(I really wonder how poor old George managed to get born at all.)
On the other hand, both George Augustus and Isabel knew how to read and write, pray, eat, drink, wash themselves, and dress up on Sundays. They were both pretty well acquainted with the Bible and Hymns A. and M.
And then they had luv. They “luved” each other. Luv was enough, luv covered a multitude of ignorances, luv would provide, luv would strew their path with roses and primroses. Luv and God. Failing Luv there was God, and failing God there was Luv. I suppose, orthodoxly, God ought to come first, but in an 1890 marriage there was such a lot of Luv and God that there was no room for common sense, or common sex knowledge, or any of the knowledge we vile modern decadents think necessary in men and women. Sweet Isabel, dear George Augustus! They were so young, so innocent, so pure. And what hell do you think is befitting the narrow-minded, slush-gutted, bug-whiskered or jet-bonneted he-and she-hypocrites who sent them to their doom? O Timon, Timon, had I thy rhetoric! Who dares, who dares in purity of manhood stand upright, and say…? Let me not rave, sweet gods, let me not rave.
The honeymoon did not take place in Paris or on the Plains of Waterloo, but in a South Coast watering-place, a sweetly pretty spot Isabel had always wanted to visit. They had a ten-mile drive from the village to the railway, and a two hours’ journey in a train which stopped at every station. They arrived tired, shy, and disappointed at the small but respectable hotel where a double room had been booked.
The marriage night was a failure. One might almost have foreseen it. George Augustus tried to be passionate and ecstatic, and merely succeeded in being clumsy and brutal. Isabel tried to be modestly yielding and complying, and was only gauche. She suffered a good deal from George Augustus’s bungling defloweration. And, as many a sweet Victorian bride of dear old England in the golden days of Good Queen Vicky, she lay awake hour after hour, while George Augustus slept stertorously, thinking, thinking, while the tears ran out of her eyes, as she lay on her back, and trickled slowly down her temples on to the bridal pillow…
It’s too painful, it’s really too painful – all this damn silly “purity” and cant and Luv and ignorance. And silly, ignorant girls handed over in their ignorance and sweetly-prettiness to ignorant and clumsy young men for them to brutalise and wound in their ignorance. It’s too painful to think of. Poor Isabel! What an initiation!
But, of course, that ghastly night had its consequences. In the first place, it meant that the marriage was legally consummated, and could not be broken without an appeal to the Divorce Courts – and I don’t even know if you could get divorced in the golden days of grand old Mr. Gladstone, bless his heart, may hell be hot for him. And then it meant that Isabel shrank from sexual intercourse with George Augustus for the rest of her days; and, since she was a woman of considerable temperament, that implied the twenty-two lovers already stirring in the womb of futurity. And finally, since Isabel was as healthy as a young woman could be who had to wear madly tight corsets and long insanitary hair and long insanitary skirts, and who had rudimentary ideas of sex hygiene – finally, that nuit de rove gave Isabel her first baby.
2
THE baby was christened Edward Frederick George – Edward after the Prince of Wales (later H. M. King Edward VII.), Frederick after his grandfather, George after his father.
Isabel wanted to call him George Hartly, but dear Mamma saw to it that there was as little Hartly as possible about her grandson.
The early years of the Isabel-George Augustus menage are really very dismal to contemplate. Largely because it was forced upon them by their elders and social convention, they began on a basis of humbug; unfortunately, they continued on a basis of humbug. Not only were they shattered by the awful experience of the wedding-night, but they were a good deal bored by the honeymoon generally. There wasn’t much to do at Isabel’s sweetly-pretty watering-place. George Augustus wouldn’t admit even to himself that he was about as competent to be a husband as to teach white mice to perform military-evolutions. Isabel knew in herself that they had begun with a ghastly failure, knew it with her instincts rather than her mind, but she had her pride. She knew perfectly well that the failure would be attributed to her, and that she could expect no sympathy from any one, least of all her own family. Wasn’t she “happily” married to a man who “luved” her – a “luv” match – and to a “rich” man? So Isabel consoled herself with the thought that George Augustus was “rich”, and they both wrote ecstatic humbugging honeymoon letters to families and friends. And once they had started on the opposite road to honesty and facing facts, they were dished for life – condemned, they too, to the dreary landscape of humbug and “luv”. O that God and Luv business! Isn’t it mysterious that Isabel didn’t take warning from the wretched cat-and-dog life of Ma and Pa, and that George Augustus hadn’t noticed the hatred which surged between dear Mamma and dear Papa under the viscid surface of domestic peace and religion; and that they didn’t try to break away to something a little better? But no, they accepted the standards, they had luv and they had God, so of course all would be for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
George Augustus continued to play at being “rich” on his honeymoon. A week before his wedding he was allowed a banking account for the first time in his life. Dear Papa paid in £200, and, by arrangement with George Augustus, dear Mamma was made to believe it was £20. To this dear Mamma added a generous £5 from her own jointure, “a little nest-egg for a rainy day” – though what on earth you want with a “nest-egg” on “a rainy day”, God and Luv only know. So the happy young couple started out with £205, and not the slightest chance of earning a penny until George Augustus gave up being “rich” and “pretty comfortable” and settled down to face facts and do a little work.
They spent a good deal – for them – on the honeymoon. George Augustus had a purse containing a lot of sovereigns and two £5 notes, with which he swanked intolerably. Isabel had never seen so much money at once and thought George Augustus was richer than ever. So she immedi-ately began sending “useful presents” to the innumerable members of the impoverished Hartly family; and George Augustus, though annoyed – for he was fundamentally mean – let her. Altogether they spent £30 in a fortnight, and the first-class fares back to Sheffield left mighty little change out of another £5 note.
The first great shock of Isabel’s life was her wedding-night. The second was when she saw the dingy little, smoke-blacked house of the “rich” Winterbournes, one of a row of highly desirable yellow-brick ten-roomed villas. The third was when she found that George Augustus earned nothing by his Profession, that he had no money but the balance of his £205, and that the Winterbournes were nearly as poor as the Hartlys.
Ghastly days that poor girl spent in that dreary little house during her first pregnancy, while George Augustus twiddled his thumbs in “the Office” (instead of in his cosy study” as in his bachelor days) under pretence of working”; while dear Papa prayed, and dear Mamma acid-sweetly nagged and humiliated her. Ghastly days when her morning sickness was treated as “a bilious attack”.
“Too much rich food,” said dear Mamma; “of course, darling Isabel, you were not used to such a plentiful table at home,” – and then playful-coyly-cattish – “we must really ask your dear husband to use his authority to restrain your appetite.”
In fact, the Hartlys, in a scratchy, vulgarish way, enjoyed much more ample and varied food than that provided by dear Mamma’s cheeseparing, genteelly meagre table.
Then, of course, there were rows. Isabel revolted, and displayed signs of that indomitable personality and talent for violent invective she afterwards developed to such Everest peaks of unpleasantness. Even dear Mamma found her match, but not before she had made Isabel miserably wretched for nearly two years and had permanently warped her character. Blessings upon you, dear Mamma, you “prayed for guidance”, you “did all for the best” – and you made Isabel into a first-class bitch.
George Augustus was pai
ned, deeply pained and surprised, by these rows. He was still pretty comfortable, and couldn’t see why Isabel wasn’t.
“Let us continue to be a loving, united family,” he would say, “let us bear with one another. We all have our burdens” – (e.g. thumb-twiddling and reading novels) – “and all we need is a little more Luv, a little more Forbearance. We must pray for Strength and Guidance.”
At first Isabel took these homilies pretty meekly. She believed she had to “respect” her husband, and she was still a little intimidated by George Augustus’s superior Bulwer Lytton airs. But one day she lost her not very well-controlled temper and let the Winterbournes have it. George Augustus was a sneak and a cad and a liar! He wasn’t “rich”! He was “pore as a church mouse”! Him and his airs, pretending to her father he was a rich gentleman with a Profession, when he didn’t earn a penny and got married on the £200 his father gave him! She wouldn’t have married him, she wouldn’t, if he hadn’t come smarming round with his presents and his drives and pretending she would be a lady! And she wished she was dead, she did! And she wished she’d never set eyes on them!
Then the fat was in the fire! Dear Mamma took up the tale. Reserving in petto a denunciation of the guilt-stricken and consternated father and son in the matter of their deception over the £200, she directed a skilful enfilade fire on the disarmed Isabel. Isabel was vulgar and irreligious, she was ill-bred and uneducated, she was mercenary on her own showing, and had ruined the hopeful life of George Augustus by seducing him into a disastrous marriage…
At that moment Isabel fainted, and most unfortunately for our George the threatened miscarriage was averted – thanks more to Isabel’s health and vitality than to the ministrations of her inept husband and in-laws. Only dear Papa was genuinely distressed, and used what shred of influence he had to protect Isabel. As for George Augustus, he simply collapsed, and did nothing but ejaculate:
“Dear Mamma! Isabel! Let us be loving and united. Let us bear one another’s burdens!”
But he was swept away in the torrent of genuine hatred revealed by this instructive scene. Even dear Mamma dropped her Nonconformist tract hypocrisy, and only picked it up again when Isabel fainted.
On dear Papa’s suggestion George Augustus took Isabel away to the seaside on what was left of the £200; and thus it happened that George was born in a seaside hotel.
It was a difficult birth, clumsily doctored. Isabel suffered tortures for nearly forty hours. If she had not been as strong as a young mare, she would inevitably have died. During this agonising labour, George Augustus prayed freely, took short walks, read Loma Doone, had a half-bottle of claret with his lunch and dinner, and slept tranquilly o’ nights. When, finally, he was admitted on tiptoe to a glance at the half-dead woman with the horrid little packet of red infant by her side, he – raised his hand and gave them his blessing. He then tiptoed down to dinner, and ordered a whole bottle of claret in honour of the event.
3
ISABEL and George Augustus depress me so much that I am anxious to get rid of them. On the other hand, it is impossible to understand George unless you know his parents. And then the older Winterbourne ménage rather fascinates me, with a fascination of loathing and contempt. I cannot help wondering how they could have been such ignorant fools, how they came to make so little effort to break free from the humbug, how less than nothing they cared about being themselves. Of course, I tell myself that our own magnanimous nephews will ask themselves precisely the same questions about us; but then I also tell myself that they must see we did struggle, we did fight against the humbug and the squelching of life and the worn-out formulae, as young George fought. Perhaps Isabel did fight a little, but the forces of inertia and active spite were too much for her. Perhaps the twenty-two lovers and the talk about Agnosticism and Socialism (of which Isabel at all periods of her life knew rather less than nothing) were a sort of protest. But she was beaten by the economic factor – by the economic factor and the child. You can say what you please, but poverty and a child will quench any woman’s instinct for self-development and self-assertion – or turn it sour. It turned Isabel’s sour and sharp. As for George Augustus, I doubt if he had any instincts left, except the instinct to be pretty comfortable. Whatever he achieved in and with his life was entirely the product of Isabel’s will and Isabel’s goading. He was a born mucker. And, since Isabel was ignorant, self-willed, and over-ambitious, and turned sour and sharp under the tender mercies of dear Mamma, she came a mucker too – through George Augustus. Yet I have far more sympathy for Isabel than for George Augustus. She was at least the wreck of a human being. He was a thumb-twiddler, a harmiess praying-Mantis, a zero of no value except in combination with her integer.
When Isabel was well enough to travel – perhaps a little before – they, who had gone out two, returned home three. They had acquired the link which divides. They had become a “family”, the eternal triangle of father, mother, child, which is so much more difficult and disagreeable and hard to deal with, and so much more productive of misery, than the other triangle of husband, wife, lover. After nine months of intimacy, Isabel and George Augustus were just getting used to each other and the “luv” situation, when this new complication appeared. Isabel was instinctively aware that yet another readjustment was needed, and, through her, George Augustus became dimly apprehensive that something was going on. So he prayed earnestly for Guidance, and all the way from the South Coast to Sheffield urged Isabel to remember that they must be a loving and united family, that they must bear one another’s burdens, that they had “Luv” but must acquire “Forbearance”. I don’t wish – Heaven forfend! – that I had been in Isabel’s place, but I should have liked to reply for five minutes on her behalf to George Augustus’s angel-in-the-house, idiot-in-the-world cant.
So they returned three, and there was much sobbing and praying, and asking for guidance, and benediction of the unconscious George. (He was too little to make a long nose at them – let us do it for him, as his posthumous godfathers and godmothers.) Isabel’s thwarted sex and idealism and ambition, her physical health and complete lack of intellectual complexity, made her an excellent mother. She really loved that miserable little packet of babydom begotten in disappointment and woe by George Augustus and herself in a hired bedroom of a dull hotel in a dull little town on the dull South Coast of dull England. She lavished herself on the infant George. The child tugging at her nipples gave her a physical satisfaction a thousand times more acute and exquisite than the clumsy caresses of George Augustus. She was like an animal with a cub. George Augustus might swank to dear Papa that he would “fight for dear Isabel like a Tiger,” but Isabel really would have fought, and did fight, for her baby, like a hot-headed, impetuous, pathetic, ignorant cow. If that was any achievement, she saved young George’s life – saved him for a German machine-gun.
For a time there was peace in the smoke-blacked little house in Sheffield. Isabel was obviously still very weak. And the first grandson was an event. Dear Papa was enchanted with young George. He bought five dozen bottles of port to lay down for George’s twenty-first birthday, and then began prudently drinking them at once “to see that they were the right vintage.” He gave George Augustus £50 he hadn’t got. He gave young George his solemn, grandfatherly, and valedictory blessing every night when Isabel put the infant to bed.
“God will bless him,” said dear Papa impressively, “God will bless all my children and my posterity,” – as if he had been Abraham or God’s Privy Councillor, as indeed he probably thought he was.
Even dear Mamma was quelled for a time. “A little che-ild shall lead them,” she quoted venomously; and George Augustus wrote another Nonconformist tract on loving and united families, taking these holy and inspiring words as his text.
The first four years of George’s life passed in a welter of squabbling, incompetence, and poverty, of which he was quite unconscious, though what harm was done to his subconscious would take a better psychologist than I to determin
e. I imagine that the combined influence of dear Papa, dear Mamma, Ma and Pa Hartly, George Augustus, and Isabel started him off on the race of life with a pretty heavy handicap weight. I should say that George was always an outsider in the Tattersall’s Ring of Life – about 100 to 7 against. However, one can but stick to the events as closely as possible, and leave the reader to form conclusions and lay his own odds.
Before George was six months old the rows had begun again in the Sheffield house, and this time more virulently and fiercely than ever. Dear Mamma felt she was fighting for her authority and John Wesley against the intruder. Isabel was fighting for herself and her child and – though she didn’t know it – any vestige of genuine humanity there might have been in George Augustus.
About that time George Augustus became really intolerable. A man he had known as a law student returned to Sheffield, bought a practice, and did rather well. Henry Bulburry came it over George Augustus pretty thick. He had spent three years in a London solicitor’s office, and to hear him talk you would have thought Mr. Bulburry was the Lord Chancellor, the Beau Brummell, and the Count d’Orsay of the year 1891. Bulburry patronized George Augustus, and George Augustus lapped his patronage up gratefully. Bulburry knew all the latest plays, all the latest actresses, all the latest books. He roared with laughter at George Augustus’s Dickens and Lorna Doone, and introduced him to Morris, Swinburne, Rossetti, Ruskin, Hardy, Mr. Moore, and young Mr. Wilde. George Augustus got fearfully excited, and became an aesthete. Once when Pater came to lecture at Sheffield he was so much moved at the spectacle of those wonderful moustaches that he fainted, and had to be taken home in a four-wheeler. George Augustus at last found his métier. He realized that he was a dreamer of dreams born out of his due time, that he should have floated Antinous-like with the Emperor Hadrian to the music of flutes and viols on the subtly-drifting waters of the immemorial Nile. Under a canopy of perfumed silk he should have sat enthroned with Zenobia while trains of naked, thewed Ethiopian slaves, glistening with oil and nard, laid at his feet jewels of the opulent East. He was older than the rocks among which he sat. He was subtler than delicate music; and there was no change of light, no shifting of the shadows, no change in the tumultuous outlines of wind-swept clouds, but had a meaning for him. Babylon and Tyre were in him, and he too wept for beautiful Bion. In Athens he had redilned, violet-crowned, at the banquet where Socrates reasoned of love with Alcibiades. But above all, he felt a stupendous passion for mediaeval and Renaissance Florence. He had never been to Italy, but he was wont to boast that he had studied the plan of the city so carefully and so frequently that he could find his way about Florence blindfold. He knew not one word of Italian, but he spoke ecstatically of Dante and “his Circle”, criticized the accuracy of Guicciardini, refuted Machiavelli, and was an authority – after Roscoe – on the life and times of Lorenzo and Leo X.
Death of a Hero Page 7