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 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 Nonconformist tract hypocrisy, and only picked it up again when Isabel fainted.
On dear Papa’s suggestion George Augustus took Isabel away to the seaside on what was left of the £200; and thus it happened that George was born in a seaside 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 agonising labour, George Augustus prayed freely, took short walks, read Loma Doone, had a half-bottle of claret with his lunch and dinner, and slept tranquilly o’ nights. When, finally, he was admitted on tiptoe 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 tiptoed down to dinner, and ordered a whole bottle of claret in honour of the event.
3
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 formulae, 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 over-ambitious, and turned sour and sharp under the tender mercies of dear Mamma, she came 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 harmiess 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 Nonconformist 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 Tattersall’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