Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells (diy ebook reader txt) 📕

“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 Headmaster 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 fountainhead, 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