Death of a Hero (10 page)

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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