Free Death of a Hero by Richard Aldington

Isabel Hartly, and, before he knew where he was, had arranged irrevocably a marriage with her – without telling dear Mamma. Hic Incipit vita nova. Thus was George, young George, generated.
    The Hartlys must have been more fun than the Winterbournes. The Winterbournes had never done a damn thing in their lives, and were as stuffily, frowsily, mawkish-religiously boring as a family could be and still remain – I won’t say alive or even sentient, but – able to digest their very puddingy meals. The Hartlys were different. They were poor Army. Pa Hartly had chased all round the Empire, dragging with him Ma Hartly, always in pod and always pupping in incongruous and inconvenient spots – the Egyptian desert, a shipwrecked troopship, a malarial morass in the West Indies, on the road to Kandahar. They had an inconceivable number of children, dead, dying, and alive, of all ages and sexes. Finally, old Hartly settled down near his wife’s family in rural Kent, with a smallish pension, a tiny “private” income, and the world of his swarming progeny on his less than Atlantean shoulders. I believe he had had two or three wives, all horribly fertile. No doubt the earlier Mrs. Hartlys had perished of superfluous child-bearing, “super-foetation ιόεν.”
    Isabel Hardy was one – don’t ask which in numerical order, or by which wife – of Captain Hardy’s daughters. She was very pretty, in a florid, vulgarish way, with her artful-innocent dark eyes, and flashing smiles, and pretty little bustle and frills, and “fresh complexion” and “abounding health”. She was fascinatingly ignorant, even to the none too sophisticated George Augustus. And she had a strength of character superior even to dear Mamma’s, added to a superb, an admirable vitality, which bewitched, bewildered, electrified the somewhat sluggish and pretty comfortable George Augustus. He had never met any one like her. In fact, dear Mamma had never allowed him to meet any one but rather soggy Nonconformists of mature years, and “nice” youths and maidens of exemplary Nonconformist stupidity and lifelessness.
    George Augustus fell horribly in love.
    He abode at the village inn, which was cheap and pretty comfortable; and he did himself well. On these holidays he had such a mood of exultation (subconscious) in getting away from dear Mamma that he felt like a hero in Bulwer Lytton. We should say he swanked; probably the early nineties would have said he came the masher. He certainly mashed Isabel.
    The Hartlys didn’t swank. They made no effort to conceal their poverty or the vulgarity imported into the family by the third (orfourth) Mrs. Hartly. They were fond of pork, and gratefully accepted the gifts of vegetables and fruit which the kind-hearted English country-people force on those they know are none too well off. They grew lots of vegetables and fruit themselves, and kept pigs. They made blackberry jam and damson jam, and scoured the country for mushrooms; and the only “drink” ever allowed in the family was Pa Hartly’s “drop o’ grog” secretly consumed after the innumerable children had gone to bed in threes and fours.
    So it wasn’t hard for George Augustus to swank. He took the Hartlys – even Isabel – in completely. He talked about “my people” and “our place.” He talked about his Profession. He gave them copies of the Nonconformist tract he had published at fifteen. He gave Ma Hartly a fourteen-pound tin of that expensive (2s. 3d. a pound) tea she had always pined for since they had left Ceylon. He bought fantastic things for Isabel – a coral brooch, a copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress bound in wood from the door of Bunyan’s parish church, a turkey, a year’s subscription to the Family Herald Supplement , a new shawl, boxes of ls. 6d. a pound chocolates, and took her for drives in an open landau