Death of a Hero (15 page)

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 chessy 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 Anderson'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 autograph 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 Chénier's “L'épi naissant mûrit, 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 Andre Chenier 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: “0 mistress mine, where are you 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 Crock-ton 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 crinidy 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, 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 infinitely 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 halfmoor, half-marsh country, with its heather and gorse and nodding white cotton-grasses. Then they went along the coast to Kirnmeridge 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, Cullompton, Tiverton, 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 taproom fires, talking to everyone, 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 hill-side.