Death of a Hero (28 page)

Fanny came to London for a week in November, before going South for the winter; and they saw her nearly every day. Fanny and George were by this time on a footing of pretty friendly familiarity. That is to say, they always kissed each other on meeting and parting – after Fanny had kissed Elizabeth – and held hands in taxis whether Elizabeth was there or not. Elizabeth didn't object at all. Not only because of her theory of freedom. She was at that time rather deeply involved in some theory of “erogenous zones” in women, and men's reactions to them. And she had got it firmly into her mind that Fanny was “sexually antipathetic” to George, because he had one day innocently and casually remarked that he thought Fanny rather fiat-chested. Elizabeth leaped on this – it confirmed her theory so nicely. George had known Fanny for over a year and “nothing had happened” between them, and therefore it was plain that Fanny's “erogenous zones” awoke no response in him.

“Most peculiar,” said Elizabeth, when she discussed the matter with a demure-looking but mighty ironical Fanny. “
I
should have thought you'd be the very type of woman to attract him. But he only talks about your ‘marvellous eyes,' and they aren't erogenous zones at all. That means he only likes you as a human being…”

So Elizabeth took no notice when Fanny kissed George; or when she said: “George darling, do go and get some cigarettes for me,” and George departed with alacrity; or when George called Fanny “My love” or “Fanny darling.” People throw these endearments about so liberally nowadays, how on earth is one to know? And, in fact, all this went on for a long time and nothing did “happen.” George was quite devoted to Elizabeth, and then they were away when Fanny was in London, and Fanny was away when they were in London. Both George and Fanny begged Elizabeth to “go South” with Fanny, but Elizabeth wouldn't. She was very loyal, and wouldn't take a holiday George couldn't share. But by this time Fanny had become fond of George, very fond indeed. She was weary of Reggie, who was sometimes so absorbed in atoms that he neglected his functions as Fanny's
faute-de-mieux.
She thought it
might be an excellent plan if she and Elizabeth swopped riders, so to speak. Not that she wanted to “take George away” from his mistress. Oh! Not at all. Fanny didn't want him as a
permanence –
Elizabeth was welcome to that. But she felt he might do excellently as a
locum tenens
, while Elizabeth was widening her experience with Reggie. So there was an unusual warmth in her farewell kiss to George, who had gone down to see her off at Victoria, and a lingeringly soft pressure of her hand, and a particularly inviting look in her beautiful eyes.

“Good-bye, darling!” and she leaned from the window and to his surprise kissed him again on the lips. “Of course, I'll write – often. And mind you write to me. I shall be back in March at latest.”

Fanny did write – occasionally to Elizabeth, once or twice to them both, frequently to George. Her letters to George were much longer and more amusing than the others. George showed some of them to Elizabeth and forgot to show others. He replied punctually and affectionately.

Just before Christmas, Reggie Burnside passed through London on his way to Mürren. He dropped into Elizabeth's studio for tea, and finding her alone asked her to marry him, in a casual, offhand way, rather as he might have suggested their going to Rumpelmeyer's instead of having tea in the studio. Elizabeth was surprised, flattered, and fluttered. They had quite a long discussion. Elizabeth was amazed that Reggie should want to marry, and above all to marry her. If she hadn't been so flattered, she would have been offended at any one's thinking she would do such a thing. She had almost the “thank-you I'm-not-that-sort-of-girl” sniffiness about it.

“Is this a new brand of joke, Reggie?”

“Good God, no! I'm perfectly serious.”

“But why in heaven's name do you want to
marry?”

“It's more convenient, you know, addressing letters and meeting people and all that.”

“But why want to marry
me?”

“Because I'm in love with you.”

Elizabeth pondered a little over this.

“Well,” she said slowly, “I don't believe I'm in love with you. I'm sure I'm not. I like you most awfully, but I'm not in love with you, I'm in love with George.”

“Oh, George!” Reggie waved a contemptuous hand. “What's the good of your wasting your time with a man like that, Elizabeth? He
won't do anything. He doesn't know anybody worth mentioning, except ourselves, and nobody at Cambridge thinks anything of his painting.”

Elizabeth was on the defensive immediately.

“Don't talk nonsense, Reggie! George is a dear, and I won't have you say things like that about him. And as if anybody cares a hang what mouldy young Cambridge thinks about a painter!”

Reggie changed his tack.

“All right, if you don't want to marry me, don't. But, look here. You oughtn't to spend the winter in London with that cough and your chest. I'll give up Mürren if you'll come for a month with me to some small place on the Riviera. We can easily find a place where there aren't any English.”

This was a far more gratifying and dangerous proposal to Elizabeth than matrimony. She was heartily sick of London fog and cold and drizzle and mire and soot and messy open fires which fill the room with dust but don't warm it. More than once she had regretted not having gone away with Fanny. Moreover, a “month's affair” with Reggie would perfectly well fit into the arrangement with George, whereas they hadn't thought of and hadn't discussed the possibility of either marrying some one else. Elizabeth hesitated, but she had a feeling that it would be rather mean to leave George suddenly alone in London and go off on her own with Reggie, if only for a month. She certainly was extraordinarily fond of George.

“No, Reggie, I can't come this time. Go to Mürren, and when you come back, perhaps… well, we'll see.”

Elizabeth made toast and tea, and they sat on a large low divan in front of the fire. The dingy light soon faded from the soiled sky; but they sat on in the firelight, holding hands.

She let Reggie kiss her as much as he wanted, but for the time being resisted any further encroachments.

Elizabeth's resistance, at that precise moment, to the advances of Mr. Reginald Burnside, seems to me a striking example of George's infelicity. I mean that I see a direct link between it and the sudden inexplicable standing up of a man in khaki before a murderous machine-gun fire, not long after dawn, on the morning of the 4th of November 1918… Not that I wish melodramatically “to set the brand of Cain” upon Elizabeth or upon Fanny or upon both jointly. Far from it.
They
didn't make the war.
They
didn't give George the jumps. And after all there is a doubt, almost a mystery, involved in George's death. Did he really commit suicide? I don't know. I've only got circumstantial evidence and my own hunch about it, a sort of intuition, a something haunting in my memory of the man, an Orestes-like feeling of some inexpiated guilt. Who is to say whether a man can really commit suicide on a battlefield? Desperate recklessness and looking for trouble may be the very means of his escaping the death which finds the prudent coward crouching in a shell-hole. And suppose he did deliberately get himself killed, ought we, ought I, to attach any blame to Elizabeth and Fanny? I don't think so. There were plenty of other things to disgust him with life. And even supposing that he realized the war was ending, realized that in his state of mind he simply could not face the problem of his relation with those two women, still I think them utterly blameless. The mess was as much his fault as theirs. It was really quite an easy mess to clear up. What made it impossible was George's shattered nerves, and for that they were not to blame. Oh, not in the least. Perhaps I'm as much to blame as anybody. I ought to have done something to get George sent out of the line. I think I might have gone to the Brigadier and have told him in private what I knew about George's state of mind – or perhaps to his Colonel. But I didn't go. At that time I was not
persona grata
with those in authority, for I happened to sympathize then with the young Russian Revolution, and had foolishly argued hotly about it. So perhaps my effort would have been wasted. And anyhow it was a very difficult and ticklish thing to do, and I was tired, very, very tired.

At any rate, just about a fortnight after Reggie went to Mürren, the abominable winter climate of London gave Elizabeth some sort of a chill inside and upset her interior economy. Within four or five days she became quite demented. She insisted that she was with child, and insisted that the only solution was for George to marry her – at once. Perhaps the afternoon with Reggie had somehow inserted the idea of marriage into her “subconscious”. At all events, her extraordinary energy was suddenly concentrated upon attaining a state which she had hitherto utterly scorned. It was a silly thing to do, but one really cannot blame her. Men are oddly callous about these mysterious female maladies and demoniacal possessions. They get peevish and pathetic enough if something goes wrong with their own livers, but they are strangely unsympathetic about the profounder derangements
of their yoke-fellows in iniquity. Perhaps they might feel a little more humane if they too had a sort of twenty-eight-day clock inside them, always a nuisance, often liable to go wrong and set up irregular blood-pressure and an intolerable poisoning of the brain. George ought to have hiked her off to a gynecologist at once. Instead of which, he behaved as stupidly as any George Augustus would have done under the circumstances. He did nothing but gasp and stare at Elizabeth's whirling tantrums, and worry, and offer exasperating comfort, and propose remedies and measures which, as Elizabeth told him, with a stamp of her foot, were impossible, impossible,
impossible.
Of course, by the Triumphal Scheme for the Perfect Sex Relation, it was duly enacted that under the circumstances there was nothing to do but marry the girl. But elementary prudence would suggest that it might be sensible to make certain the circumstances
had
arisen, a precaution which they entirely overlooked in the mental disarray caused by Elizabeth's regrettable dementia.

The change wrought in Elizabeth's outlook in a few days was amazing. If she hadn't felt so tragically about it, she would have been ludicrous in her mental manoeuvres. The whole Triumphal Scheme was scrapped almost instantaneously, and by a rapid and masterly series of evolutions her whole army of arguments was withdrawn from the outpost line of Complete Sexual Freedom, and fell back upon the Hindenburg line of Safety First, Female Honour and Legal Marriage. It was, of course, ridiculous for them to marry at all, either of them. They weren't the marrying sort. They were adventurers in life, not good citizens. Neither of them was the kind of person who exults in life insurance and buying a house on the hire-purchase system and mowing the lawn on Saturday afternoon and taking the “kiddies” (odious word) to the seaside. Neither of them looked forward to the “Old Age Will Come” summit of felicity, with an elderly and imbecilely contented-looking George sitting beside a placid and motherly white-haired Elizabeth in the garden of a dear little home, contemplating together with smug beatitude the document from the insurance company guaranteeing a safe ten pounds a week for the remainder of their joint lives. I am glad to say that George and Elizabeth would have shuddered at any such prospect. But Elizabeth insisted upon marriage, and married they duly were, despite the feeble protests of Elizabeth's family and the masterly denunciations of Isabel, already recorded.

In all outward respects the legal marriage made no difference whatever to their lives and relationship. Elizabeth retained her studio, and George his. They met no more frequently and on exactly the same terms of affectionate sensuality, into which their first exultant passion had long ago evolved. One of the terms of the Triumphal Scheme emphatically laid down the axiom that it was most undesirable and dangerous for two lovers to inhabit the same flat or small house. If they were rich enough to live in separate wings of a large house, all well and good; but if not, then they should live no nearer than neighbouring streets. The essence of freedom is the disposal of one's own time in one's own way, and how can two people do that if they are living on top of each other? Moreover, a daily absence of several hours is quite indispensable to the avoidance of the domestic-den atmosphere. It is far better for two lovers to be happy together for three or four hours a day than to be indifferent or miserable for twenty-four. The joint marriage-bed, Elizabeth used to state impressively, is destructive of all self-respect and sexual charm, and blunts the finer edges of sensibility…

Soon after the legal formalities were irrevocably accomplished and Elizabeth's social anxieties somewhat calmed, it occurred to her that she ought to consult a doctor, in order to learn how to behave during these months of “expecting”, as the modest working-class matron calls it. So she got the address of a “modern” physician, who was supposed to have all the latest and most enlightened methods of dealing with pregnancy and its distresses. To Elizabeth's amazement she found she was not pregnant at all! With the not unnatural suspicion that most doctors are more or less charlatans imposing on the ignorance of the public, she refused to believe him until he told her flatly that in her present condition she might wait till doomsday for the appearance of an infant, but that if she neglected her present slight disorder it might become serious and permanent. She then condescended to accept his diagnosis and advice. George had accompanied her, and was sitting in the specialist's waiting-room. A serious, concentrated, rather pi-jaw Elizabeth had left him to enter the consulting-room, and George fidgeted over the imbecilities of
Punch
, wondering how on earth they would deal with the problem of an infant, and feeling that he would probably have to take a job and “settle down” into the horrible morass of domestic life. To his amazement, as the consulting-
room door opened, he heard Elizabeth laugh with her old merry gaiety which was so attractive, and caught the words: