Read Death of a Hero for Free Online

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 deepprimitive 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?
    â€œHe 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.)
    â€œWe 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.)
    â€œBut 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