But still, for a year or so he had his cottage in rural Kent and was a Writer. He dreamed his dream, though it was a pretty silly and castrated dream. If he hadn’t married Isabel and gotten her with child, he might have made quite a reasonably good literary hack. But, oh! those hostages given to Fortune! Look after your cock, and your life will look after itself.
As for Isabel, she was happy for the first, and perhaps the last, time in her life. She adored her cottage in rural Kent. What did it matter that George Augustus wasted his time Writing? He still had about £170 and earned a few guineas a month by articles and stories. But for her the thrill was having a real home of her own. She furnished the cottage herself, partly with the heavy mahogany 1850 stuff George Augustus had brought from Sheffield, partly with her own atrocious taste and bamboo. George urged her to furnish “artistically”, and the resultant chaos of huge, solid, stodgy, curly mahogany and flimsy bamboo, palms, cauliflower chintzes, and framed photographs would have rendered the late Mr. Oscar Wilde plaintive in less than fifty seconds. Never mind; Isabel was happy. She had her home and she had George Augustus under her eye and thumb, and she had her baby – whom she adored with all the selfishness of a pure woman – and, best of all, she did NOT have dear Mamma pestering and sneering and praying at her through every hour of the day and at every turn. Dear Isabel, how happy she was in her hum-ble little ho-o-ome! Put it to yourself, now. Suppose you had been one of an innumerable family, enduring all the abominable discomforts and lack of privacy in that elementary Soviet System. And suppose you had then been uncomfortably impregnated and most painfully delivered, and then bullied and pried into and domineered over and tortured by dear Mamma: wouldn’t you be glad to have a home of your own, however humble, and however flimsily based on sandy foundations of WRITING and arty ties? Of course you would. So Isabel looked after the baby, tant bien que mal, and cooked abominable meals, and was swindled by the tradesmen, and ran up bills which frightened her, and let young George catch croup and nearly die, and didn’t interrupt George Augustus’s wooing of the Muse more than half a dozen times a morning and – was happy.
But in all our little arrangements on this satellite of the Sun, we are apt to forget – among a multitude of other things – two important facts. We are the inhabitants of a planet who keep alive only by a daily consumption of the material products of that planet; we are members of a crude collective organization which distributes these essential products in accordance with certain bizarre rules painfully evolved from chaos by primitive brains. George Augustus certainly forgot these two facts – if he had ever recognized them. A man, a woman, and a brat cannot live for ever on £170 and a few odd guineas a month. They couldn’t do it even in the eighteen-nineties, even with extraordinary economy. And Isabel was not economical. Neither, for that matter, was George Augustus. He was mean, but he liked to be pretty comfortable, and his notions of the pretty comfortable were a bit extravagant. Torn between his respect for the Right Hnble. the Lord Tennyson’s well-known predilection for port and Mr. Algernon Charles Swinburne’s less notorious but undisguised preference for brandy neat, George Augustus finally became original, and fell back on his favourite claret. But, even in the ‘nineties, claret was not cheap; and three dozen a month rather eat into an income of four to six guineas. And then Isabel was inexperienced. In housekeeping inexperience costs money! So a time arrived when the £170 was nearly at zero, and the few guineas a month became ‘fewer instead of more numerous. Then George, young George, developed some infant malady; Isabel lost her head, and insisted on a doctor; the doctor, like all the English middle classes, thought a Writer was a harmless fool with money, to be bled ruthlessly, called far more often than was necessary, and sent in a much bigger bill than he would have dared send a stockbroker or a millionaire. Then George Augustus had the influenza and thought he was going to die. And after that Isabel was stricken with haemorrhoids in her secret parts, and had to be treated. Consequently, the bank balance of a few guineas was turned into a deficit of a good many pounds; and the affable Bank Manager rapidly became strangely unaffable when his polite references to the overdraft remained unsatisfied with the manna of a few cheques.
It became obvious to Isabel – and would long ago have become obvious to almost any one but George Augustus -that Luv and WRITING in a cottage were hopelessly bankrupt.
Well, dear Papa pungled once more – with a pound a Week; and Pa Hartly weighed in with a weekly five shillings. But that was misery, and Isabel was determined that, since she had married George Augustus for his “riches,” “rich” he should be or perish in the act of trying to acquire riches. So she brought into play all the feminine arsenal, reinforced with a few useful underhand punches and jabs in the moral kidneys, learned from dear Mamma. George Augustus tried to keep high above these material and degrading necessities, but, as I said, isabel finally Archied him down. When they could no longer get credit even for meat or bread, George Augustus capitulated, and agreed to “practise” once more. He wanted to go back to Sheffield and be pretty comfortable again, under the talons of dear Mamma. But Isabel was – quite rightly – adamant. She refused to return to Sheffield. George Augustus had got her on false pretences, i.e. that he was “rich.” He was not rich. He was, in fact, damn poor. But he had taken on the responsibility of supporting a woman, and he had got that woman with child. He had no business to be pretty comfortable any longer under the wings of dear Mamma. His business was to get rich as quickly as possible; at any rate, to provide for his dependants. Inexorable logic, against which I can find no argument even in sophistry.
So they went to a middling-sized, dreary coast town just then in the process of “development” (Bulburry’s suggestion), and George Augustus put up another brass plaque. With no results. But then, just as the situation was getting desperate, dear Papa died. He did not leave his children a fortune, but he did leave them £250 each – and strangely enough he actually had the money. Dear Mamma was left in rather “straitened circumstances,” but she had enough to be unreservedly disagreeable to the end of her day.
That £250 – and the Oscar Wilde case – just saved the situation. The £250 gave them enough to live on for a year. The Oscar Wilde case scared George Augustus thoroughly out of aestheticism and writing. What! They were hanging men and women for wearing of the green? Then, George Augustus would wear red. After “The Sentence,” George Augustus, like most of England, decided that art and literature were niminy-piminy, if not greeneryyallery. I don’t say he burned his books and arty ties, but he put them out of sight with remarkable alacrity. The great Voice of the English People had spoken in no Uncertain Tones, and George Augustus was not deaf to the Message. How could he be, with Isabel pouring it into one ear by word of mouth, and dear Mamma – unexpected but welcome ally – into the other by letter? A nation of Mariners and Sportsmen naturally excel in the twin arts of leaving a sinking ship and kicking a man when he is down. Three months after The Sentence you would never have suspected that George Augustus had ever dreamed of Writing. His clothes were of exemplary Philistinism – indeed, the height of his starched collars and the plainness of his ties had an almost Judas touch in their unaesthetic ugliness. Urged on by Isabel he became a Freemason, an Oddfellow, an Elk, a Heart of Oak, a Buffalo, a Druid, and God knows how many other mysterious things. He himself abandoned Florence, forgot even the blameless Savonarola, and prayed for Guidance. They attended the “best Church” twice on every Sunday,
Slowly at first, then more and more rapidly, George Augustus increased his practice; and the lust of earning money came upon him. They ceased to live in one room behind the office, and took a small but highly respectable house in the residential quarter of the town. Two years later they, took a country cottage in a very high-class resort, Martin’s Point. Two years after that they bought a large country-house at Pamber, and another smaller house just outside the “quaint old” town of Hamborough. George Augustus began to buy and to build houses. Isabel, whose jointure had been less than nothing when she married, now began to complain because her allowance was “only £1200 a year.” In short, they prospered, and prospered greatly – for a time.
They had another child, and another, and another, and another. A man and a woman who can do nothing else can always have children, and, if they are legally married and are able to support their progeny, there seems no end to the amount of begetting they may do