Death of a Hero (24 page)

They had crossed the road outside Bushey Park and entered the palace gates. Between the wall which backs the Long Border, the Tudor side of the palace, and another long high wall, is the Wilderness, or old English garden, composed on the grandiose scale advocated by Bacon. It is both a garden and a “wilderness”, in the sense that it is planted with innumerable bulbs (which are thinned and renewed from time to time), but otherwise allowed to run wild. George and Elizabeth stopped with that sudden ecstasy of delight felt by the sensitive young – a few of them – at the sight of loveliness. Great secular trees, better protected than those in the outer Park, held up vast fans of glittering green-and-gold foliage which trembled in the light wind and formed moving patterns on the tender blue sky. The lilacs had just unfolded their pale hearts, showing the slim stalk of closed buds which would break open later in a foam of white and blue blossoms. Underfoot was the stouter green of wild plants, spread out like an evening sky of verdure for the thick-clustered constellations of flowers. There shone the soft, slim yellow trumpet of the wild daffodil; the daffodil which has a pointed ruff of white petals to display its gold head; and the more opulent double daffodil which, compared with the other two, is like an ostentatious merchant between Florizel and Perdita. There were the many-headed jonquils, creamy and thick-scented; the starry narcissus, so alert on its long, slender, stiff stem, so sharp-eyed, so unlike a languid youth gazing into a pool; the hyacinth-blue frail squilla almost lost in the lush herbs; and the hyacinth, blue and white and red, with its firm, thick-set stem and innumerable bells curling back their open points. Among them stood tulips – the red, like thin blown bubbles of dark wine; the yellow, more cup-like, more sensually open to the soft furry entry of the eager bees; the large parti-coloured gold and red, noble and sombre like the royal banner of Spain.

English spring flowers! What an answer to our ridiculous “cosmic woe”, how salutary, what a soft reproach to bitterness and avarice and despair, what balm to hurt minds! The lovely bulb-flowers, loveliest of the year, so unpretentious, so cordial, so unconscious, so free from the striving after originality of the gardener's tamed pets! The spring flowers of the English woods, so surprising under those bleak skies, and the flowers the English love so much and tend so skilfully in the cleanly wantonness of their gardens, as surprisingly beautiful as the poets of that bleak race! When the inevitable “fuit Ilium” resounds mournfully over London among the appalling crash of huge bombs and the foul
reek of deadly gases while the planes roar overhead, will the conqueror think regretfully and tenderly of the flowers and the poets?

When George, on one of our walks, told me the gist of this conversation with Elizabeth, I was at once more amused and more interested than I allowed him to see. There are certain aspects of people's bodies, certain things they say and do, which not only determine one's attitude towards them but seem to explain them. And more, in some cases they seem to reveal an epoch. Every one has experience of attraction or repulsion caused by another's body. For instance, there was once a poet whose work I admired; but the first time I met him he tried to hold a girl's hand. I didn't mind
that – au contraire.
What I minded was the awful spectacle of his large, ugly, raw-red hand, with knotty fingers and gnawed mourning nails, trying to enclose the washed and chubby hand, of my little friend… I could never read his poems again without thinking of that Mr. Hyde-like hand, the Barry-more film hand of Mr. Hyde.

Now, I had a reason for dwelling at some length on these preliminary conversations of George and Elizabeth with George much in the foreground. They seem to explain a great deal, at least to me. They reveal him and at the same time “throw more light” (as the learned say) on the state of mind of a generation of young men who mostly perished in their twenties. As a rule, George was very silent. Like most people who think at all, he had very little of the small change of conversation and disliked aimless babbling. But when he was with somebody he liked, he talked. My God, how much he talked! He was passionately interested in ideas, passionately interested in his own reactions to the appearance of things, comparatively little interested in the lives of other people except in a general and abstract way. He noticed in a flash the girl at a party who looked like a Botticelli (people still admired Botticelli in those days, and girls lived up to it), but he would never see, for example, the look on the face of the rather plain woman whom one guessed to be in love with the handsome host luxuriously devoted to his new wife. Consequently his talk was all ideas and impressions. He had an almost indecent love of ideas. If you threw George a new idea he caught it with a skilled and grateful snap, like a seal at the Zoo catching a fish jerked at it by the keeper.

Of course, it is very natural that young men and women should be interested in ideas which are new to them though probably stale
enough to those a bit older. But the young War Generation seem to me to have been abnormally swayed by ideas of grandiose “social reform”. England swarmed with Social Reformers. I don't pretend to know why. Perhaps it was due to the political idealism of Ruskin and Morris, aided by the infinitely more sensible work of the Fabians. Everybody was the architect of a New Jerusalem, and a rummy assortment of plans they provided. This passion has now reached the disinterested and noble-minded trade unionist and to some extent even the agricultural labourer. Consequently, you may now hear, at Hyde Park Corner or in pubs or third-class carriages, beautifully garbled versions of the highbrow talk of about twenty years ago. You thus have the encouraging and delightful spectacle of a proletariat eagerly expecting a millennium, impossible at any time, but particularly impossible after a catastrophe which has plunged the intellectuals into Spenglerian pessimism and hurled the weaker or more cynical into the ironic bosom of Mother Church…

George was pretty much affected by this Social Reform bunk. He was always looking at things from “the point of view of the Country”, and far more frequently from “the point of view of humanity”. This may have been a result of his Public School, kicked-backside-of-the-Empire training. I know he resisted it with commendable contempt and fury, but where so much pitch was flying about he could scarcely avoid some of it. Perhaps the young are always like that, although one does not seem to notice it. As I pointed out to George years afterwards, he was quite right to discuss the matter frankly and openly with Elizabeth before they proceeded further, but all this bunk about eugenics and women's rights and preventing wars by birth-control would have discouraged any girl who had not fully made up her mind already that she wanted him. It was appallingly bad strategy as seduction – though,
en passant
, let it be noted that “seduction” is one of those primitive notions which could only inhabit the degenerate minds of lawyers and social uplifters, since in nine cases out of ten the “seducer”, if any, is the woman. I thought that George ought to have imparted a little elementary information, and have pointed out that in the present state of human affairs it is not quite right for people to have a child without being legally married because it's so hard on the child, although in some cases it should be done deliberately as a protest against a foolish prejudice. He ought then to have explained how it may spoil a sexual relationship to have a child too soon and unthinkingly. And he should then
have demonstrated by example and precept that love is an art, and a very difficult art, and one most dismally and disastrously neglected, especially by “well-bred” Englishmen. It sounds incredible, but it is true, that there are thousands of such men, perfectly decent, humane persons, who despise a woman if they think or know that she experiences any sexual pleasure. And then they wonder vaguely why women are shrewish and discontented…

All this will sound very elementary to some people and very reprehensible to others. I am simply trying to explain these people. Of course, there is always the superior person who veils puritanism by saying: “I'm so bored with all this talk about sex. Why can't people go to bed with the person they want to, and stop talking about it?” Well, why shouldn't we talk about what interests us, and what, after all, is extremely important to adult life and happiness? Maybe we can learn something from the adulteries of others. It seems to me that the error of the Elizabeth and George generation was that they were far too absolute, too general, too dogmatic in their “ideas” about sex. They
would
let the Social Reform bunk distort their view. They had seen in their own homes the dreadful unhappiness and suffering caused by Victorian, and indeed Edwardian, ignorance and domestic dennery and swarming infants; and they reacted violently against it. So far, good. But they failed to see that in the way they went about it they were merely setting up another tyranny – the tyranny of free love. Why shouldn't people be monogamous if they want to be? Maybe it suits them. Don't be dragooned into it, of course, but don't be frightened out of it if you're made that way. There are certain elementary precepts which always hold good – for instance, Balzac's “Never begin marriage with a rape”; but this is a wholly personal and very complex and delicate relation which people must work out for themselves. All one asks is that they shall not be interfered with by law and busybodies. It is an interesting comment on the sadism latent in communities that the cruelty and misery of the Victorian home are legally protected and held up as shining examples of behaviour, whereas any attempt to make people a little more natural and happy and tolerant is supposed to be wicked. How men destroy their own happiness! How they hate happiness and pleasure! Think of the insane delusion of female chastity which holds that any woman who has “had” more than one man is “impure”, whereas in fact many women soon come to dislike
profoundly their first lover, and most are only really happy and satisfied with a fourth or sixth or tenth.

Alas! “with human nature what it is”, the love-lives of most people will always alternate between brief periods of happiness and long periods of suffering. The “sexual problem” will only be solved with the millennium which produces a perfect humanity. Until then we can only look on and sigh at the ruined lives; and reflect that men and women might be to each other the great consolation, while in fact they do little but torment each other.

I do not pity Elizabeth and George. They were very happy that day – and on other days – and to be quite happy even for one day is sufficient sanction for the misfortune of existence.

They went from the Wilderness into the large garden and walked slowly beside the Long Border, where the gardeners were busily potting out spring flowers. The crocuses were almost over, and the large motor lawn-mower was smoothly humming over the delicate green turf of the great lawns. They looked at the trimmed yews and wondered if they had been planted by Cardinal Wolsey. They criticized, somewhat adversely, the lead statue of the three Graces, and, walking under the trees by the canals, noticed the cold green lily-leaves just beginning to unfold under water. They stood at the end of the Long Border and for a long time in silence watched the swirl and eddy of the Thames, the house-boats being freshly painted for the season, the exquisite swaying fronds of the young willows. In the Privy Garden, on the raised walk and under the lime-tree avenue where the great clumps of crocuses lay sprawled and dying and overgrown at the foot of each tree, they talked of King Charles, and fought over the age-old contest of King and Parliament. Elizabeth was romantically for the handsome, melancholy King; George, Whiggish and all for political freedom, though gravely disapproving of Puritan vandalism. They went through the Fountain Court and the beautiful Tudor Courts, and walked along the river, and sat under a tree to eat their lunch. They talked and argued and laughed and made plans and reformed the world and felt important (God knows why!) and held hands and kissed when they thought no one was looking… And yes, they were very happy.

Dear Lovers! If it were not for you, how dreary the world would be! Never shall a pair of you pass me without a kindly discreet glance and a
murmured wish, “Be happy”. How my heart warmed to an old French poet as we walked slowly on the Boulevard, and the lovers in the soft evening air passed us by, hand so close in hand, bodies so amorously near, eyes so sparkling and alive! Now and then, in the intoxicating air of the spring and the tolerant kindliness of the Parisians, a pair would feel so exuberant and so enthusiastic and so moved with each other's perfections, that they would have to stop and exchange a long kiss, perfunctorily hidden by a quite inadequate tree-trunk. Nobody interrupted them, nobody scowled, no policeman arrested them for indecency. And the old poet paused, and laid his hand on my arm, and said: “Mon ami, I grow old! I am nearly sixty. And sometimes as I pass along the streets and see these warm young people I find myself thinking: ‘How impudique! Why is this permitted? Why do they intrude their passions on me?' And then I remember that I too was young, and I too passed eagerly and happily with one or other of my young mistresses whom I thought so beautiful, each of whom I loved with so immortal a love! And I look at the lovers passing and I say to myself: ‘Allez-y, mes enfants, allez-y, soyez heureux!' ”

Dear Lovers! Let us never forget that you are the sweetness of the bitter world.

And Elizabeth and George lingered through the sunny hours; and before the afternoon became too chill – for April is cold in England – they went back slowly through the long glades of the Park, they too hand in hand like the lovers on the Boulevard, they too with bodies amorously near, they too with eyes sparkling and alive, they too pausing to join their lips when the loveliness of life and the ecstasy of loving drew them together in a kiss.

They were so happy they did not know they were tired.