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 to-day, 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 mediæval 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. O 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 Provençal song, and sun-burned 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 sea-weeds 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,
re-arrange 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 drawing pencils 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 Quiz illustrations, which he
didn’t much care for; and a reproduction of a Bougereau 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 water-colours. 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 license and learn to kill things?
So George had a gun license, and went out every morning in the autumn
shooting. 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 design 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
sodomitical prefect appeared:
“Captain James’s compliments, Sir, and is Winterbourne here?”
As George was walked over to the Gymnasium by the innocent-looking,
rather sodomitical 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 sodomitical
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.
He got a very bad report that term, and no remove. For which he was
duly lectured and reprimanded. As the bullyingly urbane Head reproved,
did he know that the sullen, rather hard-faced boy in front of him
was not listening, was silently reciting to himself the Ode to a
Nightingale, as a kind of inner Declaration of Independence? “Magic
casements”—that was when you opened the window wide at sunset to
listen to the birds, or at night-time to look at the stars, or first
thing in the morning to smell the fresh sunlight and watch the leaves
glittering.
“If you go on like this, Winterbourne, you will disgrace yourself, your
parents, your House and your School. You take little or no interest in
the School life, and your Games record is abominable. Your set-captain
tells me that you have cut Games ten times this term, and your Form
Master reports that you have over a thousand lines of impositions yet
to work off. Your conduct with regard to the O.T.C. was contemptible
and unmanly to a degree we have never experienced in _this_ School. I
am also told that you are ruining your health with secret abominable
practices against which I warned you—unavailingly I fear—at the time
I endeavoured to prepare you for Confirmation and Holy Communion. I
notice that you have only once taken Communion since your Confirmation,
although more than six months have passed. What you do when you cut
Games and go running off to your home, I do not know. It cannot be
anything good.” (Magic casements, opening on the foam—) “It would pain
me to have to ask your parents to remove you from the School, but we
want no wasters and sneaks here. Most, indeed all, your fellow boys
are fine manly fellows; and you have the excellent example of your
House Prefects before you. Why can you not imitate them? What nonsense
have you got into your head? Speak out, and tell me plainly. Have you
entangled yourself in any way?”
No answer.
“What do you do in your spare time?”
No answer.
“Your obstinate silence gives me the right to suspect the worst.
_What_ you do I can imagine, but prefer not to mention. Now, for the
last time, will you speak out honourably and manfully, and tell me what
it is you do that makes you neglect your work and Games and makes you
conspicuous in the School for sullen and obstinate behaviour?”
No answer.
“Very well. You will receive twelve strokes from the birch. Bend over.”
George’s face quivered, but he had not shed a tear or made a sound, as
he turned silently to go.
“Stop. Kneel down at that chair, and we will pray together that this
lesson may be of service to you, and that you may conquer your evil
habits. Let us together pray GOD that He will have Mercy upon you, and
make you into a really manly fellow.”
They prayed.
Or rather the Head prayed, and George remained silent. He did not even
say “Amen.”
* * * * *
After that the School gave him up and let him drift. He was supposed
to be dull-minded as well as obstinate and unmanly, and was allowed
to vegetate vaguely about the Lower Fifth. Maybe he picked up more
even of the little they had to teach than they suspected. But as
the silent, rather white-faced, rather worried-looking boy went
mechanically through the day’s routine, hung about in corridors, moved
from classroom to classroom, he was busy enough inside, building up
a life of his own. George went at George Augustus’s books with the
energy of a fierce physical hunger. He once showed me a list in an old
notebook of the books he had read before he was sixteen. Among other
things he had raced through most of the poets from Chaucer onwards. It
was not the amount that he read which mattered, but the way in which
he read. Having no single person to talk to openly, no one to whom he
could reveal himself, no one from whom he could learn what he wanted to
know, he was perforce thrust back upon books. The English poets and the
foreign painters were his only real friends. They were his interpreters
of the mystery, the defenders of the inner vitality which he was
fighting unconsciously to save. Naturally, the School was against him.
They set out to produce “a type of thoroughly manly fellow,” a “type”
which unhesitatingly accepted the prejudices, the “code” put before it,
docilely conformed to a set of rules. George dumbly claimed to think
for himself, above all to _be_ himself. The “others” were good enough
fellows, no doubt, but they really had no selves to _be_. They hadn’t
the flame. The things which to George were the very _cor cordium_ of
life meant nothing to them, simply passed them by. They wanted to be
approved and be healthy barbarians, cultivating a little smut on the
sly, and finally dropping into some convenient post in life where the
“thoroughly manly fellow” was appreciated—mostly one must admit,
minor and unpleasant and not very remunerative posts in unhealthy
colonies. The Empire’s backbone. George, though he didn’t realize it
then, wasn’t going to be a bit of any damned Empire’s backbone, still
less part of its kicked backside. He didn’t mind going to hell, and
disgracing himself and his parents and his House and The School, if
only he could go to hell in his own way. That’s what they couldn’t
stand—the obstinate, passive refusal to accept their prejudices, to
conform to their minor-gentry, kicked-backside-of-the-Empire code. They
worried him, they bullied him, they frightened him with cock-and-bull
yarns about Smut and noses dropping off; but they didn’t get him. I
wish he hadn’t been worried and bullied to death by those two women. I
wish he hadn’t stood up to that machine-gun just one week before the
Torture ended. After he had fought the swine (i.e., the British ones)
so gallantly for so many years. If only he had hung on a little longer,
and come back, and done what he wanted to do! He could have done it, he
could have “got there”; and then even “The School” would have fawned on
him. Bloody fool. Couldn’t he see that we have only one duty—to hang
on, and smash the swine?
* * * * *
Once, only once, he nearly gave himself away to The School. At the
end of the examinations, as a sort of afterthought, there was an
English Essay. One of the subjects was: What do you want to do in Life?
George’s enthusiasm got the better of his caution, and he wrote a crude
enthusiastic school-boyish rhapsody, laying down an immense programme
of life, from travel to astronomy, with the beloved Painting as the end
and crown of all. Needless to say he did not get the Prize or even any
honourable mention. But, to his amazement, on the last day of term, as
they went to evening Chapel, the Head strolled up, put an arm round his
shoulders, and pointing to the planet Venus, said:
“Do you know what that star is, my boy?”
“No, Sir.”
“That is Sirius, a gigantic sun, many millions of miles distant from
us.”
“Yes, Sir.”
And then the conversation languished. The Head removed his arm,
and they entered the Chapel. The last hymn was “Onward, Christian
Soldiers,” because ten of the senior boys were going to Sandhurst.
George did not join actively in the service.
* * * * *
The summer holidays were the only part of the year when he was really
happy.
* * * * *
The country inland from Martin’s Point is rather barren. But, like all
the non-industrialized parts of England it has a character, very shy
like a little silvery-grey old lady, which acts gently but in the end
rather strongly on the mind. It was the edge of one of the long chalk
downs of England, with salt marshes to left and right, and fertile
clay land far behind—too far for George to reach even on a bicycle.
In detail it seemed colourless and commonplace. From the crest of one
of the high ridges, it had a kind of silvery-grey, very old quality,
with its great bare treeless fields making faint chequer-patterns on
the long gentle slopes, with always a fringe of silvery-grey sea in
the far distance. The chalk was ridged in long parallels, like the
swell of some gigantic ocean arrested in rock. The ridges became more
abrupt and violent near the coast, and ended in a long irregular wall
of silvery-grey chalk, poised like a huge wave of rock-foam forever
motionless and forever silent, while forever at its base lapped the
petty waves of the mobile and whispering sea. The sheep-and-wind-nipped
turf of the downs grew dwarf bee-orchis, blue-purple bugloss, tall
ragged knapweed and frail hare-bells. In the valleys were tall thistles
and fox-gloves. Certain nooks were curiously rich with wildflowers
mixed with deep rich-red clover and marguerite-daisies. In the summer
these little flowery patches—so precious and conspicuous in the
surrounding barrenness—were a flicker of butterfly wings—the creamy
Marbled Whites, electric blue of the Chakhill Blue, sky-blue of the
Common and Holly Blue, rich tawny of the Fritilliaries, metallic gleam
of the Coppers, cool drab of the Meadow Browns. The Peacock, the Red
Admiral, the Painted Lady, the Tortoiseshell wheeled over the nettles
and thistles, poised on the flowers, fanning their rich mottled wings.
In a certain field in August you could find Clouded Yellows rapidly
moving in little curves and irregular dashes of flight over swaying
red-purple clover, which seemed to drift like a sea as the wind ran
over it.
Yet with all this colour the “feel” of the land was silvery-grey.
The thorn-bushes and the rare trees were bent at an angle under the
pressure of the South-West gales. The inland hamlets and farms huddled
down in the hollows behind a protecting wall of elms. They were humble,
unpretentious but authentic, like the lives of the shepherds and
ploughmen who lived in them. The three to ten miles which separated
them from the pretentious suburbanity of Martin’s Point might have
been three hundred, so unmoved, so untouched were they by its golf and
its idleness and tea-party scandals and even its increasing number of
“cars.” In hollows, too, crouched its low, flint-built Norman churches,
so unpretentious, for all the richness of dog-toothed porches and
Byzantine-looking tympanums and conventionalized satiric heads sneering
and gaping and grimacing from the string-courses. Hard satiric people
those Norman conquerors must have been—you can see the hard satiric
effigies of some of their descendants in the Temple Churche. They must
have crushed the Saxon shepherds and swineherds under their steel
gauntlets, smiling in a hard satiric way. And even their piety was hard
and satiric, if you can judge from the little flinty satiric churches
they scattered over the land. Then they must have pushed on westward to
richer lands, abandoning those barren downs and scanty fields to the
descendants of the oppressed Saxon. So the land seemed old; but the
hard satiric quality of the Normans only remained in odd nooks of their
churches—all the rest had grown gentle and silvery-grey, like a rather
sweet and gentle silvery-grey old lady.
* * * * *
All this George struggled to express with his
drawing-and-paint-blocks. He tried to absorb—and to some extent
did absorb—the peculiar quality of the country. He attempted it
all, from the twenty-mile sweeps of undulating Down fringed by the
grey-silver sea, to the church doors and little patient photographic,
semi-scientific painting of the flowers and butterflies. From the point
of view of a painter, he was always too literal, too topographical,
too minutely interested in detail. He saw the poetry of the land but
didn’t express it in form and colour. The old English landscape school
of 1770-1840 died long before Turner’s body reached St. Paul’s and
his money went into the pockets of the greedy English lawyers instead
of to the painters for whom he intended it. The impulse expired in
painstaking topography and sentimental prettiness. There wasn’t the
vitality, the capacity to struggle on, which you find in the best work
of painters like Friesz, Vlaminck and even Utrillo, who can find a new
sort of poetry in tossing trees or a white farmhouse or a _bistro_ in
the Paris suburbs. George, even at fifteen, knew what he wanted to say
in paint, but couldn’t say it. He could appreciate it in others, but he
hadn’t got the power of expression in him.
* * * * *
Hitherto George had been quite alone in his blind instinctive
struggle—the fight against the effort to force him into a mould, the
eager searching out for life and more life which would respond to
the spark of life within. Now, he began to find unexpected allies,
discovered at first almost with suspicion, then with immense happiness,
that he was not quite alone, that there were others who valued what he
valued. He discovered men’s friendship and the touch of girls’ lips and
hands.
First came Mr. Barnaby Slush, at that time a “most famous novelist,”
who had hit the morbid-cretinish British taste with a sensational,
crude-Christian moral novel which sold millions of copies in a year
and is now forgotten, except that it probably lies embalmed somewhere
in the Tauchnitz collection, that mausoleum of unreadable works. Mr.
Slush was a bit of a boozer and highly delighted with his notoriety.
Still, he did occasionally look around him; he was not wholly blinkered
with prejudice and unheeding blankness like most of the middle-class
inhabitants of Martin’s Point. He noticed George, laughed at some of
the pert but pretty acute schoolboyish remarks George made and for
which he was invariably squelched, was “interested” in his passion for
painting and the persistence he gave to it.
“There’s something in that boy of yours, Mrs. Winterbourne. He’s got a
mind. He’ll do something in the world.”
“Oh, do you think so, Mr. Slush,”—Isabel, half-flattered,
half-bristling with horror and rage at the thought that George might
“have a mind”—“he’s just a healthy, happy schoolboy, and only thinks
of pleasing his Mummie.”
“Umph,” said Mr. Slush. “Well, I’d like to do something for him.
There’s more in him than you think. _I_ believe there’s an artist in
him.”
“If I thought that,” exclaimed Isabel viciously, “I’d flog him till
all such nonsense was flogged out of him.”
Mr. Slush saw he was doing George more harm than good by this
well-meant effort, and was discreetly silent. However, he gave George
one or two books, and tried to talk to him on the side. But George was
still suspicious of all grown-ups, particularly those who came and
drank whiskey in the evening with George Augustus and Isabel. Besides
poor, flabby, drink-sodden, kindly Mr. Slush rather repelled his hard
intolerant youthfulness; and they got nowhere in particular. Still,
Mr. Slush was important to the extent that he prepared George to give
some confidence to others. He broke down the first outer wall built by
George against the world. The way in which Isabel got rid of Mr. Slush,
whose possible influence on George she instinctively suspected, was
rather amusing. George Augustus and Mr. Slush went to a Free Masons’
dinner together. Now that Free Masonry had served its purpose, Isabel
was intensely jealous of its mysteries—poor mysteries!—which George
Augustus honourably refused to reveal to her, and she hated those
periodical dinners with a bitter hatred. That night there arose one of
the most terrific thunder storms which had ever been known in that part
of the country. For six hours forked and sheet lightning leaped and
stabbed at earth and sea from three sides of the horizon; crash after
crash of thunder broke over Martin’s Point and rumbled terrifically
against the cliffs, while desperate drenching sheets of rain beat
madly on roofs and windows and gushed wetly down the steep roads. It
was impossible for the men to get home. They remained—drinking a good
deal—at the hotel until nearly four, and then drove home sleepily and
merrily. Isabel put on her tragedy queen air, sat up all night, and
greeted George Augustus with horrid invective:
“Think of poor Mrs. Slush out there in that lonely farm, and me and the
children crouching here in terror, while you men were guzzling, and
besotting yourselves with whiskey... et cetera, et cetera.”
Poor George Augustus attempted a feeble defence—it was swept away.
Mr. Slush innocently walked over next day to see how things were
after the storm, was insulted, and driven from the house in amazed
indignation. He “put” Isabel a little vindictively “in his next novel,”
but as she said and said truly, he never “darkened their doors” again.
* * * * *
In one way George loved the grey sea and barrenness, in another way he
hated them. To get away to the lush inland country was a release, an
ecstasy, the more precious in that it happened so rarely. When he was
a small child, a maid-servant took him “down home” to the hop-picking.
Confused and fantastic memories of it remained with him. He never
forgot the penetrating sunlight, the long dusty ride in the horse-bus,
the sensation of hot sharp-scented shadow under the tall vines, the joy
of the great rustling heaps falling downward as the foreman cut the
strings, the tenderness of the rough women hop-pickers, the taste of
the smoky picnic tea and heavy soggy cake (so delicious!) they gave him.
Later—in the fourteen-sixteen years—it was a joy to visit the
Hambles. They were retired professional people, who lived in a remote
country house among lush meadows and rich woods. Mr. Hamble was a
large, freckly man who collected insects, and was a skilled botanist;
and thus charmed that side of George. But the real delight was the lush
countryside—and Priscilla. Priscilla was the Hambles’ daughter, almost
exactly George’s age; and between those two was a curious, intense,
childish passion. She was very golden and pretty; much too pretty, for
it made her self-conscious and flirtatious. But the passion between
those two children was a genuine thing. A pity that this sort of
Daphnis and Chloe passion is not allowed free physical expression under
our puling obscene conventions. There was always something a little
frustrated in both George and Priscilla because the timidity and false
modesty imposed on them prevented the natural physical expression. For
quite three years George was under the influence of his passion for
Priscilla, never really forgot her, always in a dim, dumb, subconscious
way felt the frustration. Like all passions it was something fugitive,
the product of a phase, but it ought not to have been frustrated. It
was a pity they were so often separated, because that meant infinite
letter-writing; and so made him always tend to too much idealizing
and intellectualizing in love affairs. But when they were together it
was pure happiness. Priscilla was a very demure and charming little
mistress. They played all sorts of games with other children, and
went fishing in the brook, picked flowers in the rich water-meadows,
hunted bird-nests along the hedges. All these things, great fun in
themselves, were so much more fun because Priscilla was there, because
they held hands and kissed, and felt very serious, like real lovers.
Sometimes he dared to touch her childish breasts. And the feeling of
friendliness from the clasp of Priscilla’s hands, the pleasure of her
short childish kisses and sweet breath, the delicate texture of her
warm childish-swelling breasts, never quite left him; and to remember
Priscilla was like remembering a fragrant English garden. Like an
English garden, she was a little old-fashioned and self-consciously
comely, but she was so spring-like and golden. She was immensely
important to George. She was something he could love unreservedly, even
if it was only with the mawkish love of adolescence. But far more than
that temporary service she gave him the capacity to love women, saved
him from the latent homosexuality which lurks in so many Englishmen,
and makes them forever dissatisfied with their women. She revealed to
him—all unconsciously—the subtle inexhaustible joys of the tender
companionate woman’s body. Even then he felt the delicious contrast
between his male nervous muscled hands and her tender budding breasts,
opening flowers to be held so delicately and affectionately. And from
her too he learned that the most satisfactory loves are those which do
not last too long, those which are never made thorny with hate, and
drift gently into the past, leaving behind only a fragrance—not a
sting—of regret. His memories of Priscilla were few, but all roses....
* * * * *
You see, they cannot really kill the spark if it is there, not with
all their bullyings and codes and prejudices and thorough manliness.
For, of course, they are not manly at all, they are merely puppets,
the products of the system—if it may be dignified by that word.
The truly manly ones are those who have the spark, and refuse to
let it be extinguished; those who know that the true values are the
vital values, not the £. s. d. and falling-into-a-good-post and the
kicked-backside-of-the-Empire values. George had already found a sort
of ally in poor Mr. Slush, and an exquisite child-passion in Priscilla.
But he needed men, too, and was lucky enough to find them. How can one
estimate what he owed to Dudley Pollak and to Donald and Tom Conington?
* * * * *
Dudley Pollak was a mysterious bird. He was a married man in the late
fifties, who had been to Cambridge, made the Grand Tour, lived in
Paris, Berlin and Italy, known numbers of fairly eminent people, owned
a large country house, appeared to have means, possessed very beautiful
furniture and all sorts of _objets d’art_, and was a cultivated man—in
most of which respects he differed exceedingly from the inhabitants of
Martin’s Point. Now, what do you suppose was the reason why Pollak and
Mrs. Pollak let their large house furnished, and spent several years
in a small cottage in a rather dreary village street a couple of miles
from Martin’s Point? George never knew, and nobody else ever knew. The
fantastic and scandalous theories evolved by Martin’s Point to explain
this mystery were amusing evidence of the vulgar stupidity of those who
formed them, and have no other interest. The Pollaks themselves said
that they had grown tired of their large house and that Mrs. Pollak
was weary of managing servants. So simple is the truth that this very
likely was the real explanation. At any rate, there they lived together
in their cottage, crowded with furniture and books, cooking their own
meals very often—they were both excellent cooks—and waited on by a
couple of servants who “lived out.” Now, although Pollak was forty
years older than George, he was in a sense the boy’s first real friend.
The Pollaks had no children of their own, which may go to explain this
odd but deep friendship.
Pollak was a much wilier bird than poor old Slush. He sized Isabel
up very quickly and accurately, and just politely refused to let her
quarrel with him, and just as politely refused to receive her. But he
was so obviously a gentleman, so obviously a man of means, that no
reasonable objection could be made when he proposed to George Augustus
that “Georgie” should come to tea once a week and learn chess. Martin’s
Point was a very chess-y place; it was somehow a mark of respectability
there. Before this, George had gone to play chess with a very elderly
gentleman, who put so much of the few brains he had into that game that
he had none left for the preposterous poems he composed, or, indeed,
anything else. So every Wednesday George went to tea with the Pollaks.
They always began, most honourably and scrupulously, with a game of
chess; and then they had tea; and then they talked. Although George
never suspected it until years afterwards, Pollak was subtly educating
him, at the same time that he tried to give him the kind of sympathy
he needed. Pollak had many volumes of Andersen’s photographs, which he
let George turn over while he talked negligently but shrewdly about
Italian architecture, styles of painters, Della Robbia work; and Mrs.
Pollak occasionally threw in some little anecdote about travel. By the
example of his own rather fastidious manners he corrected schoolboy
uncouthnesses. He somehow got George riding lessons, for in Pollak’s
days horse-riding was an indispensable accomplishment. Pollak always
worked on the boy by suggestion and example, never by exhortation or
patronage. He always assumed that George knew what he negligently but
accurately told him. The manner in which he made George learn French
was characteristic of his methods. One afternoon Pollak told a number
of amusing stories about his young days in Paris, while George was
looking through a volume of autographed letters of Napoleon, Talleyrand
and other Frenchmen—which, of course, he could not read. Next week,
when George arrived he found Pollak reading.
“Hullo, Georgie, how are you? Just listen to this lovely thing I’ve
been reading, and tell me what you think of it.”
And Pollak read, in the rather chanting voice he adopted in reading
poetry, André Chenier’s: “L’épi naissant murit, de la faux respecté.”
George had to confess shamefacedly that he hadn’t understood. Pollak
handed him the book, one of those charming large-type Didot volumes;
but André Chénier was too much for George’s public school French.
“Oh, I _do_ wish I could read it properly,” said George. “How did you
learn French?”
“I suppose I learned it in Paris. ’Tis pleasing to be schooled in a
strange tongue by female eyes and lips, you know. But you could learn
very soon if you really tried.”
“But how? I’ve done French at school for ages, and I simply can’t read
it, though I’ve often tried.”
“What you learn at school is only to handle the tools—you’ve got to
learn to use them for yourself. You take _Les Trois Mousquetaires_,
read straight through a few pages, marking the words you don’t know,
look them up, make lists of them, and try to remember them. Don’t
linger over them too much, but try and get interested in the story.”
“But I’ve read _The Three Musketeers_ in English.”
“Well, try _Vingt Ans Après_. You can have my copy and mark it.”
“No, there’s a paper-backed one at home. I’ll use that.”
In a fortnight George had skipped through the first volume of _Vingt
Ans Après_. In a month he could read simple French prose easily. Three
months later he was able to read “_La Jeune Captive_” aloud to Pollak,
who afterwards turned the talk on to Ronsard; and opened up yet another
vista.
* * * * *
The Coningtons were much younger men, the elder a young barrister.
They also talked to George about books and pictures, in which their
taste was more modern if less sure than Pollak’s urbane Second Empire
culture. But with them George learned companionship, the fun of
infinite, everlasting arguments about “life” and ideas, the fun of
making _mots_ and laughing freely. The Coningtons were both great
walkers. George, of course, had the middle class idea that five
miles was the limit of human capacity for walking. Like Pollak, the
Coningtons treated him as if he were a man, assumed also that he could
do what they were showing him how to do. So when Donald Conington came
down for a week-end, he assumed that George would want to walk. That
day’s walk had such an effect upon George that he could even remember
the date, 2nd of June. It was one of those soft cloudless days that do
sometimes happen in England, even in June. They set out from Hamborough
soon after breakfast and struck inland, going at a steady, even pace,
talking and laughing. Donald was in excellent form, cheery and amusing,
happy to be out of harness for a few hours. Four miles brought them
beyond the limits of George’s own wanderings, and after a couple of
hours’ tramp they suddenly came out on the crest of the last chalk
ridge and looked over a wide fertile plain of woodland and tilth and
hop-fields, all shimmering in the warm sunlight. The curious hooked
noses of oast-houses sniffed over the tops of soft round elm-clumps.
They could see three church spires and a dozen hamlets. The only sound
came from the larks high overhead.
“God!” exclaimed Donald in his slightly theatrical way, “what a fair
prospect!”
A fair prospect indeed, and an unforgettable moment when one comes
for the first time to the crest of a hill and looks over an unknown
country shimmering in the sun, with the white coiling English lanes
inviting exploration. Donald set off down the hill, singing lustily:
“O, Mistress mine, where art thou roaming?” George followed a little
hesitatingly. His legs were already rather tired, it was long past
eleven—how would they get back in time for lunch, and what would be
said if they were late? He mentioned his fears timidly to Donald.
“What! Tired? Why, good God, man, we’ve only just started! We’ll push
on another four miles to Crockton, and have lunch in a pub. I told them
we shouldn’t be in until after tea.”
The rest of the day passed for George in a kind of golden glory of
fatigue and exultation. His legs ached bitterly—although they only
walked about fifteen miles all told—but he was ashamed to confess his
tiredness to Donald, who seemed as fresh at the end of the day as when
he started. George came home with confused and happy memories—the
long talk and the friendly silences, the sun’s heat, a deer park and
Georgian red-brick mansion they stopped to look at, the thatched pub
at Crockton where he ate bread and cheese and pickles and drank his
first beer, the elaborately carved Norman church at Crockton. They sat
for half an hour after lunch in the churchyard, while Donald smoked
a pipe. A Red Admiral settled on a grey flat tombstone, speckled
with crinkly orange and flat grey-green lichens. They talked with
would-be profundity about how Plato had likened the Soul—Psyche—to
a butterfly, and about death, and how one couldn’t possibly accept
theology or the idea of personal immortality. But they were cheerful
about it—the only sensible time to discuss these agonizing problems
is after a pleasant meal accompanied with strong drink—and they felt
so well and cheery and animal-insouciant in the warm sunlight that
they didn’t really believe they would ever die. In that they showed
considerable wisdom; for you will remember that the wise Montaigne
spent the first half of his life preparing for death, and the latter
part in arguing that it is much wiser never to think about dying at
all—time enough to think of _that_ when it comes along.
For Donald that was just a pleasant day, which very soon took its
place among the vague mists of half-memory. For George it was all
extraordinarily important. For the first time he felt and understood
companionship between men, the frank unsuspicious exchange of
goodwill and talk, the spontaneous collaboration of two natures.
That was really the most important gain. But he also discovered the
real meaning of travel. It sounds absurd to speak of a fifteen-mile
walk as “travel.” But you may go thousands of miles by train and
boat between one international hotel and another, and not have the
sensation of travelling at all. Travel means the consciousness of
adventure and exploration, the sense of covering the miles, the
ability to seize indefatigably upon every new or familiar source of
delight. Hence the horror of _tourism_, which is a conventionalizing,
a codification of adventure and exploration—which is absurd.
Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is
experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be
any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else—above all a
travel bureau—arrange everything beforehand? It isn’t seeing new and
beautiful things which matters, it’s seeing them for yourself. And if
you want the sensation of covering the miles, go on foot. Three hundred
miles on foot in three weeks will give you indefinitely more sense of
travel, show you infinitely more surprising and beautiful experiences,
than thirty thousand miles of mechanical transport.
* * * * *
George did not rest until he went on a real exploration walk. He
did this with Tom Conington, Donald’s younger brother—and that
walk also was unforgettable, though they were rained upon daily and
subsisted almost entirely upon eggs and bacon, which seems to be the
only food heard of in English country pubs. They took the train to
Corfe Castle, and spent a day in walking over to Swanage through the
half-moor, half-marsh country, with its heather and gorse and nodding
white cotton-grasses. Then they went along the coast to Kimmeridge and
Preston and Lulworth and Lyme Regis, sleeping in cottages and small
pubs. From Lyme Regis they turned inland, and went by way of Honiton,
Collumpton, Tavistock, to Dulverton and Porlock, along the north Devon
coast to Bideford, and back to South Molton, where they had to take
the train, since they had spent their money and had only enough to pay
their fares home. The whole walk lasted less than a fortnight, but it
seemed like two months. They had such a good time, jawing away as they
walked, singing out of tune, finding their way on maps, getting wet
through and drying themselves by tap-room fires, talking to every one,
farmer or labourer, who would talk to them, reading and smoking over
a pint of beer after supper. And always that sense of adventure, of
exploration, which urged them on every morning, even through mist and
rain, and made fatigue and bad inns and muddy roads all rather fun and
an experience.
One gropes very much through all these “influences” and “scenes” and
fragmentary events in trying to form a picture of George in those
years. For example, I found the date of the Crockton walk and a few
disjointed notes about it on the back of a rough sketch of Crockton
church porch. And the itinerary of the walk with Tom Conington, with
a few comments, I found in the back of a volume of selected English
essays, which George presumably took with him on the walk. The heart of
another is indeed a dark forest, and however much I let my imagination
work over these fragments of his life, I find it hard to imagine him
at that time, still harder to imagine what was going on in his mind. I
imagine that he more or less adjusted himself to the public school and
home hostility, that, as time passed and he began to make friends, he
felt more confidence and happiness. Like most sensitive people he was
subject to moods, affected by the weather and the season of the year.
He could pass very rapidly from a mood of exuberant gaiety almost to
despair. A chance remark—as I myself found—was enough to effect that
unfortunate change. He had a habit always of implying more or less than
he said, of assuming that others would always jump with the implied,
not with the expressed, thought. Similarly, he always expected the same
sort of subtle obliquity of expression in others, and very seldom took
remarks at their face value. He could never be convinced or convince
himself that there were not implications under the most commonplace
remark. I suppose he had very early developed this habit of irony as a
protection and as a method of being scornful with seeming innocence. He
never got rid of it.
* * * * *
But for a time he was very happy. At home there was a kind of
truce—ominous had he only known—and he was left much to himself.
Priscilla awoke and satisfied the need for contact with the feminine,
fed the awakening sensuality. Then, when Priscilla somehow drifted
away, there was another, much slighter, more commonplace affair with
a girl named Maisie. She was a slightly coarse, dark type, a little
older than George and much more developed. They used to meet after dark
in the steep lanes of Martin’s Point, and kiss each other. George was
a little scared by the way she gobbled his mouth and pressed herself
against him; and then felt self-reproachful, thinking of Priscilla and
her delicate, English-garden fragrance. One night, Maisie drew them
along a different walk to a deserted part of the down, where a clump of
thick pines made a close shadow over coarse grass. They had to climb up
a steep hillside.
“Oh, I’m tired,” said Maisie, “let’s sit down.”
She lay down on the grass, and George lay beside her. He leaned over
her and felt the low warm mounds of her breasts through his thin summer
shirt.
“The touch of your mouth is beautiful,” said George. “Honey and milk is
under her tongue.”
He put the tip of his tongue between her moist lips, and she touched
it with hers. ************* ** *** ****** * *** ** ** *** *** **** **
*** *** ** *** ****. ***** *** ****** *** *****, ******* * **** **
****** ****. George stupidly wondered why, and kissed her more tenderly
and sensually.
“Your lips,” he murmured, “your lips.”
“But there must be something else,” she whispered back. “I want
something from you.”
“What more can I give you? What could be more beautiful than your
kisses?”
She lay passive and let him kiss her for a few minutes, and then sat up
abruptly.
“I must go home.”
“Oh, but why? We were so happy here, and it’s still early.”
“Yes, but I promised mother I’d be home early to-night.”
George walked back to the door of Maisie’s house, and wondered why her
good-night kiss was so untender, so perfunctory.
A few nights later George went out—on the pretext of “mothing”—in
the hope of finding Maisie. As he came silently round a corner, he saw
about thirty yards ahead, in the dusk, Maisie walking away from him
with a young man of about twenty. His arm was round her waist, and her
head was resting on his shoulder as she used to rest it on George’s. It
is to be hoped that she got her “something else” from the young man.
George turned, and strolled home, looking up at the soft gentle stars,
and thinking hard. “Something else? Something else?” It was his first
intimation that women always want something else—and men too, men too.
* * * * *
When a great liner came round the Foreland, you ran to the telescope
to see whether it was a P. and O., a Red Star or a Hamburg-Amerika. You
soon got to recognize the majestic four-funnelled _Deutschland_ as she
moved rapidly up or down the Channel. The yellow-funnelled boats for
Ostend, the white-funnelled boats for Calais and Folkestone were daily
events, hardly to be noted—and yet how they seemed to lure one to that
unknown life across the narrow seas. On clear days you could see the
faint shining of the cliffs of France. On foggy nights, the prolonged
anapæst of the Foreland Lightship fog-horn answered the hoarse spondees
of the passing ships, groping their way up channel. Even on the most
rainy or most moonlit night, the flash of the lighthouse made dabs
of yellow light on the walls of George’s bedroom. There were no
nightingales at Martin’s Point, but morning and evening thrushes and
blackbirds.
Hamborough was so different, lying off the chalk downs on the edge of
the salt marshes, the desolate, silent, unresponsive, salt marshes,
so gorgeous at sunset. The tidal river ran turbid and level with
its banks, or deep between walls of sinister mud. Little flocks of
fleet-winged grey-white birds—called “oxey-birds”—flickered rapidly
away in front of you on sickle-moon wings. A brown-sailed barge, far
inland, seemed to be gliding overland through the flat green-brown
marsh land. Behind, far across the flat desolate ex-sea-bottom ran the
old coast line, and on a bluff stood the solid ruins of a Roman fort.
“Pe-e-e-wit,” said the plunging plovers, “pee-e-ee-wit.” No other
sound. The white clouds, dappled English clouds, moved so silently over
the cool blue English skies; such faint blue, even on what the English
call a “hot” day.
You went to the marshes by way of the Barbican, the Barbican
through which the old English Kings and knights had ridden with
their men-at-arms, when they made one of their innumerable descents
on more civilized France. There stood the mediæval Barbican, on the
verge of the commonplace little money-grubbing town, like a stranded
vestige from some geological past. What was the Barbican to early
twentieth-century Hamborough? An obstacle to the new motor road, whose
abolition was always being discussed in the Town Council, and whose
destruction was only postponed because the thickness of the walls made
it too expensive. On the other side you walked out into flat fertile
country, past almshouses, and the hoary stone-mullioned Elizabethan
Grammar School, over the level crossing, to Saxon Friedasburg, where
tradition said a temple to Freya had once stood. How silver-grey the
distant sea-fringe, how silver-grey the lines of rippling poplars! How
warmly golden, like Priscilla, the wheat fields under the late August
afternoon sunshine!
These are the gods, the gods who must endure for ever, or as long
as man endures, the gods whom the perverse blood-lustful, torturing
Oriental myths cannot kill. Poseidon, the sea-god, who rules his
grey and white steeds, so gentle and playful in his rare moods of
tranquillity, so savage and destructive in his rage. With a clutch
of his hand he crumples the wooden beams or steel plates of the
wave-wanderers, with a thrust of his elbow he hurls them to destruction
on the hidden sand-bank or the ruthless sharp-toothed rocks. Selene,
the moon-goddess, who flies so swiftly through the breaking clouds of
the departing storm, or hangs so motionless white, so womanly waiting,
in the cobalt night-sky among her attendant stars. Phœbus, who scorns
these silvery-grey northern lands, but whose golden light is so welcome
when it comes. Demeter, who ripens the wheat and plumps the juicy fruit
and sets cordial bitterness in the hop and trails ragged flower and red
hip and haw along the hedges. And then the lesser humbler gods—must
there not be gods of sunrise and twilight, of bird-singing and midnight
silence, of ploughing and harvesting, of the shorn fields and the
young green springing grass, gods of lazy cattle and the uneasily
bleating flocks and of the wild creatures—(hedgehogs and squirrels
and rabbits, and their enemies the weasels)—tenuous Ariel demigods of
the trembling poplars and the many-coloured flowers and the speckled
fluttering butterflies? In ever increasing numbers the motor-cars
clattered and hammered along the dusty roads; the devils of golf leaped
on the acres and made them desolate; sport and journalism and gentility
made barren men’s lives. The gods shrank away, hid shyly in forgotten
nooks, lurked unsuspected behind bramble and thorn. Where were their
worshippers? Where were their altars? Rattle of the motors, black smoke
of the railways. One—perhaps only one—worshipper was left them. One
only saw the fleet limbs glancing through the tree-trunks, saw the
bright faun-eyes peering anxiously from behind the bushes. Hamadryads,
fauns, do not fly from me! I am not one of “them,” one of the perverse
life-torturers. I know you are there, come to me, and talk with me!
Stay with me, stay with me!
* * * * *
Then the blow fell.
[ V ]
What can have happened? What can have happened? My God, what can have
happened?
Isabel paced up and down the room, uttering this and kindred
exclamations to nobody in particular, while an outwardly calm, inwardly
very much perturbed George silently echoed the question. George
Augustus had gone to London on his usual weekly trip, and as usual
George had met the six o’clock train. No George Augustus. He met the
seven-ten, the eighty-fifty, and the eleven-five, the last train:
and still no George Augustus. No telegram, no message. A feeling of
impending calamity hung over the house that night, and there was not
much sleep for Isabel and George. Next morning a long rambling letter,
emotional and vague, arrived from George Augustus. The gist was that he
was ruined, and in flight from his creditors.
It was a bitter enough pill for George, bitterer still for Isabel. She
had schemed and boosted George Augustus for years, she thought they
were well off and getting better off. And she had taken pride in it
as her own work. She had George Augustus so much under her thumb that
whatever he did was through her influence. But the very perfection
of her system was its ruin. He was so afraid of her that he dared
not confess when a speculation went wrong. To keep up the standard
of expense, he began to mortgage; to redeem the situation he plunged
deeper into speculation and neglected his practice. Rumours began to
get about. Then suddenly he was taken with panic, and fled. Later
investigation showed that his affairs were not so compromised as he had
imagined; but the sudden mad flight ruined everything. In a day the
Winterbournes dropped from comparative affluence to comparative poverty.
The effect on George was really rather disastrous. After the almost
sordid distress of his early adolescence, he had succeeded in saving
the spark, and had built up a life for himself, had created a positive
happiness. But all that rested, in fact, on the family money. The
distrust of himself and others which had gradually disappeared, the
sense of suspicion and frustration, came flooding back with renewed
bitterness. And the whole calamity was aggravated by circumstances of
peculiar and unnecessary suffering, which made distrust and bitterness
not unjustifiable. Demented apparently by that madness which afflicts
those whom the gods wish to destroy, George Augustus had “had a little
talk” on the subject of a career with the boy not three months before,
when he must have known he was hopelessly involved.
“Now, Georgie, you have only a few months longer, and you will be
leaving school. You must think of a career in life. Have you thought
about it?”
“Yes, father.”
“That’s right. And what career do you want to take up?”
“I want to be a painter.”
“I rather expected you’d say that. But you must remember that you can
hardly expect to make money by painting. Even if you have the talent,
which I’m sure you have, it takes many years to establish a reputation,
and still more years before you can hope to make an adequate income.”
“Yes, I know that. But I’m convinced that if I had a small income and
could do what I wanted, I should be far happier than if I made a great
deal of money doing what I hated.”
“Well, my boy, I’m really rather glad that you don’t take the purely
money point of view. But think it over. If you take your examinations
and qualify, there is a regularly established practice in which you can
take your place as my partner and, in due course as my successor. Think
it over for a few months. And if you finally decide to take the course
you mention, I daresay I can allow you two or three hundred a year,
which will be four hundred when I die.”
Now all this was very fatherly and kindly and sensible. In an outburst
of quite genuine affection and gratitude George protested first of all
that he could not bear to think of his father’s dying and that it was
odious to think of profiting by his death.
“But,” he added, “I am quite determined to be a painter in spite of
everything. If you can help me as you say, it will all be perfect.”
Nothing more was said on the subject, but in the following weeks George
drew and painted hard, went twice to London to look at the galleries
and get materials, and thought he was making progress. But what strange
weakness permitted George Augustus to yield to the cruelty of raising
these hopes which he must have known would be speedily wrecked? The
thought of this was constantly in George’s mind, as he moved about
silently, rather scared, in the morning hours following the receipt of
the letter. It was a problem he never solved, but the incident did not
increase his trust in the world or himself.
Other incidents confirmed this mood. Both Isabel and George Augustus
rather pushed George forward to take the brunt of the calamity.
Isabel’s first suggestion to George was that he should go as a grocer’s
errand boy at three shillings a week, a proposition which George
indignantly and properly rejected. Whereupon she called him a parasite
and a graceless spendthrift. Probably the suggestion was only hysteria,
but it hit hard and rankled. Then, it was George do this, and George
do that. It was George who had to interview insolent tradesmen and
creditors, and plead for further credit and “time.” It was George who
recovered £90 in gold which had been stolen by the office boy, and
was refunded. It was George who was sent to persuade his father to
come back and face out the storm. It was George who was made to go and
collect rents from suspicious and uneasy tenants. It was George who had
to see solicitors, and try to get a grasp of the situation. They even
accepted his offer of the few pounds (birthday gifts saved up) which
he had in the Post Office Savings Bank. Rather a shock for a boy not
seventeen, who had been living an _exalté_ inner life, and who had been
led to suppose that his material future was assured. It is not wholly
surprising that he was very unhappy, a bit resentful, and that his
mistrust became permanent, his modesty, diffidence.
* * * * *
Things went on in this joyless way for about a year. “Disgrace”
was avoided, but it was obvious that the Winterbourne opulence was
gone, and George Augustus had lost his nerve. It was from this period
that the beginnings of his subsequent conversion dated. In defeat he
returned to the beliefs of childhood, but some latent unrecognized
hostility to the influence of dear Mamma finally led him to the form
of Christianity most opposed to hers. As for George, he brooded a
great deal and oscillated between moods of hope and exultation and
moods of profound depression. They moved nearer to London, and he
tried, with very little success, to sell some of his paintings. They
were too ambitious and too youthful, with no commercial value. He was
all the time uneasily conscious that he ought to “get out” and that
his family were anxious for him to “do something.” Kind friends wrote
proposing the most dreary and humiliating jobs they could think of.
Even Priscilla—a bitter blow—thought that “George should do something
_at once_, and in a few years might be earning two pounds a week as
a clerk.” Then George made the acquaintance of a journalist, a very
uneducated but extremely kindly and good-natured man. Thomas had some
sort of sub-editorship in Fleet Street, and generously offered to allow
George to do some minor reporting for him, an offer which he jumped
at. George did his first job—which was passed—and returned home,
naturally very late, in a glow of virtuous exultation, thinking how
he would surprise his parents next morning with the news, like a good
little boy in a story-book. The surprise, however, was his. He was met
at the door by an angry Isabel, who, without awaiting his explanation,
demanded to know what he meant by coming home at that hour and accused
him of “going with a vile woman.” George was too disgusted to make any
reply, and went to bed. Next morning there was a glorious row, in which
Isabel played the part of a broken-hearted mother and George Augustus
came out very strong as a _père noble_ of the Surrey melodrama brand.
George was upset, but his contempt kept him cool. George Augustus was
perorating:
“If you continue in this way you will break your mother’s heart!”
It was so ludicrous—poor old George Augustus—that George couldn’t
help laughing. George Augustus raised his hand in a noble gesture of
paternal malediction:
“Leave this house! And do not return to it until you have learned to
apologize for your behaviour.”
“You mean it?”
“I solemnly mean it.”
“Right.”
George went straight upstairs and packed his few clothes in a suitcase,
asked if he might have the volume of Keats, and left in half an
hour—with elevenpence in his pocket, humming:
“Now of my three score years and ten, twenty will not come again.”
* * * * *
So that was that.