“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. Maña
na…
I think that George committed suicide in that last battle of the war. I don’t mean shot himself, but it was so very easy for a company commander to stand up when an enemy machine-gun was traversing. The situation he had got into with Elizabeth and Fanny Welford was not inextricable, but it would have needed a certain amount of patience and energy and determination and common sense to put right. But by November ’18 poor old George was whacked, whacked to the wide. He was a bit off his head, as nearly all the troops were after six months in the line. Since Arras (April ’17) he had lived on his nerves, and when I saw him at the Divisional Rest Camp in October ’18 he struck me as a man who was done for, used up. He ought to have gone to the Brigadier and got sent down for a bit. But he was so horribly afraid of being afraid. He told me that last night I saw him that he was afraid even of whizz-bangs now, and that he didn’t see how he would face another barrage. But he was damned obstinate, and insisted on going back to the battalion, although he knew they were due for another battle. We lay awake half the night, and he went over Elizabeth and Fanny and himself, and himself and Fanny and Elizabeth, until it was such a nightmare, such a portentous House of Atrides tragedy, that I began to think myself that it was hopeless. There was a series of night-bombing attacks going on, and we lay in the darkness on sacking beds, muttering to each other – or rather George went on and on muttering, and I tried to interrupt and couldn’t. And every time a bomb fell anywhere near the camp, I could feel George start in the darkness. His nerves were certainly all to pieces.
Elizabeth and Fanny were not grotesques. They adjusted to the war with marvellous precision and speed, just as they afterwards adapted themselves to the postwar. They both had that rather hard efficiency of the war and post-war female, veiling the ancient predatory and possessive instincts of the sex under a skilful smoke-barrage of Freudian and Havelock Ellis theories. To hear them talk theoretically was most impressive. They were terribly at ease upon the Zion of sex, abounding in inhibitions, dream symbolism, complexes, sadism, repressions, masochism, Lesbianism, sodomy, etcetera. Such wise young women, you thought, no sentimental nonsense about them. No silly emotional slip-slop messes would ever come their way. They knew all about the sexual problem, and how to settle it. There was the physical relationship and the emotional relationship and the intellectual relationship; and they knew how to manage all three, as easily as a pilot with twenty years’ experience brings a handy ship to anchor in the Pool of London. They knew that freedom, complete freedom, was the only solution. The man had his lovers, and the woman had hers. But where there was a “proper relationship”, nothing could break it. Jealousy? it was impossible that so primitive a passion could inhabit those enlightened and rather flat bosoms. Female wiles and underhand tricks? insulting to make such a suggestion. No, no. Men must be “free” and women must be “free’
Well, George had simple-Simonly believed all this. He “had an affair” with Elizabeth, and then he “had an affair” with Fanny, her best friend. George thought they ought to tell Elizabeth. But Fanny said why bother? Elizabeth must know instinctively, and it was so much better to trust to the deeper instincts than to talk about things with “the inferior intelligence”. So they said nothing to Elizabeth, who didn’t know instinctively, and thought that George and Fanny were “sexually antipathetic”. That was just before the war. But in 1914 something went wrong with Elizabeth’s period, and she thought she was going to have a baby. And then, my hat, what a pother! Elizabeth lost her head entirely. Freud and Ellis went to the devil in a twinkling. No more talk of “freedom” then! If she had a baby, her father would cut off her allowance, people would cut her, she wouldn’t be asked to Lady Saint-Lawrence’s dinners, she… Well, she “went at” George in a way which threw him on his beam-ends. She made him use up a lot of money on a special licence, and they were married at a Registry office in the presence of Elizabeth’s parents, who were also swept bewildered into this sudden match, they knew not how or why. Elizabeth’s father had feebly protested that George hadn’t any money, and Mrs. Winterbourne senior wrote a marvellous tear-blotched dramatic epistle, in which she said that George was a feeble-minded degenerate who had broken his mother’s tender heart and insultingly trampled upon it, in a low, sensual lust for a vile woman who was only “after” the Winterbourne money. As there wasn’t any Winterbourne money left, and the elder Winterbournes lived on tick and shifts, the accusation was, to say the least, fanciful. But Elizabeth bore down all opposition, and she and George were married.
After the marriage, Elizabeth breathed again and became almost human. Then and only then did she think of consulting a doctor, who diagnosed some minor female malady, told her to “avoid cohabitation” for a few weeks, and poofed with laughter at her pregnancy. George and Elizabeth took a flat in Chelsea, and within three months Elizabeth was just as “enlightened” as before and fuller of “freedom” than ever. Relieved by the doctor’s assurance that only an operation could enable her to have a child, she “had an affair” with a young man from Cambridge, and told George about it. George was rather surprised and peeved, but played the game nobly, and most gallantly yielded the flat up for the night whenever Elizabeth dropped a hint. Of course, he didn’t suffer as much deprivation as Elizabeth thought, because he invariably spent those nights with Fanny.
This went on until about the end of 1915. George, though attractive to women, had a first-rate talent for the malapropos in dealing with them. If he had told Elizabeth about his affair with Fanny at the moment when she was full-flushed with the young man from Cambridge, she would no doubt have acquiesced, and the thing would have been smoothed over. Unluckily for George, he felt so certain that Fanny was right and so certain that Elizabeth was right. He was perfectly convinced that Elizabeth knew all about him and Fanny, and that if they didn’t speak of it together the only reason was that “one took such things for granted”, no need to “cerebrise” about them. Then one night, when Elizabeth was getting tired of the young man from Cambridge, she was struck by the extraordinary alacrity George showed in “getting out”.
“But, darling,” she said, “isn’t it very expensive always going to a hotel? Can we afford it? And don’t you mind?”
“Oh no,” said the innocent George; “I shall run round and spend the night with Fanny as usual, you know.”
Then there was a blazing row, Elizabeth at George, and then Fanny at George, and then – epic contest – Elizabeth at Fanny. Poor old George got so fed up, he went off and joined the infantry, fell into the first recruiting office he came to, and was whisked off to a training camp in the Midlands. But, of course, that didn’t solve the situation. Elizabeth’s blood was up, and Fanny’s blood was up. It was Achilles against Hector, with George as the body of Patroclus. Not that either of them so horribly wanted George, but it was essential to each to come off victorious and “bag” him, with the not improbable epilogue of dropping him pretty quickly after he had been “bagged” away from the other woman. So they each wrote him tender and emotional and “understanding” letters, and sympathized with his sufferings under military discipline. Elizabeth came down to the Midlands to bag him for week-ends; and then one week when she was “having an affair” with a young American in the Flying Corps, George got his “firing leave” and spent it with Fanny. George was a bit obtuse with women. He was very fond of Elizabeth, but he was also very fond of Fanny. If he hadn’t been taken in with the “freedom” talk and had kept Elizabeth permanently in the dark about Fanny, he might have lived an enviable double life. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t, and never did, see that the “freedom” talk was only talk with the two women, although it was real enough to him. So he wrote them both the most imbecile and provocative letters, praised Elizabeth to Fanny, and Fanny to Elizabeth, and said how much he cared for them both; and he was like Shelley, and Elizabeth was like Mary, and Fanny was like Emilia Viviani. And he went on doing that even in France, right up to the end. And he never even suspected what an ass he was.
/> Of course, George had not set foot on the boat which took him to the Boulogne Base-Camp for the first time, before both Elizabeth and Fanny had become absorbed in other “affairs”. They only fought for George in a desultory way as a symbol, more to spite each other than because they wanted to saddle themselves with him.
Elizabeth was out when her telegram came from the War Office. She did not get it until nearly midnight, when she came back to the flat with a fascinating young Swedish painter she had met at a Chelsea “rag” that evening. She was a bit sozzled, and the young Swede – tall, blond and handsome – was more than a little fired with love and whisky. The telegram was lying on the door-mat with two or three letters. Elizabeth picked them up, and opened the telegram mechanically as she switched on the electric light. The Swede stood watching her drunkenly and amorously. She could not avoid a slight start, and turned a little pale.
“What’s the matter?”
Elizabeth laughed her high little nervous laugh, and laid the telegram and letters on the table.
“The War Office regrets that my husband has been killed in action.”
It was now the Swede’s turn to be startled.
“Your husband?… Perhaps I’d better…”
“Don’t be a bloody fool,” said Elizabeth sharply; “he went out of my life years ago. She’ll mind, but I shan’t.”
She cried a bit in the bathroom, however; but the Swede was certainly a very attentive lover. They drank a good deal of brandy, too.
Next day Elizabeth wrote to Fanny the first letter she had sent her for months:
“Only a line, darling, to tell you that I have a telegram from the W.O. to say George was killed in France on the 4th. I thought it would be less of a shock for you to hear it from me than acci-dentally. Come and see me when you get your weeps over, and we can hold a post-mortem.”
Death of a Hero Page 4