Chapter V: Part ONE: Vivace (3)

Later—in the fourteen-sixteen years—it was a joy to visit the Hambles. They were retired professional people, who lived in a remote country house among lush meadows and rich woods. Mr. Hamble was a large, freckly man who collected insects, and was a skilled botanist; and thus charmed that side of George. But the real delight was the lush countryside—and Priscilla. Priscilla was the Hambles’ daughter, almost exactly George’s age; and between those two was a curious, intense, childish passion. She was very golden and pretty; much too pretty, for it made her self-conscious and flirtatious. But the passion between those two children was a genuine thing. A pity that this sort of Daphnis and Chloe passion is not allowed free physical expression under our puling obscene conventions. There was always something a little frustrated in both George and Priscilla because the timidity and false modesty imposed on them prevented the natural physical expression. For quite three years George was under the influence of his passion for Priscilla, never really forgot her, always in a dim, dumb, subconscious way felt the frustration. Like all passions it was something fugitive, the product of a phase, but it ought not to have been frustrated. It was a pity they were so often separated, because that meant infinite letter-writing; and so made him always tend to too much idealizing and intellectualizing in love affairs. But when they were together it was pure happiness. Priscilla was a very demure and charming little mistress. They played all sorts of games with other children, and went fishing in the brook, picked flowers in the rich water-meadows, hunted bird-nests along the hedges. All these things, great fun in themselves, were so much more fun because Priscilla was there, because they held hands and kissed, and felt very serious, like real lovers. Sometimes he dared to touch her childish breasts. And the feeling of friendliness from the clasp of Priscilla’s hands, the pleasure of her short childish kisses and sweet breath, the delicate texture of her warm childish-swelling breasts, never quite left him; and to remember Priscilla was like remembering a fragrant English garden. Like an English garden, she was a little old-fashioned and self-consciously comely, but she was so spring-like and golden. She was immensely important to George. She was something he could love unreservedly, even if it was only with the mawkish love of adolescence. But far more than that temporary service she gave him the capacity to love women, saved him from the latent homosexuality which lurks in so many Englishmen, and makes them forever dissatisfied with their women. She revealed to him—all unconsciously—the subtle inexhaustible joys of the tender companionate woman’s body. Even then he felt the delicious contrast between his male nervous muscled hands and her tender budding breasts, opening flowers to be held so delicately and affectionately. And from her too he learned that the most satisfactory loves are those which do not last too long, those which are never made thorny with hate, and drift gently into the past, leaving behind only a fragrance—not a sting—of regret. His memories of Priscilla were few, but all roses....

* * * * *

You see, they cannot really kill the spark if it is there, not with all their bullyings and codes and prejudices and thorough manliness. For, of course, they are not manly at all, they are merely puppets, the products of the system—if it may be dignified by that word. The truly manly ones are those who have the spark, and refuse to let it be extinguished; those who know that the true values are the vital values, not the £. s. d. and falling-into-a-good-post and the kicked-backside-of-the-Empire values. George had already found a sort of ally in poor Mr. Slush, and an exquisite child-passion in Priscilla. But he needed men, too, and was lucky enough to find them. How can one estimate what he owed to Dudley Pollak and to Donald and Tom Conington?

* * * * *

Dudley Pollak was a mysterious bird. He was a married man in the late fifties, who had been to Cambridge, made the Grand Tour, lived in Paris, Berlin and Italy, known numbers of fairly eminent people, owned a large country house, appeared to have means, possessed very beautiful furniture and all sorts of _objets d’art_, and was a cultivated man—in most of which respects he differed exceedingly from the inhabitants of Martin’s Point. Now, what do you suppose was the reason why Pollak and Mrs. Pollak let their large house furnished, and spent several years in a small cottage in a rather dreary village street a couple of miles from Martin’s Point? George never knew, and nobody else ever knew. The fantastic and scandalous theories evolved by Martin’s Point to explain this mystery were amusing evidence of the vulgar stupidity of those who formed them, and have no other interest. The Pollaks themselves said that they had grown tired of their large house and that Mrs. Pollak was weary of managing servants. So simple is the truth that this very likely was the real explanation. At any rate, there they lived together in their cottage, crowded with furniture and books, cooking their own meals very often—they were both excellent cooks—and waited on by a couple of servants who “lived out.” Now, although Pollak was forty years older than George, he was in a sense the boy’s first real friend. The Pollaks had no children of their own, which may go to explain this odd but deep friendship.

Pollak was a much wilier bird than poor old Slush. He sized Isabel up very quickly and accurately, and just politely refused to let her quarrel with him, and just as politely refused to receive her. But he was so obviously a gentleman, so obviously a man of means, that no reasonable objection could be made when he proposed to George Augustus that “Georgie” should come to tea once a week and learn chess. Martin’s Point was a very chess-y place; it was somehow a mark of respectability there. Before this, George had gone to play chess with a very elderly gentleman, who put so much of the few brains he had into that game that he had none left for the preposterous poems he composed, or, indeed, anything else. So every Wednesday George went to tea with the Pollaks.

They always began, most honourably and scrupulously, with a game of chess; and then they had tea; and then they talked. Although George never suspected it until years afterwards, Pollak was subtly educating him, at the same time that he tried to give him the kind of sympathy he needed. Pollak had many volumes of Andersen’s photographs, which he let George turn over while he talked negligently but shrewdly about Italian architecture, styles of painters, Della Robbia work; and Mrs. Pollak occasionally threw in some little anecdote about travel. By the example of his own rather fastidious manners he corrected schoolboy uncouthnesses. He somehow got George riding lessons, for in Pollak’s days horse-riding was an indispensable accomplishment. Pollak always worked on the boy by suggestion and example, never by exhortation or patronage. He always assumed that George knew what he negligently but accurately told him. The manner in which he made George learn French was characteristic of his methods. One afternoon Pollak told a number of amusing stories about his young days in Paris, while George was looking through a volume of autographed letters of Napoleon, Talleyrand and other Frenchmen—which, of course, he could not read. Next week, when George arrived he found Pollak reading.

“Hullo, Georgie, how are you? Just listen to this lovely thing I’ve been reading, and tell me what you think of it.”

And Pollak read, in the rather chanting voice he adopted in reading poetry, André Chenier’s: “L’épi naissant murit, de la faux respecté.” George had to confess shamefacedly that he hadn’t understood. Pollak handed him the book, one of those charming large-type Didot volumes; but André Chénier was too much for George’s public school French.

“Oh, I _do_ wish I could read it properly,” said George. “How did you learn French?”

“I suppose I learned it in Paris. ’Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongue by female eyes and lips, you know. But you could learn very soon if you really tried.”

“But how? I’ve done French at school for ages, and I simply can’t read it, though I’ve often tried.”

“What you learn at school is only to handle the tools—you’ve got to learn to use them for yourself. You take _Les Trois Mousquetaires_, read straight through a few pages, marking the words you don’t know, look them up, make lists of them, and try to remember them. Don’t linger over them too much, but try and get interested in the story.”

“But I’ve read _The Three Musketeers_ in English.”

“Well, try _Vingt Ans Après_. You can have my copy and mark it.”

“No, there’s a paper-backed one at home. I’ll use that.”

In a fortnight George had skipped through the first volume of _Vingt Ans Après_. In a month he could read simple French prose easily. Three months later he was able to read “_La Jeune Captive_” aloud to Pollak, who afterwards turned the talk on to Ronsard; and opened up yet another vista.

* * * * *

The Coningtons were much younger men, the elder a young barrister. They also talked to George about books and pictures, in which their taste was more modern if less sure than Pollak’s urbane Second Empire culture. But with them George learned companionship, the fun of infinite, everlasting arguments about “life” and ideas, the fun of making _mots_ and laughing freely. The Coningtons were both great walkers. George, of course, had the middle class idea that five miles was the limit of human capacity for walking. Like Pollak, the Coningtons treated him as if he were a man, assumed also that he could do what they were showing him how to do. So when Donald Conington came down for a week-end, he assumed that George would want to walk. That day’s walk had such an effect upon George that he could even remember the date, 2nd of June. It was one of those soft cloudless days that do sometimes happen in England, even in June. They set out from Hamborough soon after breakfast and struck inland, going at a steady, even pace, talking and laughing. Donald was in excellent form, cheery and amusing, happy to be out of harness for a few hours. Four miles brought them beyond the limits of George’s own wanderings, and after a couple of hours’ tramp they suddenly came out on the crest of the last chalk ridge and looked over a wide fertile plain of woodland and tilth and hop-fields, all shimmering in the warm sunlight. The curious hooked noses of oast-houses sniffed over the tops of soft round elm-clumps. They could see three church spires and a dozen hamlets. The only sound came from the larks high overhead.

“God!” exclaimed Donald in his slightly theatrical way, “what a fair prospect!”

A fair prospect indeed, and an unforgettable moment when one comes for the first time to the crest of a hill and looks over an unknown country shimmering in the sun, with the white coiling English lanes inviting exploration. Donald set off down the hill, singing lustily: “O, Mistress mine, where art thou roaming?” George followed a little hesitatingly. His legs were already rather tired, it was long past eleven—how would they get back in time for lunch, and what would be said if they were late? He mentioned his fears timidly to Donald.

“What! Tired? Why, good God, man, we’ve only just started! We’ll push on another four miles to Crockton, and have lunch in a pub. I told them we shouldn’t be in until after tea.”

The rest of the day passed for George in a kind of golden glory of fatigue and exultation. His legs ached bitterly—although they only walked about fifteen miles all told—but he was ashamed to confess his tiredness to Donald, who seemed as fresh at the end of the day as when he started. George came home with confused and happy memories—the long talk and the friendly silences, the sun’s heat, a deer park and Georgian red-brick mansion they stopped to look at, the thatched pub at Crockton where he ate bread and cheese and pickles and drank his first beer, the elaborately carved Norman church at Crockton. They sat for half an hour after lunch in the churchyard, while Donald smoked a pipe. A Red Admiral settled on a grey flat tombstone, speckled with crinkly orange and flat grey-green lichens. They talked with would-be profundity about how Plato had likened the Soul—Psyche—to a butterfly, and about death, and how one couldn’t possibly accept theology or the idea of personal immortality. But they were cheerful about it—the only sensible time to discuss these agonizing problems is after a pleasant meal accompanied with strong drink—and they felt so well and cheery and animal-insouciant in the warm sunlight that they didn’t really believe they would ever die. In that they showed considerable wisdom; for you will remember that the wise Montaigne spent the first half of his life preparing for death, and the latter part in arguing that it is much wiser never to think about dying at all—time enough to think of _that_ when it comes along.

For Donald that was just a pleasant day, which very soon took its place among the vague mists of half-memory. For George it was all extraordinarily important. For the first time he felt and understood companionship between men, the frank unsuspicious exchange of goodwill and talk, the spontaneous collaboration of two natures. That was really the most important gain. But he also discovered the real meaning of travel. It sounds absurd to speak of a fifteen-mile walk as “travel.” But you may go thousands of miles by train and boat between one international hotel and another, and not have the sensation of travelling at all. Travel means the consciousness of adventure and exploration, the sense of covering the miles, the ability to seize indefatigably upon every new or familiar source of delight. Hence the horror of _tourism_, which is a conventionalizing, a codification of adventure and exploration—which is absurd. Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else—above all a travel bureau—arrange everything beforehand? It isn’t seeing new and beautiful things which matters, it’s seeing them for yourself. And if you want the sensation of covering the miles, go on foot. Three hundred miles on foot in three weeks will give you indefinitely more sense of travel, show you infinitely more surprising and beautiful experiences, than thirty thousand miles of mechanical transport.

* * * * *

George did not rest until he went on a real exploration walk. He did this with Tom Conington, Donald’s younger brother—and that walk also was unforgettable, though they were rained upon daily and subsisted almost entirely upon eggs and bacon, which seems to be the only food heard of in English country pubs. They took the train to Corfe Castle, and spent a day in walking over to Swanage through the half-moor, half-marsh country, with its heather and gorse and nodding white cotton-grasses. Then they went along the coast to Kimmeridge and Preston and Lulworth and Lyme Regis, sleeping in cottages and small pubs. From Lyme Regis they turned inland, and went by way of Honiton, Collumpton, Tavistock, to Dulverton and Porlock, along the north Devon coast to Bideford, and back to South Molton, where they had to take the train, since they had spent their money and had only enough to pay their fares home. The whole walk lasted less than a fortnight, but it seemed like two months. They had such a good time, jawing away as they walked, singing out of tune, finding their way on maps, getting wet through and drying themselves by tap-room fires, talking to every one, farmer or labourer, who would talk to them, reading and smoking over a pint of beer after supper. And always that sense of adventure, of exploration, which urged them on every morning, even through mist and rain, and made fatigue and bad inns and muddy roads all rather fun and an experience.

One gropes very much through all these “influences” and “scenes” and fragmentary events in trying to form a picture of George in those years. For example, I found the date of the Crockton walk and a few disjointed notes about it on the back of a rough sketch of Crockton church porch. And the itinerary of the walk with Tom Conington, with a few comments, I found in the back of a volume of selected English essays, which George presumably took with him on the walk. The heart of another is indeed a dark forest, and however much I let my imagination work over these fragments of his life, I find it hard to imagine him at that time, still harder to imagine what was going on in his mind. I imagine that he more or less adjusted himself to the public school and home hostility, that, as time passed and he began to make friends, he felt more confidence and happiness. Like most sensitive people he was subject to moods, affected by the weather and the season of the year. He could pass very rapidly from a mood of exuberant gaiety almost to despair. A chance remark—as I myself found—was enough to effect that unfortunate change. He had a habit always of implying more or less than he said, of assuming that others would always jump with the implied, not with the expressed, thought. Similarly, he always expected the same sort of subtle obliquity of expression in others, and very seldom took remarks at their face value. He could never be convinced or convince himself that there were not implications under the most commonplace remark. I suppose he had very early developed this habit of irony as a protection and as a method of being scornful with seeming innocence. He never got rid of it.

* * * * *

But for a time he was very happy. At home there was a kind of truce—ominous had he only known—and he was left much to himself. Priscilla awoke and satisfied the need for contact with the feminine, fed the awakening sensuality. Then, when Priscilla somehow drifted away, there was another, much slighter, more commonplace affair with a girl named Maisie. She was a slightly coarse, dark type, a little older than George and much more developed. They used to meet after dark in the steep lanes of Martin’s Point, and kiss each other. George was a little scared by the way she gobbled his mouth and pressed herself against him; and then felt self-reproachful, thinking of Priscilla and her delicate, English-garden fragrance. One night, Maisie drew them along a different walk to a deserted part of the down, where a clump of thick pines made a close shadow over coarse grass. They had to climb up a steep hillside.

“Oh, I’m tired,” said Maisie, “let’s sit down.”

She lay down on the grass, and George lay beside her. He leaned over her and felt the low warm mounds of her breasts through his thin summer shirt.

“The touch of your mouth is beautiful,” said George. “Honey and milk is under her tongue.”

He put the tip of his tongue between her moist lips, and she touched it with hers. ************* ** *** ****** * *** ** ** *** *** **** ** *** *** ** *** ****. ***** *** ****** *** *****, ******* * **** ** ****** ****. George stupidly wondered why, and kissed her more tenderly and sensually.

“Your lips,” he murmured, “your lips.”

“But there must be something else,” she whispered back. “I want something from you.”

“What more can I give you? What could be more beautiful than your kisses?”

She lay passive and let him kiss her for a few minutes, and then sat up abruptly.

“I must go home.”

“Oh, but why? We were so happy here, and it’s still early.”

“Yes, but I promised mother I’d be home early to-night.”

George walked back to the door of Maisie’s house, and wondered why her good-night kiss was so untender, so perfunctory.

A few nights later George went out—on the pretext of “mothing”—in the hope of finding Maisie. As he came silently round a corner, he saw about thirty yards ahead, in the dusk, Maisie walking away from him with a young man of about twenty. His arm was round her waist, and her head was resting on his shoulder as she used to rest it on George’s. It is to be hoped that she got her “something else” from the young man. George turned, and strolled home, looking up at the soft gentle stars, and thinking hard. “Something else? Something else?” It was his first intimation that women always want something else—and men too, men too.

* * * * *

When a great liner came round the Foreland, you ran to the telescope to see whether it was a P. and O., a Red Star or a Hamburg-Amerika. You soon got to recognize the majestic four-funnelled _Deutschland_ as she moved rapidly up or down the Channel. The yellow-funnelled boats for Ostend, the white-funnelled boats for Calais and Folkestone were daily events, hardly to be noted—and yet how they seemed to lure one to that unknown life across the narrow seas. On clear days you could see the faint shining of the cliffs of France. On foggy nights, the prolonged anapæst of the Foreland Lightship fog-horn answered the hoarse spondees of the passing ships, groping their way up channel. Even on the most rainy or most moonlit night, the flash of the lighthouse made dabs of yellow light on the walls of George’s bedroom. There were no nightingales at Martin’s Point, but morning and evening thrushes and blackbirds.

Hamborough was so different, lying off the chalk downs on the edge of the salt marshes, the desolate, silent, unresponsive, salt marshes, so gorgeous at sunset. The tidal river ran turbid and level with its banks, or deep between walls of sinister mud. Little flocks of fleet-winged grey-white birds—called “oxey-birds”—flickered rapidly away in front of you on sickle-moon wings. A brown-sailed barge, far inland, seemed to be gliding overland through the flat green-brown marsh land. Behind, far across the flat desolate ex-sea-bottom ran the old coast line, and on a bluff stood the solid ruins of a Roman fort. “Pe-e-e-wit,” said the plunging plovers, “pee-e-ee-wit.” No other sound. The white clouds, dappled English clouds, moved so silently over the cool blue English skies; such faint blue, even on what the English call a “hot” day.

You went to the marshes by way of the Barbican, the Barbican through which the old English Kings and knights had ridden with their men-at-arms, when they made one of their innumerable descents on more civilized France. There stood the mediæval Barbican, on the verge of the commonplace little money-grubbing town, like a stranded vestige from some geological past. What was the Barbican to early twentieth-century Hamborough? An obstacle to the new motor road, whose abolition was always being discussed in the Town Council, and whose destruction was only postponed because the thickness of the walls made it too expensive. On the other side you walked out into flat fertile country, past almshouses, and the hoary stone-mullioned Elizabethan Grammar School, over the level crossing, to Saxon Friedasburg, where tradition said a temple to Freya had once stood. How silver-grey the distant sea-fringe, how silver-grey the lines of rippling poplars! How warmly golden, like Priscilla, the wheat fields under the late August afternoon sunshine!

These are the gods, the gods who must endure for ever, or as long as man endures, the gods whom the perverse blood-lustful, torturing Oriental myths cannot kill. Poseidon, the sea-god, who rules his grey and white steeds, so gentle and playful in his rare moods of tranquillity, so savage and destructive in his rage. With a clutch of his hand he crumples the wooden beams or steel plates of the wave-wanderers, with a thrust of his elbow he hurls them to destruction on the hidden sand-bank or the ruthless sharp-toothed rocks. Selene, the moon-goddess, who flies so swiftly through the breaking clouds of the departing storm, or hangs so motionless white, so womanly waiting, in the cobalt night-sky among her attendant stars. Phœbus, who scorns these silvery-grey northern lands, but whose golden light is so welcome when it comes. Demeter, who ripens the wheat and plumps the juicy fruit and sets cordial bitterness in the hop and trails ragged flower and red hip and haw along the hedges. And then the lesser humbler gods—must there not be gods of sunrise and twilight, of bird-singing and midnight silence, of ploughing and harvesting, of the shorn fields and the young green springing grass, gods of lazy cattle and the uneasily bleating flocks and of the wild creatures—(hedgehogs and squirrels and rabbits, and their enemies the weasels)—tenuous Ariel demigods of the trembling poplars and the many-coloured flowers and the speckled fluttering butterflies? In ever increasing numbers the motor-cars clattered and hammered along the dusty roads; the devils of golf leaped on the acres and made them desolate; sport and journalism and gentility made barren men’s lives. The gods shrank away, hid shyly in forgotten nooks, lurked unsuspected behind bramble and thorn. Where were their worshippers? Where were their altars? Rattle of the motors, black smoke of the railways. One—perhaps only one—worshipper was left them. One only saw the fleet limbs glancing through the tree-trunks, saw the bright faun-eyes peering anxiously from behind the bushes. Hamadryads, fauns, do not fly from me! I am not one of “them,” one of the perverse life-torturers. I know you are there, come to me, and talk with me! Stay with me, stay with me!

* * * * *

Then the blow fell.

[ V ]

What can have happened? What can have happened? My God, what can have happened?

Isabel paced up and down the room, uttering this and kindred exclamations to nobody in particular, while an outwardly calm, inwardly very much perturbed George silently echoed the question. George Augustus had gone to London on his usual weekly trip, and as usual George had met the six o’clock train. No George Augustus. He met the seven-ten, the eighty-fifty, and the eleven-five, the last train: and still no George Augustus. No telegram, no message. A feeling of impending calamity hung over the house that night, and there was not much sleep for Isabel and George. Next morning a long rambling letter, emotional and vague, arrived from George Augustus. The gist was that he was ruined, and in flight from his creditors.

It was a bitter enough pill for George, bitterer still for Isabel. She had schemed and boosted George Augustus for years, she thought they were well off and getting better off. And she had taken pride in it as her own work. She had George Augustus so much under her thumb that whatever he did was through her influence. But the very perfection of her system was its ruin. He was so afraid of her that he dared not confess when a speculation went wrong. To keep up the standard of expense, he began to mortgage; to redeem the situation he plunged deeper into speculation and neglected his practice. Rumours began to get about. Then suddenly he was taken with panic, and fled. Later investigation showed that his affairs were not so compromised as he had imagined; but the sudden mad flight ruined everything. In a day the Winterbournes dropped from comparative affluence to comparative poverty.

The effect on George was really rather disastrous. After the almost sordid distress of his early adolescence, he had succeeded in saving the spark, and had built up a life for himself, had created a positive happiness. But all that rested, in fact, on the family money. The distrust of himself and others which had gradually disappeared, the sense of suspicion and frustration, came flooding back with renewed bitterness. And the whole calamity was aggravated by circumstances of peculiar and unnecessary suffering, which made distrust and bitterness not unjustifiable. Demented apparently by that madness which afflicts those whom the gods wish to destroy, George Augustus had “had a little talk” on the subject of a career with the boy not three months before, when he must have known he was hopelessly involved.

“Now, Georgie, you have only a few months longer, and you will be leaving school. You must think of a career in life. Have you thought about it?”

“Yes, father.”

“That’s right. And what career do you want to take up?”

“I want to be a painter.”

“I rather expected you’d say that. But you must remember that you can hardly expect to make money by painting. Even if you have the talent, which I’m sure you have, it takes many years to establish a reputation, and still more years before you can hope to make an adequate income.”

“Yes, I know that. But I’m convinced that if I had a small income and could do what I wanted, I should be far happier than if I made a great deal of money doing what I hated.”

“Well, my boy, I’m really rather glad that you don’t take the purely money point of view. But think it over. If you take your examinations and qualify, there is a regularly established practice in which you can take your place as my partner and, in due course as my successor. Think it over for a few months. And if you finally decide to take the course you mention, I daresay I can allow you two or three hundred a year, which will be four hundred when I die.”

Now all this was very fatherly and kindly and sensible. In an outburst of quite genuine affection and gratitude George protested first of all that he could not bear to think of his father’s dying and that it was odious to think of profiting by his death.

“But,” he added, “I am quite determined to be a painter in spite of everything. If you can help me as you say, it will all be perfect.”

Nothing more was said on the subject, but in the following weeks George drew and painted hard, went twice to London to look at the galleries and get materials, and thought he was making progress. But what strange weakness permitted George Augustus to yield to the cruelty of raising these hopes which he must have known would be speedily wrecked? The thought of this was constantly in George’s mind, as he moved about silently, rather scared, in the morning hours following the receipt of the letter. It was a problem he never solved, but the incident did not increase his trust in the world or himself.

Other incidents confirmed this mood. Both Isabel and George Augustus rather pushed George forward to take the brunt of the calamity. Isabel’s first suggestion to George was that he should go as a grocer’s errand boy at three shillings a week, a proposition which George indignantly and properly rejected. Whereupon she called him a parasite and a graceless spendthrift. Probably the suggestion was only hysteria, but it hit hard and rankled. Then, it was George do this, and George do that. It was George who had to interview insolent tradesmen and creditors, and plead for further credit and “time.” It was George who recovered £90 in gold which had been stolen by the office boy, and was refunded. It was George who was sent to persuade his father to come back and face out the storm. It was George who was made to go and collect rents from suspicious and uneasy tenants. It was George who had to see solicitors, and try to get a grasp of the situation. They even accepted his offer of the few pounds (birthday gifts saved up) which he had in the Post Office Savings Bank. Rather a shock for a boy not seventeen, who had been living an _exalté_ inner life, and who had been led to suppose that his material future was assured. It is not wholly surprising that he was very unhappy, a bit resentful, and that his mistrust became permanent, his modesty, diffidence.

* * * * *

Things went on in this joyless way for about a year. “Disgrace” was avoided, but it was obvious that the Winterbourne opulence was gone, and George Augustus had lost his nerve. It was from this period that the beginnings of his subsequent conversion dated. In defeat he returned to the beliefs of childhood, but some latent unrecognized hostility to the influence of dear Mamma finally led him to the form of Christianity most opposed to hers. As for George, he brooded a great deal and oscillated between moods of hope and exultation and moods of profound depression. They moved nearer to London, and he tried, with very little success, to sell some of his paintings. They were too ambitious and too youthful, with no commercial value. He was all the time uneasily conscious that he ought to “get out” and that his family were anxious for him to “do something.” Kind friends wrote proposing the most dreary and humiliating jobs they could think of. Even Priscilla—a bitter blow—thought that “George should do something _at once_, and in a few years might be earning two pounds a week as a clerk.” Then George made the acquaintance of a journalist, a very uneducated but extremely kindly and good-natured man. Thomas had some sort of sub-editorship in Fleet Street, and generously offered to allow George to do some minor reporting for him, an offer which he jumped at. George did his first job—which was passed—and returned home, naturally very late, in a glow of virtuous exultation, thinking how he would surprise his parents next morning with the news, like a good little boy in a story-book. The surprise, however, was his. He was met at the door by an angry Isabel, who, without awaiting his explanation, demanded to know what he meant by coming home at that hour and accused him of “going with a vile woman.” George was too disgusted to make any reply, and went to bed. Next morning there was a glorious row, in which Isabel played the part of a broken-hearted mother and George Augustus came out very strong as a _père noble_ of the Surrey melodrama brand. George was upset, but his contempt kept him cool. George Augustus was perorating:

“If you continue in this way you will break your mother’s heart!”

It was so ludicrous—poor old George Augustus—that George couldn’t help laughing. George Augustus raised his hand in a noble gesture of paternal malediction:

“Leave this house! And do not return to it until you have learned to apologize for your behaviour.”

“You mean it?”

“I solemnly mean it.”

“Right.”

George went straight upstairs and packed his few clothes in a suitcase, asked if he might have the volume of Keats, and left in half an hour—with elevenpence in his pocket, humming:

“Now of my three score years and ten, twenty will not come again.”

* * * * *

So that was that.