t of touch
with Ewart's free gesticulating way. He was pessimistic that day and
sceptical to the very root of things. He made me feel clearly, what
I had not felt at all before, the general adventurousness of life,
particularly of life at the stage we had reached, and also the absence
of definite objects, of any concerted purpose in the lives that were
going on all round us. He made me feel, too, how ready I was to take up
commonplace assumptions. Just as I had always imagined that somewhere
in social arrangements there was certainly a Head-Master who would
intervene if one went too far, so I had always had a sort of implicit
belief that in our England there were somewhere people who understood
what we were all, as a nation, about. That crumpled into his pit of
doubt and vanished.

He brought out, sharply cut and certain, the immense effect of
purposelessness in London that I was already indistinctly feeling. We
found ourselves at last returning through Highgate Cemetery and Waterlow
Park--and Ewart was talking.

"Look at it there," he said, stopping and pointing to the great vale of
London spreading wide and far. "It's like a sea--and we swim in it. And
at last down we go, and then up we come--washed up here." He swung
his arms to the long slopes about us, tombs and headstones in long
perspectives, in limitless rows.

"We're young, Ponderevo, but sooner or later our whitened memories will
wash up on one of these beaches, on some such beach as this. George
Ponderevo, F.R.S., Sidney Ewart, R.I.P. Look at the rows of 'em!"

He paused. "Do you see that hand? The hand, I mean, pointing upward,
on the top of a blunted obelisk. Yes. Well, that's what I do for a
living--when I'm not thinking, or drinking, or prowling, or making love,
or pretending I'm trying to be a sculptor without either the money
or the morals for a model. See? And I do those hearts afire and those
pensive angel guardians with the palm of peace. Damned well I do 'em and
damned cheap! I'm a sweated victim, Ponderevo..."

That was the way of it, anyhow. I drank deep of talk that day; we went
into theology, into philosophy; I had my first glimpse of socialism. I
felt as though I had been silent in a silence since I and he had parted.
At the thought of socialism Ewart's moods changed for a time to a sort
of energy. "After all, all this confounded vagueness might be altered.
If you could get men to work together..."

It was a good talk that rambled throug