“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. O that I need not leave you tonight!”
On the way home Isabel said:
“You must speak to father tomorrow.”
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 3s. 6d. 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 goodwill 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 was 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 flicking. Come and see the fucking.”
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 of how to postpone conception or that it might be well not to impregnate a virgin bride, indeed neither he nor Isabel had ever heard of such things; he did not know what is implied by “a normal sexual life”; be did not know that women can and should have orgasms; he did not know that to brake a hymen violently and clumsily gives pain and so serious a shock that a woman may be for ever frigid with and even repelled by the man who does it; he did not know that women have periods; 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 about 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