And then Mr. Winterbourne used to pray ten minutes longer every night and morning for George’s soul, but unfortunately he went and got himself run over just by the Marble Arch as he was meditating on that blessed martyr, Father Parsons, and that other more blessed martyr, Father Garnet of Gunpowder fame. So, as the £5 was soon exhausted, there was nobody to pray for George’s soul; and for all the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church knows or cares, poor old George is in Hell, and likely to remain there. But, after the last few years of his life, George probably doesn’t find any difference.
So much for George’s father and George’s death. The “reactions” (as they are called) of Mrs. Winterbourne were different. She found it rather exciting and stimulating at first, especially erotically stimulating. She was a woman who constantly dramatized herself and her life. She was as avid of public consideration as an Italian lieutenant, no matter what the quality of the praise. The only servants who ever stayed more than a trial month with her were those who bowed themselves to an abject discipline of adulation for Mrs. Winterbourne, Mrs. Winterbourne’s doings and sayings and possessions and whims and friends. Only, since Mrs. Winterbourne was exceedingly fickle and quarrelsome, and was always changing friends into enemies and vowed enemies into hollow friends, a more than diplomatic suppleness was exacted of these mercenary retainers, who only stayed with her because she gave them presents or raised their wages whenever the praise was really gratifying.
Although a lady of “mature charms,” Mrs. Winterbourne loved to fancy herself as a delicious young thing of seventeen, passionately beloved by a sheik-like but nevertheless “clean” (not to say “straight”) Englishman. She was a mistress of would-be revolutionary platitudes about marriage and property (rather like the talk of an “enlightened” parson), but, in fact, was as sordid, avaricious, conventional, and spiteful a middle-class woman as you could dread to meet. Like all her class, she toadied to her betters and bullied her inferiors. But, with her conventionality, she was, of course, a hypocrite. In her kittenish moods, which she cultivated with a strange lack of a sense of congruity, she liked to throw out hints about “kicking over the traces.” But, as a matter of fact, she never soared much above tippling, financial dishonesty, squabbling, lying, betting, and affairs with bounderish young men, whom only her romantic effrontery could have dared describe as “clean and straight,” although there was no doubt whatever about their being English, and indeed sportin’ in a more or less bounderish way.
She had had so many of these clean, straight young sheiks, that even poor Mr. Winterbourne got mixed up, and when he used to write dramatic letters beginning,
“Sir, – You have robbed me of my wife’s affection like a low hound – be it said in no un-Christian spirit,” the letters were always getting addressed to the penultimate or antepenultimate sheik, instead of the straight, clean one of the moment. However, rendered serious by the exhortations of the war Press and still more by the ever-ripening maturity of her charms, Mrs. Winterbourne made an instinctive and firm clutch at Sam Browne – so successfully that she clutched the poor devil for the remainder of his abbreviated life. (She did the abbreviation.) Sam Browne, of course, was almost too good to be true. If I hadn’t seen him myself I should never have believed in him. He was an animated – and not so very animated – stereotype. His knowledge of life was rudimentary to the point of being quadruped, and intelligence had been bestowed upon him with rigid parsimony. An adult Boy Scout, a Public School fag in shining armour -the armour of obtuseness. He met every situation in life with a formula, and no situation in life ever reached him except in the shape imposed upon it by the appropriate and predetermined formula. So, though he wasn’t very successful at anything, he got along all right, sliding almost decorously down grooves which had nothing ringing about them. Unless urged, he never mentioned his wound, his decoration, or the fact that he had “rolled up” on August 4th. The modest, well-bred, etcetera, English gentleman.
The formula for the death of a married mistress’s son was stern heroism, and gentle consolation to the wounded mother-heart. Mrs. Winterbourne played up at first -it was the sort of thing that the sheik always did with his passionate but tender love. But the effect of George’s death on her temperament was, strangely enough, almost wholly erotic. The war did that to lots of women. All the dying and wounds and mud and bloodiness – at a safe distance – gave them a great kick, and excited them to an almost unbearable pitch of amorousness. Of course, in that eternity of 1914-18 they must have come to feel that men alone were mortal, and they immortals; wherefore they tried to behave like houris with all available sheiks – hence the lure of “war work” with its unbounded opportunities. And then there was the deep primitive physiological instinct – men to kill and be killed; women to produce more men to continue the process. (This, however, was often frustrated by the march of Science, viz. anti-conceptives; for which, much thanks.)
So you must not be surprised if Mrs. Winterbourne’s emotion at the death of George almost immediately took an erotic form. She was lying on her bed in an ample pair of white drawers with very long ruffles and a remarkably florid, if chaste, chemise. And the sheik, strong, silent, restrained, tender, was dabbing her forehead and nose with eaude-cologne, while she took large sips of brandy at increasingly frequent intervals. It was, of course, proper and even pleasant to have her grief so much respected; but she did wish Sam hadn’t to be poked always into taking the initiative. Couldn’t the man see that tender nerves like hers needed to be soothed with a little Real Love at once?
“He was so much to me, Sam,” she said in low, indeed tremulous tones, subtly calculated. “I was only a child when he was born – a child with a child, people used to say – and we grew up together. I was so young that I did not put up my hair until two years after he was born.” (Mrs. Winterbourne’s propaganda about her perennial youth was so obvious that it would hardly have deceived the readers of “John Blunt” – but the sheiks all fell for it. God knows how young they thought she was – probably imagined Winterbourne had “insulted” her when she was ten.)
“We were always together, such pals, Sam, and he told me everything.”
(Poor old George! He had such a dislike for his mother that he hadn’t seen her five times in the last five years of his life. And as for telling her anything – why, the most noble of noble savages would immediately have suspected her. She had let George down so badly time after time when he was a boy that he was all tight inside, and couldn’t give confidence to his wife or his mistresses or a man.)
“But now he’s gone” – and somehow Mrs. Winterbourne’s voice became so erotically suggestive that even the obtuse sheik noticed it and was vaguely troubled – “now he’s gone, I’ve nothing in the world but you, Sam. You heard how that vile man insulted me on the telephone today. Kiss me, Sam, and promise you’ll always be a pal, a real pal.”
Active love-making was not in the sheik’s formula for that day; consolation there was to be, but the “sacredness” of mother-grief was not to be profaned by sexual intercourse; although that too, oddly enough, was “sacred” between a “clean” Englishman and a “pure” woman who had only had one husband and twenty-two lovers. But what can the Sam Brownes of the world do against the wills, especially the will to copulate, of the Mrs. Winterbournes? He rose – if the expression may be allowed – powerfully to the situation. He, too, found a certain queer, perverse satisfaction in honeying and making love over a nasty corpse; while, if he had been capable of making the reflection, he would have realized that Mrs. Winterbourne was not only a sadist, but a necrophilous one.
In the succeeding weeks George’s death was the source of other, almost unclouded, joys to Mrs. Winterbourne. She pardoned –, temporarily – the most offending of her enemies to increase the number of artistically tearblotched letters of bereavement she composed. Quite a few of the nearly gentry, who usually avoided Mrs. Winterbourne as a particularly virulent specimen of the human scorpion, paid calls – very brief calls – of condolence. Even the Vicar appeared, and was greeted with effusive sweetness; for though Mrs. Winterbourne professed herself a social rebel and an “Agnostic” (not, however, until she had been more or less kicked out of