Chapter III: Part ONE: Vivace (1)

_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.”