About that time George Augustus became really intolerable. A man he had known as a law student returned to Sheffield, bought a practice, and did rather well. Henry Bulburry came it over George Augustus pretty thick. He had spent three years in a London solicitor’s office, and to hear him talk you would have thought Mr. Bulburry was the Lord Chancellor, the Beau Brummell, and the Count d’Orsay of the year 1891. Bulburry patronized George Augustus, and George Augustus lapped his patronage up gratefully. Bulburry knew all the latest plays, all the latest actresses, all the latest books. He roared with laughter at George Augustus’s Dickens and Lorna Doone, and introduced him to Morris, Swinburne, Rossetti, Ruskin, Hardy, Mr. Moore, and young Mr. Wilde. George Augustus got fearfully excited, and became an aesthete. Once when Pater came to lecture at Sheffield he was so much moved at the spectacle of those wonderful moustaches that he fainted, and had to be taken home in a four-wheeler. George Augustus at last found his métier. He realized that he was a dreamer of dreams born out of his due time, that he should have floated Antinous-like with the Emperor Hadrian to the music of flutes and viols on the subtly-drifting waters of the immemorial Nile. Under a canopy of perfumed silk he should have sat enthroned with Zenobia while trains of naked, thewed Ethiopian slaves, glistening with oil and nard, laid at his feet jewels of the opulent East. He was older than the rocks among which he sat. He was subtler than delicate music; and there was no change of light, no shifting of the shadows, no change in the tumultuous outlines of wind-swept clouds, but had a meaning for him. Babylon and Tyre were in him, and he too wept for beautiful Bion. In Athens he had redilned, violet-crowned, at the banquet where Socrates reasoned of love with Alcibiades. But above all, he felt a stupendous passion for mediaeval and Renaissance Florence. He had never been to Italy, but he was wont to boast that he had studied the plan of the city so carefully and so frequently that he could find his way about Florence blindfold. He knew not one word of Italian, but he spoke ecstatically of Dante and “his Circle”, criticized the accuracy of Guicciardini, refuted Machiavelli, and was an authority – after Roscoe – on the life and times of Lorenzo and Leo X.
One day George Augustus announced to the family that he should abandon his Profession and WRITE.
There may be little differences in an English family, for the best of friends fall out at times, but in all serious crises they may be depended upon to show a united front. Thank God, there can still be no doubt about it – apart from pure literature of the sheik brand and refining pictures in the revived Millais tradition, an English family can still be relied upon to present a united front against any of its members indulging in the obscene pursuits of Literature or Art. Such things may be left to the obscene Continent and our own degenerates and decadents, though it would be well if stern methods were adopted by the police to cleanse our public life of the scandal brought upon Us by the latter. The great English middle-class mass, that dreadful squat pillar of the nation, will only tolerate art and literature that are fifty years out of date, eviscerated, de-testiculated, bowdlerized, humbuggered, slip-slopped, subject to their anglicized Jehovah. They are still that unbroken rampart of Philistia against which Byron broke himself in vain, and which even the wings of Ariel were inadequate to surmount. So, look out, my friend. Hasten to adopt the slimy mask of British humbug and British fear of life, or expect to be smashed. You may escape for a time. You may think you can compromise. You can’t. You’ve either got to lose your soul to them or have it smashed by them. Or you can exile yourself.
It was probably worse in the days of George Augustus, and anyway he was only a grotesque and didn’t much matter. Still, the vitality of Isabel was real and should have found an outlet instead of being forced back into her and turned into a sharp, sour poison. And the pathetic efforts of George Augustus to be an aesthete and WRITE meant something, some inner struggle, some effort to create a life of his own. It was an evasion, of course, a feeble, flapping desire to escape into a dream world; but if you had been George Augustus, living under the sceptre of dear Mamma in the Sheffield of 1891, you too would have yearned to escape. Isabel opposed this new freak of George Augustus, because she also wanted to escape. And for her, escape was only possible if George Augustus earned enough money to take her and her baby away. She thought the Pre-Raphaelites rather nonsensical and drivelling – and she wasn’t far wrong. She thought Mr. Hardy very gloomy and immoral, and Mr. George Moore very frivolous and immoral, and young Mr. Wilde very unhealthy and immoral. But her reading in the works of all these immortals was very sketchy and snatchy – what really animated her was her immovable instinct that George Augustus’s only motive in life henceforth should be to provide for her and her child, and to get them away from Sheffield and dear Mamma.
Dear Papa and dear Mamma also thought these new crazes of George Augustus nonsensical and immoral. Dear Mamma read the opening pages of one of Mr. Hardy’s novels, and then burned the Obscene Thing in the kitchen copper. Whereupon there was a blazing row with George Augustus. Backed by the malicious Bulburry (who hated dear Mamma so much that he put several little bits of business he didn’t want into the hands of George Augustus, who thereby made about £70 in six months), George Augustus, who had never stood up for himself or his own integrity or Isabel or anything that mattered, stood up for Mr. Hardy and his own false pathetic pose of aestheticism. George Augustus locked all his priceless new books into a cupboard, of which he jealously kept the key. And he spent hours a day locked in his “cosy study” WRITING, while the enraged thunder of the offended family rolled impotently outside. But George Augustus was firm. He bought arty ties, and saw Bulburry nearly every evening, and went on WRITING. Bulburry was so malevolent that he persuaded a friend, who was editing an amateurish aesthetic review in London, to publish an article by George Augustus entitled “The Wonder of Cleopatra throughout the Ages”. George Augustus got a guinea for the article, and for a week the family was hushed and awed.
But in that atmosphere of exasperation and dread of the Unknown Obscene, rows were inevitable. And, since George Augustus remained almost hermetically sealed in his cosy study, and refused to come out and be rowed with, even when dear Mamma tapped imperiously at the door and reminded him, through the panels, of his Duties to God, his Mamma, and Society, the rows inevitably took place between dear Mamma and Isabel.
One night, after George Augustus was asleep, Isabel got up and stole £5 from his sovereign-purse. Next morning, she took the baby for a walk as usual, but took it to the railway station and fled to the Hartly home in rural Kent. This was certainly not the boldest thing Isabel ever did – she afterwards did things of incredible rashness – but it was one of the most sensible, from her point of view. It was the first of her big efforts to force George Augustus to action. It reminded him that he had taken on certain responsibilities, and that responsibilities are realities which cannot always be avoided. She bombed him out of the dug-out of dear Mamma’s tyranny, and eventually Archied him out of the empyrean of aestheticism and writing.
But she didn’t let herself or George Augustus down to the Hartly family. She reckoned – and reckoned rightly – that George Augustus would follow her up pretty smartly, for fear of “what people would say”. So she sent a telegram to Pa and Ma to say she was coming to see them for a few days – they were pretty well accustomed to Isabel’s impulsive moves by this time – and she left a note, a dramatic and naturally (not artistically) tear-stained note for George Augustus on the bedroom dressing-table. She took a few inexpensive presents home, and played her part so well that at first even Ma Hartly only vaguely suspected that something was wrong.
The loving and united home at Sheffield was in some consternation when Isabel did not return for lunch; and the consternation almost became panic – it certainly became rage in dear Mamma – when George Augustus found and communicated Isabel’s letter.
“She must be found and brought back here at once,” said dear Mamma decisively, already scenting carnage from afar; “she has disgraced herself, disgraced her husband, and disgraced the family. I have long noticed that she is inattentive at family prayers. She must be given a good lesson. It was an ill day for us all when Augustus married so far beneath him. He must go and fetch her back from her low, vulgar family – to think of our dear little George being in such