Death of a Hero (16 page)

“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. Unconsciously he had thrown a leg on to her two legs as she lay on her back. Quite suddenly she opened her knees, and gave a sort of little moan. 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 tonight.”

George walked back to the door of Maisie's house, and wondered why her goodnight kiss was so un-tender, 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 twenty 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. & 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 Boulogne, 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 anapaest of the Foreland Lightship foghorn 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 fiat, desolate ex-sca-bottom ran the old coastline, 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 mediaeval 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 sandbank 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. Phoebus, 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 demi-gods 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 alone 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.

5

W
HAT can have happened? What can have happened? O 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 eight-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, 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
exaltée
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 was 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: