Tono-Bungay

LONDON STUDENT

f frontage among the distant Kentish hills; the scene broadens out, becomes multitudinous and limitless, full of the sense of vast irrelevant movement. I do not remember my second coming to London as I do

ng impressions were added to and qualified and brought into relationship with new ones; they fused inseparably with others that were purely personal and accidental. I find myself with a cer

nd

it, or explored it with any but a personal and adventurous intention. Yet in time there has grown up in me a kind of theory of London; I do think I see lines of an ordered

ntry, since 1688 or thereabouts, the days when Bladesover was built; there have been changes, dissolving forest replacing forest, if you will; but then it was that the broad lines of the English system set firmly. And as I have gone to and fro in London in certain regions constantly

l about St. James's again, albeit perhaps of a later growth in point of time, were of the very spirit and architectural texture of the Bladesover passages and yards; they had the same smells, the space, the large cleanest and always

n the manner of my theory, Park Lane has its quite typical mansions, and they run along the border of the Green Park and St. James's. And I struck out a truth one day in Cromwell Road quite suddenly, as I looked over the Natural History Museum "By Jove," said I "but this is the little assemblage of cases of stuffed birds and animals upon the Bladesover staircase grown enormous,

movement throughout the world, sprang from the elegant leisure of the gentlemen of taste. Theirs were the first libraries, the first houses of culture; by my rat-like raids into the Bladesover saloon I bec

o be found in Regent Street and Bond Street in my early London days in those days they had been but lightly touched by the American's profaning hand-and in Piccadilly. I found the doctor's house of the country village or country town up and down Harley Street, multiplied but not otherwise different, and the family solicitor (by the hundred) further eastward in the abandoned houses of a previous ge

hitehall. The south side had no protecting estate. Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of London port is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister toward the clean clear social assurance of the West End. And south of this central London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streets of undistingui

n in my early student days-and discovering a shabbily bright foreign quarter, shops displaying Hebrew placards and weird, unfamiliar commodities and a concourse of bright-eyed, eagle-nosed people talking some incomprehensible gibberish between the shops and the barrows. And soon I became quite familiar with the

er in borax, and that palace belonged to that hero among modern adventurers, Barmentrude, who used to be an I.D.B.,-an illicit diamond buyer that is to say. A city of Bladesovers, the capital of a kingdom of Bladesovers, all much shaken and many altogether in decay, parasitically occupied, insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic and irresponsible elements; and with a ruling an adventit

ink, the common gift of imaginative youth, and I claim it unblushingly-fine in me, finer than the world and seeking fine responses. I did not want simp

tallurgy; and I hesitated between the two. The Vincent Bradley gave me L70 a year and quite the best start-off a pharmaceutical chemist could have; the South Kensington thing was worth about twenty-two shillings a week, and the prospects it opened were vague. But it meant far more scientific work than the former, and I was still under the impulse of that great intellectual appet

e very first

t been so dull, so limited and so observant. Directly I came into the London atmosphere, tasting freedom, tasting irresponsibility and the pull of new forces altogether, my discipline fell from me like a garment. Wimblehurst to a youngster in my position offered no temptations worth counting, no interests to conflict with study, no vices-such vices as it offered were coarsely stripped of any imaginative glamourfull drunkenness, clumsy leering shameful lust, no social intercourse even to waste one's time, and on the other hand it would minister greatly to the self-esteem of a conspicuously industrious student. One was marked as "clever," one

ad given me no outlet

d to have it so fully and completely. In London I walked ignorant in an immensity, and it was clear that among my fellow-students from the midlands and the north I was ill-equipped and under-trained. With the utmost exertion I should only take a secondary position among them. And finally, in the third place, I was distracted by voluminous new interests; London took hold of me, and Science, which had been the universe, shrank back to the dimensions of tiresome little formulae compacted in a book. I came to London in late September, an

sessed me to know more of this huge urban province arise, the desire to find something beyond mechanism that I could serve, some use other than learning. With this was a growing sense of loneliness, a desire for adventure and intercourse. I found myself in the evenings poring over a map o

tions of indefinite and sometimes outrageous p

g art museum I came for the first time upon the beauty of nudity, which I had hitherto held to be a shameful secret, flaunted and gloried in; I was made aware of beauty as not only permissible, but desirable and frequent and of a thousand h

Extraordinarily life unveiled. The very hoardings clamoured strangely at one's senses and curiosities. One bought pamphlets and papers full of strange and daring ideas transcending one's boldest; in the parks one heard men discussing the very existence of God, denying the rights of property, debating a hundred things that one dared not think about in Wim

ious younger brothers and sisters, sat in a public-house hilariously with them all, standing and being stood drinks, and left them in the small hours at the door of "home," never to see them again. And once I was accosted on the outskirts of a Salvation Army meeting in one of the parks by a silk-hatted young man of eager

l of this boundless ci

I

ad 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

g his hand, and we s

ers, 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 l

t quite decent-looking, Ponder

ght. What are

r 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

ently I came back to his bed and sat down and smiled at him there

be nearly six years since we met! They've got moust

all, and that lit, I gave him a

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 Goudhur

lish lie, "No," I said, a little ashamed o

-just as we were th

and stared at the plaster cast of

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

r, of securing the con

d!... 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 desir

ties for me for some time. He sat with his chin

extraordinarily queer, I don't see my game, nor why I was invited. And I

began. "It's

t very carefully, very steadily, very meanly. You find people running about and doing the most remarkable things being policemen, for example, an

nse in it," I sai

suppose, he sees he comes in there. Feels that on the whole it amounts to

you c

re you c

the world-something-something effectual, before I die.

now it is to come in and WHY,-I've no idea at all." He hugged hi

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 aff

em to remember it now, old Ewart struck the note

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

s in London that I was already indistinctly feeling. We found ourselves at la

"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 s

ill wash up on one of these beaches, on some such beach as this. Geo

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

ialism. 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

es 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, f

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 irri

was a passive resister to the practical exposition of the theories he had taught me. "We must join some orga

ing these things, perhaps with some gesticulations, and Ewart with a clay-smudged face, dressed perhaps in a flannel shirt and trou

one doesn't wa

tially 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, distur

f 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 chea

r 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 certai

ticular way in life, I did, I say, as the broad constructive ideas of socialism took

n on to other so

got som

nd look at

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 to

here in this Fabian Soc

ame at once defens

dred," he said;

ke the o

elf-satisfied laugh. "I suppose

ure that gathered up all the tall facades of the banks, the business places, the projecting clock and towers of the Law Co

se of proportion," he said. "

al theory in its first crude form of Democratic Socialism gripped my intelligence more and more powerfully. I argu

wind out of the sea that brings the waves in fast and high. Ewart had his share in that. More and more acutely and unmistakably did my perception of beauty, fo

rare visits to the theatre I always became exalted, and found the actresses and even the spectators about me mysterious, attractive, creatures of deep interest and desire. I had a stronger and stronger sense that among these glancing, passing multitudes there was somewhere one who was for me.

about in my world, that glanced back at my eyes, that flitted by with a kind of averted watchfulness. I would meet her coming through the Art Museum, which was my short cut to the Brompton Road, or see her sitting, reading as I thought, in one of the bays of the Education Library. But really, as I found out afterwards, she never rea

of colour, startled one by novelties in hats and bows and things. I've always hated the rustle, the disconcertin

Museum to lounge among the pictures. I came upon her in an odd corner of the Sheepshanks gallery, intently copying something from a picture that hung high. I had just been in the gallery of casts fr

r presence, began to imagine things about her. I no longer thought of g

ay I'd spent at Wimblehurst in response to a unique freak of hospitality on the part of Mr. Mantell. She was the sole other inside passenger.

I had so

ment to the conductor with a certain ungraciousness that seemed a part of her shyne

asant soft voice; and then less gracef

esence; her arm was stretched out over me as she moved past me, the gracious slenderness of her body was near m

ationship. That took the form of the return of my twopence. I was in the Science Library, digging something out of the Encyclopedia Britann

said, "the other day. I don't kn

I knew," I said, "you

tly a stu

requently. And I'm a student myself a

Only-even to this day-I don't remember it as in any way vulgar. She was, I could see quite clearly, anxious to overstate or conceal her real social status, a little desirous to be taken for a student in the art school and a little ashamed that she wasn't. She came to the museum to "copy things," and this, I gathered, had something to do with some way of partially earning her living that I wasn't to inquire into. I told her things about myself, vain things that I felt might appeal to her, but that I learnt long afterwards made her think me "conceited." We talked of books, but there she was

Odd, I confess. Odd, particularly, the enormous hold of certain things about her upon me, a certain slight rounded duskiness of skin, a certain perfection of modelling in her lips, her brow, a certain fine flow about the shoulders. She wasn't indeed beautiful to many people-these things are beyo

rsuit of gentlemanly neckwear. I remember when she invited me a little abruptly one day to come to tea at her home on the following Sunday and meet her father and mother and aunt, that I immediately doubted whether my hitherto unsuspected best clothes would create the impression she desired me to make on her belongings. I put off the encounter until the Sunday after, to get myself in order

against the intrusive eye by cheap lace curtains and an "art pot" upon an unstable octagonal table. Several framed Art School drawings of Marion's, bearing official South Kensington marks of approval, adorned the room, and there was a black and gilt piano with a hymn-book on the top of it. There were d

Also, I remarked, they did it with an eye on Marion. They had wanted to thank me, they said, for the kindness to their daughter in the matter of the 'bus fare, and so accounted f

ARTMENTS" fell to the floor. I picked it up and gave it to her before I realised from her quickened colo

loose, fattish man with unintelligent brown eyes magnified by spectacles; he wore an ill-fitting frock-coat and a paper collar, and he showed me, as his great treasure and interest, a large Bible which he had grangerised with photographs of

world. Her own manner changed, became more authoritative and watchful, her shyness disappeared. She had t

thout its lustre, but she was thin and careworn. The aunt, Miss Ramboat, was a large, abnorm

unreal fashion until I plunged, became talkative and made a certain ease and interest. I told them of the schools, of my lodgings, of Wimblehurst

sion," which Marion truncated before our voices became unduly raise

towards Putney Bridge, and then there was more singing and a supper of cold bacon and pie, after which Mr. Ramboat and I smoked. During that walk, I remember, she told me the import of her sketchings and copyings in the museum. A cousin of a friend of hers whom she spoke of as Smithie, had developed an original business in a sort of tea-gown garment which she called a Persian Robe, a plain sort of wrap with a gaily embroidered yoke, and Mari

the workgirls wer

t degree at that time from the intent resolve that held me to make her mine. I didn't like them. But I took them as part of the affair. Inde

. If at times she was manifestly unintelligent, in her ignorance became indisputable, I told myself her simple instincts were worth all the education and intelligence in the world. And to this day I think I wasn't real

tute. We came back on the underground railway and we travelled first-class-that being the highest cla

't," she s

beating wildly, drew her to me, drew all her beau

then, as the train ran into a station, "You must tell no

t in with us and termina

wards Battersea, she had decided to be offended. I

he told me I must ne

isfaction. But it was indeed only the beginning of

t in a position-What's the

her. "I mean

e answered. "It

ve you,"

gth of the inanimate beauty I desired to quicken, and I saw opening between u

I said. "Don't

he face with grave

"I LIKE you, of course....

her my ardour had no quickening fire. But how was I to know? I had let myself come to want her, my imagin

I said

eplied. "I like going about wit

tless, my behaviour degenerated, my punctuality declined; I was more and more outclassed in the steady grind by my fellow-stude

ntent, hard-breathing students I found against me, fell at last from keen rivalry to moral contempt. Even a girl got above me upon one of

layed more spirit than sense. I was astonished chiefly at my stupendous falling away from all the militant ideals of unflinching study I had brought up from Wimblehurst. I had dis

said, "what will become of you

resting question. What w

ee or any qualification, one earned hardly a bare living and had little leisure to struggle up to anything better. If only I had even as little as fifty pounds I might hold out in London and take my B.Sc. degree, and quadruple my chances! My bitterness against my uncle returned at th

. Its remarkable consequences, which ended my stude

ses I did not follow, the encyclopaedic process of scientific exhaustion from which I was distracted. My mind was not inactive, even if it fed on forbidden food.

in the unexpected hiding-places of Nature. I have come nearer flying than any man has done. Could I have done as much if I had had a turn for obeying those rather mediocre professors at the college who proposed to train my mind? If I had been trained in research-that ridiculous contradiction in terms-should I have done more than produce additions to the existing store of little papers with blunted conclusions, of which there are already too many? I see no sense in mock mod

ose divergent expenditures of energy, plugged up my curiosity about society with more currently acceptable r

hat afternoon when I sat dejectedly in Kensington Gardens and reviewed, in t