So George had a gun licence, and went out shooting every morning in the autumn. He killed several plovers and a wood-pigeon. Then one frosty November morning he fired into a flock of plovers, killed one, and wounded another, which fell down on the crisp grass with such a wail of despair. “If you wing a bird, pick it up and wring its neck”, he had been told. He picked up the struggling, heaving little mass of feathers, and with infinite repugnance and shut eyes tried to wring its neck. The bird struggled and squawked. George wrung harder and convulsively – and the whole head came off in his hand. The shock was unspeakable. He left the wretched body, and hurried home shuddering. Never again, never, never again would he kill things. He oiled his gun dutifully, as he had been told to do, put it away, and never touched it again. At nights he was haunted by the plover’s wail and by the ghastly sight of the headless, bleeding bird’s body. In the daytime he thought of them. He could forget them when he went out and sketched the calm trees and fields, or tried to desigu in his tranquil room. He plunged more deeply into painting than ever, and thus ended one of the many attempts to “make a man” of George Winterbourne.
The business of “making a man” of him was pursued at School, but with little more success, even with the aid of compulsion.
“The type of boy we aim at turning out,” the Head used to say to impressed parents, “is a thoroughly manly fellow. We prepare for the Universities, of course, but our pride is in our excellent Sports Record. There is an O.T.C., organized by Sergeant-Major Brown (who served throughout the South African War) and officered by the masters who have been trained in the Militia. Every boy must undergo six months’ training, and is then competent to take up arms for his Country in an emergency.”
The parents murmured polite approval, though rather tender mothers hoped the discipline was not too strict and “the guns not too heavy for young arms.” The head was contemptuously and urbanely reassuring. On such occasions he invariably quoted those stirring and indeed immortal lines of Rudyard Kipling which end up, “You’ll be a man, my son.” It is so important to know how to kill. Indeed, unless you know how to kill you cannot possibly be a Man, still less a Gentleman.
“The O.T.C. will parade in the Gymnasium for drill and instruction at twelve. Those who are excused will take Geography under Mr. Hobbs in Room 14.”
George hated the idea of the O.T.C. – he didn’t quite know why, but he somehow didn’t want to learn to kill and be a thoroughly manly fellow. Also, he resented being ordered about. Why should one be ordered about by thoroughly manly fellows whom one hates and despises? But then, as a very worthy and thoroughly manly fellow (who spent the War years in the Intelligence Department of the War Office, censoring letters) said of George many years later: “What Winterbourne needs is discipline, Discipline. He is far too self-willed and independent. The Army will make a Man of him.” Alas! it made a corpse of him. But then, as we all know, there is no Price too high to pay for the privilege of being made a thoroughly manly fellow.
So George, feeling immeasurably guilty, but immeasurably repelled, sneaked into the Geography class, instead of parading like a thoroughly manly fellow in embryo. In ten minutes a virtuous-looking but rather pimply prefect appeared:
“Captain James’s compliments, sir, and is Winterbourne here?”
As George was walked over to the Gymnasium by the innocent-looking, rather pimply, but thoroughly manly prefect, the latter said:
“Why couldn’t you do what you’re told, you filthy little sneak, instead of having to be ignominiously fetched?”
George made no answer. He just went hard and obstinate, hate-obstinate, inside. He was so clumsy and so bored – in spite of infinite manly bullyings – that the O.T.C. was very glad indeed to send him back to the Geography class after a few drills. He just went hate-obstinate, and obeyed with sullen, hate-obstinate docility. He didn’t disobey, but he didn’t really obey, not with anything inside him. He was just passive, and they could do nothing with him.
He wrote a great many impositions that term and lost a number of his precious half-holidays, the hours when he could sketch and paint and think about things. But they didn’t get at the inside vitality, it retreated behind another wall or two, threw up more sullen, hate-obstinate walls, but it was there all right, it might be all Smut and Sin; but if it was, well, Smutty and Sinful he would be. Only, he wouldn’t say “turd” and “talk smut” with the others, and he kicked out fiercely when any of the innocent-looking, rather pimply prefects tried to put their arms round him or make him a “case”. He just wouldn’t have it. He was more than hate-obstinate then, and blazed into fearful white rages, which left him trembling for hours, unable even to hold a pen. Consequently, the prefects reported that Winterbourne had “gone smutty” and was injuring his health, and he was “interviewed” by his House Master and the Head – but he baffled them with the hate-obstinate silence, and the inner exultation he felt in being Sinful and Smutty in his own way, along with Keats and Turner and Shakespeare.
The prefects gave him a good many “prefects’ lickings” on various pretexts, but they never made him cry, even, let alone break down the wall between his inner aliveness and their thorough manliness.
He got a very bad report that term, and no remove. For which he was duly lectured and reprimanded. As the bullying urbane Head reproved, did he know that the sullen, rather hard-faced boy in front of him was not listening, was silently reciting to himself the Ode to a Nightingale, as a kind of inner Declaration of Independence? “Magic casements” – that was when you opened the window wide at sunset to listen to the birds, or at night-time to look at the stars, or first thing in the morning to smell the fresh sunlight and watch the leaves glittering.
“If you go on like this, Winterbourne, you will disgrace yourself, your parents, your House, and your School. You take little or no interest in the School life, and your Games record is abominable. Your set-captain tells me that you have cut Games ten times this term, and your Form Master reports that you have over a thousand lines of impositions yet to work off. Your conduct with regard to the O.T.C. was contemptible and unmanly to a degree we have never experienced in this School. I am also told that you are ruining your health with secret abominable practices against which I warned you – unavailingly, I fear – at the time I endeavoured to prepare you for Confirmation and Holy Communion. I notice that you have only once taken Communion since your Confirmation, although more than six months have passed. What you do when you cut Games and go running off to your home, I do not know. It cannot be anything good.” (Magic casements, opening on the foam.) “It would pain me to have to ask your parents to remove you from the School, but we want no wasters and sneaks here. Most, indeed all, your fellow-boys are fine manly fellows; and you have the excellent example of your House Prefects before you. Why can you not imitate them? What nonsense have you got into your head? Speak out, and tell me plainly. Have you entangled yourself in any way?”
No answer.
“What do you do in your spare time?”
No answer.
“Your obstinate silence gives me the right to suspect the worst. What you do I can imagine, but prefer not to mention. Now, for the last time, will you speak out honourably and manfully, and tell me what it is you do that makes you neglect your work and Games and makes you conspicuous in the School for sullen and obstinate behaviour?”
No answer.
“Very well. You will receive twelve strokes from the birch. Bend over.”
George’s face quivered, but he had not shed a tear or made a sound as he turned silently to go.
“Stop. Kneel down at that chair, and we will pray together that this lesson may be of service to you, and that you may conquer your evil habits. Let us together pray GOD that He will have mercy upon you, and make you into a really manly fellow.”
They prayed.
Or rather, the Head prayed, and George remained silent. He did not even say “Amen”.
After that the School gave him up an
d let him drift. He was supposed to be dull-minded as well as obstinate and unmanly, and was allowed to vegetate vaguely about the Lower Fifth. Maybe he picked up more even of the little they had to teach than they suspected. But as the silent, rather white-faced, rather worried-looking boy went mechanically through the day’s routine, hung about in corridors, moved from classroom to classroom, he was busy enough inside, building up a life of his own. George went at George Augustus’s books with the energy of a fierce physical hunger. He once showed me a list in an old notebook of the books he had read before he was sixteen. Among other things, he had raced through most of the poets from Chaucer onwards. It was not the amount that he read which mattered, but the way in which he read. Having no single person to talk to openly, no one to whom he could reveal himself, no one from whom he could learn what he wanted to know, he was perforce thrust back upon books. The English poets and the foreign painters were his only real friends. They were his interpreters of the mystery, the defenders of the inner vitality which he was fighting unconsciously to save. Naturally, the School was against him. They set out to produce “a type of thoroughly manly fellow”, a “type” which unhesitatingly accepted the prejudices, the “code” put before it, docilely conformed to a set of rules. George dumbly claimed to think for himself, above all to be himself. The “others” were good enough fellows, no doubt, but they really had no selves to be. They hadn’t the flame. The things which to George were the very cor cordium of life meant nothing to them, simply passed them by. They wanted to be approved and be healthy barbarians, cultivating a little smut on the sly, and finally dropping into some convenient post in life where the “thoroughly manly fellow” was appreciated – mostly, one must admit, minor and unpleasant and not very remunerative posts in unhealthy colonies. The Empire’s backbone. George, though he didn’t realize it then, wasn’t going to be a bit of any damned Empire’s backbone, still less part of its kicked backside. He didn’t mind going to hell, and disgracing himself and his parents and his House and The School, if only he could go to hell in his own way. That’s what they couldn’t stand – the obstinate, passive refusal to accept their prejudices, to conform to their minor-gentry, kicked-backside-of-the-Empire code. They worried him, they bullied him, they frightened him with cock-and-bull yarns about Smut and noses dropping off; but they didn’t get him. I wish he hadn’t been worried and bullied to death by those two women. I wish he hadn’t stood up to that machine-gun just one week before the Torture ended. After he had fought the swine (i.e. the British ones) so gallantly for so many years. If only he had hung on a little longer, and come back, and done what he wanted to do! He could have done it, he could have “got there”; and then even “The School” would have fawned on him. Bloody fool! Couldn’t he see that we have only one duty – to hang on, and smash the swine?
Once, only once, he nearly gave himself away to The School. At the end of the examinations, as a sort of afterthought, there was an English Essay. One of the subjects was: What do you want to do in Life? George’s enthusiasm got the better of his caution, and he wrote a crude, enthusiastic, schoolboyish rhapsody, laying down an immense programme of life, from travel to astronomy, with the beloved Painting as the end and crown of all. Needless to say, he did not get the Prize or even any honourable mention. But, to his amazement, on the last day of term, as they went to evening Chapel, the Head strolled up, put an arm round his shoulders, and pointing to the planet Venus said:
“Do you know what that star is, my boy?”
“No, sir.”
“That is Sirius, a gigantic sun, many millions of miles distant from us.”
“Yes, sir.”
And then the conversation languished. The Head removed his arm, and they entered the Chapel. The last hymn was “Onward, Christian Soldiers”, because ten of the senior boys were going to Sandhurst.
George did not join actively in the service.
The summer holidays were the only part of the year when he was really happy.
The country inland from Martin’s Point is rather barren. But, like all the non-industrialized parts of England, it has a character, very shy like a little silvery-grey old lady, which acts gently but in the end rather strongly on the mind. It was the edge of one of the long chalk downs of England, with salt marshes to left and right, and fertile clay land far behind – too far for George to reach even on a bicycle. In detail it seemed colourless and commonplace. From the crest of one of the high ridges, it had a kind of silvery-grey, very old quality, with its great, bare, treeless fields making faint chequer-patterns on the long, gentle slopes, with always a fringe of silvery-grey sea in the far distance. The chalk was ridged in long parallels, like the swell of some gigantic ocean arrested in rock. The ridges became more abrupt and violent near the coast, and ended in a long, irregular wall of silvery-grey chalk, poised like a huge wave of rock-foam for ever motionless and for ever silent, while for ever at its base lapped the petty waves of the mobile and whispering sea. The sheep-and-wind-nipped turf of the downs grew dwarf bee-orchis, blue-purple bugloss, tall ragged knapweed, and frail harebells. In the valleys were tall thistles and foxgloves. Certain nooks were curiously rich with wild-flowers mixed with deep rich-red clover and marguerite-daisies. In the summer these little flowery patches – so precious and conspicuous in the surrounding barrenness – were a flicker of butterfly wings: the creamy Marbled Whites, electric blue of the Chalkhill Blue, sky-blue of the Common and Holly Blue, rich tawny of the Fritillaries, metallic gleam of the Coppers, cool drab of the Meadow Browns. The Peacock, the Red Admiral, the Painted Lady, the Tortoiseshell wheeled over the nettles and thistles, poised on the flowers, fanning their rich mottled wings. In a certain field in August you could find Clouded Yellows rapidly moving in little curves and irregular dashes of flight over swaying red-purple clover, which seemed to drift like a sea as the wind ran over it.
Yet with all this colour the “feel” of the land was silvery grey. The thorn-bushes and the rare trees were bent at an angle under the pressure of the South-West gales. The inland hamlets and farms huddled down in the hollows behind a protecting wall of elms. They were humble, unpretentious, but authentic, like the lives of the shepherds and ploughmen who lived in them. The three to ten miles which separated them from the pretentious suburbanity of Martin’s Point might have been three hundred, so unmoved, so untouched were they by its golf and its idleness and tea-party scandals and even its increasing number of “cars”. In hollows, too, crouched its low, flint-built Norman churches, so unpretentious, for all the richness of dog-toothed porches and Byzantine-looking tympanums and conventionalized satiric heads sneering and gaping and grimacing from the string-courses. Hard, satiric people those Norman conquerors must have been – you can see the hard, satiric effigies of some of their descendants in the Temple Church. They must have crushed the Saxon shepherds and swineherds under their steel gauntlets, smiling in a hard, satiric way. And even their piety was hard and satiric, if you can judge from the little flinty, satiric churches they scattered over the land. Then they must have pushed on westward to richer lands, abandoning those barren downs and scanty fields to the descendants of the oppressed Saxon. So the land seemed old; but the hard, satiric quality of the Normans only remained in odd nooks of their churches – all the rest had grown gentle and silvery-grey, like a rather sweet and gentle silvery-grey old lady.
All this George struggled to express with his drawing-and paint-blocks. He tried to absorb – and to some extent did absorb – the peculiar quality of the country. He attempted it all, from the twenty-mile sweeps of undulating Down fringed by the grey-silver sea, to the church doors and little patient photographic, semi-scientific painting of the flowers and butterflies. From the point of view of a painter, he was always too literal, too topographical, too minutely interested in detail. He saw the poetry of the land but didn’t express it in form and colour. The old English landscape school of 1770 – 1840 died long before Turner’s body reached St. Paul’s and his money went into the po
ckets of the greedy English lawyers instead of to the painters for whom he intended it. The impulse expired in painstaking topography and sentimental prettiness. There wasn’t the vitality, the capacity to struggle on, which you find in the best work of painters like Friesz, Vlaminck, and even Utrillo, who can find a new sort of poetry in tossing trees or a white farmhouse or a bistro in the Paris suburbs. George, even at fifteen, knew what he wanted to say in paint, but couldn’t say it. He could appreciate it in others, but he hadn’t got the power of expression in him.
Hitherto George had been quite alone in his blind instinctive struggle – the fight against the effort to force him into a mould, the eager searching out for life and more life which would respond to the spark of life within. Now he began to find unexpected allies; discovered at first almost with suspicion, then with immense happiness, that he was not quite alone, that there were others who valued what he valued. He discovered men’s friendship and the touch of girls’ lips and hands.
First came Mr. Barnaby Slush, at that time a “most famous novelist”, who had hit the morbid-cretinish British taste with a sensational, crude-Christian moral novel which sold millions of copies in a year and is now forgotten, except that it probably lies embalmed somewhere in the Tauchnitz collection, that mausoleum of unreadable works. Mr. Slush was a bit of a boozer and highly delighted with his notoriety. Still, he did occasionally look around him; he was not wholly blinkered with prejudice and unheeding blankness like most of the middle-class inhabitants of Martin’s Point. He noticed George, laughed at some of the pert but acute schoolboyish remarks George made and for which he was invariably squelched, was “interested” in his passion for painting and the persistence he gave to it.
Death of a Hero Page 10