Tono-Bungay - H. G. Wells (my reading book txt) 📗

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! We’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 stonemasons 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.