Death of a Hero (13 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He got a very bad report that term, and no remove. For which he was duly lectured and reprimanded. As the bullying 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?