Fothergill said that he, for one, would have no more of it. The past
was dead, and he wasn’t going to try to revive it. Henceforth he, too,
would be dead to Bloomsbury. Our forefathers, speaking of a man’s
death, said “he changed his life.” This is how Fothergill changed his
life and died to Bloomsbury. One morning he made his way to the
Whitechapel Road, and there he bought a barrow. The Whitechapel barrows
are of all sizes, from the barrow wheeled about by a boy with half a
dozen heads of cabbages to barrows drawn by a tall pony, such as on
Sundays take the members of a club to Epping Forest. They are all
precisely the same in plan and construction, only in the larger sizes
the handles develop or evolve into shafts; and they are equally
suitable, according to size, for the vending of whelks, for a
hot-potato can, a piano organ, or for the conveyance of a cheery and
numerous party to the Derby. Fothergill bought a medium sized
“developed” one, and also a donkey to fit; he had it painted white,
picked out with green—the barrow, not the donkey—and when his
arrangements were complete, stabled the whole for the night in
Bloomsbury. The following morning, before the early red had quite faded
from the sky, the exodus took place, those of us who were left being
assembled to drink a parting whisky-and-milk in sad and solemn silence.
Fothergill turned down Oxford Street, sitting on the shaft with a short
clay in his mouth, and disappeared from our sight, heading west at a
leisurely pace. So he passed out of our lives by way of the Bayswater
Road.
They must have wandered far and seen many things, he and his donkey,
from the fitful fragments of news that now and again reached us. It
seems that eventually, his style of living being economical, he was
enabled to put down his donkey and barrow, and set up a cart and a
mare—no fashionable gipsy-cart, a sort of houseboat on wheels, but a
light and serviceable cart, with a moveable tilt, constructed on his
own designs. This allowed him to take along with him a few canvases and
other artists’ materials; soda-water, whisky, and such like
necessaries; and even to ask a friend from town for a day or two, if he
wanted to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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