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 Vizitelly
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, frowzily, 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 pudding-y 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 troop-ship, a
malarial morass in the West Indies, on the road to Khandahar. 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,
“superfœtation of τὸ ἒν.”)
* * * * *
Isabel Hartly was one—don’t ask which in numerical order, or by
which wife—of Captain Hartly’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 Non-Conformists of mature years, and “nice” youths and
maidens of exemplary Non-Conformist 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
Non-Conformist tract he had published at fifteen. He gave Ma Hartly a
fourteen-pound tin of that expensive (2/3 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 1/6 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 _exalté_ 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_—
“Oh, 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 to 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. Oh that I need not leave you
to-night!”
On the way home Isabel said:
“You must speak to father to-morrow.”
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 3/6 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 good will
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 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 *******.
Come and see the *******.”
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
how to postpone conception ** **** ** ***** ** **** *** ** **********
* ****** *****, ****** ******* ** *** ****** *** **** ***** ** ****
******; he did not know what is implied by “a normal sexual life”;
** *** *** **** **** ***** *** *** ****** ***** *******; ** *** ***
**** **** ** ***** * *** *** ********* *** ******** ***** **** ***
** ******* * ***** **** * ***** *** ** *** **** ****** **** *** ****
********* ** *** *** *** **** **; ** *** **** **** ***** **** *******;
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 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 brutalize 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 rêve_ gave Isabel her
first baby.
[ II ]
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 _ménage_ 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 immediately
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, smoke-blackened 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 cheese-paring
genteely 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 then 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 Non-Conformist
tract hypocrisy, and only picked it up again when Isabel fainted.
On dear Papa’s suggestion George Augustus took Isabel away to the
sea-side on what was left of the £200; and thus it happened that George
was born in a sea-side 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 agonizing labour, George
Augustus prayed freely, took short walks, read “Lorna Doone,” had a
half bottle of claret with his lunch and dinner, and slept tranquilly
o’ nights. When, finally, he was admitted on tip-toe 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 tip-toed down to
dinner, and ordered a whole bottle of claret in honour of the event.
[ III ]
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 formulæ, 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
overambitious, and turned sour and sharp under the tender mercies of
dear Mamma, she became 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 harmless
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
Non-Conformist 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
Tatersall’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 æsthetic.
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 had wept for beautiful Bion. In Athens he had reclined,
violet-crowned, at the banquet where Socrates reasoned of love with
Alcibiades. But above all he felt a stupendous passion for mediæval
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 æsthete 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 æstheticism. 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 art-y 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 æsthetic 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 panes, 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 æstheticism 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 fairly 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 I 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. Winterbourne 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 has 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 et cetera; 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 Hartly 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 1/6 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 æsthetes 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 known 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! **** ***** **** *****, *** **** ****
**** **** ***** ******.
* * * * *
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-me! 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 art-y 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 forever 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 hemorrhoids 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 have long ago 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 dependents. 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 days.
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 æstheticism 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 greenery-yallery. I don’t say he burned his books and art-y 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 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 unæsthetic ugliness. Urged on by Isabel he
became a Free Mason, 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, patronizing 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 whiskey, and the æsthetes 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 _cache-sexe_, which are
apparently worn in the Mysteries of the Free Masons. 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.
[ IV ]
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 peoples’ 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 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 elfin
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 over-sweet; 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: