Death of a Hero (14 page)

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, schoolboyish 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 for ever motionless and for ever silent, while for ever 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 harebells. In the valleys were tall thistles and foxgloves. Certain nooks were curiously rich with wild-flowers 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 Chalkhill Blue, sky-blue of the Common and Holly Blue, rich tawny of the Fritillaries, 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 Church. 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 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 too suspicious of all grown-ups, particularly those who came and drank whisky 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 Freemasons' dinner together. Now that Freemasonry 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 thunderstorms 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 whisky”… etcetera, etcetera.

Poor George Augustus attempted a feeble defence – it was swept away. Mr. Slush innocently walked over next day to see how things were after the storm, was insulted, and driven from the house in amazed indignation. He “put” Isabel a little vindictively “in his next novel”, but, as she said and said truly, he never “darkened their doors” again.

In one way George loved the grey sea and barrenness, in another way he hated them. To get away to the lush inland country was a release, an ecstasy, the more precious in that it happened so rarely. When he was a small child, a maid-servant took him “down home” to the hop-picking. Confused and fantastic memories of it remained with him. He never forgot the penetrating sunlight, the long dusty ride in the horse-bus, the sensation of hot-sharp-scented shadow under the tall vines, the joy of the great rustling heaps falling downward as the foreman cut the strings, the tenderness of the rough women hop-pickers, the taste of the smoky picnic tea and heavy soggy cake (so delicious!) they gave him. Later – in the fourteen-sixteen years – it was a joy to visit the Hambies. 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 Hambies' 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 for ever 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?