Chapter IV: Part ONE: Vivace (2)

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.