Death of a Hero (12 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

A penetrating voice came up the stairs:

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

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

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

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

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

Said the gardener:

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

Insoluble problem, capricious decrees of Providence.

Confirmation classes.

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

“What's he say to you?”

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

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

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

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

But did he know, that blind prophet?

Was he inspired, that stately hypocrite?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hymn Number… A few more years shall roll.

How wicked I must be!

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