prayed more than ever.
“I think, Papa,” she said, “that the Hand of Providence must have led Augustus. I hope Miss Isabel will make him a good wife, and not be too grand with her Army ways to darn his socks and overlook the maids. Of course the young couple must live here, and I shall be able to give kindly guidance to their early married life as well as religious instruction to the bride. I pray GOD may bless them.”
Dear Papa, who was not a bad sort, said “Umph,” and wrote George Augustus a very decent letter, promising him £200 to start married life, and suggesting that the honeymoon should take place either in Paris or on the Plains of Waterloo.
The wedding took place in spring in “rural Kent.” A lot of Winterbournes, including, of course, George’s parents, came down. Dear Mamma was horribly shocked, not to say disgusted, by the unseemly behaviour of the Hartlys; and even dear Papa was a bit staggered. But it was then too late to retreat with honour.
A village wedding in 1890! Gods of our fathers known of old, what a sight! Alas! that there were no cinemas then! Can’t you see it? Old men in bug-whiskers and top-hats; old ladies in bustles and bonnets. Young men in drooping moustaches, “artistic” flowing ties, and probably grey toppers. Young women in small bustles and small flowery hats. And bridesmaids in white. And a best man. And George Augustus was a bit sweaty in a new morning suit. And Isabel, of course, “radiant” in white and orange-blossoms. And the parson, and signing the register, and the wedding breakfast, and the double peal on the bells, and the “going-away.”… No, it’s too painful, it’s so horrible it isn’t even funny. It’s indecent. I’m positively sorry for George Augustus and Isabel, especially for Isabel. What said the bells? “Come and see the flicking. Come and see the fucking.”
But Isabel enjoyed the whole ghastly ceremony, little beast. She wrote a long description of it to one of her “fellows”, whom she really loved but had jilted for George Augustus’s “riches.”
“… It was a cloudy day, but as we knelt at the altar a long ray of sunshine came through the church window and rested lovingly on our bowed heads…”
How could they rise to such bilge? But they did, they did, they did. And they believed in it. If only they’d had their tongues in their cheeks there might have been some hope. But they hadn’t. They believed in the sickish, sweetish, canting bilge, they believed in it. Believed in it with all the superhuman force of ignorance.
Can one tabulate the ignorances, the relevant ignorances, of George Augustus and Isabel when they pledged themselves until death do us part?
George Augustus did not know how to make a living; he did not know in the very least how to treat a woman; he did not know how to live with a woman; he did not know how to make love to a woman – in fact, he was all minus there, for his experience with whores had been sordid, dismal, and repulsive; he did not know the anatomy of his own body, let alone the anatomy of a woman’s body; he had not the faintest idea of how to postpone conception or that it might be well not to impregnate a virgin bride, indeed neither he nor Isabel had ever heard of such things; he did not know what is implied by “a normal sexual life”; be did not know that women can and should have orgasms; he did not know that to brake a hymen violently and clumsily gives pain and so serious a shock that a woman may be for ever frigid with and even repelled by the man who does it; he did not know that women have periods; he did not know that pregnancy is a nine months’ illness; he had not the least idea that childbirth costs money if the woman is not to suffer vilely; he did not know that a married man dependent on his and his wife’s parents is an abject, helpless, and contemptible figure; he did not know that it is hard to earn a decent living even when you have “a Profession”; he knew damn little about even his profession; he knew very little indeed about the conditions of life and nothing about human psychology; he knew nothing about business and about money, except how to spend it; he knew nothing about indoor sanitation, food values, carpentry, house-furnishing, shopping, fire-lighting, chimney-sweeping, higher mathematics, Greek, domestic invective, making the worse appear the better cause, how to feed a baby, music, dancing, Swedish drill, opening sardine-tins, boiling eggs, which side of the bed to sleep with a woman, charades, gas stoves, and an infinity of other things all indispensable to a married man.
He must have been rather a dull dog.
As for Isabel – what she didn’t know includes almost the whole range of human knowledge. The puzzle is to find out what she did know. She didn’t even know how to buy her own clothes – Ma Hartly had always done that for her. Among the things she did not know were: How babies are made and come; how to make love; how to pretend she was enjoying it even when she wasn’t; how to sew, wash, cook, scrub, run a house, purchase provisions, keep household accounts, domineer over a housemaid, order a dinner, dismiss a cook, know when a room was clean, manage George Augustus when he was in a bad temper, give George Augustus a pill when he was liverish, feed and wash a baby and pin on its napkins, pay and receive calls, knit, crochet, make pastry, how to tell a fresh herring is stale, the difference between pork and veal, never to use margarine, how to make a bed comfortably, look after her health especially in pregnancy, produce the soft answer which turneth away wrath, keep the home fires burning, and an infinity of other things indispensable to a married woman.
(I really wonder how poor old George managed to get born at all.)
On the other hand, both George Augustus and Isabel knew how to read and write, pray, eat, drink, wash themselves, and dress up on Sundays. They were both pretty well acquainted with the Bible and Hymns A. and M.
And then they had luv. They “luved” each other. Luv was enough, luv covered a multitude of ignorances, luv would provide, luv would strew their path with roses and primroses. Luv and God. Failing Luv there was God, and failing God there was Luv. I suppose, orthodoxly, God ought to come first, but in an 1890 marriage there was such a lot of Luv and God that there was no room for common sense, or common sex knowledge, or any of the knowledge we vile modern decadents think necessary in men and women. Sweet Isabel, dear George Augustus! They were so young, so innocent, so pure. And what hell do you think is befitting the narrow-minded, slush-gutted, bug-whiskered or jet-bonneted he-and she-hypocrites who sent them to their doom? O Timon, Timon, had I thy rhetoric! Who dares, who dares in purity of manhood stand upright, and say…? Let me not rave, sweet gods, let me not rave.
The honeymoon did not take place in Paris or on the Plains of Waterloo, but in a South Coast watering-place, a sweetly pretty spot Isabel had always wanted to visit. They had a ten-mile drive from the village to the railway, and a two hours’ journey in a train which stopped at every station. They arrived tired, shy, and disappointed at the small but respectable hotel where a double room had been booked.
The marriage night was a failure. One might almost have foreseen it. George Augustus tried to be passionate and ecstatic, and merely succeeded in being clumsy and brutal. Isabel tried to be modestly yielding and complying, and was only gauche. She suffered a good deal from George Augustus’s bungling defloweration. And, as many a sweet Victorian bride of dear old England in the golden days of Good Queen Vicky, she lay awake hour after hour, while George Augustus slept stertorously, thinking, thinking, while the tears ran out of her eyes, as she lay on her back, and trickled slowly down her temples on to the bridal pillow…
It’s too painful, it’s really too painful – all this damn silly “purity” and cant and Luv and ignorance. And silly, ignorant girls handed over in their ignorance and sweetly-prettiness to ignorant and clumsy young men for them to brutalise and wound in their ignorance. It’s too painful to think of. Poor Isabel! What an initiation!
But, of course, that ghastly night had its consequences. In the first place, it meant that the marriage was legally consummated, and could not be broken without an appeal to the Divorce Courts – and I don’t even know if you could get
