[ IV ]
George, the younger, liked Hamborough best perhaps, Martin’s Point next, Pamber hardly at all, and he detested Dullborough, the town which contained his father’s offices and the minor public school which he attended.
The mind of a very young child is not very interesting. It has imagination and wonder, but too unregulated, too bizarre, too “quaint,” too credulous. Does it matter very much that George babbled o’ white lobsters, stirred up frogs in a bucket, thought that the word “mist” meant sunset, and was easily persuaded that a sort of milk pudding he detested had been made from an ostrich’s egg? Of course a good deal of adult imagination consists in peoples’ persuading themselves that they can see white lobsters, just as their poetry consists in persuading themselves that the milk pudding did come out of the ostrich’s egg. The child at least is honest, which is something. But on the whole the young child-mind is boring.
The intellect wakes earlier than the feelings, curiosity before the passions. The child asks the scientist’s Why? before he asks the poet’s How? George read little primers on Botany and Geology and the Story of the Stars, and collected butterflies, and wanted to do chemistry, and hated Greek. And then one evening the world changed. It was at Martin’s Point. All one night the South-West wind had streamed over the empty downs, sweeping up in a crescendo of sound to a shrill ecstasy of speed, sinking into abrupt sobs of dying vigour, while underneath steadily, unyieldingly, streamed and roared the major volume of the storm. The windows rattled. Rain pelted on the panes, oozed and bubbled through the joints of the woodwork. The sea, dimly visible at dusk, rolled furiously-tossing long breakers on the rocks, and made a tumult of white horses in the Channel. Even the largest ships took shelter. In the irregular harmony of that storm George went to sleep in his narrow lonely child’s bed, and who knows what Genius, what Puck, what elfin spirit of Beauty came riding on the storm from the South, and shed the juice of what magic herb on his closed eyes? All next day the gale blew with ever diminishing violence. It was a half holiday, and no games on account of the wet. After lunch, George went to his room, and sank absorbed in his books, his butterflies, his moths, his fossils. He was aroused by a sudden glare of yellow sunlight. The storm had blown itself out. The last clouds, broken in lurid ragged-edged fragments, were sailing gently over a soft blue sky. Soon even they were gone. George opened the window, and leaned out. The heavy dank smell of wet earth-mould came up to him with its stifling hyacinth-like quality; the rain-drenched privet was almost over-sweet; the young poplar leaves twinkled and trembled in the last gusts, shaking down rapid chains of diamonds. But it was all fresh, fresh with the clarity of air which follows a great gale, with the scentless purity of young leaves, the drenched grasses of the empty downs. The sun moved majestically and imperceptibly downwards in a widening pool of gold, which faded, as the great ball vanished, into pure clear hard green and blue. One, two, a dozen blackbirds and linnets and thrushes were singing; and as the light faded they dwindled to one blackbird tune of exquisite melancholy and purity.
Beauty is in us, not outside us. We recognize our own beauty in the patterns of the infinite flux. Light, form, movement, glitter, scent, sound, suddenly apprehended as givers of delight, as interpreters of the inner vitality, not as the customary aspect of things. A boy, caught for the first time in a kind of ecstasy, brooding on the mystery of beauty.
A penetrating voice came up the stairs:
“Georgie! Georgie! Come out of that stuffy room at once! I want you to get me something from Gilpin’s.”
What perverse instinct tells them when to strike? How do they learn to break the crystal mood so unerringly? Why do they hate the mystery so much?
Long before he was fifteen George was living a double life—one life for school and home, another for himself. Consummate dissimulation of youth, fighting for the inner vitality and the mystery. How amusingly, but rather tragically he fooled them. How innocent-seemingly he played the fine healthy barbarian schoolboy, even to the slang and the hateful games. Be ye soft as doves and cunning as serpents. He’s such a real boy, you know—viz., not an idea in his head, no suspicion of the mystery. “Rippin’ game of rugger to-day, Mother. I scored two tries.” Upstairs was that volume of Keats, artfully abstracted from the shelves.
A double row of huge old poplars beside the narrow brook swayed and danced in the gales, rustled in the late spring breeze, stood spirelike heavy in July sunlight—a stock-in-trade of spires without churches left mysteriously behind by some mediæval architect. Chestnut trees hung over the walks built on the old town walls. In late May after rain the sweet musty scent filled the lungs and nostrils, and sheets of white and pink petals hid the asphalt. In summer the tiled roofs of the old town were soft deep orange and red, speckled with lemon-coloured lichens. In winter the snow drifted down the streets and formed a tessellated pattern of white and black in the cobbled market-place. The sound of footsteps echoed in the deserted streets. The clock bells from the Norman tower, with its curious bulbous Dutch cupola, rang so leisurely, marking a fabulous Time.
Said the gardener:
“It’s a rum thing, Master George, them rabbits don’t drink, and they makes water; and the chickens don’t make water, but they drinks it.”
Insoluble problem, capricious decrees of Providence.
Confirmation classes.
“You’ll have to go and see old Squish.”
“What’s he say to you?”
“Oh, he gives you a lot of jaw, and asks you if you know any smut.”
In the School Chapel. Full-dress Preparation Class for Confirmation. The Head in academic hood and surplice entered the pulpit. Whispers sank to intimidated silence, dramatically prolonged by the hawk-faced man silently bullying the rows of immature eyes. Then in slow, deliberate, impressive tones:
“Within ten years one half of you boys will be DEAD!”
Moral: prepare to meet Thy God, and avoid smut.
But did he know, that blind prophet?
Was he inspired, that stately hypocrite?
Like a moral vulture he leaned over and tortured his palpitating prey. Motionless in body, they writhed within, as he painted dramatically the penalties of Vice and Sin, drew pictures of Hell. But did he know? Did he know the hell they were going to within ten years, did he know how soon most of their names would be on the Chapel wall? How he must have enjoyed composing that inscription to those “who went forth unfalteringly, and proudly laid down their lives for King and Country”!
One part of the mystery was called SMUT. If you were smutty you went mad and had to go into a lunatic asylum. Or you “contracted a loathsome disease” and your nose fell off.
The pomps and vanities of this wicked world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh. So it was wicked, like being smutty, to feel happy when you looked at things and read Keats? Perhaps you went mad that way too and your eyes fell out?
“That’s what makes them lay eggs,” said the little girl, swinging her long golden hair and laughing, as the cock leaped on a hen.
O dreadful, O wicked little girl, you’re talking smut to me. You’ll go mad, I shall go mad, our noses will drop off. O please don’t talk like that, please, please.
From fornication and all other deadly sins.... What is fornication? Have I committed fornication? Is that the holy word for smut? Why don’t they tell me what it means, why is it “the foulest thing a decent man can commit”? When that thing happened in the night it must have been fornication; I shall go mad and my nose will drop off.
Hymn Number.... A few more years shall roll.
How wicked I must be.
Are there two religions? A few more years shall roll, in ten years half of you boys will be dead. Smut, nose dropping off, fornication and all other deadly sins. Oh, wash me in Thy Precious Blood, and take my sins away. Blood, Smut. And then the other—a draught of vintage that has been cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, tasting of Flora and the country green, dance and Provençal song, and sun-burned mirth? Listening to the sound of the wind as you fell asleep; watching the blue butterflies and the Small Coppers hovering and settling on the great scented lavender bush; taking off your clothes and letting your body slide into a cool deep clear rock-pool, while the grey kittiwakes clamoured round the sun-white cliffs and the scent of sea-weeds and salt water filled you; watching the sun go down and trying to write something of what it made you feel, like Keats; getting up very early in the morning and riding out along the white empty lanes on your bicycle; wanting to be alone and think about things and feeling strange and happy and ecstatic—was that another religion? Or was that all Smut and Sin? Best not speak of it, best keep it all hidden. I can’t help it, if it is Smut and Sin. Is “Romeo and Juliet” smut? It’s in the same book where you do parsing and analysis out of “King John.” Seize on the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand and steal immortal blessing from her lips....
But more than words about things were things themselves. You looked and looked at them, and then you wanted to put down what they looked like, re-arrange them in patterns. In the drawing class they made you look at a dirty whitish cube, cylinder and cone, and you drew and re-drew hard outlines which weren’t there. But for yourself you wanted to get the colours of things and how they faded into each other and how they formed themselves—or did you form them?—into exciting patterns. It was so much more fun to paint things than even to read what Keats and Shakespeare thought about them. George spent all his pocket-money on paints and drawing pencils and sketch-books and oil sketching paper and water-colour blocks. For a long time he hadn’t much to look at, even in reproductions. He had Cruikshank and Quiz illustrations, which he didn’t much care for; and a reproduction of a Bougereau which he hated, and two Rossetti pictures which he rather liked, and a catalogue of the Tate Collection which gave him photographs of a great many horrible Watts and Frank Dicksees. Best of all, he liked an album of coloured reproductions of Turner’s water-colours. Then, one spring, George Augustus took him to Paris for a few days. They did an “educative” visit to the Louvre, and George simply leaped at the Italians and became very pre-Raphaelite and adored the Primitives. He was quite feverish for weeks after he got back, unable to talk of anything else. Isabel was worried about him—it was so unboyish, so, well, really, quite unhealthy, all this silly craze for pictures, and spending hours and hours crouching over paint-blocks, instead of being in the fresh air. So much nicer for the boy to be manly. Wasn’t he old enough to have a gun license and learn to kill things?
So George had a gun license, and went out every morning in the autumn shooting. 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 design 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 sodomitical prefect appeared:
“Captain James’s compliments, Sir, and is Winterbourne here?”
As George was walked over to the Gymnasium by the innocent-looking, rather sodomitical 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 sodomitical 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 bullyingly 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 and 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 school-boyish 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 forever motionless and forever silent, while forever 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 hare-bells. In the valleys were tall thistles and fox-gloves. Certain nooks were curiously rich with wildflowers 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 Chakhill Blue, sky-blue of the Common and Holly Blue, rich tawny of the Fritilliaries, 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 Churche. 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 pockets 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 pretty 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.
“There’s something in that boy of yours, Mrs. Winterbourne. He’s got a mind. He’ll do something in the world.”
“Oh, do you think so, Mr. Slush,”—Isabel, half-flattered, half-bristling with horror and rage at the thought that George might “have a mind”—“he’s just a healthy, happy schoolboy, and only thinks of pleasing his Mummie.”
“Umph,” said Mr. Slush. “Well, I’d like to do something for him. There’s more in him than you think. I believe there’s an artist in him.”
“If I thought that,” exclaimed Isabel viciously, “I’d flog him till all such nonsense was flogged out of him.”
Mr. Slush saw he was doing George more harm than good by this well-meant effort, and was discreetly silent. However, he gave George one or two books, and tried to talk to him on the side. But George was still suspicious of all grown-ups, particularly those who came and drank whiskey in the evening with George Augustus and Isabel. Besides poor, flabby, drink-sodden, kindly Mr. Slush rather repelled his hard intolerant youthfulness; and they got nowhere in particular. Still, Mr. Slush was important to the extent that he prepared George to give some confidence to others. He broke down the first outer wall built by George against the world. The way in which Isabel got rid of Mr. Slush, whose possible influence on George she instinctively suspected, was rather amusing. George Augustus and Mr. Slush went to a Free Masons’ dinner together. Now that Free Masonry had served its purpose, Isabel was intensely jealous of its mysteries—poor mysteries!—which George Augustus honourably refused to reveal to her, and she hated those periodical dinners with a bitter hatred. That night there arose one of the most terrific thunder storms which had ever been known in that part of the country. For six hours forked and sheet lightning leaped and stabbed at earth and sea from three sides of the horizon; crash after crash of thunder broke over Martin’s Point and rumbled terrifically against the cliffs, while desperate drenching sheets of rain beat madly on roofs and windows and gushed wetly down the steep roads. It was impossible for the men to get home. They remained—drinking a good deal—at the hotel until nearly four, and then drove home sleepily and merrily. Isabel put on her tragedy queen air, sat up all night, and greeted George Augustus with horrid invective:
“Think of poor Mrs. Slush out there in that lonely farm, and me and the children crouching here in terror, while you men were guzzling, and besotting yourselves with whiskey... et cetera, et cetera.”
Poor George Augustus attempted a feeble defence—it was swept away. Mr. Slush innocently walked over next day to see how things were after the storm, was insulted, and driven from the house in amazed indignation. He “put” Isabel a little vindictively “in his next novel,” but as she said and said truly, he never “darkened their doors” again.
In one way George loved the grey sea and barrenness, in another way he hated them. To get away to the lush inland country was a release, an ecstasy, the more precious in that it happened so rarely. When he was a small child, a maid-servant took him “down home” to the hop-picking. Confused and fantastic memories of it remained with him. He never forgot the penetrating sunlight, the long dusty ride in the horse-bus, the sensation of hot sharp-scented shadow under the tall vines, the joy of the great rustling heaps falling downward as the foreman cut the strings, the tenderness of the rough women hop-pickers, the taste of the smoky picnic tea and heavy soggy cake (so delicious!) they gave him.
Later—in the fourteen-sixteen years—it was a joy to visit the Hambles. They were retired professional people, who lived in a remote country house among lush meadows and rich woods. Mr. Hamble was a large, freckly man who collected insects, and was a skilled botanist; and thus charmed that side of George. But the real delight was the lush countryside—and Priscilla. Priscilla was the Hambles’ daughter, almost exactly George’s age; and between those two was a curious, intense, childish passion. She was very golden and pretty; much too pretty, for it made her self-conscious and flirtatious. But the passion between those two children was a genuine thing. A pity that this sort of Daphnis and Chloe passion is not allowed free physical expression under our puling obscene conventions. There was always something a little frustrated in both George and Priscilla because the timidity and false modesty imposed on them prevented the natural physical expression. For quite three years George was under the influence of his passion for Priscilla, never really forgot her, always in a dim, dumb, subconscious way felt the frustration. Like all passions it was something fugitive, the product of a phase, but it ought not to have been frustrated. It was a pity they were so often separated, because that meant infinite letter-writing; and so made him always tend to too much idealizing and intellectualizing in love affairs. But when they were together it was pure happiness. Priscilla was a very demure and charming little mistress. They played all sorts of games with other children, and went fishing in the brook, picked flowers in the rich water-meadows, hunted bird-nests along the hedges. All these things, great fun in themselves, were so much more fun because Priscilla was there, because they held hands and kissed, and felt very serious, like real lovers. Sometimes he dared to touch her childish breasts. And the feeling of friendliness from the clasp of Priscilla’s hands, the pleasure of her short childish kisses and sweet breath, the delicate texture of her warm childish-swelling breasts, never quite left him; and to remember Priscilla was like remembering a fragrant English garden. Like an English garden, she was a little old-fashioned and self-consciously comely, but she was so spring-like and golden. She was immensely important to George. She was something he could love unreservedly, even if it was only with the mawkish love of adolescence. But far more than that temporary service she gave him the capacity to love women, saved him from the latent homosexuality which lurks in so many Englishmen, and makes them forever dissatisfied with their women. She revealed to him—all unconsciously—the subtle inexhaustible joys of the tender companionate woman’s body. Even then he felt the delicious contrast between his male nervous muscled hands and her tender budding breasts, opening flowers to be held so delicately and affectionately. And from her too he learned that the most satisfactory loves are those which do not last too long, those which are never made thorny with hate, and drift gently into the past, leaving behind only a fragrance—not a sting—of regret. His memories of Priscilla were few, but all roses....
You see, they cannot really kill the spark if it is there, not with all their bullyings and codes and prejudices and thorough manliness. For, of course, they are not manly at all, they are merely puppets, the products of the system—if it may be dignified by that word. The truly manly ones are those who have the spark, and refuse to let it be extinguished; those who know that the true values are the vital values, not the £. s. d. and falling-into-a-good-post and the kicked-backside-of-the-Empire values. George had already found a sort of ally in poor Mr. Slush, and an exquisite child-passion in Priscilla. But he needed men, too, and was lucky enough to find them. How can one estimate what he owed to Dudley Pollak and to Donald and Tom Conington?
Dudley Pollak was a mysterious bird. He was a married man in the late fifties, who had been to Cambridge, made the Grand Tour, lived in Paris, Berlin and Italy, known numbers of fairly eminent people, owned a large country house, appeared to have means, possessed very beautiful furniture and all sorts of objets d’art, and was a cultivated man—in most of which respects he differed exceedingly from the inhabitants of Martin’s Point. Now, what do you suppose was the reason why Pollak and Mrs. Pollak let their large house furnished, and spent several years in a small cottage in a rather dreary village street a couple of miles from Martin’s Point? George never knew, and nobody else ever knew. The fantastic and scandalous theories evolved by Martin’s Point to explain this mystery were amusing evidence of the vulgar stupidity of those who formed them, and have no other interest. The Pollaks themselves said that they had grown tired of their large house and that Mrs. Pollak was weary of managing servants. So simple is the truth that this very likely was the real explanation. At any rate, there they lived together in their cottage, crowded with furniture and books, cooking their own meals very often—they were both excellent cooks—and waited on by a couple of servants who “lived out.” Now, although Pollak was forty years older than George, he was in a sense the boy’s first real friend. The Pollaks had no children of their own, which may go to explain this odd but deep friendship.
Pollak was a much wilier bird than poor old Slush. He sized Isabel up very quickly and accurately, and just politely refused to let her quarrel with him, and just as politely refused to receive her. But he was so obviously a gentleman, so obviously a man of means, that no reasonable objection could be made when he proposed to George Augustus that “Georgie” should come to tea once a week and learn chess. Martin’s Point was a very chess-y place; it was somehow a mark of respectability there. Before this, George had gone to play chess with a very elderly gentleman, who put so much of the few brains he had into that game that he had none left for the preposterous poems he composed, or, indeed, anything else. So every Wednesday George went to tea with the Pollaks.
They always began, most honourably and scrupulously, with a game of chess; and then they had tea; and then they talked. Although George never suspected it until years afterwards, Pollak was subtly educating him, at the same time that he tried to give him the kind of sympathy he needed. Pollak had many volumes of Andersen’s photographs, which he let George turn over while he talked negligently but shrewdly about Italian architecture, styles of painters, Della Robbia work; and Mrs. Pollak occasionally threw in some little anecdote about travel. By the example of his own rather fastidious manners he corrected schoolboy uncouthnesses. He somehow got George riding lessons, for in Pollak’s days horse-riding was an indispensable accomplishment. Pollak always worked on the boy by suggestion and example, never by exhortation or patronage. He always assumed that George knew what he negligently but accurately told him. The manner in which he made George learn French was characteristic of his methods. One afternoon Pollak told a number of amusing stories about his young days in Paris, while George was looking through a volume of autographed letters of Napoleon, Talleyrand and other Frenchmen—which, of course, he could not read. Next week, when George arrived he found Pollak reading.
“Hullo, Georgie, how are you? Just listen to this lovely thing I’ve been reading, and tell me what you think of it.”
And Pollak read, in the rather chanting voice he adopted in reading poetry, André Chenier’s: “L’épi naissant murit, de la faux respecté.” George had to confess shamefacedly that he hadn’t understood. Pollak handed him the book, one of those charming large-type Didot volumes; but André Chénier was too much for George’s public school French.
“Oh, I do wish I could read it properly,” said George. “How did you learn French?”
“I suppose I learned it in Paris. ’Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongue by female eyes and lips, you know. But you could learn very soon if you really tried.”
“But how? I’ve done French at school for ages, and I simply can’t read it, though I’ve often tried.”
“What you learn at school is only to handle the tools—you’ve got to learn to use them for yourself. You take Les Trois Mousquetaires, read straight through a few pages, marking the words you don’t know, look them up, make lists of them, and try to remember them. Don’t linger over them too much, but try and get interested in the story.”
“But I’ve read The Three Musketeers in English.”
“Well, try Vingt Ans Après. You can have my copy and mark it.”
“No, there’s a paper-backed one at home. I’ll use that.”
In a fortnight George had skipped through the first volume of Vingt Ans Après. In a month he could read simple French prose easily. Three months later he was able to read “La Jeune Captive” aloud to Pollak, who afterwards turned the talk on to Ronsard; and opened up yet another vista.
The Coningtons were much younger men, the elder a young barrister. They also talked to George about books and pictures, in which their taste was more modern if less sure than Pollak’s urbane Second Empire culture. But with them George learned companionship, the fun of infinite, everlasting arguments about “life” and ideas, the fun of making mots and laughing freely. The Coningtons were both great walkers. George, of course, had the middle class idea that five miles was the limit of human capacity for walking. Like Pollak, the Coningtons treated him as if he were a man, assumed also that he could do what they were showing him how to do. So when Donald Conington came down for a week-end, he assumed that George would want to walk. That day’s walk had such an effect upon George that he could even remember the date, 2nd of June. It was one of those soft cloudless days that do sometimes happen in England, even in June. They set out from Hamborough soon after breakfast and struck inland, going at a steady, even pace, talking and laughing. Donald was in excellent form, cheery and amusing, happy to be out of harness for a few hours. Four miles brought them beyond the limits of George’s own wanderings, and after a couple of hours’ tramp they suddenly came out on the crest of the last chalk ridge and looked over a wide fertile plain of woodland and tilth and hop-fields, all shimmering in the warm sunlight. The curious hooked noses of oast-houses sniffed over the tops of soft round elm-clumps. They could see three church spires and a dozen hamlets. The only sound came from the larks high overhead.
“God!” exclaimed Donald in his slightly theatrical way, “what a fair prospect!”
A fair prospect indeed, and an unforgettable moment when one comes for the first time to the crest of a hill and looks over an unknown country shimmering in the sun, with the white coiling English lanes inviting exploration. Donald set off down the hill, singing lustily: “O, Mistress mine, where art thou roaming?” George followed a little hesitatingly. His legs were already rather tired, it was long past eleven—how would they get back in time for lunch, and what would be said if they were late? He mentioned his fears timidly to Donald.
“What! Tired? Why, good God, man, we’ve only just started! We’ll push on another four miles to Crockton, and have lunch in a pub. I told them we shouldn’t be in until after tea.”
The rest of the day passed for George in a kind of golden glory of fatigue and exultation. His legs ached bitterly—although they only walked about fifteen miles all told—but he was ashamed to confess his tiredness to Donald, who seemed as fresh at the end of the day as when he started. George came home with confused and happy memories—the long talk and the friendly silences, the sun’s heat, a deer park and Georgian red-brick mansion they stopped to look at, the thatched pub at Crockton where he ate bread and cheese and pickles and drank his first beer, the elaborately carved Norman church at Crockton. They sat for half an hour after lunch in the churchyard, while Donald smoked a pipe. A Red Admiral settled on a grey flat tombstone, speckled with crinkly orange and flat grey-green lichens. They talked with would-be profundity about how Plato had likened the Soul—Psyche—to a butterfly, and about death, and how one couldn’t possibly accept theology or the idea of personal immortality. But they were cheerful about it—the only sensible time to discuss these agonizing problems is after a pleasant meal accompanied with strong drink—and they felt so well and cheery and animal-insouciant in the warm sunlight that they didn’t really believe they would ever die. In that they showed considerable wisdom; for you will remember that the wise Montaigne spent the first half of his life preparing for death, and the latter part in arguing that it is much wiser never to think about dying at all—time enough to think of that when it comes along.
For Donald that was just a pleasant day, which very soon took its place among the vague mists of half-memory. For George it was all extraordinarily important. For the first time he felt and understood companionship between men, the frank unsuspicious exchange of goodwill and talk, the spontaneous collaboration of two natures. That was really the most important gain. But he also discovered the real meaning of travel. It sounds absurd to speak of a fifteen-mile walk as “travel.” But you may go thousands of miles by train and boat between one international hotel and another, and not have the sensation of travelling at all. Travel means the consciousness of adventure and exploration, the sense of covering the miles, the ability to seize indefatigably upon every new or familiar source of delight. Hence the horror of tourism, which is a conventionalizing, a codification of adventure and exploration—which is absurd. Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else—above all a travel bureau—arrange everything beforehand? It isn’t seeing new and beautiful things which matters, it’s seeing them for yourself. And if you want the sensation of covering the miles, go on foot. Three hundred miles on foot in three weeks will give you indefinitely more sense of travel, show you infinitely more surprising and beautiful experiences, than thirty thousand miles of mechanical transport.
George did not rest until he went on a real exploration walk. He did this with Tom Conington, Donald’s younger brother—and that walk also was unforgettable, though they were rained upon daily and subsisted almost entirely upon eggs and bacon, which seems to be the only food heard of in English country pubs. They took the train to Corfe Castle, and spent a day in walking over to Swanage through the half-moor, half-marsh country, with its heather and gorse and nodding white cotton-grasses. Then they went along the coast to Kimmeridge and Preston and Lulworth and Lyme Regis, sleeping in cottages and small pubs. From Lyme Regis they turned inland, and went by way of Honiton, Collumpton, Tavistock, to Dulverton and Porlock, along the north Devon coast to Bideford, and back to South Molton, where they had to take the train, since they had spent their money and had only enough to pay their fares home. The whole walk lasted less than a fortnight, but it seemed like two months. They had such a good time, jawing away as they walked, singing out of tune, finding their way on maps, getting wet through and drying themselves by tap-room fires, talking to every one, farmer or labourer, who would talk to them, reading and smoking over a pint of beer after supper. And always that sense of adventure, of exploration, which urged them on every morning, even through mist and rain, and made fatigue and bad inns and muddy roads all rather fun and an experience.
One gropes very much through all these “influences” and “scenes” and fragmentary events in trying to form a picture of George in those years. For example, I found the date of the Crockton walk and a few disjointed notes about it on the back of a rough sketch of Crockton church porch. And the itinerary of the walk with Tom Conington, with a few comments, I found in the back of a volume of selected English essays, which George presumably took with him on the walk. The heart of another is indeed a dark forest, and however much I let my imagination work over these fragments of his life, I find it hard to imagine him at that time, still harder to imagine what was going on in his mind. I imagine that he more or less adjusted himself to the public school and home hostility, that, as time passed and he began to make friends, he felt more confidence and happiness. Like most sensitive people he was subject to moods, affected by the weather and the season of the year. He could pass very rapidly from a mood of exuberant gaiety almost to despair. A chance remark—as I myself found—was enough to effect that unfortunate change. He had a habit always of implying more or less than he said, of assuming that others would always jump with the implied, not with the expressed, thought. Similarly, he always expected the same sort of subtle obliquity of expression in others, and very seldom took remarks at their face value. He could never be convinced or convince himself that there were not implications under the most commonplace remark. I suppose he had very early developed this habit of irony as a protection and as a method of being scornful with seeming innocence. He never got rid of it.
But for a time he was very happy. At home there was a kind of truce—ominous had he only known—and he was left much to himself. Priscilla awoke and satisfied the need for contact with the feminine, fed the awakening sensuality. Then, when Priscilla somehow drifted away, there was another, much slighter, more commonplace affair with a girl named Maisie. She was a slightly coarse, dark type, a little older than George and much more developed. They used to meet after dark in the steep lanes of Martin’s Point, and kiss each other. George was a little scared by the way she gobbled his mouth and pressed herself against him; and then felt self-reproachful, thinking of Priscilla and her delicate, English-garden fragrance. One night, Maisie drew them along a different walk to a deserted part of the down, where a clump of thick pines made a close shadow over coarse grass. They had to climb up a steep hillside.
“Oh, I’m tired,” said Maisie, “let’s sit down.”
She lay down on the grass, and George lay beside her. He leaned over her and felt the low warm mounds of her breasts through his thin summer shirt.
“The touch of your mouth is beautiful,” said George. “Honey and milk is under her tongue.”
He put the tip of his tongue between her moist lips, and she touched it with hers. ************* ** *** ****** * *** ** ** *** *** **** ** *** *** ** *** ****. ***** *** ****** *** *****, ******* * **** ** ****** ****. George stupidly wondered why, and kissed her more tenderly and sensually.
“Your lips,” he murmured, “your lips.”
“But there must be something else,” she whispered back. “I want something from you.”
“What more can I give you? What could be more beautiful than your kisses?”
She lay passive and let him kiss her for a few minutes, and then sat up abruptly.
“I must go home.”
“Oh, but why? We were so happy here, and it’s still early.”
“Yes, but I promised mother I’d be home early to-night.”
George walked back to the door of Maisie’s house, and wondered why her good-night kiss was so untender, so perfunctory.
A few nights later George went out—on the pretext of “mothing”—in the hope of finding Maisie. As he came silently round a corner, he saw about thirty yards ahead, in the dusk, Maisie walking away from him with a young man of about twenty. His arm was round her waist, and her head was resting on his shoulder as she used to rest it on George’s. It is to be hoped that she got her “something else” from the young man. George turned, and strolled home, looking up at the soft gentle stars, and thinking hard. “Something else? Something else?” It was his first intimation that women always want something else—and men too, men too.
When a great liner came round the Foreland, you ran to the telescope to see whether it was a P. and O., a Red Star or a Hamburg-Amerika. You soon got to recognize the majestic four-funnelled Deutschland as she moved rapidly up or down the Channel. The yellow-funnelled boats for Ostend, the white-funnelled boats for Calais and Folkestone were daily events, hardly to be noted—and yet how they seemed to lure one to that unknown life across the narrow seas. On clear days you could see the faint shining of the cliffs of France. On foggy nights, the prolonged anapæst of the Foreland Lightship fog-horn answered the hoarse spondees of the passing ships, groping their way up channel. Even on the most rainy or most moonlit night, the flash of the lighthouse made dabs of yellow light on the walls of George’s bedroom. There were no nightingales at Martin’s Point, but morning and evening thrushes and blackbirds.
Hamborough was so different, lying off the chalk downs on the edge of the salt marshes, the desolate, silent, unresponsive, salt marshes, so gorgeous at sunset. The tidal river ran turbid and level with its banks, or deep between walls of sinister mud. Little flocks of fleet-winged grey-white birds—called “oxey-birds”—flickered rapidly away in front of you on sickle-moon wings. A brown-sailed barge, far inland, seemed to be gliding overland through the flat green-brown marsh land. Behind, far across the flat desolate ex-sea-bottom ran the old coast line, and on a bluff stood the solid ruins of a Roman fort. “Pe-e-e-wit,” said the plunging plovers, “pee-e-ee-wit.” No other sound. The white clouds, dappled English clouds, moved so silently over the cool blue English skies; such faint blue, even on what the English call a “hot” day.
You went to the marshes by way of the Barbican, the Barbican through which the old English Kings and knights had ridden with their men-at-arms, when they made one of their innumerable descents on more civilized France. There stood the mediæval Barbican, on the verge of the commonplace little money-grubbing town, like a stranded vestige from some geological past. What was the Barbican to early twentieth-century Hamborough? An obstacle to the new motor road, whose abolition was always being discussed in the Town Council, and whose destruction was only postponed because the thickness of the walls made it too expensive. On the other side you walked out into flat fertile country, past almshouses, and the hoary stone-mullioned Elizabethan Grammar School, over the level crossing, to Saxon Friedasburg, where tradition said a temple to Freya had once stood. How silver-grey the distant sea-fringe, how silver-grey the lines of rippling poplars! How warmly golden, like Priscilla, the wheat fields under the late August afternoon sunshine!
These are the gods, the gods who must endure for ever, or as long as man endures, the gods whom the perverse blood-lustful, torturing Oriental myths cannot kill. Poseidon, the sea-god, who rules his grey and white steeds, so gentle and playful in his rare moods of tranquillity, so savage and destructive in his rage. With a clutch of his hand he crumples the wooden beams or steel plates of the wave-wanderers, with a thrust of his elbow he hurls them to destruction on the hidden sand-bank or the ruthless sharp-toothed rocks. Selene, the moon-goddess, who flies so swiftly through the breaking clouds of the departing storm, or hangs so motionless white, so womanly waiting, in the cobalt night-sky among her attendant stars. Phœbus, who scorns these silvery-grey northern lands, but whose golden light is so welcome when it comes. Demeter, who ripens the wheat and plumps the juicy fruit and sets cordial bitterness in the hop and trails ragged flower and red hip and haw along the hedges. And then the lesser humbler gods—must there not be gods of sunrise and twilight, of bird-singing and midnight silence, of ploughing and harvesting, of the shorn fields and the young green springing grass, gods of lazy cattle and the uneasily bleating flocks and of the wild creatures—(hedgehogs and squirrels and rabbits, and their enemies the weasels)—tenuous Ariel demigods of the trembling poplars and the many-coloured flowers and the speckled fluttering butterflies? In ever increasing numbers the motor-cars clattered and hammered along the dusty roads; the devils of golf leaped on the acres and made them desolate; sport and journalism and gentility made barren men’s lives. The gods shrank away, hid shyly in forgotten nooks, lurked unsuspected behind bramble and thorn. Where were their worshippers? Where were their altars? Rattle of the motors, black smoke of the railways. One—perhaps only one—worshipper was left them. One only saw the fleet limbs glancing through the tree-trunks, saw the bright faun-eyes peering anxiously from behind the bushes. Hamadryads, fauns, do not fly from me! I am not one of “them,” one of the perverse life-torturers. I know you are there, come to me, and talk with me! Stay with me, stay with me!
Then the blow fell.
[ V ]
What can have happened? What can have happened? My God, what can have happened?
Isabel paced up and down the room, uttering this and kindred exclamations to nobody in particular, while an outwardly calm, inwardly very much perturbed George silently echoed the question. George Augustus had gone to London on his usual weekly trip, and as usual George had met the six o’clock train. No George Augustus. He met the seven-ten, the eighty-fifty, and the eleven-five, the last train: and still no George Augustus. No telegram, no message. A feeling of impending calamity hung over the house that night, and there was not much sleep for Isabel and George. Next morning a long rambling letter, emotional and vague, arrived from George Augustus. The gist was that he was ruined, and in flight from his creditors.
It was a bitter enough pill for George, bitterer still for Isabel. She had schemed and boosted George Augustus for years, she thought they were well off and getting better off. And she had taken pride in it as her own work. She had George Augustus so much under her thumb that whatever he did was through her influence. But the very perfection of her system was its ruin. He was so afraid of her that he dared not confess when a speculation went wrong. To keep up the standard of expense, he began to mortgage; to redeem the situation he plunged deeper into speculation and neglected his practice. Rumours began to get about. Then suddenly he was taken with panic, and fled. Later investigation showed that his affairs were not so compromised as he had imagined; but the sudden mad flight ruined everything. In a day the Winterbournes dropped from comparative affluence to comparative poverty.
The effect on George was really rather disastrous. After the almost sordid distress of his early adolescence, he had succeeded in saving the spark, and had built up a life for himself, had created a positive happiness. But all that rested, in fact, on the family money. The distrust of himself and others which had gradually disappeared, the sense of suspicion and frustration, came flooding back with renewed bitterness. And the whole calamity was aggravated by circumstances of peculiar and unnecessary suffering, which made distrust and bitterness not unjustifiable. Demented apparently by that madness which afflicts those whom the gods wish to destroy, George Augustus had “had a little talk” on the subject of a career with the boy not three months before, when he must have known he was hopelessly involved.
“Now, Georgie, you have only a few months longer, and you will be leaving school. You must think of a career in life. Have you thought about it?”
“Yes, father.”
“That’s right. And what career do you want to take up?”
“I want to be a painter.”
“I rather expected you’d say that. But you must remember that you can hardly expect to make money by painting. Even if you have the talent, which I’m sure you have, it takes many years to establish a reputation, and still more years before you can hope to make an adequate income.”
“Yes, I know that. But I’m convinced that if I had a small income and could do what I wanted, I should be far happier than if I made a great deal of money doing what I hated.”
“Well, my boy, I’m really rather glad that you don’t take the purely money point of view. But think it over. If you take your examinations and qualify, there is a regularly established practice in which you can take your place as my partner and, in due course as my successor. Think it over for a few months. And if you finally decide to take the course you mention, I daresay I can allow you two or three hundred a year, which will be four hundred when I die.”
Now all this was very fatherly and kindly and sensible. In an outburst of quite genuine affection and gratitude George protested first of all that he could not bear to think of his father’s dying and that it was odious to think of profiting by his death.
“But,” he added, “I am quite determined to be a painter in spite of everything. If you can help me as you say, it will all be perfect.”
Nothing more was said on the subject, but in the following weeks George drew and painted hard, went twice to London to look at the galleries and get materials, and thought he was making progress. But what strange weakness permitted George Augustus to yield to the cruelty of raising these hopes which he must have known would be speedily wrecked? The thought of this was constantly in George’s mind, as he moved about silently, rather scared, in the morning hours following the receipt of the letter. It was a problem he never solved, but the incident did not increase his trust in the world or himself.
Other incidents confirmed this mood. Both Isabel and George Augustus rather pushed George forward to take the brunt of the calamity. Isabel’s first suggestion to George was that he should go as a grocer’s errand boy at three shillings a week, a proposition which George indignantly and properly rejected. Whereupon she called him a parasite and a graceless spendthrift. Probably the suggestion was only hysteria, but it hit hard and rankled. Then, it was George do this, and George do that. It was George who had to interview insolent tradesmen and creditors, and plead for further credit and “time.” It was George who recovered £90 in gold which had been stolen by the office boy, and was refunded. It was George who was sent to persuade his father to come back and face out the storm. It was George who was made to go and collect rents from suspicious and uneasy tenants. It was George who had to see solicitors, and try to get a grasp of the situation. They even accepted his offer of the few pounds (birthday gifts saved up) which he had in the Post Office Savings Bank. Rather a shock for a boy not seventeen, who had been living an exalté inner life, and who had been led to suppose that his material future was assured. It is not wholly surprising that he was very unhappy, a bit resentful, and that his mistrust became permanent, his modesty, diffidence.
Things went on in this joyless way for about a year. “Disgrace” was avoided, but it was obvious that the Winterbourne opulence was gone, and George Augustus had lost his nerve. It was from this period that the beginnings of his subsequent conversion dated. In defeat he returned to the beliefs of childhood, but some latent unrecognized hostility to the influence of dear Mamma finally led him to the form of Christianity most opposed to hers. As for George, he brooded a great deal and oscillated between moods of hope and exultation and moods of profound depression. They moved nearer to London, and he tried, with very little success, to sell some of his paintings. They were too ambitious and too youthful, with no commercial value. He was all the time uneasily conscious that he ought to “get out” and that his family were anxious for him to “do something.” Kind friends wrote proposing the most dreary and humiliating jobs they could think of. Even Priscilla—a bitter blow—thought that “George should do something at once, and in a few years might be earning two pounds a week as a clerk.” Then George made the acquaintance of a journalist, a very uneducated but extremely kindly and good-natured man. Thomas had some sort of sub-editorship in Fleet Street, and generously offered to allow George to do some minor reporting for him, an offer which he jumped at. George did his first job—which was passed—and returned home, naturally very late, in a glow of virtuous exultation, thinking how he would surprise his parents next morning with the news, like a good little boy in a story-book. The surprise, however, was his. He was met at the door by an angry Isabel, who, without awaiting his explanation, demanded to know what he meant by coming home at that hour and accused him of “going with a vile woman.” George was too disgusted to make any reply, and went to bed. Next morning there was a glorious row, in which Isabel played the part of a broken-hearted mother and George Augustus came out very strong as a père noble of the Surrey melodrama brand. George was upset, but his contempt kept him cool. George Augustus was perorating:
“If you continue in this way you will break your mother’s heart!”
It was so ludicrous—poor old George Augustus—that George couldn’t help laughing. George Augustus raised his hand in a noble gesture of paternal malediction:
“Leave this house! And do not return to it until you have learned to apologize for your behaviour.”
“You mean it?”
“I solemnly mean it.”
“Right.”
George went straight upstairs and packed his few clothes in a suitcase, asked if he might have the volume of Keats, and left in half an hour—with elevenpence in his pocket, humming:
“Now of my three score years and ten, twenty will not come again.”
So that was that.