Speaker 1: a hundred things that one dared not think about in Wimblehurst.
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Speaker 1: And after the ordinary overcast day, after dull mornings, came twilight,
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Speaker 1: and London lit up and became a thing of white
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Speaker 1: and yellow and red jewels of light, and wonderful floods
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Speaker 1: of golden illumination and stupendous and unfathomable shadows. And there
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Speaker 1: were no longer any mean or shabby people, but a
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Speaker 1: great mysterious movement of unaccountable beings. Always I was coming
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Speaker 1: on the queerest new aspects. Late one Saturday night I
21:42
Speaker 1: found myself one of a great slow moving crowd between
21:45
Speaker 1: the blazing shops and the flaring barrows in the Harrow Road.
21:49
Speaker 1: I got into conversation with two bold eyed girls. I
21:53
Speaker 1: bought them boxes of chocolate, made the acquaintance of father
21:56
Speaker 1: and mother and various younger brothers and sisters sat in
21:59
Speaker 1: a public house hilariously with them, all standing and being
22:03
Speaker 1: stood drinks, and left them in the small hours at
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Speaker 1: the door of home, never to see them again. And
22:10
Speaker 1: once I was accosted on the outskirts of a Salvation
22:14
Speaker 1: Army meeting in one of the parks by a silk
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Speaker 1: hatted young man of eager and serious discourse, who argued
22:20
Speaker 1: against skepticism with me, invited me home to Tea into
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Speaker 1: a clean and cheerful family of brothers and sisters and friends.
22:29
Speaker 1: And there I spent the evening singing hymns to the harmonium,
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Speaker 1: which reminded me of half forgotten Chatham, and wishing all
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Speaker 1: the sisters were not so obviously engaged. Then on the
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Speaker 1: remote hill of this boundless city world, I found Ewert three.
22:47
Speaker 1: How well I remember the first morning, a bright Sunday
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Speaker 1: morning in early October, when I raided in upon Ewart.
22:54
Speaker 1: I found my old schoolfellow in bed in a room
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Speaker 1: over an oil shop in a back street at the
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Speaker 1: foot of Highgate Hill. His landlady, a pleasant, dirty young
23:03
Speaker 1: woman with soft brown eyes, brought down his message for
23:06
Speaker 1: me to come up, and up I went. The room
23:10
Speaker 1: presented itself as ample and interesting in detail, and shabby,
23:15
Speaker 1: with a quite commendable shabbiness. I had an impression of
23:18
Speaker 1: brown walls They were papered with brown paper, of a
23:21
Speaker 1: long shelf along one side of the room, with dusty
23:24
Speaker 1: plaster casts, and a small cheap lay figure of a horse,
23:28
Speaker 1: of a table, and something of gray wax partially covered
23:32
Speaker 1: with a cloth, and of scattered drawings. There was a
23:36
Speaker 1: gas stove in one corner, and some enameled ware that
23:39
Speaker 1: had been used for overnight cooking. The oil cloth on
23:42
Speaker 1: the floor was streaked with a peculiar white dust. Ewart
23:46
Speaker 1: himself was not in the first instance visible, but only
23:49
Speaker 1: a fourfold canvas screen at the end of the room,
23:52
Speaker 1: from which shouts proceeded of come on. Then his wiry
23:56
Speaker 1: black hair, very much rumpled, and a staring red brown eye,
24:00
Speaker 1: and his stump of a nose came around the edge
24:02
Speaker 1: of this at a height of about three feet from
24:05
Speaker 1: the ground. It's all ponderevo, he said, the early bird,
24:10
Speaker 1: and he's caught the worm by jove. But it's cold
24:13
Speaker 1: this morning. Come round here and sit on the bed.
24:17
Speaker 1: I walked round, wrung his hand, and we surveyed one another.
24:21
Speaker 1: He was lying on a small wooden fold up bed,
24:24
Speaker 1: the scanty covering of which was supplemented by an overcoat
24:28
Speaker 1: and an elderly but still cheerful pair of checked trousers,
24:31
Speaker 1: and he was wearing pajamas of a virulent pink and green.
24:35
Speaker 1: His neck seemed longer and more stringy than it had
24:38
Speaker 1: been even in our school days, and his upper lip
24:41
Speaker 1: had a wiry black mustache. The rest of his ruddy,
24:45
Speaker 1: knobby countenance, his erratic hair, and his general hairy leanness
24:49
Speaker 1: had not, even to my perceptions, grown by jove. He said,
24:55
Speaker 1: you've got quite decent looking, ponderevo. What do you think
24:59
Speaker 1: of me? You're all right? What are you doing here? Art?
25:04
Speaker 1: My son? Sculpture? And incidentally he hesitated, I ply a trade.
25:10
Speaker 1: Will you hand me that pipe and those smoking things?
25:13
Speaker 1: So you can't make coffee? Eh? Well, try your hand?
25:18
Speaker 1: Cast down this screen, no, fold it up, and so
25:21
Speaker 1: we'll go into the other room. I'll keep in bed
25:24
Speaker 1: all the same. The fire's aghas stove, Yes, don't make
25:29
Speaker 1: it bang too loud as you light it. I can't
25:32
Speaker 1: stand it this morning. You won't smoke. Well, it does
25:36
Speaker 1: me good to see you again, Ponderevo. Tell me what
25:39
Speaker 1: you're doing and how you're getting on? He directed me
25:43
Speaker 1: in the service of his simple hospitality, and presently I
25:47
Speaker 1: came back to his bed and sat down and smiled
25:49
Speaker 1: at him there, smoking comfortably with his hands under his head,
25:53
Speaker 1: surveying me. How's life's morning, Ponderevo. By jove, it must
25:59
Speaker 1: be nearly six years since we met. They've got mustaches.
26:04
Speaker 1: We fleshed ourselves a bit, eh, and you I felt
26:09
Speaker 1: a pipe was becoming after all, and that lit I
26:12
Speaker 1: gave him a favorable sketch of my career science. And
26:16
Speaker 1: you've worked like that while I've been potting round doing
26:20
Speaker 1: odd jobs for Stonemasons and people, and trying to get
26:23
Speaker 1: to sculpture. I've a sort of feeling that the chisel.
26:27
Speaker 1: I began with painting Ponderevo, and found I was color blind,
26:31
Speaker 1: color blind enough to stop it. I've drawn about and
26:35
Speaker 1: thought about thought more particularly. I give myself three days
26:40
Speaker 1: a week as an art student, and the rest of
26:42
Speaker 1: the time I've a sort of trade that keeps me.
26:45
Speaker 1: And were still in the beginning of things, young men starting.
26:50
Speaker 1: Do you remember the old times at Goudhurst, our Doll's
26:53
Speaker 1: House Island, the retreat of the ten thousand young Holmes
26:57
Speaker 1: and the rabbits. Eh, It's surprising, if you think of it,
27:01
Speaker 1: to find we are still young, and we used to
27:03
Speaker 1: talk of what we would be, and we used to
27:05
Speaker 1: talk of love. I suppose you know all about that now, Ponderevo,
27:11
Speaker 1: I finished and hesitated on some vague, foolish lie. No,
27:15
Speaker 1: I said, a little ashamed of the truth. Do you
27:19
Speaker 1: I've been too busy. I'm just beginning just as we were.
27:23
Speaker 1: Then things happen. He sucked at his pipe for a
27:27
Speaker 1: space and stared at the plaster cast of a flat
27:30
Speaker 1: hand that hung on the wall. The fact is, ponderevo,
27:34
Speaker 1: I'm beginning to find life a most extraordinary queer. Set
27:37
Speaker 1: out the things that pull one, the things that don't,
27:41
Speaker 1: the wants. This business of sex, it's a net, no
27:45
Speaker 1: end to it, no way out of it, no sense
27:48
Speaker 1: in it. There are times when women take possession of me,
27:53
Speaker 1: when my mind is like a painted ceiling at Hampton Court,
27:56
Speaker 1: with the pride of the flesh sprawling all over it.
28:00
Speaker 1: Why and then again, sometimes when I have to encounter
28:03
Speaker 1: a woman, I am overwhelmed by a terror of tantalizing boredom.
28:08
Speaker 1: I fly, I hide, I do anything. You've got your
28:12
Speaker 1: scientific explanations, Perhaps what's nature and the universe up to
28:17
Speaker 1: in that matter? It's her way I gather of securing
28:21
Speaker 1: the continuity of the species. But it doesn't, said Eward,
28:26
Speaker 1: That's just it. No, I have succumbed to dissipation down
28:31
Speaker 1: the hill there Euston roadway, and it was damned ugly
28:36
Speaker 1: and mean, and I hate having done it. And the
28:39
Speaker 1: continuity of the species. Lord, And why does nature make
28:43
Speaker 1: a man so infernally ready for drinks? There's no sense
28:46
Speaker 1: in that anyhow, He sat up in bed to put
28:50
Speaker 1: this question with a greater earnestness. And why has she
28:53
Speaker 1: given me a most violent desire towards sculpture and an
28:57
Speaker 1: equally violent desire to leave off work directly? I begin it, Eh,
29:02
Speaker 1: let's have some more coffee. I put it to you.
29:05
Speaker 1: These things puzzle me, ponderevo, They dishearten me, They keep
29:10
Speaker 1: me in bed. He had an air of having saved
29:13
Speaker 1: up these difficulties for me. For some time he sat
29:16
Speaker 1: with his chin almost touching his knees, sucking at his pipe.
29:20
Speaker 1: That's what I mean, he went on, when I say
29:23
Speaker 1: life is getting on to me as extraordinarily queer. I
29:27
Speaker 1: don't see my game, nor why I was invited, And
29:30
Speaker 1: I don't make anything of the world outside either. What
29:34
Speaker 1: do you make of it? London? I began, It's so enormous,
29:41
Speaker 1: isn't it? And it's all up to nothing. You find
29:44
Speaker 1: chaps keeping grocery shops. Why the devil, ponderevo do they
29:48
Speaker 1: keep grocer's shops? They all do it very carefully, very steadily,
29:53
Speaker 1: very meanly. You find people running about and doing the
29:57
Speaker 1: most remarkable things, being policemen, for a example, and burglars.
30:02
Speaker 1: They go about these businesses quite gravely and earnestly. I
30:07
Speaker 1: somehow can't go about mine. Is there any sense in
30:11
Speaker 1: it at all? Anywhere? There must be sense in it?
30:15
Speaker 1: I said, we're young. We're young, yes, But one must
30:20
Speaker 1: inquire the grocer's a grocer, because I suppose he sees
30:24
Speaker 1: he comes in there feels that on the whole it
30:27
Speaker 1: amounts to a call. But the bother is, I don't
30:30
Speaker 1: see where I come in at all? Do you? Where
30:34
Speaker 1: you come in? Now? Where you come in? Not exactly yet?
30:39
Speaker 1: I said, I want to do some good in the world, something,
30:43
Speaker 1: something effectual before I die. I have a sort of
30:46
Speaker 1: idea my scientific work. I don't know, yes, he mused,
30:52
Speaker 1: And I've got a sort of idea my sculpture but
30:55
Speaker 1: how it is to come in, and why I've no
30:58
Speaker 1: idea at all. He hugged his knees for a space.
31:01
Speaker 1: That's what puzzles me. Ponderevo no end. He became animated.
31:07
Speaker 1: If you will look in that cupboard, he said, you
31:09
Speaker 1: will find an old, respectable looking roll on a plate,
31:13
Speaker 1: and a knife somewhere, and a gallipot containing butter. You
31:17
Speaker 1: give them me and I'll make my breakfast. And then
31:20
Speaker 1: if you don't mind watching me paddle about at my
31:23
Speaker 1: simple toilet, I'll get up. Then we'll go for a
31:26
Speaker 1: walk and talk about this affair of life farther, and
31:30
Speaker 1: about art and literature and anything else that crops up
31:33
Speaker 1: on the way. Yes, that's the gallipot. Cockroach got in it.
31:38
Speaker 1: Check him out. Damned it a loper. So in the
31:43
Speaker 1: first five minutes of our talk, as I seem to
31:45
Speaker 1: remember it now, old Ewart struck the note that ran
31:49
Speaker 1: through all that morning's intercourse. To me, it was a
31:53
Speaker 1: most memorable talk because it opened out quite new horizons
31:56
Speaker 1: of thought. I'd been working rather close and out of
32:00
Speaker 1: touch with Ewart's free gesticulating way. He was pessimistic that day,
32:04
Speaker 1: and skeptical to the very root of things. He made
32:08
Speaker 1: me feel clearly what I had not felt at all before,
32:11
Speaker 1: the general adventurousness of life, particularly of life at the
32:15
Speaker 1: stage we had reached, and also the absence of definite
32:18
Speaker 1: objects of any concerted purpose in the lives that were
32:22
Speaker 1: going on all round us. He made me feel too,
32:26
Speaker 1: how ready I was to take up commonplace assumptions, just
32:30
Speaker 1: as I had always imagined that somewhere in social arrangements
32:34
Speaker 1: there was certainly a head master who would intervene if
32:37
Speaker 1: one went too far. So I had always had a
32:39
Speaker 1: sort of implicit belief that in our England there were
32:43
Speaker 1: somewhere people who understood what we were all as a
32:46
Speaker 1: nation about That crumbled into his pit of doubt and vanished.
32:52
Speaker 1: He brought out, sharply, cut and certain the immense effect
32:56
Speaker 1: of purposelessness in London that I was already indistinctly feeling.
33:01
Speaker 1: We found ourselves at last returning through Highgate Cemetery and
33:05
Speaker 1: Waterlow Park, and Ewart was talking. Look at it there,
33:10
Speaker 1: he said, stopping and pointing at the great veil of London,
33:13
Speaker 1: spreading wide and far. It's like a sea, and we
33:17
Speaker 1: swim in it, and at last down we go, and
33:20
Speaker 1: then up we come washed up here. He swung his
33:23
Speaker 1: arms to the long slopes about us, tombs and headstones
33:26
Speaker 1: and long perspectives in limitless rows. We're young, Ponderevo. But
33:32
Speaker 1: sooner or later our whitened memories will wash up on
33:35
Speaker 1: one of these beaches, on some such beach as this,
33:39
Speaker 1: George Ponderevo f R. S. Sidney ewert R. I p
33:45
Speaker 1: look at the rows of em. He paused, Do you
33:48
Speaker 1: see that hand, the hand I mean pointing upward on
33:52
Speaker 1: the top of a blunted obelisque. Yes. Well, that's what
33:56
Speaker 1: I do for a living. When I'm not thinking or drinking,
33:59
Speaker 1: or prowling, or making love or pretending. I'm trying to
34:02
Speaker 1: be a sculptor without either the money or the morals
34:05
Speaker 1: for a model. See, and I do those hearts afire
34:09
Speaker 1: and those pensive angel guardians with the palm of peace.
34:13
Speaker 1: Damned well, I do em, and damned cheap. I'm a
34:16
Speaker 1: sweated victim, Ponderevo. That was the way of it. Anyhow,
34:21
Speaker 1: I drink deep of talk that day. We went into theology,
34:24
Speaker 1: into philosophy. I had my first glimpse of socialism. I
34:29
Speaker 1: felt as though I had been silent in a silence.
34:31
Speaker 1: Since I and he had parted at the thought of socialism,
34:34
Speaker 1: Ewart's moods changed for a time to a sort of energy.
34:38
Speaker 1: After all, all this confounded vagueness might be altered if
34:42
Speaker 1: you could get men to work together. It was a
34:45
Speaker 1: good talk that rambled through all the universe. I thought
34:48
Speaker 1: I was giving my mind refreshment, but indeed it was dissipation,
34:52
Speaker 1: all sorts of ideas, even now, carrying me back as
34:56
Speaker 1: it were, to a fountain head, to Waterlow Park and
35:00
Speaker 1: my resuscitated Ewart. There stretches away south of us, long
35:04
Speaker 1: garden slopes and white gravestones, and the white expanse of London,
35:09
Speaker 1: And somewhere in the picture is a red old wall,
35:12
Speaker 1: sun warmed, and a great blaze of Michaelmas daisies set
35:16
Speaker 1: off with late golden sunflowers and a drift of mottled
35:20
Speaker 1: blood red fallen leaves. It was with me that day,
35:23
Speaker 1: as though I had lifted my head suddenly out of
35:26
Speaker 1: dull and immediate things and looked at life altogether. But
35:30
Speaker 1: it played the very devil with the copying up of
35:33
Speaker 1: my arrears of notes to which I had bowed the
35:36
Speaker 1: latter half of that day. After that reunion. Ewart and
35:40
Speaker 1: I met much and talked much, and in our subsequent
35:43
Speaker 1: encounters his monologue was interrupted, and I took my share.
35:48
Speaker 1: He had exercised me so greatly that I lay awake
35:51
Speaker 1: at nights thinking him over, and discoursed and answered him
35:55
Speaker 1: in my head as I went in the morning to
35:58
Speaker 1: the college. I I am by nature a doer, and
36:02
Speaker 1: only by the way a critic. His philosophical assertion of
36:06
Speaker 1: the incalculable vagueness of life, which fitted his natural indolence,
36:11
Speaker 1: roused my more irritable and energetic nature to active protests.
36:15
Speaker 1: It's also pointless, I said, because people are slack, and
36:19
Speaker 1: because it's in the ebb of an age. But you're
36:22
Speaker 1: a socialist. Well let's bring that about, and there's a
36:26
Speaker 1: purpose there you are. Heward gave me all my first
36:30
Speaker 1: conceptions of socialism in a little while. I was an
36:34
Speaker 1: enthusiastic socialist, and he was a passive resist to the
36:38
Speaker 1: practical exposition of the theories. He had taught me. We
36:42
Speaker 1: must join some organization, I said. We ought to do things.
36:45
Speaker 1: We ought to go and speak at street corners. People
36:48
Speaker 1: don't know. You must figure me a rather ill dressed
36:52
Speaker 1: young man in a state of great earnestness, standing up
36:55
Speaker 1: in that shabby studio of his and saying these things,
36:59
Speaker 1: perhaps with some gesticulations, and Ewart with a clay smudged face,
37:04
Speaker 1: dressed perhaps in a flannel's shirt and trousers, with a
37:07
Speaker 1: pipe in his mouth, squatting philosophically at a table, working
37:11
Speaker 1: at some chunk of clay that never got beyond suggestion.
37:16
Speaker 1: I wonder why one doesn't want to, he said. It
37:19
Speaker 1: was only very slowly I came to gage Ewert's real
37:22
Speaker 1: position in the scheme of things, to understand how deliberate
37:26
Speaker 1: and complete was this detachment of his from the moral
37:29
Speaker 1: condemnation and responsibilities that played so fine a part in
37:33
Speaker 1: his talk. His was essentially the nature of an artistic appreciator.
37:38
Speaker 1: He could find interest and beauty in endless aspects of
37:41
Speaker 1: things that I marked as evil, or at least as
37:44
Speaker 1: not negotiable, and the impulse I had towards self deception
37:48
Speaker 1: to sustained and consistent self devotion, disturbed and detached and
37:53
Speaker 1: pointless as it was at that time, he had indeed
37:55
Speaker 1: a sort of admiration for but no sympathy. Like men
38:00
Speaker 1: any fantastic and ample talkers, he was at bottom secretive,
38:04
Speaker 1: and he gave me a series of little shocks of
38:07
Speaker 1: discovery throughout our intercourse. The first of these came in
38:12
Speaker 1: the realization that he quite seriously meant to do nothing
38:15
Speaker 1: in the world at all towards reforming the evils he
38:18
Speaker 1: laid bare in so easy and dexterous a manner. The
38:22
Speaker 1: next came in the sudden appearance of a person called
38:24
Speaker 1: Milly I've forgotten her surname, whom I found in his
38:28
Speaker 1: room one evening, simply attired in a blue wrap, the
38:31
Speaker 1: rest of her costume behind the screen, smoking cigarettes and
38:35
Speaker 1: sharing a flagon of an amazingly cheap and self assertive
38:39
Speaker 1: grocer's wine. Ewart affected called cannery sack Hullo, said Ewart
38:45
Speaker 1: as I came in, This is Milly. You know she's
38:49
Speaker 1: been being a model. She is a model. Really, keep calm,
38:54
Speaker 1: ponderevo have some sack. Milly was a woman of thirty perhaps,
39:00
Speaker 1: with a broad, rather pretty face, a placid disposition, a
39:04
Speaker 1: bad accent, and delightful blonde hair that waved off her
39:08
Speaker 1: head with an irrepressible variety of charm, and whenever Ewart spoke,
39:12
Speaker 1: she beamed at him. Ewart was always sketching this hair
39:16
Speaker 1: of hers, and embarking upon clay statuettes of her that
39:19
Speaker 1: were never finished. She was, I know now, a woman
39:23
Speaker 1: of the streets whom Ewart had picked up in the
39:26
Speaker 1: most casual manner, and who had fallen in love with him.
39:29
Speaker 1: But my inexperience in those days was too great for
39:32
Speaker 1: me to place her then, and Ewart offered no elucidations.
39:36
Speaker 1: She came to him, he went to her. They took
39:39
Speaker 1: holidays together in the country, when certainly she sustained her
39:42
Speaker 1: fair share of their expenditure. I suspect him now even
39:46
Speaker 1: of taking money from her. Odd old Ewart. It was
39:50
Speaker 1: a relationship so alien to my orderly conceptions of honor,
39:54
Speaker 1: to what I could imagine any friend of mine doing that.
39:57
Speaker 1: I really hardly saw it, with it there under my knows,
40:01
Speaker 1: But I see it, and I think I understand it now.
40:05
Speaker 1: Before I fully grasped the discursive manner in which Ewert
40:08
Speaker 1: was committed to his particular way in life, I did
40:11
Speaker 1: I say, as the broad constructive ideas of socialism took
40:15
Speaker 1: hold of me, tried to get him to work with
40:17
Speaker 1: me in some definite fashion. As a socialist, we ought
40:21
Speaker 1: to join on to other socialists. I said, they've got something.
40:26
Speaker 1: Let's go and look at some first. After some pains,
40:30
Speaker 1: we discovered the office of the Fabian Society lurking in
40:34
Speaker 1: a cellar in Clement's Inn, and we went and interviewed
40:37
Speaker 1: a rather discouraging secretary who stood astraddle in front of
40:40
Speaker 1: a fire and questioned us severely and seemed to doubt
40:43
Speaker 1: the integrity of our intentions profoundly. He advised us to
40:48
Speaker 1: attend the next open meeting in Clifford's Inn and gave
40:51
Speaker 1: us the necessary data. We both contrived to get to
40:54
Speaker 1: the affair and heard a discursive, gritty paper on trusts,
40:58
Speaker 1: and one of the most inconclude of discussions you can imagine.
41:02
Speaker 1: Three quarters of the speakers seemed under some jocular obsession
41:05
Speaker 1: which took the form of pretending to be conceited. It
41:08
Speaker 1: was a sort of family joke, and as strangers to
41:11
Speaker 1: the family, we did not like it. As we came
41:14
Speaker 1: out through the narrow passage from Clifford's Inn to the
41:17
Speaker 1: strand Ewart suddenly pitched upon a wizened, speckled little man
41:21
Speaker 1: in a vast felt hat and a large orange tie.
41:26
Speaker 1: How many members are there? In this fabian society of yours,
41:29
Speaker 1: he asked. The little man became at once defensive in
41:32
Speaker 1: his manner. About seven hundred, he said, perhaps eight, like
41:37
Speaker 1: like the ones here. The little man gave a nervous,
41:41
Speaker 1: self satisfied laugh. I suppose they're up to sample, he said.
41:46
Speaker 1: The little man dropped out of existence, and we emerged
41:49
Speaker 1: upon the strand. Ewert twisted his arm into a queerly
41:53
Speaker 1: eloquent gesture that gathered up all the tall facades of
41:56
Speaker 1: the banks, the business places, the projecting clock and towers
42:00
Speaker 1: of the law courts, the advertisements, the luminous signs into
42:04
Speaker 1: one social immensity, into a capitalistic system, gigantic and invincible.
42:10
Speaker 1: These socialists have no sense of proportion, he said, What
42:14
Speaker 1: can you expect of them? End of book, second chapter,
42:19
Speaker 1: first parts one to three. Recording by William tom Coe