Death of a Hero (5 page)

After dinner, of which he ate sparingly, thinking with dreary satisfaction how grief destroys appetite, he went round to see his confessor, Father Slack. He spent a pleasantly emotional evening. Mr. Winterbourne cried a good deal, and they both prayed; Father Slack said perhaps George had been influenced by his father's prayers and virtues and had made an act of contrition before he died; and Mr. Winterbourne said that although George had not been “received” he had “a true Catholic spirit” and had once read a sermon of Bossuet; and Father Slack said he would pray for George's soul, and
Mr. Winterbourne left £5 for Masses for the repose of George, which was generous (if foolish), for he didn't earn much.

And then Mr. Winterbourne used to pray ten minutes longer every night and morning for George's soul, but unfortunately he went and got himself run over just by the Marble Arch as he was meditating on that blessed martyr, Father Parsons, and that other more blessed martyr, Father Garnet of Gunpowder fame. So, as the £5 was soon exhausted, there was nobody to pray for George's soul; and for all the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church knows or cares, poor old George is in Hell, and likely to remain there. But, after the last few years of his life, George probably doesn't find any difference.

So much for George's father and George's death. The “reactions” (as they are called) of Mrs. Winterbourne were different. She found it rather exciting and stimulating at first, especially erotically stimulating. She was a woman who constantly dramatized herself and her life. She was as avid of public consideration as an Italian lieutenant, no matter what the quality of the praise. The only servants who ever stayed more than a trial month with her were those who bowed themselves to an abject discipline of adulation for Mrs. Winterbourne, Mrs. Winterbourne's doings and sayings and possessions and whims and friends. Only, since Mrs. Winterbourne was exceedingly fickle and quarrelsome, and was always changing friends into enemies and vowed enemies into hollow friends, a more than diplomatic suppleness was exacted of these mercenary retainers, who only stayed with her because she gave them presents or raised their wages whenever the praise was really gratifying.

Although a lady of “mature charms,” Mrs. Winterbourne loved to fancy herself as a delicious young thing of seventeen, passionately beloved by a sheik-like but nevertheless “clean” (not to say “straight”) Englishman. She was a mistress of would-be revolutionary platitudes about marriage and property (rather like the talk of an “enlightened” parson), but, in fact, was as sordid, avaricious, conventional, and spiteful a middle-class woman as you could dread to meet. Like all her class, she toadied to her betters and bullied her inferiors. But, with her conventionality, she was, of course, a hypocrite. In her kittenish moods, which she cultivated with a strange lack of a sense of congruity, she liked to throw out hints about “kicking over the traces.” But, as a matter of fact, she never soared much above tippling, financial dishonesty, squabbling, lying, betting, and affairs with bounderish young men,
whom only her romantic effrontery could have dared describe as “clean and straight,” although there was no doubt whatever about their being English, and indeed sportin' in a more or less bounderish way.

She had had so many of these clean, straight young sheiks, that even poor Mr. Winterbourne got mixed up, and when he used to write dramatic letters beginning,

“Sir, – You have robbed me of my wife's affection like a low hound – be it said in no un-Christian spirit,” the letters were always getting addressed to the penultimate or antepenultimate sheik, instead of the straight, clean one of the moment. However, rendered serious by the exhortations of the war Press and still more by the ever-ripening maturity of her charms, Mrs. Winterbourne made an instinctive and firm clutch at Sam Browne – so successfully that she clutched the poor devil for the remainder of his abbreviated life. (She did the abbreviation.) Sam Browne, of course, was almost too good to be true. If I hadn't seen him myself I should never have believed in him. He was an animated – and not so very animated – stereotype. His knowledge of life was rudimentary to the point of being quadruped, and intelligence had been bestowed upon him with rigid parsimony. An adult Boy Scout, a Public School fag in shining armour -the armour of obtuseness. He met every situation in life with a formula, and no situation in life ever reached him except in the shape imposed upon it by the appropriate and predetermined formula. So, though he wasn't very successful at anything, he got along all right, sliding almost decorously down grooves which had nothing ringing about them. Unless urged, he never mentioned his wound, his decoration, or the fact that he had “rolled up” on August 4th. The modest, well-bred, etcetera, English gentleman.

The formula for the death of a married mistress's son was stern heroism, and gentle consolation to the wounded mother-heart. Mrs. Winterbourne played up at first -it was the sort of thing that the sheik always did with his passionate but tender love. But the effect of George's death on her temperament was, strangely enough, almost wholly erotic. The war did that to lots of women. All the dying and wounds and mud and bloodiness – at a safe distance – gave them a great kick, and excited them to an almost unbearable pitch of amorousness. Of course, in that eternity of 1914-18 they must have come to feel that men alone were mortal, and they immortals; wherefore they tried to behave like houris with all available sheiks – hence the lure of “war work” with its unbounded opportunities. And then there was the deep
primitive physiological instinct – men to kill and be killed; women to produce more men to continue the process. (This, however, was often frustrated by the march of Science, viz. anti-conceptives; for which, much thanks.)

So you must not be surprised if Mrs. Winterbourne's emotion at the death of George almost immediately took an erotic form. She was lying on her bed in an ample pair of white drawers with very long ruffles and a remarkably florid, if chaste, chemise. And the sheik, strong, silent, restrained, tender, was dabbing her forehead and nose with eaude-cologne, while she took large sips of brandy at increasingly frequent intervals. It was, of course, proper and even pleasant to have her grief so much respected; but she did wish Sam hadn't to be poked always into taking the initiative. Couldn't the man see that tender nerves like hers needed to be soothed with a little Real Love
at once?

“He was so much to me, Sam,” she said in low, indeed tremulous tones, subtly calculated. “I was only a child when he was born – a child
with
a child, people used to say – and we grew up together. I was so young that I did not put up my hair until two years after he was born.” (Mrs. Winterbourne's propaganda about her perennial youth was so obvious that it would hardly have deceived the readers of “John Blunt” – but the sheiks all fell for it. God knows how young they thought she was – probably imagined Winterbourne had “insulted” her when she was ten.)

“We were always together, such pals, Sam, and he told me everything.”

(Poor old George! He had such a dislike for his mother that he hadn't seen her five times in the last five years of his life. And as for telling her anything – why, the most noble of noble savages would immediately have suspected
her.
She had let George down so badly time after time when he was a boy that he was all tight inside, and couldn't give confidence to his wife or his mistresses or a man.)

“But now he's gone” – and somehow Mrs. Winterbourne's voice became so erotically suggestive that even the obtuse sheik noticed it and was vaguely troubled – “now he's gone, I've nothing in the world but
you,
Sam. You heard how that vile man insulted me on the telephone today. Kiss me, Sam, and promise you'll always be a pal, a
real
pal.”

Active love-making was not in the sheik's formula for that day; consolation there was to be, but the “sacredness” of mother-grief was
not to be profaned by sexual intercourse; although that too, oddly enough, was “sacred” between a “clean” Englishman and a “pure” woman who had only had one husband and twenty-two lovers. But what can the Sam Brownes of the world do against the wills, especially the will to copulate, of the Mrs. Winterbournes? He rose – if the expression may be allowed – powerfully to the situation. He, too, found a certain queer, perverse satisfaction in honeying and making love over a nasty corpse; while, if he had been capable of making the reflection, he would have realized that Mrs. Winterbourne was not only a sadist, but a necrophilous one.

In the succeeding weeks George's death was the source of other, almost unclouded, joys to Mrs. Winterbourne. She pardoned –, temporarily – the most offending of her enemies to increase the number of artistically tearblotched letters of bereavement she composed. Quite a few of the nearly gentry, who usually avoided Mrs. Winterbourne as a particularly virulent specimen of the human scorpion, paid calls – very brief calls – of condolence. Even the Vicar appeared, and was greeted with effusive sweetness; for though Mrs. Winterbourne professed herself a social rebel and an “Agnostic” (not, however, until she had been more or less kicked out of middle-class and Church society), she retained a superstitious reverence for parsons of the Established Church.

Another joy was squabbling with Elizabeth Winterbourne, George's wife, about his poor little “estate” and military effects. When George joined up, he thought he had to give his father as his next-of-kin. Later, he found his mistake, and when he went out to France the second time he gave his wife. The War Office carefully preserved both records, either under the impression that there were two George Winterbournes, or because the original record was never erased and so became law. At any rate, some of George's possessions were sent to the country address, and, although directed to his father, were unscrupulously seized by his mother. And the remainder of his military kit and the pay due him went to his wife. Old Mrs Winterbourne was fearfully enraged at this. Stupid red tape, she said it was. Why! wasn't her baby son
hers?
Hadn't she borne him, and therefore established complete possession of him and his for the rest of her natural life? What can any woman mean to a
Man
in comparison with his
Mother?
Therefore, it was plain that she was the next-of-kin and that all George's possessions,
including the widow's pension, should come to her and her only: Q.E.D. She bothered her harassed husband about it, tried to stimulate Sam Browne to action – but he evaporated in a would-be straight, clean letter to Elizabeth, who knocked him out in the first round – and even consulted a lawyer in London. Old Mrs Winterbourne came back from London in a spluttering temper. “That man”
(i.e.
her husband) had “insulted” her again, by timidly stating that all George's possessions ought to be given to his wife, who would doubtless allow them to keep a few “mementoes.” And the lawyer – foul brute – had unsympathetically said that George's wife had a perfect right to sue her mother-in-law for detaining her (Elizabeth's) property. George's will was perfectly plain – he had left everything he had to his wife. However, that small amount of George's property which his mother got hold of she kept, in defiance of all the King's horses and writs. And she took, she embraced, the opportunity of telling “that woman”
(i.e.
Elizabeth) what she thought of her – which, if believed, meant that poor Elizabeth was a composition of Catherine of Russia, Lucrezia Borgia, Mine de Brinvilliers, Moll flanders, a
tricoteuse
, and a hissing villainess from the Surrey side.

But George only lasted his mother as a source of posthumous excitement for about two months. Just as the quarrel with Elizabeth reached stupendous heights of vulgar invective (on her side), old Winterbourne got himself run over. So there was the excitement of the inquest and a real funeral, and widow's weeds and more tear-blotched letters. She even sent a tear-blotched letter to Elizabeth, which I saw, saying that “twenty years” – it was really almost thirty – “of happy married life were over, both father and son were now happily united, and, whatever Mr. Winterbourne's faults, he was a
gentleman.”
(Heavily underlined and followed by several exclamation marks, the insinuation being apparently that Elizabeth was no lady.)

A month later Mrs. Winterbourne married the sheik – alas! no sheik now – at a London registry office, whence they departed to Australia to live a clean sportin' life. Peace be with them both – they were too clean and sportin' for a corrupt and unclean Europe.

George's parents, of course, were grotesques. When, in a mood of cynical merriment, he used to tell his friends the exact truth about his parents, he was always accused – even by quite intelligent people – of creating a monstrous legend. Unless all the accepted ideas about
heredity and environment are false – which they probably are – it is a regular mystery of Udolpho how George managed to be so different from his parents and the family
milieu.
Physically he looked like them both – in every other respect, he might have dropped from the moon for all the resemblance he had to them. Perhaps they seemed so grotesque because neither of them could adjust to the tremendous revolution in everything, of which the war was a cause or symptom. The whole immense drama went on in front of their noses, and they never perceived it. They only worried about their rations. Old Winterbourne also worried a good deal about “the country”, and wrote letters of advice to
The Times
(which didn't publish them), and then rewrote them on Club notepaper to the Prime Minister. They were invariably politely acknowledged by a secretary. But Mrs. Winterbourne only cared spasmodically about “the country”. Her view of the British Empire was that it should continue the war as a holy crusade for the extermination of all “filthy vile foreigners”, making the world safe for straight, clean sheiks and pure, sweet, kittenish Englishwomen of fifty. Grotesques indeed, fanciful, unbelievable, like men's fashions of 1840. To me, who only saw them a few times, either in company with George or as his executor, they seemed as fantastic, as ridiculous, as prehistoric as the returning
émigrés
seemed to Paris in 1815. Like the Bourbons, the elder Winterbournes learned nothing from the war, and forgot nothing. It is the tragedy of England that the war has taught its Winterbournes nothing, and that it has been ruled by grotesques and a groaning Civil Service of disheartened men and women, while the young have simply chucked up the job in despair.
Gott strafe England
is a prayer that has been fully answered – by the insanity of retaining the old Winterbourne grotesques and pretending they are alive. And we go on acquiescing, we go on without even the guts to kick the grotesque Aunt Sallies of England into the limbo they deserve.
Pero, paciencia. Mañana. Mañana…