PART ONE

_VIVACE_

_VIVACE_

[ I ]

A very different England, that of 1890, and yet curiously the same. In some ways so fabulous, so remote from us; in others so near, terrifyingly near and like us. An England morally buried in great foggy wrappings of hypocrisy and prosperity and cheapness. The wealth of that England, the maritime power of that England, its worse than R. L. S. optimism, its righteous cant! Victoria, broad-bottomed on her people’s will; the possessing class, heavy-bottomed on the people’s neck. The working class beginning to heave restively, but still Moody and Sankeyish, still under the Golden Rule of “ever remember, my dear Bert, you may one day be manager of that concern.” The middle classes, especially the traders, making money hand over fist, and still “praying that our unexampled prosperity may last.” The aristocracy still pretty flip, keeping its tail up. Still lots of respect for Rank and Property—Dizzy not long dead, and his novels not yet grotesques, not yet wholly a fossil parody. The intellectuals æsthetic and Oscarish, or æsthetic and Burne-Morrisy, or Utilitarian and Huxley-Darwinish.

Come where the booze is cheaper.

Where I could live on a pound a week in lux-u-ry.

The world is so full of a number of things, I am _sure_ we should ALL be as Happy as KINGS.

Consols over par.

Lord Claud Hamilton and White at the Admiralty, building, building, building.

Building a majestic ruin.

George Moore, an elegant scandal in a hansom; Hardy a rural atheistic scandal, not yet discovered to be an intolerable bore; Oscar prancing negligently, O so clever, O so lah-di-dah.

Rummy old England. Pox on you, you old bitch, you’ve made worms’ meat of us. (We’ve made worms’ meat of ourselves.) But still, let me look back upon thee. Timon knew thee.

* * * * *

The Winterbournes were not gentry, but nourished vague and unfounded traditions of past genteel splendours. They were, however, fairly comfortable middle class. Worcestershire, migrated to Sheffield. Methodist on female side; C. of E. on the Winterbourne side. Young George Augustus—father of our George—was pretty comfortable. His mother was a dominating old bitch who destroyed his initiative and courage, but in the eighties hardly any one had the sense to tell dominating bitch-mothers to go to hell. George Augustus didn’t. At fifteen he wrote a Non-Conformist tract (which was published) expressing nothing but his dear Mamma’s views. He became top of his school, in conformity with dear Mamma’s views also. He did not go to Oxford, as he wanted, because dear Mamma thought it unpractical. And he did pass his examinations as a lawyer, because dear Mamma thought it so eminently right that he should have a profession and that there should be a lawyer in the family. George Augustus was a third son. The eldest son became a Non-Conformist parson, because dear Mamma had prayed for guidance on her marriage night and during her first pregnancy (only she never mentioned such horrid occurrences, even to her husband, but—she had “prayed for guidance”) and it had been revealed to her that her first-born must take up The Ministry. And take it up, poor devil, he did. The second son had a little bit of spunk, and his dear Mamma made him a waster. Remained George Augustus, dear Mamma’s darling chick, who prayed at her knee, and was flogged regularly once a month by dear Papa, because the Scripture says: Spare the rod, spoil the child. Dear Papa had never done anything in particular, lived on his “means,” was generally rather in debt, and spent the last fifteen years of his life praying to the C. of E. God in the garden, while dear Mamma prayed to John Wesley’s God in her bedroom. Dear Mamma admired dear pious Mr. Bright and grand Mr. Gladstone; but dear Papa collected and even read all the works of the Right Hnble the Earl of Beaconsfield, K. G.

Still, George Augustus was pretty comfortable. The one thing he wanted in life was to be pretty comfortable. After he became a full-blown solicitor, at the age of twenty-four, a family council was held. Present: Dear Mamma, dear Papa, George Augustus. Nothing formal, _of_ course, just a cosy little family gathering after tea, round the blazing hearth (coal was cheap in Sheffield then), rep curtains drawn, and sweet domestic peace. Dear Papa opened the proceedings:

“George, you are now come to man’s estate. At considerable sacrifice, your dear Mamma and I have given you a Profession. You are an Admitted Solicitor, and we are proud—I think we may say ‘proud,’ Mamma?—that we have a legal luminary in the family....”

But dear Mamma could not even allow dear Papa the semblance of authority, respected not even the forms of Limited Domestic Monarchy, and cut in:

“Your Papa is right, George. The question is now, what are you going to _do_ in your Profession?”

Did a feeble hope of escape cross the bright young mind of George Augustus? Or was that supine love of being pretty comfortable added to the terror of disobeying dear Mamma, already dominant? He murmured something about “getting in with a respectable and old-established firm in London.” At the word “London” dear Mamma bridled. Although Mr. Gladstone spent much of his time in London, it was notorious in Sheffield Non-Conformist circles that London was a haunt of vice, filled with theatres and unmentionable women. Besides, dear Mamma was not going to let George Augustus off so easily; she still meant he should plough a deuce of a long furrow of filial obedience.

“I cannot hear of _London_, George. It would break my heart and bring your dear Papa’s grey hairs” (dear Papa hated to be reminded that he was bald) “in sorrow to the grave, if you went to the _bad_ in that dreadful town. Think how we should feel if we heard you had visited a _Theatre!_ No, George, we shall not fail in our duty. We have brought you up to be a God-fearing Christian man... et patata et patati.”

The upshot was, of course, that dear George Augustus did not go to London. He didn’t even get an office of his own in Sheffield. It was agreed that George Augustus would never marry (except for a whore or two, furtively and ineffectually possessed on furtive ineffectual sprees in London, George Augustus was a virgin), but would spend his life with dear Mamma, and (afterthought) dear Papa. So some structural alterations were made in the house. Another entrance was made, with a new brass plate engraved in copperplate:

G. A. WINTERBOURNE

SOLICITOR

Three rooms, somewhat separated from the rest of the house, were allotted to George Augustus—a bedroom, an “Office,” and a “cosy study.” Needless to say, George Augustus did very little practice, except when his dear Mamma in an access of ambition procured him the job of making the will of some female friend or of drawing up the conveyance of the land for a new Wesleyan Chapel. What George Augustus did with most of his time is a bit of a puzzle—twiddled his thumbs, and read Dickens and Thackeray and Bulwer and George Augustus Sala mostly.

* * * * *

This lasted three or four years. Dear Mamma had her talons deep into George Augustus, vamped on him hideously, and was content. Dear Papa prayed in the garden and read the Right Hnble etcetera’s novels, and was uneasily content. George Augustus was pretty comfortable, and thought himself rather a hell of a bhoy because he occasionally sneaked off to a play or a whore, and bought some of the Vizitelly books on the sly. But there was one snag dear Mamma had not foreseen. Dear Papa had been fairly decently educated and brought up; he had, when a young man, travelled annually for several weeks, and had seen the Fields of Waterloo, Paris, and Ramsgate. After he married dear Mamma, he had to be content with Malvern and Ramsgate, for he was never allowed again to behold that wicked Continent. However, such is the force of Tradition, George Augustus was annually allowed a month’s holiday. In 1887 he visited Ireland; in 1888 Scotland; in 1889 the Lake District, with “pilgrimages” to the “shrines” of those unblemished geniuses, Wordsworth and Southey. But in 1890 George Augustus went to “rural Kent,” with “pilgrimages” to the Dingley Dell country and to the “shrine” of Sir Philip Sidney. But there were sirens awaiting our Odysseus in rural Kent. George Augustus met Isabel Hartly and before he knew where he was, had arranged irrevocably a marriage with her—_without_ telling dear Mamma. Hic incipit vita nova. Thus was George, young George, generated.

The Hartlys must have been more fun than the Winterbournes. The Winterbournes had never done a damn thing in their lives, and were as stuffily, frowzily, mawkish-religiously boring as a family could be and still remain—I won’t say alive or even sentient—but, able to digest their very pudding-y meals. The Hartlys were different. They were poor Army. Pa Hartly had chased all round the Empire, dragging with him Ma Hartly, always in pod and always pupping in incongruous and inconvenient spots—the Egyptian desert, a shipwrecked troop-ship, a malarial morass in the West Indies, on the road to Khandahar. They had an inconceivable number of children, dead, dying and alive, of all ages and sexes. Finally, old Hartly settled down near his wife’s family in rural Kent, with a smallish pension, a tiny “private” income, and the world of his swarming progeny on his less than Atlantean shoulders. (I believe he had had two or three wives, all horribly fertile. No doubt, the earlier Mrs. Hartlys had perished of superfluous child-bearing, “superfœtation of τὸ ἒν.”)

* * * * *

Isabel Hartly was one—don’t ask which in numerical order, or by which wife—of Captain Hartly’s daughters. She was very pretty in a florid vulgarish way, with her artful-innocent dark eyes, and flashing smiles, and pretty little bustle and frills, and “fresh complexion” and “abounding health.” She was fascinatingly ignorant, even to the none too sophisticated George Augustus. And she had a strength of character superior even to dear Mamma’s, added to a superb, an admirable vitality, which bewitched, bewildered, electrified, the somewhat sluggish and pretty comfortable George Augustus. He had never met any one like her. In fact dear Mamma had never allowed him to meet any one but rather soggy Non-Conformists of mature years, and “nice” youths and maidens of exemplary Non-Conformist stupidity and lifelessness.

George Augustus fell horribly in love.

He abode at the village inn, which was cheap and pretty comfortable; and he did himself well. On these holidays he had such a mood of exultation (subconscious) in getting away from dear Mamma that he felt like a hero in Bulwer-Lytton. We should say he swanked; probably the early nineties would have said he came the masher. He certainly mashed Isabel.

The Hartlys didn’t swank. They made no effort to conceal their poverty or the vulgarity imported into the family by the third (or fourth) Mrs. Hartly. They were fond of pork; and gratefully accepted the gifts of vegetables and fruit which the kind-hearted English country people force on those they know are none too well off. They grew lots of vegetables and fruit themselves; and kept pigs. They made blackberry jam and damson jam, and scoured the country for mushrooms; and the only “drink” ever allowed in the family was Pa Hartly’s “drop o’ grog” secretly consumed after the innumerable children had gone to bed in threes and fours.

So it wasn’t hard for George Augustus to swank. He took the Hartlys—even Isabel—in completely. He talked about “my people” and “our place.” He talked about his Profession. He gave them copies of the Non-Conformist tract he had published at fifteen. He gave Ma Hartly a fourteen-pound tin of that expensive (2/3 a pound) tea she had always pined for since they had left Ceylon. He bought fantastic things for Isabel—a coral brooch, a copy of the _Pilgrim’s Progress_ bound in wood from the door of Bunyan’s parish church, a turkey, a year’s subscription to the _Family Herald Supplement_, a new shawl, boxes of 1/6 a pound chocolates, and took her for drives in an open landau smelling of horse-piss and oats.

The Hartlys thought he was “rich.” George Augustus was so very comfortable and _exalté_ that he, too, really thought he was “rich.”

One night, a sweet rural night, with a lemon moon over the sweet, breast-round, soft English country, with the nightingales jug-jugging and twit-twitting like mad in the leafy lanes, George Augustus kissed Isabel by a stile, and—manly fellow—asked her to marry him. Isabel—she had a pretty fiery temperament even then—had just sense enough not to kiss back and let him know that other “fellows” had kissed her, and perhaps fumbled further. She turned away her pretty head with its Pompadour knot of dark hair, and murmured—yes, she did, because she _had_ read the stories in the _Quiver_ and the _Family Herald_—

“Oh, Mr. Winterbourne, this is so unexpected!”

But then her common-sense and the eagerness to be “rich” got the better of her _Quiver_ artificiality, and she said, oh, so softly and moderately:

“_Yes!_”

George Augustus quivered dramatically, clasped her, and they kissed a long time. He liked her ever so much more than the London whores, but he didn’t dare to do any more than kiss her, and exclaim:

“Isabel! I love you. Be mine. Be my wife and build a home for me. Let us pass our lives in a delirium of joy. Oh that I need not leave you to-night!”

On the way home Isabel said:

“You must speak to father to-morrow.”

And George Augustus, who was nothing if not the gent, replied:

“I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.”

Next morning, according to schedule, George Augustus called on Pa Hartly with a bottle of 3/6 port and a leg of fresh pork; and after a good deal of hemming and blushing and talking round the subject (as if old Hartly hadn’t heard from Isabel what was coming) formally and with immense solemnity applied for the job of supporting Isabel for the rest of his and her natural lives.

Did Pa Hartly refuse? Did he hesitate? Eagerly, gratefully, effusively, enthusiastically, he granted the request. He slapped George Augustus on the shoulder, which military expression of good will startled and slightly annoyed the prim George Augustus. He said George Augustus was a man after his own heart, the man he would have chosen to make his daughter happy, the man he longed to have as a son-in-law. He told two barrack-room stories, which made George Augustus exquisitely uneasy; drank two large glasses of port; and then launched out on a long story about how he had saved the British Army when he was an Ensign during the Crimea. George Augustus listened patiently and filially, but as hour after hour went by and the story showed no signs of ending, he ventured to suggest that the good news should be broken to Isabel and Ma Hartly, who (unknown to the gentlemen) were listening at the keyhole in an agony of impatience.

So they were called in, and Pa Hartly made a little speech founded on the style of old General Snooter, K.C.B., and then Pa kissed Isabel, and Ma embraced Isabel tearfully but enthusiastically and admiringly, and Pa pecked at Ma, and George Augustus kissed Isabel; and they were left alone for half an hour before “dinner”—1:30 P.M., chops, potatoes, greens, a fruit-suet pudding and beer.

The Hartlys still thought George Augustus was “rich.”

But before he left rural Kent, he had to write home to his father for ten pounds to pay his inn bill and his fare. He told dear Papa about Isabel, and asked him to break the news to dear Mamma. “An old Army family,” George Augustus wrote, and “a sweet pure girl who loves me dearly and for whom I would fight like a TIGER and willingly lay down my life.” He didn’t mention the poverty and the vulgarity and the catch-as-catch-can atmosphere of the Hartly family, or the innumerable progeny. Dear Papa almost thought George Augustus was marrying into the gentry.

Dear Papa sent George Augustus his ten pounds, and broke the news to dear Mamma. Strangely enough, she did not cut up as rough as you might have expected. Did she feel the force of Isabel’s character and determination even at that distance? Had she a suspicion of the furtive whoring, and did she think it better to marry than to burn? Perhaps she thought she could vamp George Augustus’s wife as well as George Augustus, and so enjoy two victims.

She wept a bit and prayed more than ever.

“I think, Papa,” she said, “that the Hand of Providence must have led Augustus. I hope Miss Isabel will make him a good wife, and not be too grand with her Army ways to darn his socks and overlook the maids. Of course, the young couple must live here, and _I_ shall be able to give kindly guidance to their early married life as well as religious instruction to the bride. I pray GOD may bless them.”

Dear Papa, who was not a bad sort, said “Umph,” and wrote George Augustus a very decent letter, promising him £200 to start married life, and suggesting that the honeymoon should take place either in Paris or on the Plains of Waterloo.

* * * * *

The wedding took place in spring in “rural Kent.” A lot of Winterbournes, including, of course, George’s parents, came down. Dear Mamma was horribly shocked, not to say disgusted by the _unseemly_ behaviour of the Hartlys; and even dear Papa was a bit staggered. But it was then too late to retreat with honour.

A village wedding in 1890! Gods of our fathers known of old, what a sight! Alas! that there were no cinemas then. Can’t you see it? Old men in bug-whiskers and top-hats; old ladies in bustles and bonnets. Young men in drooping moustaches, “artistic” flowing ties, and probably grey toppers. Young women in small bustles and small flowery hats. And bridesmaids in white. And a best man. And George Augustus a bit sweaty in a new morning suit. And Isabel, of course, “radiant” in white and orange-blossoms. And the parson, and signing the register, and the wedding breakfast, and the double peal on the bells, and the “going away.”... No, it’s too painful, it’s so horrible it isn’t even funny. It’s indecent. I’m positively sorry for George Augustus and Isabel, especially for Isabel. What said the bells? “Come and see the *******. Come and see the *******.”

But Isabel enjoyed the whole ghastly ceremony, little beast. She wrote a long description of it to one of her “fellows,” whom she really loved but had jilted for George Augustus’s “riches.”

“... It was a cloudy day, but as we knelt at the altar a long ray of sunshine came through the church window and rested lovingly on our bowed heads....”

How could they rise to such bilge? But they did, they did, they did. And they believed in it. If only they’d had their tongues in their cheeks there might have been some hope. But they hadn’t. They believed in the sickish, sweetish canting bilge, they believed in it. Believed in it with all the superhuman force of ignorance.

Can one tabulate the ignorances, the relevant ignorances of George Augustus and Isabel when they pledged themselves until death do us part?

George Augustus did not know how to make a living; he did not know in the very least how to treat a woman; he did not know how to live with a woman; he did not know how to make love to a woman—in fact he was all minus there, for his experience with whores had been sordid, dismal and repulsive; he did not know the anatomy of his own body, let alone the anatomy of a woman’s body; he had not the faintest idea how to postpone conception ** **** ** ***** ** **** *** ** ********** * ****** *****, ****** ******* ** *** ****** *** **** ***** ** **** ******; he did not know what is implied by “a normal sexual life”; ** *** *** **** **** ***** *** *** ****** ***** *******; ** *** *** **** **** ** ***** * *** *** ********* *** ******** ***** **** *** ** ******* * ***** **** * ***** *** ** *** **** ****** **** *** **** ********* ** *** *** *** **** **; ** *** **** **** ***** **** *******; he did not know that pregnancy is a nine months’ illness; he had not the least idea that childbirth costs money if the woman is not to suffer vilely; he did not know that a married man dependent on his and his wife’s parents is an abject, helpless and contemptible figure; he did not know that it is hard to earn a decent living even when you have “A Profession”; he knew damn little about even his profession; he knew very little indeed about the conditions of life and nothing about human psychology; he knew nothing about business and money, except how to spend it; he knew nothing about indoor sanitation, food values, carpentry, house furnishing, shopping, fire-lighting, chimney-sweeping, higher mathematics, Greek, domestic invective, making the worse appear the better cause, how to feed a baby, music, dancing, Swedish drill, opening sardine tins, boiling eggs, which side of the bed to sleep with a woman, charades, gas stoves, and an infinity of other things all indispensable to a married man.

He must have been rather a dull dog.

As for Isabel—what she didn’t know includes almost the whole range of human knowledge. The puzzle is to find out what she _did_ know. She didn’t even know how to buy her own clothes—Ma Hartly had always done that for her. Among the things she did not know, were: How babies are made and come; how to make love; how to pretend she was enjoying it even when she wasn’t; how to sew, wash, cook, scrub, run a house, purchase provisions, keep household accounts, domineer over a housemaid, order a dinner, dismiss a cook, know when a room was clean, manage George Augustus when he was in a bad temper, give George Augustus a pill when he was liverish, feed and wash a baby and pin on its napkins, pay and receive calls, knit, crochet, make pastry, how to tell a fresh herring is stale, the difference between pork and veal, never to use margarine, how to make a bed comfortably, look after her health especially in pregnancy, produce the soft answer which turneth away wrath, keep the home fires burning, and an infinity of other things indispensable to a married woman.

(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 brutalize 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 rêve_ gave Isabel her first baby.

[ II ]

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 _ménage_ 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 immediately 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, smoke-blackened 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 cheese-paring genteely 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 pained, 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 then 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 Non-Conformist tract hypocrisy, and only picked it up again when Isabel fainted.

On dear Papa’s suggestion George Augustus took Isabel away to the sea-side on what was left of the £200; and thus it happened that George was born in a sea-side 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 agonizing labour, George Augustus prayed freely, took short walks, read “Lorna Doone,” had a half bottle of claret with his lunch and dinner, and slept tranquilly o’ nights. When, finally, he was admitted on tip-toe 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 tip-toed down to dinner, and ordered a whole bottle of claret in honour of the event.

[ III ]

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 formulæ, 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 overambitious, and turned sour and sharp under the tender mercies of dear Mamma, she became 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 harmless 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 Non-Conformist 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 determine. 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 Tatersall’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 æsthetic. 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 had wept for beautiful Bion. In Athens he had reclined, violet-crowned, at the banquet where Socrates reasoned of love with Alcibiades. But above all he felt a stupendous passion for mediæval 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.

One day George Augustus announced to the family that he should abandon his Profession and WRITE.

* * * * *

There may be little differences in an English family, for the best of friends fall out at times, but in all serious crises they may be depended upon to show a united front. Thank God, there can still be no doubt about it—apart from pure literature of the sheik brand and refining pictures in the revived Millais tradition, an English family can still be relied upon to present a united front against any of its members’ indulging in the obscene pursuits of Literature or Art. Such things may be left to the obscene Continent and our own degenerates and decadents, though it would be well if stern methods were adopted by the police to cleanse our public life of the scandal brought upon Us by the latter. The great English middle-class mass, that dreadful squat pillar of the nation, will only tolerate art and literature that are fifty years out of date, eviscerated, de-testiculated, bowdlerized, humbuggered, slip-slopped, subject to their anglicized Jehovah. They are still that unbroken rampart of Philistia against which Byron broke himself in vain, and which even the wings of Ariel were inadequate to surmount. So, look out, my friend. Hasten to adopt the slimy mask of British humbug and British fear of life, or expect to be smashed. You may escape for a time. You may think you can compromise. You can’t. You’ve either got to lose your soul to them or have it smashed by them. Or you can exile yourself.

It was probably worse in the days of George Augustus, and anyway he was only a grotesque and didn’t much matter. Still, the vitality of Isabel was real and should have found an outlet instead of being forced back into her and turned into a sharp sour poison. And the pathetic efforts of George Augustus to be an æsthete and WRITE meant something, some inner struggle, some effort to create a life of his own. It was an evasion, of course, a feeble flapping desire to escape into a dream world; but if you had been George Augustus, living under the sceptre of dear Mamma in the Sheffield of 1891, you too would have yearned to escape. Isabel opposed this new freak of George Augustus, because she also wanted to escape. And for her, escape was only possible if George Augustus earned enough money to take her and her baby away. She thought the pre-Raphaelites rather nonsensical and drivelling—and she wasn’t far wrong. She thought Mr. Hardy very gloomy and immoral, and Mr. George Moore very frivolous and immoral, and young Mr. Wilde very unhealthy and immoral. But her reading in the works of all these immortals was very sketchy and snatchy—what really animated her was her immovable instinct that George Augustus’s only motive in life henceforth should be to provide for her and her child, and to get them away from Sheffield and dear Mamma.

Dear Papa and dear Mamma also thought these new crazes of George Augustus nonsensical and immoral. Dear Mamma read the opening pages of one of Mr. Hardy’s novels, and then burned the Obscene Thing in the kitchen copper. Whereupon there was a blazing row with George Augustus. Backed by the malicious Bulburry (who hated dear Mamma so much that he put several little bits of business he didn’t want into the hands of George Augustus, who thereby made about £70 in six months), George Augustus, who had never stood up for himself or his own integrity or Isabel or anything that mattered, stood up for Mr. Hardy and his own false pathetic pose of æstheticism. George Augustus locked all his priceless new books into a cupboard of which he jealously kept the key. And he spent hours a day locked in his “cosy study” WRITING, while the enraged thunder of the offended family rolled impotently outside. But George Augustus was firm. He bought art-y ties, and saw Bulburry nearly every evening, and went on WRITING. Bulburry was so malevolent that he persuaded a friend, who was editing an amateurish æsthetic review in London, to publish an article by George Augustus, entitled _The Wonder of Cleopatra throughout the Ages_. George Augustus got a guinea for the article, and for a week the family was hushed and awed.

But in that atmosphere of exasperation and dread of the Unknown Obscene, rows were inevitable. And, since George Augustus remained almost hermetically sealed in his cosy study, and refused to come out and be rowed with, even when dear Mamma tapped imperiously at the door and reminded him, through the panes, of his Duties to God, his Mamma and Society, the rows inevitably took place between dear Mamma and Isabel.

One night, after George Augustus was asleep, Isabel got up and stole £5 from his sovereign-purse. Next morning, she took the baby for a walk as usual, but took it to the Railway station and fled to the Hartly home in rural Kent. This was certainly not the boldest thing Isabel ever did—she afterwards did things of incredible rashness—but it was one of the most sensible, from her point of view. It was the first of her big efforts to force George Augustus to action. It reminded him that he had taken on certain responsibilities, and that responsibilities are realities which cannot always be avoided. She bombed him out of the dug-out of dear Mamma’s tyranny, and eventually Archied him out of the empyrean of æstheticism and writing.

But she didn’t let herself or George Augustus down to the Hartly family. She reckoned—and reckoned rightly—that George Augustus would follow her up pretty smartly, for fear of “what people would say.” So she sent a telegram to Pa and Ma to say she was coming to see them for a few days—they were fairly well accustomed to Isabel’s impulsive moves by this time—and she left a note, a dramatic and naturally (not artistically) tear-stained note for George Augustus on the bedroom dressing-table. She took a few inexpensive presents home, and played her part so well that at first even Ma Hartly only vaguely suspected that something was wrong.

* * * * *

The loving and united home at Sheffield was in some consternation when Isabel did not return for lunch; and the consternation almost became panic—it certainly became rage in dear Mamma—when George Augustus found and communicated Isabel’s letter.

“She must be found and brought back here at once,” said dear Mamma decisively, already scenting carnage from afar, “she has disgraced herself, disgraced her husband and disgraced the family. I have long noticed that she is inattentive at family prayers. She must be given a good lesson. It was an ill day for us all when Augustus married so far beneath him. He must go and fetch her back from her low vulgar family—to think of our dear little George being in such _immoral_ surroundings.”

“Suppose she won’t come?” said dear Papa, who had suffered so many years from dear Mamma that he had a fellow feeling for Isabel.

“She must be _made_ to come,” said dear Mamma, “Augustus! You must do your duty and assert your authority as a _Husband_. You must leave to-night.”

“But what will people _say?_” murmured George Augustus dejectedly.

At those fatal words even dear Mamma flushed beneath the pallor of fifty years bad temper and cloistered malevolence. What would people say? What would people say I What indeed? What would the Minister say? What would Mrs. Standish say? And Mrs. Gregory? And Miss Stint, who was another Minister’s niece? And cousin Joan, who had an eye like a brace of buzzards, and a nose for scandal and other carrion which would have been surprising in a starving condor of the Andes? What would they say? Why, they would say that young Mrs. Winterbourne had run away with a ticket collector on the G. W. R. They would say young George had turned out to have a touch of the tar-brush owing to the prolonged residence of Captain and Mrs. Hartly in the West Indies; and that, consequently, Mrs. Winterbourne and the infant had been spirited away “to a home.” They would say that there was a “dreadful disease” in the Winterbourne family, and that Isabel had run away with an infected baby. They would also say things which, being nearer the truth, would be even more painful. They would say that dear Mamma had plagued Isabel beyond the verge of endurance—and so she had run away, with or without an accomplice. They would say that George Augustus was unable to support his family, and that Isabel had grown tired of thumb-twiddling and “all this nonsense about books.” They would say—what would they not say? And the Winterbournes, unique in this among human beings, were sensitive to “what people said.”

So when George Augustus said dejectedly: “What will people _say?_” even the ranks of Tuscany—viz. dear Mamma—were for a moment dismayed. But that undaunted spirit (which has made the Empire famous) soon rallied, and dear Mamma evolved a plan; and issued orders with a precision and clarity which may be recommended to all Brigadiers, Battalion, Company and Platoon commanders. The maids must be told at once that Mrs. Winterbourne had been unexpectedly called home by the illness of her father—which was immediately done, but as the maids had been listening with delighted eagerness to the conference in the parlour, that bit of camouflage was not very effective. Then dear Mamma would pay a round of visits that afternoon, and casually let drop that “dear Isabel” had been unexpectedly et cetera; to which she would add negligently that an “important conveyance” had detained her son in Sheffield until the next morning, when he would follow his wife—“such a devoted couple, and only my daughter-in-law’s earnest entreaties could prevail upon my dear son not to neglect this important business to act as her cavalier.” Then, George Augustus would leave next morning for rural Kent, and would hale Isabel home like the husband of patient Grissel, or some other hero of romance.

All of which was carried out according to schedule, with one important exception. When George Augustus unexpectedly walked into the multitudinous and tumultuous Saturday dinner of the Hartly family—loin of fresh pork, greens, potatoes, apple sauce, fruit-suet pudding, but no beer this time—he found no patient Grissel awaiting him. And his very impatient and aggrieved Grissel was backed up by an equally aggrieved family, who by now had wormed out of her by no means reticent mind something of the truth. The Hartlys were simply furious with George Augustus for not being “rich.” The way he had come it over them! The way he had mashed Isabel with his 1/6 a pound chocolates! The way dear Mamma had put on her airs of righteous disapproval at Captain Hartly’s little jokes about a fellah in India (Ha! Ha!) and a couple of native women (He! He!)! The intolerable way in which dear Papa had come it about ’64 Port and Paris and the Plains of Waterloo! And after the Hartlys had endured all those humiliations to find that George Augustus was not “rich,” after all! O horrible, most horrible!

So when George Augustus, still half-armed with the bolts of thunder-compelling dear Mamma, walked in dramatically to that agape of roast pig, he found he had a tougher job to deal with than he had imagined.

He was greeted with very constrained and not very polite reticence by the elder Hartlys, and gazed at by such an inordinate number of round-O-eyed youthful Hartlys that he felt all the reproachful juvenile eyes in the world must be directed upon him, as he struggled with an (intentionally) tough and disagreeable portion of the meal.

* * * * *

Need it be said? George Augustus was defeated by Isabel and the Hartlys, as he would have been defeated by any one with half an ounce of spunk and half a dram of real character.

He capitulated.

Without the honours of war.

He apologized to Isabel.

And to Ma Hartly.

And to “the Captain.”

An Armistice was arranged, the terms of which were:

George Augustus surrendered unconditionally, and all the honours of war went to Isabel.

Isabel was not to return to dear Mamma or to Sheffield, not ever again.

They were to take a cottage in rural Kent, not far from the Hartlys.

George Augustus was to return to Sheffield and bring to rural Kent his precious æsthetes and as much furniture as he could cadge.

He was to sell his “practice” in Sheffield, and to start to “practise” in rural Kent.

As a concession to George Augustus, he was to be allowed to WRITE—for a time. But if the Writing proved unremunerative within a reasonable period—such period to be determined by Isabel and the Other High Contracting Powers—he was to “practise” with more assiduity—and profit.

Failing which, George Augustus would hear about it, and Isabel would apply for a maintenance order for herself and child.

Signed, sealed and delivered over a quart bottle of East Kent Pale Ale.

* * * * *

Poor old George Augustus, the shadows of the prison were rapidly closing round _him_, though he didn’t know it. He had a hell of a time with dear Mamma when he went home with his tail between his legs and without Isabel, and announced that they had determined to take a cottage in rural Kent and—WRITE. At the word “write,” dear Mamma sniffed:

“And who, pray, will pay your washing bills?”

In a spirit of loving-kindness and forbearance, George Augustus ignored this taunt, which was just as well, since he could think of nothing to say in reply.

Well, dear Papa came to the rescue again. He gave George Augustus as much of the furniture as he dared, and another gift of £50 he hadn’t got. And Bulburry got George Augustus orders for an article on _The Friends of Lorenzo the Magnificent_, and another article on _My Wanderings in Florence_. Bulburry also advised George Augustus to write a book, either a history of the _Decline and Fall of the Florentine Republic_, or a novel on the unhackneyed topic of Savonarola. In addition, Bulburry gave him an introduction to one of those enterprising young publishers who are always arising in London to witch the world with noble publishing; and then, after two or three years, always disappear in the bankruptcy court, leaving behind a sad trail of unpaid bills and disappointed authors and wrecked reputations.

* * * * *

So George Augustus set up in Rural Kent as a WRITER, in a pleasant little cottage which Isabel had found for them.

(I do wish you could have seen the “artistic” ties George Augustus wore when he was a WRITER; they would have given you that big feeling.)

But—let us be just—George Augustus really worked—three hours a day, like all the great authors—at writing. He produced articles and he produced stories and he began the Decline and Fall of the Florentine Republic and the most blood-curdling novel about Savonarola, beginning: “One stormy night in December 14—, two black-cloaked figures might have been observed traversing the Piazza della Signoria in Florence on their way from Or San Michele to the private residence of Lorenzo the Magnificent, now known as the Palazzo Strozzi.”

Poor George Augustus! Take it for all in all, we shall look upon many like him again. He had a lot to learn. He had to learn that the only books which have the least importance are those which are made from direct contact with life, which are built out of a man’s guts. He had to learn that every age pullulates with imitators of the authors who have done this, and created a fashion,—which in time and for a time kills them and their influence.

But still, for a year or so he had his cottage in rural Kent and was a Writer. He dreamed his dream, though it was a pretty silly and castrated dream. If he hadn’t married Isabel and gotten her with child, he might have made quite a reasonably good literary hack. But, Oh! those hostages given to Fortune! **** ***** **** *****, *** **** **** **** **** ***** ******.

* * * * *

As for Isabel, she was happy for the first, and perhaps the last time in her life. She adored her cottage in rural Kent. What did it matter that George Augustus wasted his time Writing? He still had about £170 and earned a few guineas a month by articles and stories. But for her the thrill was having a real home of her own. She furnished the cottage herself, partly with the heavy mahogany 1850 stuff George Augustus had brought from Sheffield, partly with her own atrocious taste and bamboo. George urged her to furnish “artistically,” and the resultant chaos of huge solid stodgy curly mahogany and flimsy bamboo, palms, cauliflower chintzes and framed photographs would have rendered the late Mr. Oscar Wilde plaintive in less than fifty seconds. Never mind, Isabel was happy. She had her home and she had George Augustus under her eye and thumb, and she had her baby—whom she adored with all the selfishness of a pure woman—and, best of all, she did NOT have dear Mamma pestering and sneering and praying at her through every hour of the day and at every turn. Dear Isabel, how happy she was in her hum-ble little ho-o-me! Put it to yourself, now. Suppose you had been one of an innumerable family, enduring all the abominable discomforts and lack of privacy in that elementary Soviet System. And suppose you had then been uncomfortably impregnated and most painfully delivered, and then bullied and pried into and domineered over and tortured by dear Mamma; wouldn’t you be glad to have a home of your own, however humble, and however flimsily based on sandy foundations of WRITING and art-y ties? Of course you would. So Isabel looked after the baby, _tant bien que mal_, and cooked abominable meals, and was swindled by the tradesmen, and ran up bills which frightened her, and let young George catch croup and nearly die, and didn’t interrupt George Augustus’s wooing of the Muse more than half a dozen times a morning and—was happy.

* * * * *

But in all our little arrangements on this satellite of the Sun, we are apt to forget—among a multitude of other things—two important facts. We are the inhabitants of a planet who keep alive only by a daily consumption of the material products of that planet; we are members of a crude collective organization which distributes these essential products in accordance with certain bizarre rules painfully evolved from chaos by primitive brains. George Augustus certainly forgot these two facts—if he had ever recognized them. A man, a woman and a brat cannot live forever on £170 and a few odd guineas a month. They couldn’t do it even in the eighteen nineties, even with extraordinary economy. And Isabel was not economical. Neither, for that matter, was George Augustus. He was mean, but he liked to be pretty comfortable, and his notions of the pretty comfortable were a bit extravagant. Torn between his respect for the Right Hnble the Lord Tennyson’s well-known predilection for Port and Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne’s less notorious but undisguised preference for brandy neat, George Augustus finally became original, and fell back on his favourite claret. But, even in the nineties, claret was not cheap; and three dozen a month rather eat into an income of four to six guineas. And then Isabel was inexperienced. In housekeeping inexperience costs money. So a time arrived when the £170 was nearly at zero, and the few guineas a month became fewer instead of more numerous. Then George, young George, developed some infant malady; Isabel lost her head, and insisted on a doctor; the doctor, like all the English middle classes thought a Writer was a harmless fool with money to be bled ruthlessly, called far more often than was necessary, and sent in a much bigger bill than he would have dared send a stockbroker or a millionaire. Then George Augustus had the influenza and thought he was going to die. And after that Isabel was stricken with hemorrhoids in her secret parts; and had to be treated. Consequently, the bank balance of a few guineas was turned into a deficit of a good many pounds; and the affable Bank Manager rapidly became strangely unaffable when his polite references to the overdraft remained unsatisfied with the manna of a few cheques.

It became obvious to Isabel—and would have long ago become obvious to almost any one but George Augustus—that Luv and WRITING in a cottage were hopelessly bankrupt.

Well, dear Papa pungled once more—with a pound a week; and Pa Hartly weighed in with a weekly five shillings. But that was misery, and Isabel was determined that since she had married George Augustus for his “riches,” “rich” he should be or perish in the act of trying to acquire riches. So she brought into play all the feminine arsenal, reinforced with a few useful underhand punches and jabs in the moral kidneys, learned from dear Mamma. George Augustus tried to keep high above these material and degrading necessities, but, as I said, Isabel finally Archied him down. When they could no longer get credit even for meat or bread, George Augustus capitulated, and agreed to “practise” once more. He wanted to go back to Sheffield and be pretty comfortable again, under the talons of dear Mamma. But Isabel was—quite rightly—adamant. She refused to return to Sheffield. George Augustus had got her on false pretences, i.e., that he was “rich.” He was not rich. He was, in fact, damn poor. But he had taken on the responsibility of supporting a woman, and he had got that woman with child. He had no business to be pretty comfortable any longer under the wings of dear Mamma. His business was to get rich as quickly as possible; at any rate to provide for his dependents. Inexorable logic, against which I can find no argument even in sophistry.

So they went to a middling-sized, dreary, coast town just then in the process of “development” (Bulburry’s suggestion) and George Augustus put up another brass plaque. With no results. But then, just as the situation was getting desperate dear Papa died. He did not leave his children a fortune, but he did leave them £250 each—and strangely enough he actually had the money. Dear Mamma was left in rather “straitened circumstances”, but she had enough to be unreservedly disagreeable to the end of her days.

That £250—and the Oscar Wilde case—just saved the situation. The £250 gave them enough to live on for a year. The Oscar Wilde case scared George Augustus thoroughly out of æstheticism and Writing. What? They were hanging men and women for wearing of the green? Then, George Augustus would wear red. After “The Sentence” George Augustus, like most of England, decided that art and literature were niminy-piminy, if not greenery-yallery. I don’t say he burned his books and art-y ties, but he put them out of sight with remarkable alacrity. The Great Voice of the English People had spoken in no Uncertain Tones, and George Augustus was not deaf to the Message. How could he be, with Isabel pouring it into one ear by word of mouth and dear Mamma—unexpected but welcome ally—into the other by letter? A nation of Mariners and Sportsmen naturally excel in the twin arts of leaving a sinking ship and kicking a man when he is down. Three months after The Sentence you would never have suspected that George Augustus had dreamed of Writing. His clothes were of exemplary Philistinism—indeed, the height of his starched collars and the plainness of his ties had an almost Judas touch in their unæsthetic ugliness. Urged on by Isabel he became a Free Mason, an Oddfellow, an Elk, a Heart of Oak, a Buffalo, a Druid, and God knows how many other mysterious things. He himself abandoned Florence, forgot even the blameless Savonarola, and prayed for Guidance. They attended the “best Church” twice on every Sunday.

Slowly at first, then more and more rapidly George Augustus increased his practice; and the lust of earning money came upon him. They ceased to live in one room behind the office, and took a small but highly respectable house in the residential quarter of the town. Two years later they took a country cottage in a very high class resort, Martin’s Point. Two years after that they bought a large country house at Pamber, and another smaller house just outside the “quaint old” town of Hamborough. George Augustus began to buy and to build houses. Isabel, whose jointure had been less than nothing when she married, now began to complain because her allowance was “only £1200 a year.” In short, they prospered and prospered greatly—for a time.

* * * * *

They had another child, and another, and another and another. A man and a woman who can do nothing else can always have children, and, if they are legally married and are able to support their progeny, there seems no end to the amount of begetting they may do and the laurel crowns of virtue to which they are thereby entitled. Isabel put her vitality into child-bearing, boosting George Augustus to profitable action, thrusting herself ever onward and upward financially and socially, buying and furnishing houses, quarrelling with her friends, acquiring sheiks, malforming her children’s minds, capriciously interfering with their education, swanking to the Hartlys with her money, patronizing the now aged and less venomous dear Mamma, and other lofty and inspiring activities. Was she happy? What a question! We are not placed here by a benevolent Providence to be happy, but to make ourselves unpleasant to our neighbours and to impose the least amiable portions of our personalities on as many people as possible. Was George Augustus happy? Which I parry with—did he deserve to be happy? He made money anyway, which is more than you and I can do. He dropped claret for whiskey, and the æsthetes for the “English Classics,” all those “noble” authors who have “stood the test of time,” and thereby become so very dull that one prefers to go to the cinema which has not stood any such test. He had a brougham, in which he drove daily to his office. He became a Worshipful Grand Master, and possessed any amount of funny little medals and coloured leather _cache-sexe_, which are apparently worn in the Mysteries of the Free Masons. He framed his certificates as a Solicitor, a Buffalo, a Druid, and all the other queer things, and hung them in various places to surprise and awe the inexperienced. He had a great many bills. For about ten years he was so prosperous that he was able to give up attending Church on Sundays.

[ 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.