Death of a Hero (6 page)

I think that George committed suicide in that last battle of the war. I don't mean shot himself, but it was so very easy for a company commander to stand up when an enemy machine-gun was traversing. The situation he had got into with Elizabeth and Fanny Welford was not inextricable, but it would have needed a certain amount of patience and energy and determination and common sense to put right. But by November '18 poor old George was whacked, whacked to the wide. He was a bit off his head, as nearly all the troops were after six months in
the line. Since Arras (April '17) he had lived on his nerves, and when I saw him at the Divisional Rest Camp in October '18 he struck me as a man who was done for, used up. He ought to have gone to the Brigadier and got sent down for a bit. But he was so horribly afraid of being afraid. He told me that last night I saw him that he was afraid even of whizz-bangs now, and that he didn't see how he would face another barrage. But he was damned obstinate, and insisted on going back to the battalion, although he knew they were due for another battle. We lay awake half the night, and he went over Elizabeth and Fanny and himself, and himself and Fanny and Elizabeth, until it was such a nightmare, such a portentous House of Atrides tragedy, that I began to think myself that it was hopeless. There was a series of night-bombing attacks going on, and we lay in the darkness on sacking beds, muttering to each other – or rather George went on and on muttering, and I tried to interrupt and couldn't. And every time a bomb fell anywhere near the camp, I could feel George start in the darkness. His nerves were certainly all to pieces.

Elizabeth and Fanny were not grotesques. They adjusted to the war with marvellous precision and speed, just as they afterwards adapted themselves to the postwar. They both had that rather hard efficiency of the war and post-war female, veiling the ancient predatory and possessive instincts of the sex under a skilful smoke-barrage of Freudian and Havelock Ellis theories. To hear them talk theoretically was most impressive. They were terribly at ease upon the Zion of sex, abounding in inhibitions, dream symbolism, complexes, sadism, repressions, masochism, Lesbianism, sodomy, etcetera. Such wise young women, you thought, no sentimental nonsense about
them.
No silly emotional slip-slop messes would ever come
their
way. They knew all about the sexual problem, and how to settle it. There was the physical relationship and the emotional relationship and the intellectual relationship; and they knew how to manage all three, as easily as a pilot with twenty years' experience brings a handy ship to anchor in the Pool of London. They knew that freedom, complete freedom, was the only solution. The man had his lovers, and the woman had hers. But where there was a “proper relationship”, nothing could break it. Jealousy? it was impossible that so primitive a passion could inhabit those enlightened and rather flat bosoms. Female wiles and underhand
tricks? insulting to make such a suggestion. No, no. Men must be “free” and women must be “free'

Well, George had simple-Simonly believed all this. He “had an affair” with Elizabeth, and then he “had an affair” with Fanny, her best friend. George thought they ought to tell Elizabeth. But Fanny said why bother? Elizabeth
must
know instinctively, and it was so much better to trust to the deeper instincts than to talk about things with “the inferior intelligence”. So they said nothing to Elizabeth, who didn't know instinctively, and thought that George and Fanny were “sexually antipathetic”. That was just before the war. But in 1914 something went wrong with Elizabeth's period, and she thought she was going to have a baby. And then, my hat, what a pother! Elizabeth lost her head entirely. Freud and Ellis went to the devil in a twinkling. No more talk of “freedom”
then!
If she had a baby, her father would cut off her allowance, people would cut her, she wouldn't be asked to Lady Saint-Lawrence's dinners, she… Well, she “went at” George in a way which threw him on his beam-ends. She made him use up a lot of money on a special licence, and they were married at a Registry office in the presence of Elizabeth's parents, who were also swept bewildered into this sudden match, they knew not how or why. Elizabeth's father had feebly protested that George hadn't any money, and Mrs. Winterbourne senior wrote a marvellous tear-blotched dramatic epistle, in which she said that George was a feeble-minded degenerate who had broken his mother's tender heart and insultingly trampled upon it, in a low, sensual lust for a vile woman who was only “after” the Winterbourne money. As there wasn't any Winterbourne money left, and the elder Winterbournes lived on tick and shifts, the accusation was, to say the least, fanciful. But Elizabeth bore down all opposition, and she and George were married.

After the marriage, Elizabeth breathed again and became almost human. Then and only then did she think of consulting a doctor, who diagnosed some minor female malady, told her to “avoid cohabitation” for a few weeks, and poofed with laughter at her pregnancy. George and Elizabeth took a flat in Chelsea, and within three months Elizabeth was just as “enlightened” as before and fuller of “freedom” than ever. Relieved by the doctor's assurance that only an operation could enable her to have a child, she “had an affair” with a young man from Cambridge, and told George about it. George was rather surprised and peeved, but played the game nobly, and most gallantly yielded the flat up for the night whenever Elizabeth dropped a hint. Of course, he
didn't suffer as much deprivation as Elizabeth thought, because he invariably spent those nights with Fanny.

This went on until about the end of 1915. George, though attractive to women, had a first-rate talent for the malapropos in dealing with them. If he had told Elizabeth about his affair with Fanny at the moment when she was full-flushed with the young man from Cambridge, she would no doubt have acquiesced, and the thing would have been smoothed over. Unluckily for George, he felt so certain that Fanny was right and so certain that Elizabeth was right. He was perfectly convinced that Elizabeth knew all about him and Fanny, and that if they didn't speak of it together the only reason was that “one took such things for granted”, no need to “cerebrise” about them. Then one night, when Elizabeth was getting tired of the young man from Cambridge, she was struck by the extraordinary alacrity George showed in “getting out”.

“But, darling,” she said, “isn't it very expensive always going to a hotel? Can we afford it? And don't you mind?”

“Oh no,” said the innocent George; “I shall run round and spend the night with Fanny as usual, you know.”

Then there was a blazing row, Elizabeth at George, and then Fanny at George, and then – epic contest – Elizabeth at Fanny. Poor old George got so fed up, he went off and joined the infantry, fell into the first recruiting office he came to, and was whisked off to a training camp in the Midlands. But, of course, that didn't solve the situation. Elizabeth's blood was up, and Fanny's blood was up. It was Achilles against Hector, with George as the body of Patroclus. Not that either of them so horribly wanted George, but it was essential to each to come off victorious and “bag” him, with the not improbable epilogue of dropping him pretty quickly after he had been “bagged” away from the other woman. So they each wrote him tender and emotional and “understanding” letters, and sympathized with his sufferings under military discipline. Elizabeth came down to the Midlands to bag him for week-ends; and then one week when she was “having an affair” with a young American in the Flying Corps, George got his “firing leave” and spent it with Fanny. George was a bit obtuse with women. He was very fond of Elizabeth, but he was also very fond of Fanny. If he hadn't been taken in with the “freedom” talk and had kept Elizabeth permanently in the dark about Fanny, he might have lived an enviable double life. Unfortunately for him, he couldn't, and never
did, see that the “freedom” talk was only talk with the two women, although it was real enough to him. So he wrote them both the most imbecile and provocative letters, praised Elizabeth to Fanny, and Fanny to Elizabeth, and said how much he cared for them both; and he was like Shelley, and Elizabeth was like Mary, and Fanny was like Emilia Viviani. And he went on doing that even in France, right up to the end. And he never even suspected what an ass he was.

Of course, George had not set foot on the boat which took him to the Boulogne Base-Camp for the first time, before both Elizabeth and Fanny had become absorbed in other “affairs”. They only fought for George in a desultory way as a symbol, more to spite each other than because they wanted to saddle themselves with him.

Elizabeth was out when her telegram came from the War Office. She did not get it until nearly midnight, when she came back to the flat with a fascinating young Swedish painter she had met at a Chelsea “rag” that evening. She was a bit sozzled, and the young Swede – tall, blond and handsome – was more than a little fired with love and whisky. The telegram was lying on the door-mat with two or three letters. Elizabeth picked them up, and opened the telegram mechanically as she switched on the electric light. The Swede stood watching her drunkenly and amorously. She could not avoid a slight start, and turned a little pale.

“What's the matter?”

Elizabeth laughed her high little nervous laugh, and laid the telegram and letters on the table.

“The War Office regrets that my husband has been killed in action.”

It was now the Swede's turn to be startled.

“Your husband?… Perhaps I'd better…”

“Don't be a bloody fool,” said Elizabeth sharply; “he went out of my life years ago.
She'll
mind, but I shan't.”

She cried a bit in the bathroom, however; but the Swede was certainly a very attentive lover. They drank a good deal of brandy, too.

Next day Elizabeth wrote to Fanny the first letter she had sent her for months:

“Only a line, darling, to tell you that I have a telegram from the W.O. to say George was killed in France on the 4th. I thought it would be less of a shock for you to hear it from me than acci-
dentally. Come and see me when you get your weeps over, and we can hold a post-mortem.”

Fanny didn't reply to the letter. She had been rather fond of George, and thought Elizabeth heartless. But Elizabeth too had been fond of George; only, she wasn't going to give it away to Fanny. I saw a good deal of Elizabeth while settling up George's scanty estate – mostly furniture and books in the flat, his credit at Cox's, a few War Bonds, a little money due to him from civilian sources, and Elizabeth's pension. However, it meant a certain amount of letter-writing, which Elizabeth was glad to have me do. I also saw Fanny once or twice, and took her the trifles George had left her. But I never saw the two women together – they avoided each other; and when my duties as executor were done, I saw very little of either. Fanny went to Paris in 1919, and soon married an American painter. I saw her in the Dome one night in 1924, pretty well rouged and quite nicely dressed, with a party. She was laughing and flirting with a middle-aged American – possibly an art patron – and didn't look as if she mourned much for George. Why indeed should she?

As for Elizabeth, she rather went to pieces. With her father's allowance, which doubled and became her own income when he died, and her widow's pension, she was quite well off as poor people of the “artistic” sort go. She travelled a good deal, always with a pretty large brandy-flask, and had more lovers than were good for her – or them. I hadn't seen her for years, until about a month ago I ran into her on the corner of the Piazzetta in Venice. She was with Stanley Hopkins, one of those extremely clever young novelists who oscillate between women and homosexuality. He had recently published a novel so exceedingly clever, so stupendously smart and up-to-date and witty and full of personalities about well-known people, that he was quite famous, especially in America, where all Hopkins's brilliantly quacking and hissing and kissing geese were taken as melodious swans and
(vide
Press) as a “startling revelation of the corruption of the British Aristocracy.” We went and had ices together, all three, at Florian's; and then Hopkins went off to get something, and left us together for half an hour. Elizabeth chattered very wittily – you had to be witty with Hopkins or die of shame and humiliation – but never mentioned George. George was a drab bird from a drab past. She told me that she and Hopkins would not marry; they had both determined never to
pollute themselves with the farce of “legalized copulation”, but they would “probably go on living with each other.” Hopkins, who was a very rich young man as well as a successful novelist, had settled a thousand a year on her, so that they could both be “free”. She looked as nearly un-miserable as our cynical and battered generation can look; but she still had the brandy-flask.

Like a fool, I allowed myself to be persuaded to drink liqueur brandies after dinner that evening; and paid for it with a sleepless night. No doubt it was the unexpected meeting with Elizabeth which made me think a lot about George during those ghastly wakeful hours. I can't claim that I had set up any altar to the deceased George in my heart, but I truly believe that I am the only person left alive who ever thinks of him. Perhaps because I was the only person who cared for George for his own sake, disinterestedly. Naturally, his death meant very little to me at the time – there were eighty deaths in my own battalion on the day George was killed, and the Armistice and getting out of the blasted Army and settling my own problems and starting civilian life again and getting to work, all occupied my attention. In fact, it was not until two or three years after the war that I began to think much, if at all, about George. Then, although I didn't in the least believe in it, I got a half-superstitious, half-sentimental idea that “he” (poor old bag of decaying bones) wanted me to think about him. I half-knew, half-guessed that the people on whom he had counted had forgotten him, at least no longer cared that he had existed, and would have been merely surprised and rather annoyed if he had suddenly come back, like one of those shell-shocked heroes of fiction who recover their wits seven years after the Armistice. His father had taken it out in religiosity, his mother in the sheik, Elizabeth in “unlicensed copulation” and brandy, and Fanny in tears and marrying a painter. But I hadn't taken it out in anything, I hadn't been conscious that George's death meant anything in particular to me; and so it was waiting inside patiently to be dealt with in due course.