Читать книгу Death of a Hero - Richard Aldington - Страница 13

PART I

vivace

1

A VERY different England, that of 1890, and yet curiously the same. In some ways so fabulous, so remote from us; in others so near, terrifyingly near and like us. An England morally buried in great foggy wrappings of hypocrisy and prosperity and cheapness. The wealth of that England, the maritime power of that England, its worse than R. L. S. optimism, its righteous cant! Victoria, broad-bottomed on her people’s will; the possessing class, heavy-bottomed on the people’s neck. The working class beginning to heave restively, but still Moody and Sankeyish, still under the Golden Rule of “Ever remember, my dear Bert, you may one day be manager of that concern.” The middle classes, especially the traders, making money hand over fist, and still “praying that our unexampled prosperity may last.” The aristocracy still pretty flip, keeping its tail up. Still lots of respect for Rank and Property – Dizzy not long dead, and his novels not yet grotesques, not yet wholly a fossil parody. The intellectuals aesthetic and Oscarish, or aesthetic and Burne-Morrisy, or Utilitarian and Huxley-Darwinish.

Come where the booze is cheaper.

Where I could live on a pound a week in lux-u-ry.

The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should ALL be as Happy as KING.

Consols over par.

Lord Claud Hamilton and White at the Admiralty, building, building, building.

Building a majestic ruin.

George Moore an elegant scandal in a hansom; Hardy a rural atheistic scandal, not yet discovered to be an intolerable bore; Oscar prancing negligently, O so clever, O so lad-di-dah.

Rummy old England. Pox on you, you old bitch, you’ve made worms’ meat of us. (We’ve made worms’ meat of ourselves.) But still, let me look back upon thee. Timon knew thee.

The Winterbournes were not gentry, but nourished vague and unfounded traditions of past genteel splendours. They were, however, pretty comfortable middle-class. Worcestershire, migrated to Sheffield. Methodist on female side; C. of E. on the Winterbourne side. Young George Augustus – father of our George – was pretty comfortable. His mother was a dominating old bitch who destroyed his initiative and courage, but in the eighties hardly any one had the sense to tell dominating bitch-mothers to go to hell. George Augustus didn’t. At fifteen he wrote a Nonconformist tract (which was published) expressing nothing but his dear Mamma’s views. He became top of his school, in conformity with dear Mamma’s views also. He did not go to Oxford, as he wanted, because dear Mamma thought it unpractical. And he did pass his examinations as a lawyer, because dear Mamma thought it so eminently right that he should have a profession and that there should be a lawyer in the family. George Augustus was a third son. The eldest son became a Nonconformist parson, because dear Mamma had prayed for guidance on her marriage night and during her first pregnancy (only, she never mentioned such horrid occurrences, even to her husband, but – she had “prayed for guidance”), and it had been revealed to her that her firstborn must take up The Ministry. And take it up, poor devil, he did. The second son had a little bit of spunk, and his dear Mamma made him a waster. Remained George Augustus, dear Mamma’s darling chick, who prayed at her knee, and was flogged regularly once a month by dear Papa, because the Scripture says: Spare the rod, spoil the child. Dear Papa had never done anything in particular, lived on his “means”, was generally rather in debt, and spent the last fifteen years of his life praying to the C. of E. God in the garden, while dear Mamma prayed to John Wesley’s God in her bedroom. Dear Mamma admired dear pious Mr. Bright and grand Mr. Gladstone; but dear Papa recollected and even read all the Works of the Right Hnble. the Earl of Beaconsfield, K.G.

Still. George Augustus was pretty comfortable. The one thing he wanted in life was to be pretty comfortable. After he became a full-blown solicitor, at the age of twenty-four, a family council was held. Present: Dear Mamma, dear Papa, George Augustus. Nothing formal, of course, just a cosy little family gathering after tea, round the blazing hearth (coal was cheap in Sheffield then), rep curtains drawn, and sweet domestic peace. Dear Papa opened the proceedings:

“George, you are now come to man’s estate. At considerable sacrifice, your dear Mamma and I have given you a Profession. You are an Admitted Solicitor, and we are proud – I think we may say ‘proud’, Mamma? – that we have a legal luminary in the family…

But dear Mamma could not allow dear Papa even the semblance of authority, respected not even the forms of Limited Domestic Monarchy, and cut in:

“Your Papa is right, George. The question is now, what are you going to do in your Profession?”

Did a feeble hope of escape cross the bright young mind of George Augustus? Or was that supine love of being pretty comfortable, added to the terror of disobeying dear Mamma, already dominant? He murmured something about “getting in with a respectable and old-established firm in London.” At the word “London” dear Mamma bridled. Although Mr. Gladstone spent much of his time in London, it was notorious in Sheffield Nonconformist circles that London was a haunt of vice, filled with theatres and unmentionable women. Besides, dear Mamma was not going to let George Augustus off so easily; she still meant he should plough a deuce of a long furrow of filial obedience.

“I cannot hear of London, George. It would break my heart and bring your dear Papa’s grey hairs” (dear Papa hated to be reminded that he was bald) “in sorrow to the grave, if you went to the bad in that dreadful town. Think how we should feel if we heard you had visited a theatre! No, George, we shall not fail in our duty. We have brought you up to be a God-fearing Christian man.” et patata etpatati.

The upshot was, of course, that dear George Augustus did not go to London. He didn’t even get an office of his own in Sheffield. It was agreed that George Augustus would never marry (except for a whore or two, furtively and ineffectually possessed on furtive ineffectual sprees in London, George Augustus was a virgin), but would spend his life with dear Mamma, and (afterthought) dear Papa. So some structural alterations were made in the house. Another entrance was made, with a new brass plate engraved in copperplate:

G. A. WINTERBOURNE SOLICITOR

Three rooms, somewhat separated from the rest of the house, were allotted to George Augustus – a bedroom, an “Office”, and a “cosy study”. Needless to say, George Augustus did very little practice, except when his dear Mamma in an access of ambition procured him the job of making the will of some female friend or of drawing up the conveyance of the land for a new Wesleyan Chapel. What George Augustus did with most of his time is a bit of a puzzle – twiddled his thumbs, and read Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer and George Augustus Sala mostly.

This lasted three or four years. Dear Mamma had her talons deep into George Augustus, vamped on him hideously; and was content. Dear Papa prayed in the garden and read the Right Hnble. etcetera’s novels, and was uneasily content. George Augustus was pretty comfortable, and thought himself rather a hell of a bhoy because he occasionally sneaked off to a play or a whore, and bought some of the Vizetelly books on the sly. But there was one snag dear Mamma had not foreseen. Dear Papa had been fairly decently educated and brought up; he had, when a young man, travelled annually for several weeks, and had seen the Fields of Waterloo, Paris, and Ramsgate. After he married dear Mamma, he had to be content with Malvern and Ramsgate, for he was never allowed again to behold that wicked Continent. However, such is the force of Tradition, George Augustus was annually allowed a month’s holiday. In 1887 he visited Ireland; in 1888, Scotland; in 1889, the Lake District, with “pilgrimages” to the “shrines” of those unblemished geniuses, Wordsworth and Southey. But in 1890 George Augustus went to “rural Kent”, with “pilgrimages” to the Dingley Dell country and to the “shrine” of Sir Philip Sidney. But there were sirens awaiting our Odysseus in rural Kent. George Augustus met Isabel Hartly, and, before he knew where he was, had arranged irrevocably a marriage with her – without telling dear Mamma. Hic Incipit vita nova. Thus was George, young George, generated.

The Hartlys must have been more fun than the Winterbournes. The Winterbournes had never done a damn thing in their lives, and were as stuffily, frowsily, mawkish-religiously boring as a family could be and still remain – I won’t say alive or even sentient, but – able to digest their very puddingy meals. The Hartlys were different. They were poor Army. Pa Hartly had chased all round the Empire, dragging with him Ma Hartly, always in pod and always pupping in incongruous and inconvenient spots – the Egyptian desert, a shipwrecked troopship, a malarial morass in the West Indies, on the road to Kandahar. They had an inconceivable number of children, dead, dying, and alive, of all ages and sexes. Finally, old Hartly settled down near his wife’s family in rural Kent, with a smallish pension, a tiny “private” income, and the world of his swarming progeny on his less than Atlantean shoulders. I believe he had had two or three wives, all horribly fertile. No doubt the earlier Mrs. Hartlys had perished of superfluous child-bearing, “super-foetation ιόεν.”

Isabel Hardy was one – don’t ask which in numerical order, or by which wife – of Captain Hardy’s daughters. She was very pretty, in a florid, vulgarish way, with her artful-innocent dark eyes, and flashing smiles, and pretty little bustle and frills, and “fresh complexion” and “abounding health”. She was fascinatingly ignorant, even to the none too sophisticated George Augustus. And she had a strength of character superior even to dear Mamma’s, added to a superb, an admirable vitality, which bewitched, bewildered, electrified the somewhat sluggish and pretty comfortable George Augustus. He had never met any one like her. In fact, dear Mamma had never allowed him to meet any one but rather soggy Nonconformists of mature years, and “nice” youths and maidens of exemplary Nonconformist stupidity and lifelessness.

George Augustus fell horribly in love.

He abode at the village inn, which was cheap and pretty comfortable; and he did himself well. On these holidays he had such a mood of exultation (subconscious) in getting away from dear Mamma that he felt like a hero in Bulwer Lytton. We should say he swanked; probably the early nineties would have said he came the masher. He certainly mashed Isabel.

The Hartlys didn’t swank. They made no effort to conceal their poverty or the vulgarity imported into the family by the third (or fourth) Mrs. Hartly. They were fond of pork, and gratefully accepted the gifts of vegetables and fruit which the kind-hearted English country-people force on those they know are none too well off. They grew lots of vegetables and fruit themselves, and kept pigs. They made blackberry jam and damson jam, and scoured the country for mushrooms; and the only “drink” ever allowed in the family was Pa Hartly’s “drop o’ grog” secretly consumed after the innumerable children had gone to bed in threes and fours.

So it wasn’t hard for George Augustus to swank. He took the Hartlys – even Isabel – in completely. He talked about “my people” and “our place.” He talked about his Profession. He gave them copies of the Nonconformist tract he had published at fifteen. He gave Ma Hartly a fourteen-pound tin of that expensive (2s. 3d. a pound) tea she had always pined for since they had left Ceylon. He bought fantastic things for Isabel – a coral brooch, a copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress bound in wood from the door of Bunyan’s parish church, a turkey, a year’s subscription to the Family Herald Supplement, a new shawl, boxes of ls. 6d. a pound chocolates, and took her for drives in an open landau smelling of horse-piss and oats.

The Hartlys thought he was “rich”. George Augustus was so very comfortable and exalts that he too really thought he was “rich”.

One night, a sweet rural night, with a lemon moon over the sweet, breast-round, soft English country, with the nightingales jug-jugging and twit-twitting like mad in the leafy lanes, George Augustus kissed Isabel by a stile, and – manly fellow – asked her to marry him. Isabel – she had a pretty fiery temperament even then – had just sense enough not to kiss back and let him know that other “fellows” had kissed her, and perhaps fumbled further. She turned away her pretty head with its Pompadour knot of dark hair, and murmured – yes, she did, because she had read the stories in the Quiver and the Family Herald:

“O Mr. Winterbourne, this is so unexpected!”

But then her common-sense and the eagerness to be “rich” got the better of her Quiver artificiality, and she said, oh so softly and moderately:

“Yes!”

George Augustus quivered dramatically, clasped her, and they kissed a long time. He liked her ever so much more than the London whores, but he didn’t dare do any more than kiss her, and exclaim:

“Isabel! I love you. Be mine. Be my wife and build a home for me. Let us pass our lives in a delirium of joy. O that I need not leave you tonight!”

On the way home Isabel said:

“You must speak to father tomorrow.”

And George Augustus, who was nothing if not the gent, replied:

“I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.”

Next morning, according to schedule, George Augustus called on Pa Hartly with a bottle of 3s. 6d. port and a leg of fresh pork; and after a good deal of hemming and blushing and talking round the subject (as if old Hartly hadn’t heard from Isabel what was coming), formally and with immense solemnity applied for the job of supporting Isabel for the rest of his and her natural lives.

Did Pa Hartly refuse? Did he hesitate? Eagerly, gratefully, effusively, enthusiastically, he granted the request. He slapped George Augustus on the shoulder, which military expression of goodwill startled and slightly annoyed the prim George Augustus. He said George Augustus was a man after his own heart, the man he would have chosen to make his daughter happy, the man he longed to have as a son-in-law. He told two barrack-room stories, which made George Augustus exquisitely uneasy; drank two large glasses of port; and then launched out on a long story about how he had saved the British Army when he was an Ensign during the Crimea. George Augustus listened patiently and filially; but as hour after hour went by and the story showed no signs of ending, he ventured to suggest that the good news should be broken to Isabel and Ma Hartly, who (unknown to the gentlemen) were listening at the keyhole in an agony of impatience.

So they were called in, and Pa Hartly made a little speech founded on the style of old General Snooter, K.C.B., and then Pa kissed Isabel, and Ma embraced Isabel tearfully but enthusiastically and admiringly, and Pa pecked at Ma, and George Augustus kissed Isabel; and they were left alone for half an hour before “dinner” – 1.30 P.M., chops, potatoes, greens, a fruit-suet pudding, and beer.

The Hartlys still thought George Augustus was “rich”.

But before he left rural Kent he had to write home to his father for ten pounds to pay his inn bill and his fare. He told dear Papa about Isabel, and asked him to break the news to dear Mamma. “An old Army family,” George Augustus wrote, and “a sweet, pure girl who loves me dearly and for whom I would fight like a TIGER and willingly lay down my life.” He didn’t mention the poverty and the vulgarity and the catch-as-catch-can atmosphere of the Hartly family, or the innumerable progeny. Dear Papa almost thought George Augustus was marrying into the gentry.

Dear Papa sent George Augustus his ten pounds, and broke the news to dear Mamma. Strangely enough, she did not cut up as rough as you might have expected. Did she feel the force of Isabel’s character and determination even at that distance? Had she a suspicion of the furtive whoring, and did she think it better to marry than to burn? Perhaps she thought she could vamp George Augustus’s wife as well as George Augustus, and so enjoy two victims.

She wept a bit and prayed more than ever.

“I think, Papa,” she said, “that the Hand of Providence must have led Augustus. I hope Miss Isabel will make him a good wife, and not be too grand with her Army ways to darn his socks and overlook the maids. Of course the young couple must live here, and I shall be able to give kindly guidance to their early married life as well as religious instruction to the bride. I pray GOD may bless them.”

Dear Papa, who was not a bad sort, said “Umph,” and wrote George Augustus a very decent letter, promising him £200 to start married life, and suggesting that the honeymoon should take place either in Paris or on the Plains of Waterloo.

The wedding took place in spring in “rural Kent.” A lot of Winterbournes, including, of course, George’s parents, came down. Dear Mamma was horribly shocked, not to say disgusted, by the unseemly behaviour of the Hartlys; and even dear Papa was a bit staggered. But it was then too late to retreat with honour.

A village wedding in 1890! Gods of our fathers known of old, what a sight! Alas! that there were no cinemas then! Can’t you see it? Old men in bug-whiskers and top-hats; old ladies in bustles and bonnets. Young men in drooping moustaches, “artistic” flowing ties, and probably grey toppers. Young women in small bustles and small flowery hats. And bridesmaids in white. And a best man. And George Augustus was a bit sweaty in a new morning suit. And Isabel, of course, “radiant” in white and orange-blossoms. And the parson, and signing the register, and the wedding breakfast, and the double peal on the bells, and the “going-away.”… No, it’s too painful, it’s so horrible it isn’t even funny. It’s indecent. I’m positively sorry for George Augustus and Isabel, especially for Isabel. What said the bells? “Come and see the flicking. Come and see the fucking.”

But Isabel enjoyed the whole ghastly ceremony, little beast. She wrote a long description of it to one of her “fellows”, whom she really loved but had jilted for George Augustus’s “riches.”

“… It was a cloudy day, but as we knelt at the altar a long ray of sunshine came through the church window and rested lovingly on our bowed heads…”

How could they rise to such bilge? But they did, they did, they did. And they believed in it. If only they’d had their tongues in their cheeks there might have been some hope. But they hadn’t. They believed in the sickish, sweetish, canting bilge, they believed in it. Believed in it with all the superhuman force of ignorance.

Can one tabulate the ignorances, the relevant ignorances, of George Augustus and Isabel when they pledged themselves until death do us part?

George Augustus did not know how to make a living; he did not know in the very least how to treat a woman; he did not know how to live with a woman; he did not know how to make love to a woman – in fact, he was all minus there, for his experience with whores had been sordid, dismal, and repulsive; he did not know the anatomy of his own body, let alone the anatomy of a woman’s body; he had not the faintest idea of how to postpone conception or that it might be well not to impregnate a virgin bride, indeed neither he nor Isabel had ever heard of such things; he did not know what is implied by “a normal sexual life”; be did not know that women can and should have orgasms; he did not know that to brake a hymen violently and clumsily gives pain and so serious a shock that a woman may be for ever frigid with and even repelled by the man who does it; he did not know that women have periods; he did not know that pregnancy is a nine months’ illness; he had not the least idea that childbirth costs money if the woman is not to suffer vilely; he did not know that a married man dependent on his and his wife’s parents is an abject, helpless, and contemptible figure; he did not know that it is hard to earn a decent living even when you have “a Profession”; he knew damn little about even his profession; he knew very little indeed about the conditions of life and nothing about human psychology; he knew nothing about business and about money, except how to spend it; he knew nothing about indoor sanitation, food values, carpentry, house-furnishing, shopping, fire-lighting, chimney-sweeping, higher mathematics, Greek, domestic invective, making the worse appear the better cause, how to feed a baby, music, dancing, Swedish drill, opening sardine-tins, boiling eggs, which side of the bed to sleep with a woman, charades, gas stoves, and an infinity of other things all indispensable to a married man.

He must have been rather a dull dog.

As for Isabel – what she didn’t know includes almost the whole range of human knowledge. The puzzle is to find out what she did know. She didn’t even know how to buy her own clothes – Ma Hartly had always done that for her. Among the things she did not know were: How babies are made and come; how to make love; how to pretend she was enjoying it even when she wasn’t; how to sew, wash, cook, scrub, run a house, purchase provisions, keep household accounts, domineer over a housemaid, order a dinner, dismiss a cook, know when a room was clean, manage George Augustus when he was in a bad temper, give George Augustus a pill when he was liverish, feed and wash a baby and pin on its napkins, pay and receive calls, knit, crochet, make pastry, how to tell a fresh herring is stale, the difference between pork and veal, never to use margarine, how to make a bed comfortably, look after her health especially in pregnancy, produce the soft answer which turneth away wrath, keep the home fires burning, and an infinity of other things indispensable to a married woman.

(I really wonder how poor old George managed to get born at all.)

On the other hand, both George Augustus and Isabel knew how to read and write, pray, eat, drink, wash themselves, and dress up on Sundays. They were both pretty well acquainted with the Bible and Hymns A. and M.

And then they had luv. They “luved” each other. Luv was enough, luv covered a multitude of ignorances, luv would provide, luv would strew their path with roses and primroses. Luv and God. Failing Luv there was God, and failing God there was Luv. I suppose, orthodoxly, God ought to come first, but in an 1890 marriage there was such a lot of Luv and God that there was no room for common sense, or common sex knowledge, or any of the knowledge we vile modern decadents think necessary in men and women. Sweet Isabel, dear George Augustus! They were so young, so innocent, so pure. And what hell do you think is befitting the narrow-minded, slush-gutted, bug-whiskered or jet-bonneted he-and she-hypocrites who sent them to their doom? O Timon, Timon, had I thy rhetoric! Who dares, who dares in purity of manhood stand upright, and say…? Let me not rave, sweet gods, let me not rave.

The honeymoon did not take place in Paris or on the Plains of Waterloo, but in a South Coast watering-place, a sweetly pretty spot Isabel had always wanted to visit. They had a ten-mile drive from the village to the railway, and a two hours’ journey in a train which stopped at every station. They arrived tired, shy, and disappointed at the small but respectable hotel where a double room had been booked.

The marriage night was a failure. One might almost have foreseen it. George Augustus tried to be passionate and ecstatic, and merely succeeded in being clumsy and brutal. Isabel tried to be modestly yielding and complying, and was only gauche. She suffered a good deal from George Augustus’s bungling defloweration. And, as many a sweet Victorian bride of dear old England in the golden days of Good Queen Vicky, she lay awake hour after hour, while George Augustus slept stertorously, thinking, thinking, while the tears ran out of her eyes, as she lay on her back, and trickled slowly down her temples on to the bridal pillow…

It’s too painful, it’s really too painful – all this damn silly “purity” and cant and Luv and ignorance. And silly, ignorant girls handed over in their ignorance and sweetly-prettiness to ignorant and clumsy young men for them to brutalise and wound in their ignorance. It’s too painful to think of. Poor Isabel! What an initiation!

But, of course, that ghastly night had its consequences. In the first place, it meant that the marriage was legally consummated, and could not be broken without an appeal to the Divorce Courts – and I don’t even know if you could get divorced in the golden days of grand old Mr. Gladstone, bless his heart, may hell be hot for him. And then it meant that Isabel shrank from sexual intercourse with George Augustus for the rest of her days; and, since she was a woman of considerable temperament, that implied the twenty-two lovers already stirring in the womb of futurity. And finally, since Isabel was as healthy as a young woman could be who had to wear madly tight corsets and long insanitary hair and long insanitary skirts, and who had rudimentary ideas of sex hygiene – finally, that nuit de rove gave Isabel her first baby.

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THE baby was christened Edward Frederick George – Edward after the Prince of Wales (later H. M. King Edward VII.), Frederick after his grandfather, George after his father.

Isabel wanted to call him George Hartly, but dear Mamma saw to it that there was as little Hartly as possible about her grandson.

The early years of the Isabel-George Augustus menage are really very dismal to contemplate. Largely because it was forced upon them by their elders and social convention, they began on a basis of humbug; unfortunately, they continued on a basis of humbug. Not only were they shattered by the awful experience of the wedding-night, but they were a good deal bored by the honeymoon generally. There wasn’t much to do at Isabel’s sweetly-pretty watering-place. George Augustus wouldn’t admit even to himself that he was about as competent to be a husband as to teach white mice to perform military-evolutions. Isabel knew in herself that they had begun with a ghastly failure, knew it with her instincts rather than her mind, but she had her pride. She knew perfectly well that the failure would be attributed to her, and that she could expect no sympathy from any one, least of all her own family. Wasn’t she “happily” married to a man who “luved” her – a “luv” match – and to a “rich” man? So Isabel consoled herself with the thought that George Augustus was “rich”, and they both wrote ecstatic humbugging honeymoon letters to families and friends. And once they had started on the opposite road to honesty and facing facts, they were dished for life – condemned, they too, to the dreary landscape of humbug and “luv”. O that God and Luv business! Isn’t it mysterious that Isabel didn’t take warning from the wretched cat-and-dog life of Ma and Pa, and that George Augustus hadn’t noticed the hatred which surged between dear Mamma and dear Papa under the viscid surface of domestic peace and religion; and that they didn’t try to break away to something a little better? But no, they accepted the standards, they had luv and they had God, so of course all would be for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

George Augustus continued to play at being “rich” on his honeymoon. A week before his wedding he was allowed a banking account for the first time in his life. Dear Papa paid in £200, and, by arrangement with George Augustus, dear Mamma was made to believe it was £20. To this dear Mamma added a generous £5 from her own jointure, “a little nest-egg for a rainy day” – though what on earth you want with a “nest-egg” on “a rainy day”, God and Luv only know. So the happy young couple started out with £205, and not the slightest chance of earning a penny until George Augustus gave up being “rich” and “pretty comfortable” and settled down to face facts and do a little work.

They spent a good deal – for them – on the honeymoon. George Augustus had a purse containing a lot of sovereigns and two £5 notes, with which he swanked intolerably. Isabel had never seen so much money at once and thought George Augustus was richer than ever. So she immedi-ately began sending “useful presents” to the innumerable members of the impoverished Hartly family; and George Augustus, though annoyed – for he was fundamentally mean – let her. Altogether they spent £30 in a fortnight, and the first-class fares back to Sheffield left mighty little change out of another £5 note.

The first great shock of Isabel’s life was her wedding-night. The second was when she saw the dingy little, smoke-blacked house of the “rich” Winterbournes, one of a row of highly desirable yellow-brick ten-roomed villas. The third was when she found that George Augustus earned nothing by his Profession, that he had no money but the balance of his £205, and that the Winterbournes were nearly as poor as the Hartlys.

Ghastly days that poor girl spent in that dreary little house during her first pregnancy, while George Augustus twiddled his thumbs in “the Office” (instead of in his cosy study” as in his bachelor days) under pretence of working”; while dear Papa prayed, and dear Mamma acid-sweetly nagged and humiliated her. Ghastly days when her morning sickness was treated as “a bilious attack”.

“Too much rich food,” said dear Mamma; “of course, darling Isabel, you were not used to such a plentiful table at home,” – and then playful-coyly-cattish – “we must really ask your dear husband to use his authority to restrain your appetite.”

In fact, the Hartlys, in a scratchy, vulgarish way, enjoyed much more ample and varied food than that provided by dear Mamma’s cheeseparing, genteelly meagre table.

Then, of course, there were rows. Isabel revolted, and displayed signs of that indomitable personality and talent for violent invective she afterwards developed to such Everest peaks of unpleasantness. Even dear Mamma found her match, but not before she had made Isabel miserably wretched for nearly two years and had permanently warped her character. Blessings upon you, dear Mamma, you “prayed for guidance”, you “did all for the best” – and you made Isabel into a first-class bitch.

George Augustus was pained, deeply pained and surprised, by these rows. He was still pretty comfortable, and couldn’t see why Isabel wasn’t.

“Let us continue to be a loving, united family,” he would say, “let us bear with one another. We all have our burdens” – (e.g. thumb-twiddling and reading novels) – “and all we need is a little more Luv, a little more Forbearance. We must pray for Strength and Guidance.”

At first Isabel took these homilies pretty meekly. She believed she had to “respect” her husband, and she was still a little intimidated by George Augustus’s superior Bulwer Lytton airs. But one day she lost her not very well-controlled temper and let the Winterbournes have it. George Augustus was a sneak and a cad and a liar! He wasn’t “rich”! He was “pore as a church mouse”! Him and his airs, pretending to her father he was a rich gentleman with a Profession, when he didn’t earn a penny and got married on the £200 his father gave him! She wouldn’t have married him, she wouldn’t, if he hadn’t come smarming round with his presents and his drives and pretending she would be a lady! And she wished she was dead, she did! And she wished she’d never set eyes on them!

Then the fat was in the fire! Dear Mamma took up the tale. Reserving in petto a denunciation of the guilt-stricken and consternated father and son in the matter of their deception over the £200, she directed a skilful enfilade fire on the disarmed Isabel. Isabel was vulgar and irreligious, she was ill-bred and uneducated, she was mercenary on her own showing, and had ruined the hopeful life of George Augustus by seducing him into a disastrous marriage…

At that moment Isabel fainted, and most unfortunately for our George the threatened miscarriage was averted – thanks more to Isabel’s health and vitality than to the ministrations of her inept husband and in-laws. Only dear Papa was genuinely distressed, and used what shred of influence he had to protect Isabel. As for George Augustus, he simply collapsed, and did nothing but ejaculate:

“Dear Mamma! Isabel! Let us be loving and united. Let us bear one another’s burdens!”

But he was swept away in the torrent of genuine hatred revealed by this instructive scene. Even dear Mamma dropped her Nonconformist tract hypocrisy, and only picked it up again when Isabel fainted.

On dear Papa’s suggestion George Augustus took Isabel away to the seaside on what was left of the £200; and thus it happened that George was born in a seaside hotel.

It was a difficult birth, clumsily doctored. Isabel suffered tortures for nearly forty hours. If she had not been as strong as a young mare, she would inevitably have died. During this agonising labour, George Augustus prayed freely, took short walks, read Loma Doone, had a half-bottle of claret with his lunch and dinner, and slept tranquilly o’ nights. When, finally, he was admitted on tiptoe to a glance at the half-dead woman with the horrid little packet of red infant by her side, he – raised his hand and gave them his blessing. He then tiptoed down to dinner, and ordered a whole bottle of claret in honour of the event.

3

ISABEL and George Augustus depress me so much that I am anxious to get rid of them. On the other hand, it is impossible to understand George unless you know his parents. And then the older Winterbourne ménage rather fascinates me, with a fascination of loathing and contempt. I cannot help wondering how they could have been such ignorant fools, how they came to make so little effort to break free from the humbug, how less than nothing they cared about being themselves. Of course, I tell myself that our own magnanimous nephews will ask themselves precisely the same questions about us; but then I also tell myself that they must see we did struggle, we did fight against the humbug and the squelching of life and the worn-out formulae, as young George fought. Perhaps Isabel did fight a little, but the forces of inertia and active spite were too much for her. Perhaps the twenty-two lovers and the talk about Agnosticism and Socialism (of which Isabel at all periods of her life knew rather less than nothing) were a sort of protest. But she was beaten by the economic factor – by the economic factor and the child. You can say what you please, but poverty and a child will quench any woman’s instinct for self-development and self-assertion – or turn it sour. It turned Isabel’s sour and sharp. As for George Augustus, I doubt if he had any instincts left, except the instinct to be pretty comfortable. Whatever he achieved in and with his life was entirely the product of Isabel’s will and Isabel’s goading. He was a born mucker. And, since Isabel was ignorant, self-willed, and over-ambitious, and turned sour and sharp under the tender mercies of dear Mamma, she came a mucker too – through George Augustus. Yet I have far more sympathy for Isabel than for George Augustus. She was at least the wreck of a human being. He was a thumb-twiddler, a harmiess praying-Mantis, a zero of no value except in combination with her integer.

When Isabel was well enough to travel – perhaps a little before – they, who had gone out two, returned home three. They had acquired the link which divides. They had become a “family”, the eternal triangle of father, mother, child, which is so much more difficult and disagreeable and hard to deal with, and so much more productive of misery, than the other triangle of husband, wife, lover. After nine months of intimacy, Isabel and George Augustus were just getting used to each other and the “luv” situation, when this new complication appeared. Isabel was instinctively aware that yet another readjustment was needed, and, through her, George Augustus became dimly apprehensive that something was going on. So he prayed earnestly for Guidance, and all the way from the South Coast to Sheffield urged Isabel to remember that they must be a loving and united family, that they must bear one another’s burdens, that they had “Luv” but must acquire “Forbearance”. I don’t wish – Heaven forfend! – that I had been in Isabel’s place, but I should have liked to reply for five minutes on her behalf to George Augustus’s angel-in-the-house, idiot-in-the-world cant.

So they returned three, and there was much sobbing and praying, and asking for guidance, and benediction of the unconscious George. (He was too little to make a long nose at them – let us do it for him, as his posthumous godfathers and godmothers.) Isabel’s thwarted sex and idealism and ambition, her physical health and complete lack of intellectual complexity, made her an excellent mother. She really loved that miserable little packet of babydom begotten in disappointment and woe by George Augustus and herself in a hired bedroom of a dull hotel in a dull little town on the dull South Coast of dull England. She lavished herself on the infant George. The child tugging at her nipples gave her a physical satisfaction a thousand times more acute and exquisite than the clumsy caresses of George Augustus. She was like an animal with a cub. George Augustus might swank to dear Papa that he would “fight for dear Isabel like a Tiger,” but Isabel really would have fought, and did fight, for her baby, like a hot-headed, impetuous, pathetic, ignorant cow. If that was any achievement, she saved young George’s life – saved him for a German machine-gun.

For a time there was peace in the smoke-blacked little house in Sheffield. Isabel was obviously still very weak. And the first grandson was an event. Dear Papa was enchanted with young George. He bought five dozen bottles of port to lay down for George’s twenty-first birthday, and then began prudently drinking them at once “to see that they were the right vintage.” He gave George Augustus £50 he hadn’t got. He gave young George his solemn, grandfatherly, and valedictory blessing every night when Isabel put the infant to bed.

“God will bless him,” said dear Papa impressively, “God will bless all my children and my posterity,” – as if he had been Abraham or God’s Privy Councillor, as indeed he probably thought he was.

Even dear Mamma was quelled for a time. “A little che-ild shall lead them,” she quoted venomously; and George Augustus wrote another Nonconformist tract on loving and united families, taking these holy and inspiring words as his text.

The first four years of George’s life passed in a welter of squabbling, incompetence, and poverty, of which he was quite unconscious, though what harm was done to his subconscious would take a better psychologist than I to determine. I imagine that the combined influence of dear Papa, dear Mamma, Ma and Pa Hartly, George Augustus, and Isabel started him off on the race of life with a pretty heavy handicap weight. I should say that George was always an outsider in the Tattersall’s Ring of Life – about 100 to 7 against. However, one can but stick to the events as closely as possible, and leave the reader to form conclusions and lay his own odds.

Before George was six months old the rows had begun again in the Sheffield house, and this time more virulently and fiercely than ever. Dear Mamma felt she was fighting for her authority and John Wesley against the intruder. Isabel was fighting for herself and her child and – though she didn’t know it – any vestige of genuine humanity there might have been in George Augustus.

About that time George Augustus became really intolerable. A man he had known as a law student returned to Sheffield, bought a practice, and did rather well. Henry Bulburry came it over George Augustus pretty thick. He had spent three years in a London solicitor’s office, and to hear him talk you would have thought Mr. Bulburry was the Lord Chancellor, the Beau Brummell, and the Count d’Orsay of the year 1891. Bulburry patronized George Augustus, and George Augustus lapped his patronage up gratefully. Bulburry knew all the latest plays, all the latest actresses, all the latest books. He roared with laughter at George Augustus’s Dickens and Lorna Doone, and introduced him to Morris, Swinburne, Rossetti, Ruskin, Hardy, Mr. Moore, and young Mr. Wilde. George Augustus got fearfully excited, and became an aesthete. Once when Pater came to lecture at Sheffield he was so much moved at the spectacle of those wonderful moustaches that he fainted, and had to be taken home in a four-wheeler. George Augustus at last found his métier. He realized that he was a dreamer of dreams born out of his due time, that he should have floated Antinous-like with the Emperor Hadrian to the music of flutes and viols on the subtly-drifting waters of the immemorial Nile. Under a canopy of perfumed silk he should have sat enthroned with Zenobia while trains of naked, thewed Ethiopian slaves, glistening with oil and nard, laid at his feet jewels of the opulent East. He was older than the rocks among which he sat. He was subtler than delicate music; and there was no change of light, no shifting of the shadows, no change in the tumultuous outlines of wind-swept clouds, but had a meaning for him. Babylon and Tyre were in him, and he too wept for beautiful Bion. In Athens he had redilned, violet-crowned, at the banquet where Socrates reasoned of love with Alcibiades. But above all, he felt a stupendous passion for mediaeval and Renaissance Florence. He had never been to Italy, but he was wont to boast that he had studied the plan of the city so carefully and so frequently that he could find his way about Florence blindfold. He knew not one word of Italian, but he spoke ecstatically of Dante and “his Circle”, criticized the accuracy of Guicciardini, refuted Machiavelli, and was an authority – after Roscoe – on the life and times of Lorenzo and Leo X.

One day George Augustus announced to the family that he should abandon his Profession and WRITE.

There may be little differences in an English family, for the best of friends fall out at times, but in all serious crises they may be depended upon to show a united front. Thank God, there can still be no doubt about it – apart from pure literature of the sheik brand and refining pictures in the revived Millais tradition, an English family can still be relied upon to present a united front against any of its members indulging in the obscene pursuits of Literature or Art. Such things may be left to the obscene Continent and our own degenerates and decadents, though it would be well if stern methods were adopted by the police to cleanse our public life of the scandal brought upon Us by the latter. The great English middle-class mass, that dreadful squat pillar of the nation, will only tolerate art and literature that are fifty years out of date, eviscerated, de-testiculated, bowdlerized, humbuggered, slip-slopped, subject to their anglicized Jehovah. They are still that unbroken rampart of Philistia against which Byron broke himself in vain, and which even the wings of Ariel were inadequate to surmount. So, look out, my friend. Hasten to adopt the slimy mask of British humbug and British fear of life, or expect to be smashed. You may escape for a time. You may think you can compromise. You can’t. You’ve either got to lose your soul to them or have it smashed by them. Or you can exile yourself.

It was probably worse in the days of George Augustus, and anyway he was only a grotesque and didn’t much matter. Still, the vitality of Isabel was real and should have found an outlet instead of being forced back into her and turned into a sharp, sour poison. And the pathetic efforts of George Augustus to be an aesthete and WRITE meant something, some inner struggle, some effort to create a life of his own. It was an evasion, of course, a feeble, flapping desire to escape into a dream world; but if you had been George Augustus, living under the sceptre of dear Mamma in the Sheffield of 1891, you too would have yearned to escape. Isabel opposed this new freak of George Augustus, because she also wanted to escape. And for her, escape was only possible if George Augustus earned enough money to take her and her baby away. She thought the Pre-Raphaelites rather nonsensical and drivelling – and she wasn’t far wrong. She thought Mr. Hardy very gloomy and immoral, and Mr. George Moore very frivolous and immoral, and young Mr. Wilde very unhealthy and immoral. But her reading in the works of all these immortals was very sketchy and snatchy – what really animated her was her immovable instinct that George Augustus’s only motive in life henceforth should be to provide for her and her child, and to get them away from Sheffield and dear Mamma.

Dear Papa and dear Mamma also thought these new crazes of George Augustus nonsensical and immoral. Dear Mamma read the opening pages of one of Mr. Hardy’s novels, and then burned the Obscene Thing in the kitchen copper. Whereupon there was a blazing row with George Augustus. Backed by the malicious Bulburry (who hated dear Mamma so much that he put several little bits of business he didn’t want into the hands of George Augustus, who thereby made about £70 in six months), George Augustus, who had never stood up for himself or his own integrity or Isabel or anything that mattered, stood up for Mr. Hardy and his own false pathetic pose of aestheticism. George Augustus locked all his priceless new books into a cupboard, of which he jealously kept the key. And he spent hours a day locked in his “cosy study” WRITING, while the enraged thunder of the offended family rolled impotently outside. But George Augustus was firm. He bought arty ties, and saw Bulburry nearly every evening, and went on WRITING. Bulburry was so malevolent that he persuaded a friend, who was editing an amateurish aesthetic review in London, to publish an article by George Augustus entitled “The Wonder of Cleopatra throughout the Ages”. George Augustus got a guinea for the article, and for a week the family was hushed and awed.

But in that atmosphere of exasperation and dread of the Unknown Obscene, rows were inevitable. And, since George Augustus remained almost hermetically sealed in his cosy study, and refused to come out and be rowed with, even when dear Mamma tapped imperiously at the door and reminded him, through the panels, of his Duties to God, his Mamma, and Society, the rows inevitably took place between dear Mamma and Isabel.

One night, after George Augustus was asleep, Isabel got up and stole £5 from his sovereign-purse. Next morning, she took the baby for a walk as usual, but took it to the railway station and fled to the Hartly home in rural Kent. This was certainly not the boldest thing Isabel ever did – she afterwards did things of incredible rashness – but it was one of the most sensible, from her point of view. It was the first of her big efforts to force George Augustus to action. It reminded him that he had taken on certain responsibilities, and that responsibilities are realities which cannot always be avoided. She bombed him out of the dug-out of dear Mamma’s tyranny, and eventually Archied him out of the empyrean of aestheticism and writing.

But she didn’t let herself or George Augustus down to the Hartly family. She reckoned – and reckoned rightly – that George Augustus would follow her up pretty smartly, for fear of “what people would say”. So she sent a telegram to Pa and Ma to say she was coming to see them for a few days – they were pretty well accustomed to Isabel’s impulsive moves by this time – and she left a note, a dramatic and naturally (not artistically) tear-stained note for George Augustus on the bedroom dressing-table. She took a few inexpensive presents home, and played her part so well that at first even Ma Hartly only vaguely suspected that something was wrong.

The loving and united home at Sheffield was in some consternation when Isabel did not return for lunch; and the consternation almost became panic – it certainly became rage in dear Mamma – when George Augustus found and communicated Isabel’s letter.

“She must be found and brought back here at once,” said dear Mamma decisively, already scenting carnage from afar; “she has disgraced herself, disgraced her husband, and disgraced the family. I have long noticed that she is inattentive at family prayers. She must be given a good lesson. It was an ill day for us all when Augustus married so far beneath him. He must go and fetch her back from her low, vulgar family – to think of our dear little George being in such immoral surroundings!”

“Suppose she won’t come?” said dear Papa, who had suffered so many years from dear Mamma that he had a fellow-feeling for Isabel.

“She must be made to come,” said dear Mamma. “Augustus! You must do your duty and assert your authority as a Husband. You must leave to-night.”

“But what will people say?” murmured George Augustus dejectedly.

At those fatal words even dear Mamma flushed beneath the pallor of fifty years’ bad temper and cloistered malevolence. What would people say? What would people say! What indeed! What would the Minister say? What would Mrs. Standish say? And Mrs. Gregory? And Miss Stint, who was another Minister’s niece? And Cousin Joan, who had an eye like a brace of buzzards, and a nose for scandal and other carrion which would have been surprising in a starving condor of the Andes? What would they say? Why, they would say that young Mrs W.interbourne had run away with a ticket-collector on the G.W.R. They would say young George had turned out to have a touch of the tar-brush owing to the prolonged residence of Captain and Mrs. Hartly in the West Indies; and that, consequently, Mrs. Winterbourne and the infant had been spirited away “to a home”. They would say that there was a “dreadful disease” in the Winterbourne family, and that Isabel had run away with an infected baby. They would also say things which, being nearer the truth, would be even more painful. They would say that dear Mamma had plagued Isabel beyond the verge of endurance – and so she had run away, with or without an accomplice. They would say that George Augustus was unable to support his family, and that Isabel had grown tired of thumb-twiddling and “all this nonsense about books.” They would say – what would they not say? And the Winterbournes, unique in this among human beings, were sensitive to “what people said”.

So when George Augustus said dejectedly, “What will people say?” even the ranks of Tuscany – viz, dear Mamma – were for a moment dismayed. But that undaunted spirit (which had made the Empire famous) soon rallied, and dear Mamma evolved a plan, and issued orders with a precision and clarity which may be recommended to all Brigadiers, Battalion, Company, and Platoon commanders. The maids must be told at once that Mrs. Winterbourne had been unexpectedly called home by the illness of her father – which was immediately done; but as the maids had been listening with delighted eagerness to the conference in the parlour, that bit of camouflage was not very effective. Then dear Mamma would pay a round of visits that afternoon, and casually let drop that “dear Isabel” had been unexpectedly etcetera; to which she would add negligently that an “important conveyance” had detained her son in Sheffield until the next morning, when he would follow his wife – “such a devoted couple, and only my daughter-in-law’s earnest entreaties could prevail upon my dear son not to neglect this important business to act as her cavalier.” Then George Augustus would leave next morning for rural Kent, and would hale Isabel home like the husband of patient Grissel, or some other hero of romance.

All of which was carried out according to schedule, with one important exception. When George Augustus unexpectedly walked into the multitudinous and tumultuous Saturday dinner of the Hardy family – loin of fresh pork, greens, potatoes, apple sauce, fruit-suet pudding, but no beer this time – he found no patient Grissel awaiting him. And his very impatient and aggrieved Grissel was backed up by an equally aggrieved family, who by now had wormed out of her by no means reticent mind something of the truth. The Hartlys were simply furious with George Augustus for not being “rich”. The way he had come it over them! The way he had mashed Isabel with his ls. 6d. a pound chocolates! The way dear Mamma had put on her airs of righteous disapproval at Captain Hartly’s little jokes about a fellah in India (Ha! ha!) and a couple of native women (He! he!)! The intolerable way in which dear Papa had come it about ’64 port and Paris and the Plains of Waterloo! And after the Hartlys had endured all those humiliations, to find that George Augustus was not “rich” after all! O, horrible, most horrible!

So when George Augustus, still half-armed with the bolts of thunder-compelling dear Mamma, walked in dramatically to that agape of roast pig, he found he had a tougher job to deal with than he had imagined.

He was greeted with very constrained and not very polite reticence by the elder Hartlys, and gazed at by such an inordinate number of round-O-eyed youthful Hartlys that he felt all the reproachful juvenile eyes in the world must be directed upon him, as he struggled with an (intentionally) tough and disagreeable portion of the meal.

Need it be said? George Augustus was defeated by Isabel and the Hartlys, as he would have been defeated by any one with half an ounce of spunk and half a dram of real character.

He capitulated.

Without the honours of war.

He apologized to Isabel.

And to Ma Hartly.

And to “the Captain”.

An Armistice was arranged, the terms of which were:

George Augustus surrendered unconditionally, and all the honours of war went to Isabel.

Isabel was not to return to dear Mamma or to Sheffield, not ever again.

They were to take a cottage in rural Kent, not far from the Hartlys.

George Augustus was to return to Sheffield and bring to rural Kent his precious aesthetes and as much furniture as he could cadge.

He was to sell his “practice” in Sheffield, and to start to “practise” in rural Kent.

As a concession to George Augustus, he was to be allowed to WRITE – for a time. But if the Writing proved unremunerative within a reasonable period – such period to be determined by Isabel and the Other High Contracting Powers – he was to “practise” with more assiduity – and profit.

Failing which, George Augustus would hear about it, and Isabel would apply for a maintenance order for herself and child.

Signed, sealed, and delivered over a quart bottle of East Kent Pale Ale.

Poor old George Augustus! the shadows of the prison were rapidly-closing round him, though he didn’t know it. He had a hell of a time with dear Mamma when he went home with his tail between his legs and without Isabel, and announced that they had determined to take a cottage in rural Kent and – WRITE. At the word “write”, dear Mamma sniffed:

“And who, pray, will pay your washing-bills?”

In a spirit of loving kindness and forbearance, George Augustus ignored this taunt, which was just as well, since he could think of nothing to say in reply.

Well, dear Papa came to the rescue again. He gave George Augustus as much of the furniture as he dared, and another gift of £50 he hadn’t got. And Bulburry got George Augustus orders for an article on The Friends of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and another article on My Wanderings in Florence. Bulburry also advised George Augustus to write a book, either a history of The Decline and Fall of the Florentine Republic, or a novel on the unhackneyed topic of Savonarola. In addition, Bulburry gave him an introduction to one of those enterprising young publishers who are always arising in London to witch the world with noble publishing, and then, after two or three years, always disappear in the bankruptcy court, leaving behind a sad trail of unpaid bills and disappointed authors and wrecked reputations.

So George Augustus set up in rural Kent as a WRITER, in a pleasant little cottage which Isabel had found for them.

(I do wish you could have seen the “artistic” ties George Augustus wore when he was a WRITER; they would have given you that big feeling.)

But – let us be just – George Augustus really worked – three hours a day, like all the great authors – at writing. He produced articles and he produced stories and he began the Decline and Fall of the Florentine Republic and the most blood-curdling novel about Savonarola, beginning: “One stormy night in December 14 –, two black-cloaked figures might have been observed traversing the Piazza della Signoria in Florence on their way from Or San Michele to the private residence of Lorenzo the Magnificent, now know as the Palazzo Strozzi.”

Poor George Augustus! Take it for all in all, we shall look upon many like him again. He had a lot to learn. He had to learn that the only books which have the least importance are those which are made from direct contact with life, which are built out of a man’s guts. He had to learn that every age pullulates with imitators of the authors who have done this, and created a fashion – which in time and for a time kills them and their influence.

But still, for a year or so he had his cottage in rural Kent and was a Writer. He dreamed his dream, though it was a pretty silly and castrated dream. If he hadn’t married Isabel and gotten her with child, he might have made quite a reasonably good literary hack. But, oh! those hostages given to Fortune! Look after your cock, and your life will look after itself.

As for Isabel, she was happy for the first, and perhaps the last, time in her life. She adored her cottage in rural Kent. What did it matter that George Augustus wasted his time Writing? He still had about £170 and earned a few guineas a month by articles and stories. But for her the thrill was having a real home of her own. She furnished the cottage herself, partly with the heavy mahogany 1850 stuff George Augustus had brought from Sheffield, partly with her own atrocious taste and bamboo. George urged her to furnish “artistically”, and the resultant chaos of huge, solid, stodgy, curly mahogany and flimsy bamboo, palms, cauliflower chintzes, and framed photographs would have rendered the late Mr. Oscar Wilde plaintive in less than fifty seconds. Never mind; Isabel was happy. She had her home and she had George Augustus under her eye and thumb, and she had her baby – whom she adored with all the selfishness of a pure woman – and, best of all, she did NOT have dear Mamma pestering and sneering and praying at her through every hour of the day and at every turn. Dear Isabel, how happy she was in her hum-ble little ho-o-ome! Put it to yourself, now. Suppose you had been one of an innumerable family, enduring all the abominable discomforts and lack of privacy in that elementary Soviet System. And suppose you had then been uncomfortably impregnated and most painfully delivered, and then bullied and pried into and domineered over and tortured by dear Mamma: wouldn’t you be glad to have a home of your own, however humble, and however flimsily based on sandy foundations of WRITING and arty ties? Of course you would. So Isabel looked after the baby, tant bien que mal, and cooked abominable meals, and was swindled by the tradesmen, and ran up bills which frightened her, and let young George catch croup and nearly die, and didn’t interrupt George Augustus’s wooing of the Muse more than half a dozen times a morning and – was happy.

But in all our little arrangements on this satellite of the Sun, we are apt to forget – among a multitude of other things – two important facts. We are the inhabitants of a planet who keep alive only by a daily consumption of the material products of that planet; we are members of a crude collective organization which distributes these essential products in accordance with certain bizarre rules painfully evolved from chaos by primitive brains. George Augustus certainly forgot these two facts – if he had ever recognized them. A man, a woman, and a brat cannot live for ever on £170 and a few odd guineas a month. They couldn’t do it even in the eighteen-nineties, even with extraordinary economy. And Isabel was not economical. Neither, for that matter, was George Augustus. He was mean, but he liked to be pretty comfortable, and his notions of the pretty comfortable were a bit extravagant. Torn between his respect for the Right Hnble. the Lord Tennyson’s well-known predilection for port and Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne’s less notorious but undisguised preference for brandy neat, George Augustus finally became original, and fell back on his favourite claret. But, even in the ‘nineties, claret was not cheap; and three dozen a month rather eat into an income of four to six guineas. And then Isabel was inexperienced. In housekeeping inexperience costs money! So a time arrived when the £170 was nearly at zero, and the few guineas a month became ‘fewer instead of more numerous. Then George, young George, developed some infant malady; Isabel lost her head, and insisted on a doctor; the doctor, like all the English middle classes, thought a Writer was a harmless fool with money, to be bled ruthlessly, called far more often than was necessary, and sent in a much bigger bill than he would have dared send a stockbroker or a millionaire. Then George Augustus had the influenza and thought he was going to die. And after that Isabel was stricken with haemorrhoids in her secret parts, and had to be treated. Consequently, the bank balance of a few guineas was turned into a deficit of a good many pounds; and the affable Bank Manager rapidly became strangely unaffable when his polite references to the overdraft remained unsatisfied with the manna of a few cheques.

It became obvious to Isabel – and would long ago have become obvious to almost any one but George Augustus -that Luv and WRITING in a cottage were hopelessly bankrupt.

Well, dear Papa pungled once more – with a pound a Week; and Pa Hartly weighed in with a weekly five shillings. But that was misery, and Isabel was determined that, since she had married George Augustus for his “riches,” “rich” he should be or perish in the act of trying to acquire riches. So she brought into play all the feminine arsenal, reinforced with a few useful underhand punches and jabs in the moral kidneys, learned from dear Mamma. George Augustus tried to keep high above these material and degrading necessities, but, as I said, isabel finally Archied him down. When they could no longer get credit even for meat or bread, George Augustus capitulated, and agreed to “practise” once more. He wanted to go back to Sheffield and be pretty comfortable again, under the talons of dear Mamma. But Isabel was – quite rightly – adamant. She refused to return to Sheffield. George Augustus had got her on false pretences, i.e. that he was “rich.” He was not rich. He was, in fact, damn poor. But he had taken on the responsibility of supporting a woman, and he had got that woman with child. He had no business to be pretty comfortable any longer under the wings of dear Mamma. His business was to get rich as quickly as possible; at any rate, to provide for his dependants. Inexorable logic, against which I can find no argument even in sophistry.

So they went to a middling-sized, dreary coast town just then in the process of “development” (Bulburry’s suggestion), and George Augustus put up another brass plaque. With no results. But then, just as the situation was getting desperate, dear Papa died. He did not leave his children a fortune, but he did leave them £250 each – and strangely enough he actually had the money. Dear Mamma was left in rather “straitened circumstances,” but she had enough to be unreservedly disagreeable to the end of her day.

That £250 – and the Oscar Wilde case – just saved the situation. The £250 gave them enough to live on for a year. The Oscar Wilde case scared George Augustus thoroughly out of aestheticism and writing. What! They were hanging men and women for wearing of the green? Then, George Augustus would wear red. After “The Sentence,” George Augustus, like most of England, decided that art and literature were niminy-piminy, if not greeneryyallery. I don’t say he burned his books and arty ties, but he put them out of sight with remarkable alacrity. The great Voice of the English People had spoken in no Uncertain Tones, and George Augustus was not deaf to the Message. How could he be, with Isabel pouring it into one ear by word of mouth, and dear Mamma – unexpected but welcome ally – into the other by letter? A nation of Mariners and Sportsmen naturally excel in the twin arts of leaving a sinking ship and kicking a man when he is down. Three months after The Sentence you would never have suspected that George Augustus had ever dreamed of Writing. His clothes were of exemplary Philistinism – indeed, the height of his starched collars and the plainness of his ties had an almost Judas touch in their unaesthetic ugliness. Urged on by Isabel he became a Freemason, an Oddfellow, an Elk, a Heart of Oak, a Buffalo, a Druid, and God knows how many other mysterious things. He himself abandoned Florence, forgot even the blameless Savonarola, and prayed for Guidance. They attended the “best Church” twice on every Sunday,

Slowly at first, then more and more rapidly, George Augustus increased his practice; and the lust of earning money came upon him. They ceased to live in one room behind the office, and took a small but highly respectable house in the residential quarter of the town. Two years later they, took a country cottage in a very high-class resort, Martin’s Point. Two years after that they bought a large country-house at Pamber, and another smaller house just outside the “quaint old” town of Hamborough. George Augustus began to buy and to build houses. Isabel, whose jointure had been less than nothing when she married, now began to complain because her allowance was “only £1200 a year.” In short, they prospered, and prospered greatly – for a time.

They had another child, and another, and another, and another. A man and a woman who can do nothing else can always have children, and, if they are legally married and are able to support their progeny, there seems no end to the amount of begetting they may do and the laurel crowns of virtue to which they are thereby entitled. Isabel put her vitality into child-bearing, boosting George Augustus to profitable action, thrusting herself ever onward and upward financially and socially, buying and furnishing houses, quarrelling with her friends, acquiring sheiks, malforming her children’s minds, capriciously interfering with their education, swanking to the Hartlys with her money, patronising the now aged and less venomous dear Mamma, and other lofty and inspiring activities. Was she happy? What a question! We are not placed here by a benevolent Providence to be happy, but to make ourselves unpleasant to our neighbours and to impose the least amiable portions of our personalities on as many people as possible. Was George Augustus happy? Which I parry with – did he deserve to be happy? He made money, anyway, which is more than you and I can do. He dropped claret for whisky, and the aesthetes for the “English Classics,” all those “noble” authors who have “stood the test of time,” and thereby become so very dull that one prefers to go to the cinema, which has not stood any such test. He had a brougham, in which he drove daily to his office. He became a Worshipful Grand Master, and possessed any amount of funny little medals and coloured leather caches-sexe, which are apparently worn in the Mysteries of the Freemasons. He framed his certificates as a Solicitor, a Buffalo, a Druid, and all the other queer things, and hung them in various places to surprise and awe the inexperienced. He had a great many bills. For about ten years he was so prosperous that he was able to give up attending Church on Sundays.

4

GEORGE, the younger, liked Hamborough best, perhaps, Martin’s Point next, Pamber hardly at all, and he detested Dullborough, the town which contained his father’s offices and the minor public school which he attended.

The mind of a very young child is not very interesting. It has imagination and wonder, but too unregulated, too bizarre, too “quaint,” too credulous. Does it matter very much that George babbled o’ white lobsters, stirred up frogs in a bucket, thought that the word “mist” meant sunset, and was easily persuaded that a sort of milk pudding he detested had been made from an ostrich’s egg? Of course, a good deal of adult imagination consists in people’s persuading themselves that they can see white lobsters, just as their poetry consists in persuading themselves that the milk pudding did come out of the ostrich’s egg. The child at least is honest, which is something. But on the whole the young child-mind is boring.

The intellect wakes earlier than the feelings, curiosity before the passions. The child asks the scientist’s Why? before he asks the poet’s How? George read little primers on Botany and Geology and the Story of the Stars, and collected butterflies, and wanted to do chemistry, and hated Greek. And then one evening the world changed. It was at Martin’s Point. All one night the South-West wind had streamed over the empty downs, sweeping up in a crescendo of sound to a shrill ecstasy of speed, sinking into abrupt sobs of dying vigour, while underneath steadily, unyieldingly, streamed and roared the major volume of the storm. The windows rattled. Rain pelted on the panes, oozed and bubbled through the joints of the woodwork. The sea, dimly visible at dusk, rolled furiously – tossing the long breakers on the rocks, and made a tumult of white horses in the Channel. Even the largest ships took shelter. In the irregular harmony of that storm George went to sleep in his narrow, lonely child’s bed, and who knows what Genius, what Puck, what elm Spirit of Beauty came riding on the storm from the South, and shed the juice of what magic herb on his closed eyes? All next day the gale blew with ever-diminishing violence. It was a half-holiday, and no games on account of the wet. After lunch, George went to his room, and sank absorbed in his books, his butterflies, his moths, his fossils. He was aroused by a sudden glare of yellow sunlight. The storm had blown itself out. The last clouds, broken in lurid, ragged-edged fragments, were sailing gently over a soft blue sky. Soon even they were gone. George opened the window and leaned out. The heavy, dank smell of wet earth-mould came up to him with its stifling hyacinth-like quality; the rain-drenched privet was almost oversweet; the young poplar leaves twinkled and trembled in the last gusts, shaking down rapid chains of diamonds. But it was all fresh – fresh with the clarity of air which follows a great gale, with the scentless purity of young leaves, the drenched grasses of the empty downs. The sun moved majestically and imperceptibly downwards in a widening pool of gold, which faded, as the great ball vanished, into pure, clear, hard green and blue. One, two, a dozen blackbirds and linnets and thrushes were singing; and as the light faded they dwindled to one blackbird tune of exquisite melancholy and purity.

Beauty is in us, not outside us. We recognize our own beauty in the patterns of the infinite flux. Light, form, movement, glitter, scent, sound, suddenly apprehended as givers of delight, as interpreters of the inner vitality, not as the customary aspect of things. A boy, caught for the first time in a kind of ecstasy, brooding on the mystery of beauty.

A penetrating voice came up the stairs:

“Georgie! Georgie! Come out of that stuffy room at once! I want you to get me something from Gilpin’s.”

What perverse instinct tells them when to strike? How do they learn to break the crystal mood so unerringly? Why do they hate the mystery so much?

Long before he was fifteen George was living a double life – one life for school and home, another for himself. Consummate dissimulation of youth, fighting for the inner vitality and the mystery. How amusingly, but rather tragically, he fooled them! How innocent-seemingly he played the fine, healthy, barbarian schoolboy, even to the slang and the hateful games! Be ye soft as doves and cunning as serpents. He’s such a real boy, you know – viz, not an idea in his head, no suspicion of the mystery.

“Rippin’ game of rugger today, Mother. I scored two tries.” Upstairs was that volume of Keats, artfully abstracted from the shelves.

A double row of huge old poplars beside the narrow brook swayed and danced in the gales, rustled in the late spring breeze, stood spirelike heavy in July sunlight – a stock-in-trade of spires without churches left mysteriously behind by some mediaeval architect. Chestnut trees hung over the walks built on the old town walls. In late May after rain the sweet musty scent filled the lungs and nostrils, and sheets of white and pink petals hid the asphalt. In summer the tiled roofs of the old town were soft deep orange and red, speckled with lemon-coloured lichens. In winter the snow drifted down the streets and formed a tessellated pattern of white and black in the cobbled market-place. The sound of footsteps echoed in the deserted streets. The clock bells from the Norman tower, with its curious bulbous Dutch cupola, rang so leisurely, marking a fabulous Time.

Said the gardener:

“It’s a rum thing, Master George, them rabbits don’t drink, and they makes water; and the chickens don’t make water, but they drinks it.”

Insoluble problem, capricious decrees of Providence.

Confirmation classes.

“You’ll have to go and see old Squish.”

“What’s he say to you?”

“Oh, he gives you a lot of jaw, and asks you if you know any smut.”

In the School Chapel. Full-dress Preparation Class for Confirmation. The Head in academic hood and surplice entered the pulpit. Whispers sank to intimidated silence, dramatically prolonged by the hawk-faced man silently bullying the rows of immature eyes. Then in slow, deliberate, impressive tones:

“Within ten years one half of you boys will be DEAD!”

Moral:prepare to meet thy God, and avoid smut.

But did he know, that blind prophet?

Was he inspired, that stately hypocrite?

Like a moral vulture he leaned over and tortured his palpitating prey. Motionless in body, they writhed within, as he painted dramatically the penalties of Vice and Sin, drew pictures of Hell. But did he know? Did he know the hell they were going to within ten years, did he know how soon most of their names would be on the Chapel wall? How he must have enjoyed composing that inscription to those “who went forth unfalteringly, and proudly laid down their lives for King and Country”!

One part of the mystery was called SMUT. If you were smutty you went mad and had to go into a lunatic asylum. Or you “contracted a loathsome disease” and your nose fell off.

The pomps and vanities of this wicked world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh. So it was wicked, like being smutty, to feel happy when you looked at things and read Keats? Perhaps you went mad that way too and your eyes fell out?

“That’s what makes them lay eggs,” said the little girl, swinging her long golden hair and laughing, as the cock leaped on a hen.

O dreadful, O wicked little girl, you’re talking smut to me. You’ll go mad, I shall go mad, our noses will drop off. Oh, please don’t talk like that, please, please!

From fornication and all other deadly sins… What is fornication? Have I committed fornication? Is that the holy word for smut? Why don’t they tell me what it means? why is it the foulest thing a decent man can commit? When that thing happened in the night it must have been fornication; I shall go mad and my nose will drop off.

Hymn Number… A few more years shall roll.

How wicked I must be!

Are there two religions? A few more years shall roll, in ten years half of you boys will be dead, Smut, nose dropping off, fornication and all other deadly sins. Oh, wash me in Thy Precious Blood, and take my sins away. Blood, Smut.

And then the other – a draught of vintage that has been cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, tasting of Flora and the country green, dance and Proven~al song, and sunburned mirth? Listening to the sound of the wind as you fell asleep; watching the blue butterflies and the Small Coppers hovering and settling on the great scented lavender bush; taking off your clothes and letting your body slide into a cool, deep, clear rock-pool, while the grey kittiwakes clamoured round the sun-white cliffs and the scent of seaweeds and salt water filled you; watching the sun go down and trying to write something of what it made you feel, like Keats; getting up very early in the morning and riding out along the white empty lanes on your bicycle; wanting to be alone and think about things and feeling strange and happy and ecstatic – was that another religion? Or was that all Smut and Sin? Best not speak of it, best keep it all hidden. I can’t help it if it is Smut and Sin. Is Romeo and Juliet smut? It’s in the same book where you do parsing and analysis out of King John. Seize on the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand and steal immortal blessing from her lips…

But more than words about things were things themselves. You looked and looked at them, and then you wanted to put down what they looked like, rearrange them in patterns. In the drawing-class they made you look at a dirty whitish cube, cylinder, and cone, and you drew and re-drew hard outlines which weren’t there. But for yourself you wanted to get the colours of things and how they faded into each other and how they formed themselves – or did you form them? – into exciting patterns. It was so much more fun to paint things than even to read what Keats and Shakespeare thought about them. George spent all his pocket-money on paints and drawingpencils and sketch-books and oil-sketching paper and water-colour blocks. For a long time he hadn’t much to look at, even in reproductions. He had Cruikshank and Qmz illustrations which he didn’t much care for; and a reproduction of a Bouguereau which he hated; and two Rossetti pictures which he rather liked; and a catalogue of the Tate Collection which gave him photographs of a great many horrible Watts and Frank Dicksees. Best of all, he liked an album of coloured reproductions of Turner’s watercolours. Then, one spring, George Augustus took him to Paris for a few days. They did an “educative” visit to the Louvre, and George simply leaped at the Italians and became very Pre-Raphaelite and adored the Primitives. He was quite feverish for weeks after he got back, unable to talk of anything else. Isabel was worried about him: it was so unboyish, so – well, really, quite unhealthy, all this silly craze for pictures, and spending hours and hours crouching over paint-blocks, instead of being in the fresh air. So much nicer for the boy to be manly. Wasn’t he old enough to have a gun licence and learn to kill things?

So George had a gun licence, and went out shooting every morning in the autumn. He killed several plovers and a wood-pigeon. Then one frosty November morning he fired into a flock of plovers, killed one, and wounded another, which fell down on the crisp grass with such a wail of despair. “If you wing a bird, pick it up and wring its neck”, he had been told. He picked up the struggling, heaving little mass of feathers, and with infinite repugnance and shut eyes tried to wring its neck. The bird struggled and squawked. George wrung harder and convulsively – and the whole head came off in his hand. The shock was unspeakable. He left the wretched body, and hurried home shuddering. Never again, never, never again would he kill things. He oiled his gun dutifully, as he had been told to do, put it away, and never touched it again. At nights he was haunted by the plover’s wail and by the ghastly sight of the headless, bleeding bird’s body. In the daytime he thought of them. He could forget them when he went out and sketched the calm trees and fields, or tried to desigu in his tranquil room. He plunged more deeply into painting than ever, and thus ended one of the many attempts to “make a man” of George Winterbourne.

The business of “making a man” of him was pursued at School, but with little more success, even with the aid of compulsion.

“The type of boy we aim at turning out,” the Head used to say to impressed parents, “is a thoroughly manly fellow. We prepare for the Universities, of course, but our pride is in our excellent Sports Record. There is an O.T.C., organized by Sergeant-Major Brown (who served throughout the South African War) and officered by the masters who have been trained in the Militia. Every boy must undergo six months’ training, and is then competent to take up arms for his Country in an emergency.”

The parents murmured polite approval, though rather tender mothers hoped the discipline was not too strict and “the guns not too heavy for young arms.” The head was contemptuously and urbanely reassuring. On such occasions he invariably quoted those stirring and indeed immortal lines of Rudyard Kipling which end up, “You’ll be a man, my son.” It is so important to know how to kill. Indeed, unless you know how to kill you cannot possibly be a Man, still less a Gentleman.

“The O.T.C. will parade in the Gymnasium for drill and instruction at twelve. Those who are excused will take Geography under Mr. Hobbs in Room 14.”

George hated the idea of the O.T.C. – he didn’t quite know why, but he somehow didn’t want to learn to kill and be a thoroughly manly fellow. Also, he resented being ordered about. Why should one be ordered about by thoroughly manly fellows whom one hates and despises? But then, as a very worthy and thoroughly manly fellow (who spent the War years in the Intelligence Department of the War Office, censoring letters) said of George many years later: “What Winterbourne needs is discipline, Discipline. He is far too self-willed and independent. The Army will make a Man of him.” Alas! it made a corpse of him. But then, as we all know, there is no Price too high to pay for the privilege of being made a thoroughly manly fellow.

So George, feeling immeasurably guilty, but immeasurably repelled, sneaked into the Geography class, instead of parading like a thoroughly manly fellow in embryo. In ten minutes a virtuous-looking but rather pimply prefect appeared:

“Captain James’s compliments, sir, and is Winterbourne here?”

As George was walked over to the Gymnasium by the innocent-looking, rather pimply, but thoroughly manly prefect, the latter said:

“Why couldn’t you do what you’re told, you filthy little sneak, instead of having to be ignominiously fetched?”

George made no answer. He just went hard and obstinate, hate-obstinate, inside. He was so clumsy and so bored – in spite of infinite manly bullyings – that the O.T.C. was very glad indeed to send him back to the Geography class after a few drills. He just went hate-obstinate, and obeyed with sullen, hate-obstinate docility. He didn’t disobey, but he didn’t really obey, not with anything inside him. He was just passive, and they could do nothing with him.

He wrote a great many impositions that term and lost a number of his precious half-holidays, the hours when he could sketch and paint and think about things. But they didn’t get at the inside vitality, it retreated behind another wall or two, threw up more sullen, hate-obstinate walls, but it was there all right, it might be all Smut and Sin; but if it was, well, Smutty and Sinful he would be. Only, he wouldn’t say “turd” and “talk smut” with the others, and he kicked out fiercely when any of the innocent-looking, rather pimply prefects tried to put their arms round him or make him a “case”. He just wouldn’t have it. He was more than hate-obstinate then, and blazed into fearful white rages, which left him trembling for hours, unable even to hold a pen. Consequently, the prefects reported that Winterbourne had “gone smutty” and was injuring his health, and he was “interviewed” by his House Master and the Head – but he baffled them with the hate-obstinate silence, and the inner exultation he felt in being Sinful and Smutty in his own way, along with Keats and Turner and Shakespeare.

The prefects gave him a good many “prefects’ lickings” on various pretexts, but they never made him cry, even, let alone break down the wall between his inner aliveness and their thorough manliness.