brideshead revisited

Brideshead Revisited: Epilogue

2008-08-06T14:11:00.000+02:00

Epilogue

"the worst place we've struck yet," said the commanding officer; "no
facilities, no amenities, and Brigade sitting right on top of us. There's
one pub in Flyte St. Mary with capacity for about twenty -- that, of course,
will be out of bounds for officers; there's a Naafi in the camp area. I hope
to run transport once a week to Melstead Carbury. Marchmain is ten miles
away and damn-all when you get there. It will therefore be the first concern
of company officers to organize recreation for their men. M.O., I want you
to take a look at the lakes to see if they're fit for bathing."

"Very good, sir."

"Brigade expects us to clean up the house for them. I should have
thought some of those half-shaven scrimshankers I see lounging round
Headquarters might have saved us the trouble; however . . . Ryder, you will
find a fatigue party of fifty and report to the quartering commandant at the
house at 10-45 hours; he'll show you what we're taking over."

"Very good, sir."

"Our predecessors do not seem to have been very enterprising. The
valley has great potentialities for an assault course and a mortar range.
Weapon-training officer, make a recce this morn-' ing and get something laid
on before Brigade arrives."

"Very good, sir."

"I'm going out myself with the adjutant to recce training areas. Anyone
happen to know this district?"

I said nothing.

"That's all then, get cracking."

"Wonderful old place in its way," said the quartering commandant; "pity
to knock it about too much."

He was an old, retired, re-appointed lieutenant-colonel from some miles
away. We met in the space before the main doors, where I had my half-company
fallen-in, waiting for orders.

"Come in. I'll soon show you over. It's a great warren of a place, but
we've only requisitioned the ground floor and half a dozen bedrooms.
Everything else upstairs is still private property, mostly cram full of
furniture; you never saw such stuff, priceless some of it.

"There's a caretaker and a couple of old servants live at the top --
they won't be any trouble to you -- and a blitzed R.C. padre whom Lady Julia
gave a home to -- jittery old bird, but no trouble. He's opened the chapel;
that's in bounds for the troops; surprising lot use it, too.

"The place belongs to Lady Julia Flyte, as she calls herself now. She
was married to Mottram, the Minister of whatever-it-is. She's abroad in some
woman's service, and I try to keep an eye on things for her. Queer thing the
old marquis leaving everything to her -- rough on the boys.
"Now this is where the last lot put the clerks; plenty of room, anyway.
I've had the walls and fireplaces boarded up you see -- valuable old work
underneath. Hullo, someone seems to have been making a beast of himself
here; destructive beggars, soldiers are! Lucky we spotted it, or it would
have been charged to you chaps.

"This is another good-sized room, used to be full of tapestry.., I'd
advise you to use this for conferences."

"I'm only here to clean up, sir. Someone from Brigade will allot the
rooms."

"Oh, well, you've got an easy job. Very decent fellows the last lot.
They shouldn't have done that to the fireplace though. How did they manage
it? Looks solid enough. I wonder if it can be mended?

"I expect the brigadier will take this for his office; the last did.
It's got a lot of painting that can't be moved, done on the walla.

As you see, I've covered it up as best I can, but soldiers get through
anything -- as the brigadier's done in the corner. There was another painted
room, outside under the pillars -- modern work but, if you ask me, the
prettiest in the place; it was the signal office and they made absolute hay
of it; rather a shame.

"This eye-sore is what they used as the mess; that's why I didn't cover
it up; not that it would matter much if it did get damaged; always reminds
me of one of the costlier knocking-shops, you know--'Maison Japonaise' . . .
and this was the ante-room . . ."

It did not take us long to make our tour of the echoing rooms. Then we
went outside on the terrace.

"Those are die other ranks' latrines and wash-house; can't think why
they built them just there; it was done before I took the job over. All this
used to be cut off from the front. We laid the road through the trees
joining it up with the main drive; unsightly but very practical; awful lot
of transport comes in and out; cuts the place up, too. Look where one
careless devil went smack through the box-hedge and carried away all that
balustrade; did it with a three-ton lorry, too; you'd think he had a
Churchill tank at least.

"That fountain is rather a tender spot with our landlady; the young
officers used to lark about in it on guest nights and it was looking a bit
the worse for wear, so I wired it in and turned the water off. Looks a bit
untidy now; all the drivers throw their cigarette-ends and the remains of
the sandwiches there, and you can't get to it to clean it up, since I put
the wire round it. Florid great thing, isn't it? ...

"Well, if you've seen everything I'll push off. Good day to you."

His driver threw a cigarette into the dry basin of the fountain;
saluted and opened the door of the car. I saluted and the quartering
commandant drove away through the new, metalled gap in the lime-trees.

"Hooper," I said, when I had seen my men started, "do you think I can
safely leave you in charge of the work-party for half an hour?"

"I was just wondering where we could scrounge some tea."

"For Christ's sake," I said, "they've only just begun work."

"They're awfully browned-off."

"Keep them at it."

"Rightyoh."

I did not spend long hi the desolate ground-floor rooms, but went
upstairs and wandered down the familiar corridors, trying doors that were
locked, opening doors into rooms piled to the ceiling with furniture. At
length I met an old housemaid carrying a cup of tea. "Why," she said, "isn't
it Mr. Ryder ?"

"It is. I was wondering when I should meet sorheone I knew."

"Mrs. Hawkins is up in her old room. I was just taking her some tea."

"I'll take it for you," I said, and passed through the baize doors, up
the uncarpeted stairs, to the nursery.

Nanny Hawkins did not recognize me until I spoke, and my arrival threw
her into some confusion; it was not until I had been sitting some time by
her fireside that she recovered her old calm. She, who had changed so little
in all the years I knew her, had lately become greatly aged. The changes of
the last years had come too late in her life to be accepted and understood;
her sight was failing, she told me, and she could see only the coarsest
needlework. Her speech, sharpened by years of gentle conversation, had
reverted now to the soft, peasant tones of its origin.

". . . only myself here and the two girls and poor Father Membling who
was blown up, not a roof to his head nor a stick of furniture till Julia
took him in with the kind heart she's got, , and his nerves something
shocking. . . . Lady Brideshead, too, who I ought by rights to call her
Ladyship now, but it doesn't come natural, it was the same with her. First,
when Julia and Cordelia left to the war, she came here with the two boys and
then the military turned them out, so they went to London, nor they hadn't
been in their house not a month, and Bridey away with the yeomanry the same
as his poor Lordship, when they were blown up too, everything gone, all the
furniture she brought here and kept in the coach-house. Then she had another
house outside London, and the military took that, too, and there she is now,
when I last heard, in a hotel at the seaside, which isn't the same as your
own home, is it? It doesn't seem right.

". . . Did you listen to Mr. Mottram last night? Very nasty he was
about Hitler. I said to the girl Effie who does for me: 'If Hitler was
listening, and if he understands English, which I doubt, he must feel very
Small.' Who would have thought of Mr. Mottram doing so well? And so many of
his friends, too, that used to stay here? I said to Mr. Wilcox, who comes to
see me regular on the bus from Melstead twice a month, which is very good of
him and I appreciate it, I said: 'We were entertaining angels unawares,'
because Mr. Wilcox never liked Mr. Mottram's friends, which I never saw,,
but used to hear about from all of you, nor Julia didn't like them, but
they've done very well, haven't they?"

At last I asked her: "Have you heard from Julia?"

"From Cordelia, only last week, and they're together still as they have
been all the time, and Julia sent me love at the bottoni of the page.
They're both very well, though they couldn't say where, but Father Membling
said, reading between the lines, it was Palestine, which is where Bridey's
yeomanry is, so that's very nice for them all. Cordelia said they were
looking forward to coming home after the war, which I am sure we all are,
though whether I live to see it, is another story."

I stayed with her for half an hour, and left promising to return often.
When I reached the hall I found no sign of work and Hooper looking guilty.

"They had to go off to draw the bed-straw. I didn't know till Sergeant
Block told me. I don't know whether they're coming back."

"Don't know? What orders did you give?"

"Well, I told Sergeant Block to bring them back if he thought it was
worth while; I mean if there was time before dinner."

It was nearly twelve. "You've been hotted again, Hooper. That straw was
to be drawn any time before six to-night."

"Oh Lor; sorry Ryder. Sergeant Block -- "

"It's my own fault for going away. . . . Fall-in the same party
immediately after dinner, bring them back here and keep them here till the
job's done."

"Rightyoh. I say, did you say you knew this place before?"

"Yes, very well. It belongs to friends of mine," and as I said the
words they sounded as odd in my ears as Sebastian's had done, when, instead
of saying, "It is my home," he said, "It is where my family live."

"It doesn't seem to make any sense--one family in a place this size.
What's the use of it?"

"Well, I suppose Brigade are finding it useful."

"But that's not what it was built for, is it?"

"No," I said, "not what it was built for. Perhaps that's one of the
pleasures of building, like having a son, wondering how he'll grow up. I
don't know; I never built anything, and I forfeited the right to watch my
son grow up. I'm homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless, Hooper." He
looked to see if I was being funny, decided that I was, and laughed. "Now go
back to camp, keep out of the C.O.'s way, if he's back from his recce, and
don't let on to anyone that we've made a nonsense of the morning."

"Okey, Ryder."

There was one part of the house I had not yet visited, and I went there
now. The chapel showed no ill-effects of its long neglect; the art-nouveau
paint was as fresh and bright as ever; the art-nouveau lamp burned once more
before the altar. I said a prayer, an ancient, newly learned form of words,
and left, turning towards the camp; and as I walked back, and the cookhouse
bugle sounded ahead of me, I thought: --

The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend;
they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year,
generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the
great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden
frost, came the -age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all
brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is
vanity.

And yet, I thought, stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where
the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call and were sounding
Pic-em-up, Pic-em-up, hot potatoes -- and yet that is not the last word; it
is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out
of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played;
something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame -- a
beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper
doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs,
which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from
home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit
but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning,
burning anew among the old stones.

I quickened my pace and reached the hut which served us for our
ante-room.

"You're looking unusually cheerful to-day," said the second-in-command.

chagford, February-June, 1944

THE END

Brideshead Revisited: Book II. A twitch upon the thread. Chapter Five

2008-08-06T14:08:00.000+02:00

Chapter Five

my divorce case, or rather my wife's, was due to be heard at about the
same time as Brideshead was to be married. Julia's would not come up till
the following term; meanwhile the game of General Post--moving my property
from the Old Rectory to my flat, my wife's from my flat to the Old Rectory,
Julia's from Rex's house and from Brideshead to my flat, Rex's from Brides,
head to his house, and Mrs. Muspratt's from Falmouth to Brides, head -- was
in full swing and we were all, in varying degrees, homeless, when a halt was
called and Lord Marchmain, with a taste for the dramatically inopportune
which was plainly the prototype of his elder son's, declared his intention,
in view of the international situation, of returning to England and passing
his declining years in his old home.

The only member of the family to whom this change promised any benefit
was Cordelia, who had been sadly abandoned in the turmoil. Brideshead,
indeed, had made a formal request to her to consider his house her home for
as long as it suited her, but when she learned that her sister-in-law
proposed to install her children there for the holidays immediately after
the wedding, in the charge of a sister of hers and the sister's friend,
Cordelia had decided to move, too, and was talking of setting up alone in
London. She now found herself, Cinderella-like, promoted chatelaine, while
her brother and his wife, who had till that moment expected to find
themselves, within a matter of days, absolute owners of the entire property,
were without a roof; the deeds of conveyance, engrossed and ready for
signing, were rolled up, tied and put away in one of the black tin boxes in
Lincoln's Inn. It was bitter for Mrs. Muspratt; she was not an ambitious
woman; something very much less grand than Brideshead would have contented
her heartily; but she did aspire to finding some shelter for her children
over Christmas. The house at Falmouth was stripped and up for sale;
moreover, Mrs. Muspratt had taken leave of the place with some justifiably
rather large talk of her new establishment; they could not return there. She
was obliged in a hurry to move her furniture from Lady Marchmain's room to a
disused coachhouse and to take a furnished villa at Torquay. She was not, as
I have said, a woman of high ambition, but, having had her expectations so
much raised, it was disconcerting to be brought so low so suddenly. In the
village the working party who had been preparing the decorations for the
bridal entry began unpicking the B's on the bunting and substituting M's,
obliterating the Earl's points and stencilling balls and strawberry leaves
on the painted coronets, in preparation for Lord Marchmain's return.

News of his intentions came first to the solicitors, then to, Cordelia,
then to Julia and me, in a rapid succession of contradictory cables. Lord
Marchmain would arrive in time for the wedding; he would arrive after the
wedding, having seen Lord and Lady Brideshead on their way through Paris; he
would see them in Rome. He was not well enough to travel at all; he was just
starting; he had unhappy memories of winter at Brideshead and would not come
until spring was well advanced and the heating apparatus overhauled; he was
coming alone; he was bringing his Italian household; he wished his return to
be unannounced and to lead a life of complete seclusion; he would give a
ball. At last a date in January was chosen which proved to be the correct
one.
Plender preceded him by some days; there was a difficulty here. Plender
was not an original member of the Brideshead household; he had been Lord
Marchmain's servant in the yeomanry, and had only once met Wilcox, on the
painful occasion of the removal of his master's luggage when it was decided
not to return from the war; then Plender had been valet, as, officially, he
still was, but he had in the past years introduced a kind of curate, a Swiss
body-servant, to attend to the wardrobe and also, when occasion arose, lend
a hand with less dignified tasks about the house, and had in effect become
major-domo of that fluctuating and mobile household; sometimes he even
referred to himself on the telephone as the "secretary." There was an acre
of thin ice between him and Wilcox.

Fortunately the two men took a liking to one anodier, and the thing was
solved in a series of three-cornered discussions with Cordelia. Plender and
Wilcox became Joint Grooms of the Chambers, like Blues and Life Guards with
equal precedence, Plender having as his particular province his Lordship's
own apartments, and Wilcox a sphere of influence in the public rooms; the
senior footman was given a black coat and promoted butler, the nondescript
Swiss, on arrival, was to have full valet's status; there was a general
increase in wages to meet the new dignities, and all were content.

Julia and I, who had left Brideshead a month before, thinking we should
not return, moved back for the reception. When the day came, Cordelia went
to the station and we remained to greet him at home. It was a bleak and
gusty day. Cottages and lodges were decorated; plans for a bonfire that
night and for the village silver band to play on the terrace were put down,
but the house flag that had not flown for twenty-five years was hoisted over
the pediment, and flapped sharply against the leaden sky. Whatever harsh
voices might be bawling into the microphones of Central Europe, and whatever
lathes spinning in the armament factories, the return of Lord Marchmain was
a matter of first importance in his own neighbourhood.

He was due at three o'clock. Julia and I waited in the drawing-room
until Wilcox, who had arranged with the station-master to be kept informed,
announced "The train is signalled," and a minute later, "The train is in;
his Lordship is on the way." Then we went to the front portico and waited
there with the upper,' servants. Soon the Rolls appeared at the turn in the
drive, followed at some distance by the two vans. It drew up; first Cordelia
got out, then Cara; there was a pause, a rug was handed to theu chauffeur, a
stick to the footman; then a leg was cautiously thrust I forward. Plender
was by now at the car door; another servant -- the Swiss valet -- had
emerged from a van; together they lifted jj Lord Marchmain out and set him
on his feet; he felt for his stick grasped it, and stood for a minute
collecting his strength for the I few low steps which led to the front door.

Julia gave a little sigh of surprise and touched my hand. We had seen
him nine months ago at Monte Carlo, when he had j been an upright and
stately figure, little changed from when I first met him in Venice. Now he
was an old man. Plender had told us his master had been unwell lately; he
had not prepared us for j this.

Lord Marchmain stood bowed and shrunken, weighed down ... by his
great-coat, a white muffler fluttering untidily at his throat, a cloth cap
pulled low on his forehead, his face white and lined, his nose coloured by
the cold; the tears which gathered in his eyes came not from emotion but
from the east wind; he breathed heavily. Cara tucked in the end of his
muffler and whispered something to him. He raised a gloved hand -- a
schoolboy's glove of grey wool -- and made a small, weary gesture of
greeting to the group at the door; then, very slowly, with his eyes on thfl
ground before him, he made his way into the house.

They took off his coat and cap and muffler and the kind of leather
jerkin which he wore under them; thus stripped he seemed more than ever
wasted but more elegant; he had cast the shabbiness of extreme fatigue. Cara
straightened his tie; he wiped his eyes with a bandanna handkerchief and
shuffled with' his stick to the hall fire.

There was a little heraldic chair by the chimney-piece, one of a set
which stood against the walls, a little, inhospitable, flat-seated thing, a
mere excuse for the elaborate armorial painting on its back, on which,
perhaps, no one, not even a weary footman, had ever sat since it was made;
there Lord Marchmain sat and wiped his eyes.

"It's the cold," he said. "I'd forgotten how cold it is in England.
Quite bowled me over."

"Can I get you anything, my lord?"

"Nothing, thank you. Cara, where are those confounded pills?"

"Alex, the doctor said not more than three times a day."

"Damn the doctor. I feel quite bowled-over."

Cara produced a blue bottle from her bag and Lord Marchmain took a
pill. Whatever was in it seemed to revive him. He remained seated, his long
legs stuck out before him, his cane between them, his chin on its ivory
handle, but he began to take notice of us all, to greet us and to give
orders.

'Tm afraid I'm not at all the thing to-day; the journey's taken it out
of me. Ought to have waked a night at Dover. Wilcox, what rooms have you
prepared for me?"

"Your old ones, my lord."

"Won't do; not till I'm fit again. Too many stairs; must be on the
ground floor. Plender, get a bed made up for me downstairs."

Plender and Wilcox exchanged an anxious glance.

"Very good, my lord. Which room shall we put it in?"

Lord Marchmain thought' for a moment. "The Chinese drawing-room; and,
Wilcox, the 'Queen's bed.'"

"The Chinese drawing-room, my lord, the 'Queen's bed'?"

"Yes, yes. I may be spending some time there in the next few weeks."

The Chinese drawing-room was one I had never seen used; in fact one
could not normally go further into it than a small roped area round the
door, where sight-seers were corralled on the days the house was open to the
public; it was a splendid uninhabitable museum of Chippendale carving and
porcelain and lacquer and painted hangings; the "Queen's bed," too, was an
exhibition piece, a vast velvet tent like the Baldachino at St. Peter's. Had
Lord Marchmain planned this lying-in-state for himself, I wondered, before
he left the sunshine of Italy? Had he thought of it during the scudding rain
of his long, fretful journey? Had it come to him at that moment, an awakened
memory of childhood, a dream in the nursery -- "When I'm grown up I'll sleep
in the Queen's bed in the Chinese drawing-room" -- the apotheosis of adult
grandeur?
Few things, certainly, could have caused more stir in the house. What
had been foreseen as a day of formality became one of fierce exertion;
housemaids began making a fire, removing covers, unfolding linen; men in
aprons, never normally seen, shifted furniture; the estate carpenters were
collected to dismantle the bed. It came down the main staircase in pieces,
at intervals during the afternoon; huge sections of rococo, velvet-covered
cornice; the twisted gilt and velvet columns which formed its posts; beams
of unpolished wood, made not to be seen, which performed invisible,
structural functions below the draperies; plumes of dyed feathers, which
sprang from gold-mounted ostrich eggs and crowned the canopy; finally, the
mattresses with four toiling men to each. Lord Marchmain seemed to derive
comfort from the consequences of his whim; he sat by the fire watching the
bustle, while we stood in a half-circle--Cara, Cordelia," Julia and I -- and
talked to him.

Colour came back to his cheeks and light to his eyes. "Brides-head and
his wife dined with me in Rome," he said. "Since we are all members of the
family" -- and his eye moved ironically from Cara to me -- "I can speak
without reserve. I found her deplorable. Her former consort, I understand,
was a seafaring man and, presumably, the less exacting, but how my son, at
the ripe age of thirty-eight, with, unless things have changed very much, a
very free choice among the women of England, can have settled on--I suppose
I must call her so--Beryl . . ." He left the sentence eloquently unfinished.

Lord Marchmain showed no inclination to move, so presently we drew up
chairs -- the little heraldic chairs, for everything else in the hall was
ponderous--and sat round him.

"I daresay I shall not be really fit again until summer comes," he
said. "I look to you four to amuse me."

There seemed little we could do at the moment to lighten the rather
sombre mood; he, indeed, was the most cheerful of us. "Tell me," he said,
"the circumstances of Brideshead's courtship."

We told him what we knew.

"Match-boxes," he said. "Match-boxes. Ithink she's past
child-bearing."

Tea was brought us at the hall fireplace.

"In Italy," he said, "no one believes there will be a war. They think
it will all be 'arranged.' I suppose, Julia, you no longer have access to
political information? Cara, here, is fortunately a British subject by
marriage. It is not a thing she customarily mentions, but it may prove
valuable. She is legally Mrs. Hicks, are you not, my dear? We know little of
Hicks, but we shall be grateful to him, none the less, if it comes to war.
And you," he said, turning the attack to me, "you will no doubt become an
official artist?"

"No. As a matter of fact I am negotiating now for a commission in the
Special Reserve."

"Oh, but you should be an artist. I had one with my squadron during the
last war, for weeks -- until we went up to the line."

This waspishness was new. I had always been aware of a frame of
malevolence under his urbanity, now it protruded like his own sharp bones
through the sunken skin.
It was dark before the bed was finished; we went to see it, Lord
Marchmain stepping quite briskly now through the intervening rooms.

"I congratulate you. It really looks remarkably well. Wilcox, I seem to
remember a silver basin and ewer--they stood in a room we called 'the
Cardinal's dressing-room,' I think -- suppostt we had them here on the
console. Then if you will send Plender and Gaston to me, the luggage can
wait till to-morrow -- simply' the dressingose and what I need for the
night. Plender will know. If you will leave me with Plender and Gaston, I
will go td ' bed. We will meet later; you will dine here and keep me
amused."

We turned to go; as I was at the door he called me back.

"It looks very well, does it not?"

"Very well."

"You might paint it, eh --and call it "The Death Bed'?"

"Yes," said Cara, "he has come home to die."

"But when he first arrived he was talking so confidently of recovery."

"That was because he was so ill. When he is himself, he knows he is
dying and accepts it. His sickness is up and down; one day, sometimes for
several days on end, he is strong and lively and then he is ready for death,
then he is down and afraid. I do not | know how it will be when he is more
and more down. That must come in good time. The doctors in Rome gave him
less than a year. There is someone coining from London, I think to-morrow, j
who will tell us more."

"What is it?"

"His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word."

That evening Lord Marchmain was in good spirits; the room I had a
Hogarthian aspect, with the dinner-table set for the four of us by the
grotesque, chinoiserie chimney-piece, and the old j man propped among his
pillows, sipping champagne, tasting,' praising, and failing to eat the
succession of dishes which had been prepared for his homecoming. Wilcox had
brought out for the occasion the gold plate, which I had not before seen in
use; that and the gilt mirrors and the lacquer and the drapery of the great
bed and Julia's mandarin coat gave the scene an air of pantomime, of
Aladdin's cave.

Just at the end, when the time came for us to go, his spirits flagged.

"I shall not sleep," he said. "Who is going to sit with me? Cara,
carissima, you are fatigued. Cordelia, will you watch for an hour in this
Gethsemane?"

Next morning I asked her how the night had passed.

"He went to sleep almost at once. I came in to see him at two to make
up the fire; the lights were on, but he was asleep again. He must have woken
up and turned them on; he had to get out of bed to. do that. I think perhaps
he is afraid of the dark."

It was natural, with her hospital experience, that Cordelia should take
charge of her father. When the doctors came that day they gave their
instructions to her, instinctively.

"Until he gets worse," she said, "I and the valet can look after him.
We don't want nurses in the house before they are needed." At this stage the
doctors had nothing to recommend except to keep him comfortable and
administer certain drugs when his attacks came on. "How long will it be?"

"Lady Cordelia, there are men walking about in hearty old age whom
their doctors gave a week to live. I have learned one thing in medicine:
never prophesy."

These two men had made a long journey to tell her this; the local
doctor was there to accept the same advice in technical phrases.

That night Lord Marchmain reverted to the topic of his new
daughter-in-law; it had never been long out of his mind, finding expression
in various sly hints throughout the day; now he lay back in his pillows and
talked of her at length.

"I have never been much moved by family piety until now," he said, "but
I am frankly appalled at the prospect of-- of Beryl taking what was once my
mother's place in this house. Why
should that uncouth pair sit here childless while the place crumbles
about their ears? I will not disguise from you that I have take a dislike to
Beryl.

"Perhaps it was unfortunate that we met in Rome. Anywhere else might
have been more sympathetic. And yet, if one comes to consider it, where
could I have met her without repugnance? We dined at Ranieri's; it is a
quiet little restaurant I have fire quented for years -- no doubt you know
it. Beryl seemed to fill the place. I, of course, was host, though to hear
Beryl press my son with food, you might have thought otherwise. Brideshead
was always a greedy boy; a wife who has his best interests at heart should
seek to restrain him. However, that is a matter ol small importance.

"She had no doubt heard of me as a man of irregular life. I can only
describe her manner to me as roguish. A naughty old man, that's what she
thought I was. I suppose she had met naughty old admirals and knew how they
should be humoured; a stage-door chappie, a bit of a lad ... I could not
attempt to reproduce her conversation. I will give you one example.

"They had been to an audience at the Vatican that morning; a blessing
for their marriage -- I did not follow attentively ---something of the kind
had happened before I gathered, some previous husband, some previous Pope.
She described, rather vivaciously, how on this earlier occasion she had gone
with a whole body of newly married couples, mostly Italians of all ranks,
some of the simpler girls in their wedding dresses, and how each had
appraised the other, the bridegrooms looking the brides over, comparing
their own with one another's, and so fordi. Then she said, 'This time, of
course, we were in private, but do you know, Lord Marchmain, I felt as
though it was I who was leading in the bride.'

"It was said with great indelicacy. I have not yet quite fathomed her
meaning. Was she making a play on my son's name, or was she, do you think,
referring to his undoubted virginity? I fancy the latter. Anyway, it was
with pleasantries of that kind that we passed the evening.

"I don't think she would be quite in her proper element here, do you?
Who shall I leave k to? The entail ended with me, you know. Sebastian, alas,
is out of the question. Who wants it? Quis? Would you like it, Cara? No, of
course you would not. Cordelia? I think I shall leave it to Julia and
Charles."

"Of course not, Papa, it's Bridey's."

"And . . . Beryl's? I will have Gregson down one day soon and go over
the matter. It is time I brought my will up to date; it is full of anomalies
and anachronisms. ... I have rather a fancy for the idea of installing Julia
here; so beautiful this evening, my dear; so beautiful always; much, much
more suitable."

Shortly after this he sent to London for his solicitor, but, on the day
he came, Lord Marchmain was suffering from an attack and would not see him.
"Plenty of time," he said, between painful gasps for breath, "another day,
when I am stronger," but the choice of his heir was constantly in his mind,
and he referred often to the time when Julia and I should be married and in
possession.
"Do you think he really means to leave it to us?" I asked Julia.

"Yes, I think he does.'

"But it's monstrous for Bridey."

"Is it? I don't think he cares much for the place. I do, you know. He
and Beryl would be much more content in some little house somewhere."

"You mean to accept it?"

"Certainly. It's Papa's to leave as he likes. I think you and I would
be very happy here."

It opened a prospect; the prospect one gained at the turn of the
avenue, as I had first seen it with Sebastian, of the secluded valley, the
lakes falling away one below the other, the old house in the foreground, the
rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and
love and beauty; a soldier's dream in a foreign bivouac; such a prospect
perhaps as a hig pinnacle of the temple afforded after the hungry days in
desert and the jackal-haunted nights. Need I reproach myself if sometimes I
was rapt in the vision?

The weeks of illness wore on and the life of the house kept pace with
the faltering strength of the sick man. There days when Lord Marchmain was
dressed, when he stood at the window or moved on his valet's arm from fire
to fire through if the rooms of the ground floor, when visitors came and
went -- neighbours and people from the estate, men of business from London
-- parcels of new books were opened and discussed, a piano moved into the
Chinese drawing-room; once at the end of February, on a single, unexpected
day of brilliant sunshine, he called for a car and got as far as the hall,
had on his fur coat and reached the front door. Then suddenly he lost
interest in the drive, said, "Not now. Later. One day in the summer," took
his man's arm again and was led back to his chair. Once ho had the humour of
changing his room and gave detailed orders for a move to the Painted
Parlour; the chinoiserie, he said disturbed his rest -- he kept the lights
full on at night -- but again lost heart, countermanded everything, and kept
his room.

On other days the house was hushed as he sat high in bed,]' propped by
his pillows, with labouring breath; even then Wanted to have us round him;
night or day he could not bead to be alone; when he could not speak his eyes
followed us, and ii| anyone left the room he would look distressed, and
Cara, sitting I often for hours at a time by his side against the pillows
with atilj arm .in his, would say, "It's all right, Alex, she's coming
back."

Brideshead and his wife returned from their honeymoon and stayed a few
nights; it was one of the bad times, and Lord Marchmain refused to have them
near him. It was Beryl's first visit, and she would have been unnatural if
she had shown no" curiosity about what had nearly been, and now again
promised soon to be, her home. Beryl was natural enough, and surveyed the
place fairly thoroughly in the days she was there. In the strange disorder
caused by Lord Marchmain's illness, it must have seemed capable of much
improvement; she referred once or twice to the way in which establishments
of similar size had been managed at various Government Houses she had
visited. Brideshead took her visiting among the tenants by day, and in the
evenings she talked to me of painting, or to Cordelia of hospitals, or to
Julia of clothes, with cheerful assurance. The shadow of betrayal, the
knowledge of how precarious were their just expectations, was all one-sided.
I was not easy with them; but that was no new thing to Brideshead; in the
little circle of shyness in which he was used to move, my guilt passed
unseen.
Eventually it became clear that Lord Marchmain did not intend to see
more of them. Brideshead was admitted alone for a minute's leave-taking;
then they left.

"There's nothing we can do here," said Brideshead, "and it's very
distressing for Beryl. We'll come back if things get worse."

The bad spells became longer and more frequent; a nurse was engaged. "I
never saw such a room," she said, "nothing like it anywhere; no conveniences
of any sort." She tried to have her patient moved upstairs, where there was
running water, a dressing-room for herself, a "sensible" narrow bed she
could "get round" --what she was used to--but Lord Marchmain would not
budge. Soon, as days and nights became indistinguishable to him, a second
nurse was installed; the specialists came again from London; they
recommended a new and rather daring treatment, but his body seemed weary of
all drugs and did not respond. Presently there were no good spells, merely
brief fluctuations in the speed of his decline.

Brideshead was called. It was the Easter holidays and Beryl was busy
with her children. He came alone, and haying stood silently for some minutes
beside his father, who sat silently looking at him, he left the room and,
joining the rest of us who wertfj in the library, said, "Papa must see a
priest."

It was not the first time the topic had come up. In the early days,
when Lord Marchmain first arrived, the parish priest-since the chapel was
shut there was a new church and presbytery in Melstead -- had come to call
as a matter of politeness. Cordelia' I had put him off with apologies and
excuses, but when he was gone she said: "Not yet. Papa doesn't want him
yet."

Julia, Cara and I were there at the time; we each had something to say,
began to speak, and thought better of it. It was never mentioned between the
four of us, but Julia, alone with me, said, "Charles, I see great Church
trouble ahead."

"Can't they even let him die in peace?"

"They mean something so different by 'peace.'"

"It would be an outrage. No one could have made it clearer, all his
life, what he thought of religion. They'll come now, when his mind's
wandering and he hasn't the strength to resist, and I claim him as a
death-bed penitent. I've had a certain respect for their Church up till now.
If they do a thing like that I shall know that everything stupid people say
about them is quite true -- that it's all superstition and trickery." Julia
said nothing. "Don't you agree?" Still Julia said nothing.

"Don't you agree?"

"I don't know, Charles. I simply don't know."

And, though none of us spoke of it, I felt the question ever present,
growing through all the weeks of Lord Marchmain's illness; I saw it when
Cordelia drove off early in the mornings to mass; I saw it as Cara took to
going with her; this little cloud the size of a man's hand, that was going
to swell into a storm among us.

Now Brideshead, in his heavy, ruthless way, planted the problem down
before us.

"Oh, Bridey, do you think he would?" asked Cordelia.

"I shall see that he does," said Brideshead. "I shall take Father
Mackay in to him to-morrow."

Still the clouds gathered and did not break; none of us spoke. Cara and
Cordelia went back to the sick-room; Brideshead looked for a book, found
one, and left us.

"Julia," I said, "how can we stop this tomfoolery?"

She did not answer for some time; then: "Why should we?"

"You know as well as I do. It's just--just an unseemly incident"

"Who am I to object to unseemly incidents?" she asked sadly. "Anyway,
what harm can it do? Let's ask the doctor."

We asked the doctor, who said: "It's hard to say. It might alarm him of
course; on the other hand, I have known cases where it has had a wonderfully
soothing effect on a patient; I've even known it act as a positive
stimulant. It certainly is usually a great comfort to the relations. Really
I think it's a thing for Lord Brideshead to decide. Mind you, there is no
need for immediate anxiety. Lord Marchmain is very weak to-day; tomorrow he
may be quite strong again. Is it not usual to wait a little?"

"Well, he wasn't much help," I said to Julia, when we left him.

"Help? I really can't quite see why you've taken it so much at heart
that my father shall not have the last sacraments."

"It's such a lot of witchcraft and hypocrisy."

"Is it? Anyway, it's been going on for nearly two thousand years. I
don't know why you should suddenly get in a rage now." Her voice rose; she
was swift to anger of late months. "For Christ's sake, write to The Times;
get up and make a speech in Hyde Park; start a 'No Popery' riot--but don't
bore me about it. What's it got to do with you or me whether my father sees
his parish priest?"

I knew these fierce moods of Julia's, such as had overtaken her at the
fountain in moonlight, and dimly surmised their origin; I knew they could
not be assuaged by words. Nor could I have spoken, for the answer to her
question was still unformed, but lay in a pocket of my mind, like sea-mist
in a dip of the sand dunes; the cloudy sense that the fate of more souls
than one was at issue; that the snow was beginning to shift on the high
slopes.

Brideshead and I breakfasted together next morning with the
night-nurse, who had just come off duty.

"He's much brighter to-day," she said. "Fie slept very nicely for
nearly three hours. When Gaston eame to shave him he was quite chatty."

"Good," said Brideshead. "Cordelia went to mass. She's driving Father
Mackay back here to breakfast."

I had met Father Mackay several times; he was a stocky, middle-aged,
genial Glasgow-Irishman who, when we met, was apt to ask me such questions
as, "Would you say now, Mr. Ryder, I that the painter Titian was more truly
artistic than the painter Raphael?" and, more disconcertingly still, to
remember my answers: "To revert, Mr. Ryder, to what you said when last I had
the pleasure to meet you,'would it be right now to say that the painter
Titian . . ." usually ending with some such reflection as: "Ah, it's a grand
resource for a man to have the talent you have, Mr. Ryder, and the time to
indulge it." Cordelia could imitate him brilliantly.

This morning he made a hearty breakfast, glanced at the headlines of
the paper, and then said with professional briskness: "And now, Lord
Brideshead, would the poor soul be ready to set me, do you think?"

Brideshead led him out; Cordelia followed and I was left alone among
the breakfast things. In less than a minute I heard the voices of all three
outside the door.

". . . can only apologize."

". . . poor soul. Mark you, it was seeing a strange face; depend upon
it, it was that--an unexpected stranger. I well understand it."

". . . Father, I am sorry . . . bringing you all this way . . ."

"Don't think about it at all, Lady Cordelia. Why, I've had bottles
thrown at me in the Gorbals. . . . Give him time. I've known worse cases
make beautiful deaths. Pray for him . . . I'll come again . . . and now if
you'll excuse me I'll just pay a little visit to Mrs. Hawkins. Yes, indeed,
I know the way well."

Then Cordelia and Brideshead came into the room.

"I gather the visit was not a success."

"It was not. Cordelia, will you drive Father Mackay home when he comes
down from Nanny?

I'm going to telephone to Beryl and see when she needs me home."

"Bridey, it was horrible. What are we to do?"

"We've done everything we can at the moment." He left the room.

Cordelia's face was grave; she took a piece of bacon from the dish,
dipped it in mustard and ate it. "Damn Bridey," she said, "I knew it
wouldn't work."

"What happened?"

"Would you like to know? We walked in there in a line; Cara was reading
the paper aloud to Papa. Bridey said, Tve brought Father Mackay to see you';
Papa said, 'Father Mackay, I am afraid you have been brought here under a
misapprehension. I am not in extremis, and I have not been a practising
member of your Church for twenty-five years. Brideshead, show Father Mackay
the way out.' Then we all turned about and walked away, and I heard Cara
start reading the paper again, and that, Charles, was that."

I carried the news to Julia, who lay with her bed-table amid a litter
of newspapers and envelopes.

"Mumbo-jumbo is off," I said, "the witch-doctor has gone."

"Poor Papa."

"It's great sucks to Bridey."

I felt triumphant. I had been right, everyone else had been wrong,
truth had prevailed; the thread that I had felt hanging over Julia and me
ever since that evening at the fountain had been averted, perhaps dispelled
for ever; and there was also--I can now confess it -- another unexpressed,
inexpressible, indecent little victory that I was furtively celebrating. I
guessed that that morning's business had putBrideshead some considerable way
further from his rightful inheritance.
In that I was correct; a man was sent for from the solicitors in
London; and in a day or two he came and it was known throughout the house
that Lord Marchmain had made a new will. But I was wrong in thinking that
the religious controversy was quashed; it flamed up again after dinner on
Brideshead's last evening.

". . . What Papa said was, 'I am not in extremis; I have not been a
practising member of the Church for twenty-five years.'"

"Not 'the Church,' 'your Church.'"

"I don't see the difference."

"There's every difference."

"Bridey, it's quite plain what he meant."

"I presume he meant what he said. He meant that he had not been
accustomed regularly to receive the sacraments, and since he was not at the
moment dying, he did not mean to change his ways -- yet."

"That's simply a quibble."
"Why do people always think that one is quibbling when one tries to be
precise? His plain meaning was that he did not want to see a priest that
day, but that he would when he was in extremis."

"I wish someone would explain to me," I said, "quite what the
significance of these sacraments is. Do you mean that if he dies alone he
goes to hell, and that if a priest puts oil on him -- "

"Oh, it's not the oil," said Cordelia, "that's to heal him."

"Odder still -- well, whatever it is the priest does -- that he then
goes tq heaven? Is that what you believe?"

Cara then interposed: "I think my nurse told me, someone did anyway,
that if the priest got there before the body was cold it was all right.
That's so, isn't it?"

The others turned on her.

"No, Cara, it's not."

"Of course not."

"You've got it all wrong, Cara."

"Well, I remember when Alphonse de Grenet died, Madame de Grenet had a
priest hidden outside the door -- he couldn't bear the sight of a priest --
and brought him in before the body was cold; she told me herself, and they
had a full requiem for him, and I went to it."

"Having a requiem doesn't mean you go to heaven necessarily."

"Madame de Grenet thought it did."

"Well, she was wrong."

"Do any of you Catholics know what good you think this priest can do?"
I asked. "Do you simply want to arrange it so that your father can have
Christian burial? Do you want to keep him out of hell? I only want to be
told."

Brideshead told me at some length, and when he had finished Cara
slightly marred the unity of the Catholic front by saying in simple wonder,
"I never heard that before."

"Let's get this clear," I said; "he has to make an act of will; he has
to be contrite and wish to be reconciled; is that right? But only God knows
whether he has really made an act of will; the priest can't tell; and if
there isn't a priest there, and he makes the act of will alone, that's as
good as if there were a priest. And it's quite possible that the will may
still be working when a man is too weak to make any outward sign of it; is
that right? He may be lying, as though for dead, and willing all the time,
and being reconciled, and God understands that; is that right?"

"More or less," said Brideshead.

"Well, for heaven's sake," I said, "what is the priest for?"

There was a pause in which Julia sighed and Brideshead drew breath as
though to start further subdividing the propositions.

In the silence Cara said, "All I know is that I shall take very good
care to have a priest."

"Bless you," said Cordelia, "I believe that's the best answer."

And we let the argument drop, each for different reasons, thinking it
had been inconclusive.
Later Julia said: "I wish you wouldn't start these religious
arguments."

"I didn't start it."

"You don't convince anyone else and you don't really convince
yourself."

"I only want to know what these people believe. They say it's all based
on logic."

"If you'd let Bridey finish, he would have made it all quite logical."

"There were four of you," I said. "Cara didn't know the first thing it
was about, and may or may not have believed it; you knew a bit and didn't
believe a word; Cordelia knew about aS much and believed it madly; only poor
Bridey knew and believed, and I thought he made a pretty poor show when it
came to explaining. And people go round saying, 'At least Catholics know
what they believe.' We had a fair cross-section to-night--"

"Oh, Charles, don't rant. I shall begin to think you're getting doubts
yourself."

The weeks passed and still Lord Marchmain lived on. In June my divorce
was made absolute and my former wife married for the second time. Julia
would be free in September. The nearer our marriage got, the more wistfully,
I noticed, Julia spoke of it; war was growing nearer, too -- we neither of
us doubted that-- but Julia's tender, remote, it sometimes seemed desperate
longing did not come from any uncertainty outside herself; it suddenly
darkened too, into brief accesses of hate when she seemed to throw herself
against the restraints of her love for me like a caged animal against the
bars.

I was summoned to the War Office, interviewed and put on a list in case
of emergency; Cordelia also, on another list; lists were becoming part of
our lives once more, as they had been at school--those strips of paper on
the green baize notice boards which defined success and failure. No one in
that dark office spoke the word "war"; it was taboo; we should be called for
if there was "an emergency" -- not in case of strife, an act of human will;
nothing so clear and simple as wrath or retribution; an emergency; something
coming out of the waters, a monster with sightless face and thrashing tail
thrown up from the depdis.

Lord Marchmain took little interest in events outside his own room; we
took him the papers daily and made the attempt to read to him, but he turned
his head on the pillows and with his eyes followed the intricate patterns
about him. "Shall I go on?" "Please do if it's not boring you." But he was
not listening; occasionally at a familiar name he would whisper: "Irwin ...
I knew him -- a mediocre fellow"; occasionally some remote comment: "Czechs
make good coachmen; nothing else"; but his mind was far from world affairs;
it was there, on the spot, turned in on himself; he had no strength for any
other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

I said to the doctor, who was with us daily: "He's got a wonderful will
to live, hasn't he?"

"Would you put it like that? I should say a great fear of death."

"Is there a difference?"

"Oh dear, yes. He doesn't derive any strength from his fear, you know.
It's wearing him out."

Next to death, perhaps because they are like death, he feared darkness
and loneliness. He liked to have us in his room and the lights burnt all
night among the gilt figures; he did not wish us to speak much, but he
talked himself, so quietly that we could often not hear him; he talked, I
think, because his was the only voice he could trust, when it assured him
that he was still alive; what he said was not for us, nor for any ears but
his own.

"Better to-day. Better to-day. I can see now, in the corner of the
fireplace, where the mandarin is holding his gold bell and the crooked tree
is in flower below his feet, where yesterday I was confused and took the
little tower for another man. Soon I shall see the bridge and the three
storks and know where the path leads over the hill.

"Better to-morrow. We live long in our family and marry late.
Seventy-three is no age. Aunt Julia, my father's aunt, lived to be
eighty-eight, born and died here, never married, saw the fire on beacon hill
for the battle of Trafalgar, always called it 'the New House'; that Was the
name they had for it in the nursery and in the fields when unlettered men
had long memories. You can see where the old house stood near the village
church; they call the field 'Castle Hill,' Horlick's field where the
ground's uneven and half of it is waste, nettle and brier in hollows too
deep for ploughing. They dug to the foundations to carry the stone for the
new house; the house that was a century old when Aunt Julia was born. Those
were our roots in the waste hollows of Castle Hill, in the brier and nettle;
among the tombs in the old church and the chantrey where no clerk sings.
"Aunt Julia knew the tombs, cross-legged knight and doubleted earl,
marquis like a Roman senator, limestone, alabaster, and Italian marble;
tapped the escutcheons with her ebony cane, made the casque ring over old
Sir Roger. We were knights then, barons since Agincourt; the larger honours
came with the Georges. They came the last and they'll go the first; the
barony descends in the female line; when Brideshead is buried--he married
late -- Julia's son will be called by the name his fathers bore before the
fat days; the days of wool shearing and the wide corn lands, the days of
growth and building, when the marshes were drained and the waste land
brought under the plough, when one built the house, his son added the dome,
his son spread the wings and dammed the river. Aunt Julia watched them build
the fountain; it was old before it came here, weathered two hundred years by
the suns of Naples, brought by man-o'-war in the days of Nelson. Soon the
fountain will be dry till the rain fills it, setting the fallen leaves
afloat in the basin and over the lakes the reeds will spread and close.
Better to-day.

"Better to-day. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold
winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in
my own sheets; I shall live long. I was fifty when they dismounted us and
sent us into the line; old men stay at the base, the orders said, but Walter
Venables, my commanding officer, my nearest neighbour, said: 'You're as fit
as the youngest of them, Alex.' So I was; so I am now, if I could only
breathe.

"No air; no wind stirring under the velvet canopy; no one has opened
the door for a thousand years in Aladdin's treasury, deep underground where
the jinns burrow like moles and no wind stirs. When the summer comes," said
Lord Marchmain, oblivious of the deep corn and swelling fruit and the
surfeited bees who slowly sought their hives in the heavy afternoon sunlight
outside his windows, "when the summer comes I shall leave my bed and sit in
the open air and breathe more easily.

"Better to-morrow, when the wind comes down the valley and a man can
turn to meet it and fill himself with air like a beast at water. Who would
have thought that all these little gold men-, gentlemen in their own
country, could live so long without breathing? Like toads in the coal, down
a deep mine, untroubled. God take it, why have they dug a hole for me? Must
a man stifle to death in his own cellars? Plender, Gaston, open the
windows."

"The windows are all wide open, my lord."

"I know them. I was born in this house. They open from a cellar into a
tunnel. It can only be done by gunpowder; bore the rock, cram it with
powder, trace the fuse, crouch under cover round the corner while we touch
it off; we'll blast our way to daylight."

A cylinder of oxygen was placed beside his bed, with a long1
tube, a face-piece, and a little stop-cock he could work himself.
Often he said: "It's empty; look, nurse, there's nothing cornel out."

"No, Lord Marchmain, it's quite full; the bubble here in the glass bulb
shows that; it's at full pressure; listen, don't you hear it hiss? Try and
breathe slowly, Lord Marchmain; quite gently, then you get the benefit."

"Free as air; that's what they say -- 'free as air.' I was free once. I
committed a crime in the name of freedom. Now they bring me my air in an
iron barrel."

Once he said: "Cordelia, what became of the chapel?"

"They locked it up, Papa, when Mummy died."

"It was hers, I gave it to her. We've always been builders in our
family. I built it for her; pulled down the pavilion that stood there;
rebuilt with the old stones; it was the last of the. new house to come, the
first to go. There used to be a chaplain until the war. Do you remember
him?"

"I was too young."

"Then I went away -- left her in the chapel praying. It was hers. It
was the place for her. I never came back to disturb her prayers. They said
we were fighting for freedom; I had my own victory. Was it a crime?"

"I think it was, Papa."

"Crying to heaven for vengeance? Is that why they've locked me in this
cave, do you think, with a black tube of air and the little yellow men along
the walls, who live without breathing? Do you think that, child? But the
wind will come soon, tomorrow perhaps, and we'll breathe again. The ill wind
that will blow me good. Better to-morrow."

Thus, till mid-July, Lord Marchmain lay dying, wearing himself down in
the struggle to live. Then, since there was no reason to expect an immediate
change, Cordelia went to London to see her women's organization about the
coming "emergency." That day Lord Marchmain's condition became suddenly
worse. He lay silent and quite still, breathing laboriously; only his open
eyes, which sometimes moved about the room, gave any sign of consciousness.
"Is this the end?" Julia asked.

"It is impossible to say," the doctor answered; "when he does die it
will probably be like this. He may recover from the present attack. The only
thing is not to disturb him. The least shock will be fatal."

"I'm going for Father Mackay," she said. I was not surprised. I had
seen it in her mind all the summer. When she had gone I said to the doctor,
"We must stop this nonsense."

He said: "My business is with the body. It's not my business to argue
whether people are better alive or dead or what happens to them after death.
I only try to keep them alive."

"And you said just now any shock would kill him. What could be worse
for a man who fears death, as he does, than to have a priest brought to him
-- a priest he turned out when he had the strength?"

"I think it may kill him." "Then will you forbid it?"

"I've no authority to forbid anything. I can only give my opinion."

"Cara, what do you think?"

"I don't want him made unhappy. That is all there is to hope for now;
that he'll die without knowing it. But I should like the priest there, all
the same."

"Will you try and persuade Julia to keep him away-- until the end?
After that he can do no harm." "I will ask her to leave Alex happy, yes." In
half an hour Julia was back with Father Mackay. We all met in the library.

"I've telegraphed for Bridey and Cordelia," I said. "I hope you agree
that nothing must be done till they arrive."

"I wish they were here," said Julia.

"You can't take the responsibility alone," I said; "everyone else ' is
against you. Doctor, tell her what you said to me just now."

"I said that the shock of seeing a priest might well kill him; without
that he may survive this attack. As his medical man I must protest against
anything being done to disturb him."

"Cara?"

"Julia, dear, I know you are thinking for the best, but, you know, Alex
was not a religious man.

He scoffed always. We mustn't take advantage of him, now he's weak, to
comfort our own consciences. If Father Mackay comes to him when he is
unconscious, then he can be buried in the proper way, can he not, Father?"

"I'll go and see how he is," said the doctor, leaving us.

"Father Mackay," I said. "You know how Lord Marchmain greeted you last
time you came; do you think it possible he can have changed now?"

"Thank God, by His grace it is possible."

"Perhaps," said Cara, "you could slip in while he is sleeping, say the
words of absolution over him; he would never know."

"I have seen so many men and women die," said the priest; , "I never
knew them sorry to have me there at the end."

"But they were Catholics; Lord Marchmain has never been one" except in
name--at any rate, not for years. He was a scoffer, Cara said so."

"Christ came to call, not the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

The doctor returned. "There's no change," he said.

"Now, Doctor," said the priest, "how would I be a shock to anyone?" He
turned his bland, innocent, matter-of-fact face first on the doctor, then
upon the rest of us. "Do you know what I want to do? It is something so
small, no show about it. I don't wear special clothes, you know. I go just
as I am. He knows the look of me now. There's nothing alarming. I just want
to ask him if he is sorry for his sins. I want him to make some little sign
of assent; I want him, anyway, not to refuse me; then I Want to give him
God's pardon. Then, though that's not essential, I want to anoint him. It is
nothing, a touch of the fingers, just some oil. from this little box, look,
it is pure oil, nothing to hurt him." "Oh, Julia," said Cara, "what are we
to say? Let me speak to him."

She went to the Chinese drawing-room; we waited in silence; there was a
wall of fire between Julia and me. Presently Cara returned.

"I don't think he heard," she said. "I thought I knew how to put it to
him. I said: 'Alex, you remember the priest from Melstead. You were very
naughty when he came to see you. You hurt his feelings very much. Now he's
here again. I want you to see him just for my sake, to make friend's.' But
he didn't answer. If he's unconscious, it couldn't make him unhappy to see
the priest, could it, Doctor?"

Julia, who had been standing still and silent, suddenly moved.

"Thank you for your advice, Doctor," she said. "I take full
responsibility for whatever happens. Father Mackay, will you please come and
see my father now," and without looking at me, led him to the door.

We all followed. Lord Marchmain was lying as I had seen him that
morning, but his eyes were now shut; his hands lay, palm-up wards, above the
bed-clothes; the nurse had her fingers on the pulse of one of them. "Come
in," she said brightly, "you won't disturb him now."

"D'you mean . . . ?"

"No, no, but he's past noticing anything."

She held the oxygen apparatus to his face and the hiss of escaping gas
was the only sound at the bedside.

The priest bent over Lord Marchmain and blessed him. Julia and Cara
knelt at the foot of the bed. The doctor, the nurse and I stood behind them.

"Now," said the priest, "I know you are sorry for all the sins of your
life, aren't you? Make a sign, if you can. You're sorry, aren't you?" But
there was no sign. "Try and remember your sins; tell God you are sorry. I am
going to give you absolution. While I am giving it, tell God you are sorry
you have offended Him." He began to speak in Latin. I recognized the words
Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris . . . and saw the priest make the sign of
the cross. Then I knelt, too, and prayed: "O God, if there is a God, forgive
him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin," and the man on the bed
opened his eyes and gave a sigh, the sort of sigh I had imagined people made
at the moment of death, but his eyes moved so that we knew there was still
life in him.
I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only
for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I
knew, for a sign. It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare
acknowledgment of a present, a nod in the crowd. All over the world people
were on their knees before innumerable crosses, and here the drama was being
played again by two men -- by one man, rather, and he nearer death than
life; the universal drama in which there is only one actor.

The priest took the little silver box from his pocket and spoke again
in Latin, touching the dying man with an oily wad; he-finished what he had
to do, put away the box and gave the final blessing. Suddenly Lord Marchmain
moved his hand to his forehead; I thought he had felt the touch of the
chrism and was wiping it away. "O God," I prayed, "don't let him do that."
But there was no need for fear; the hand moved slowly down his breast, then
to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross. Then I knew
that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of
recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of
the temple being rent from top to bottom.

It was over; we stood up; the nurse went back to the oxygen cylinder;
the doctor bent over his patient. Julia whispered to me: "Will you sec
Father Mackay out? I'm staying here for a little."
Outside the door Father Mackay became the simple, genial man I had
known before. "Well, now, and that was a beautiful thing to see. I've known
it happen that way again and again. The devil resists to the last moment and
then the Grace of God is too much for him. You're not a Catholic, I think,
Mr. Ryder, but at least you'll be glad for the ladies to have the comfort of
it.''

As we were waiting for the chauffeur, it occurred to me that Father
Mackay should be paid for his services. I asked him awkwardly. "Why, don't
think about it, Mr. Ryder. It was a pleasure," he said, "but anything you
care to give is useful in a parish like mine." I found I had three pounds in
my note-case and gave them to him. "Why, indeed, that's more than generous.
God bless you, Mr. Ryder. I'll call again, but I don't think the poor soul
has long for this world."

Julia remained in the Chinese drawing-room until, at five o'clock that
evening, her father died, proving both sides right in the dispute, priest
and doctor.

Thus I come to the broken sentences which were the last words spoken
between Julia and me, the last memories.

When htr father died Julia remained some minutes with his body; the
nurse came to the next room to announce the news and I had a glimpse of her,
through the open door, kneeling at the foot of the bed, and of Cara sitting
by her. Presently the two women came out together, and Julia said to me:
"Not now; I'm just taking Cara up to her room; later."

While she was still upstairs Brideshead and Cordelia arrived from
London; when at last we met alone it was by stealth, like young lovers.

Julia said: "Here in the shadow, in the corner of the stair -- a minute
to say good-bye."

"So long to say so little."

"You knew?"

"Since this morning; since before this morning; all this year."

"I didn't know till to-day. Oh, my dear, if you could only understand.
Then I could bear to part, or bear it better. I should say my heart was
breaking, if I believed in broken hearts. I can't marry you, Charles; I
can't be with you ever again."

"I know."

"How can you know?"

"What will you do?"

"Just go on -- alone. How can I tell what I shall do? You know the
whole of me. You know I'm not one for a life of mourning. I've always been
bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the
more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it
would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. One can only hope to see
one step ahead. But I saw to-day there was one thing unforgivable-- like
things in the schoolroom, so bad they are unpunishable, that only Mummy
could deal with -- the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not
quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's. Why should I be
allowed to understand that, and not you, Charles? It may be because of
Mummy, Nanny, Cordelia, Sebastian -- perhaps Bridey and Mrs. Muspratt --
keeping my name in their prayers; or it may be a private bargain between me
and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am,
He won't quite despair of me in the end.

"Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you
understand."

"I don't want to make it easier for you," I said; "I hope your heart
may break; but I do understand."

The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last
echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in
the silent valley.

Brideshead Revisited_12: Book II. A twitch upon the thread. Chapter Four

2008-08-06T14:07:00.001+02:00

Chapter Four

"and of course Celia will have custody of the children."

"Of course."

"Then what about the Old Rectory? I don't imagine you'll want to settle
down with Julia bang at our gates. The children look on it as their home,
you know. Robin's got no place of his own till his uncle dies. After all,
you never used the studio, did you? Robin was saying only the other day what
a good playroom it would make--big enough for badminton."

"Robin can have the Old Rectory."

"Now with regard to money, Celia and Robin naturally don't want to
accept anything for themselves, but there's the question of the children's
education."

"That will be all right. I'll see the lawyers about it."

"Well, I think that's everything," said Mulcaster. "You know, I've seen
a few divorces in my time, and I've never known one work out so happily for
all concerned. Almost always, however matey people are at the start, bad
blood crops up when they get down to detail. Mind you, I don't miricl saying
there have been times in the last two years when I thought you were treating
Celia a bit rough. It's hard to tell with one's own sister, but I've always
thought her a jolly attractive girl, the sort of girl any chap would be glad
to have--artistic, too, just down your street. But I must admit you're a
good picker. I've always had a soft spot for Julia. Anyway, as things have
turned out everyone seems satisfied. Robin's been mad about Celia for a year
or more. D'you know him?"

"Vaguely. A half-baked, pimply youth as I remember him." "Oh, I
wouldn't quite say that. He's rather young, of course, but the great thing
is that Johnjohn and Caroline adore him. You've got two grand kids there,
Charles. Remember me to Julia; wish her all the best for old time's sake."

"So you're being divorced," said my father. "Isn't that rather
unnecessary, after you've been happy together all these years?"

"We weren't particularly happy, you know."

"Weren't you? Were you not? I distinctly remember last Christmas seeing
you together and thinking how happy you looked, and wondering why. You'll
find it very disturbing, you know, starting off again. How old are
you--thirty-four? That's no age to be starting. You ought to be settling
down. Have you made any plans?"

"Yes. I'm marrying again as soon as the divorce is through."

"Well, I do call that a lot of nonsense. I can understand a man wishing
he hadn't married and trying to get out of it -- though I never felt
anything of the kind myself -- but to get rid of one wife and take up with
another immediately is beyond all reason. Celia was always perfectly civil
to me. I had quite a liking for her, in a way. If you couldn't be happy with
her, why on earth should you expect to be happy with anyone else? Take my
advice, my dear boy, and give up the whole idea."

"Why bring Julia and me into this?" asked Rex. "If Celia wants to marry
again, well and good; let her. That's your business and hers. But I should
have thought Julia and I were quite happy as we are. You can't say I've been
difficult. Lots of chaps would have cut up nasty. I hope I'm a man of the
world. I've had my own fish to fry, too. But a divorce is a different thing
altogether; I've never known a divorce do anyone any good."

"That's your affair and Julia's."

"Oh, Julia's set on it. What I hoped was, you might be able to talk her
round. I've tried to keep out of the way as much as I could; if I've been
around too much, just tell me, I shan't mind. But there's too much going on
altogether at the moment, what with Bridey wanting me to clear out of the
house; it's disturbing, and I've got a lot on my mind."

Rex's public life was approaching a climacteric. Things had not gone as
smoothly with him as he had planned. I knew nothing of finance, but I heard
it said that his dealings were badly looked on by orthodox conservatives;
even his good qualities of geniality and impetuosity counted against him,
for his parties at Brideshead got talked about. There was always too much
about him in the papers; he was one with the press lords and their sad-eyed,
smiling hangers-on; in his speeches he said the sort of thing which "made a
story" in Fleet Street, and that did him no good with his party chiefs; only
war could put Rex's fortunes right and carry him into power. A divorce would
do Him no harm with these cronies; it was rather that with a big bank
running he could not look up from the table.

"If Julia insists on a divorce, I suppose she must have it," he said.
"But she couldn't have chosen a worse time. Tell her to hang on a bit,
Charles, there's a good fellow."

"Bridey's widow said: 'So you're divorcing one divorced man and
marrying another. It sounds rather complicated, but my dear' -- she called
me 'my dear' about twenty times -- 'I've usually found every Catholic family
has one lapsed member, and it's often the nicest.'"

Julia had just returned from a luncheon party given by Lady Rosscommon
in honour of Brideshead's engagement.

"What's she like?"

"Majestic and voluptuous; common, of course; might be Irish or Jewish
or both; husky voice, big mouth, small eyes, dyed hair -- I'll tell you one
thing, she's lied to Bridey about her age. She's a good forty-five. I don't
see her providing an heir. Bridey can't take his eyes off her. He was
gloating on her in the most revolting way all through luncheon."

"Friendly?"

"Goodness, yes, in a condescending way. You see, I imagine 1 she's been
used to bossing things rather in naval circles, with flag-lieutenants
trotting round and young officers-on-the-make sucking up to her. Well, she
clearly couldn't do a great deal of bossing at Aunt Fanny's, so it put her
rather at ease to have me there as the black sheep. She concentrated on me,
in fact; asked my advice about shops and things; said, rather pointedly, she
hoped to see me often in London. I think Bridey's scruples only extend to
her sleeping under the same roof with me. Apparently I can do her no serious
harm in a hat-shop or hairdresser's ' or lunching at the Ritz. The scruples
are all on Bridey's part, anyway; the widow is madly tough."

"Does she boss him?"

"Not yet, much. He's in an amorous stupor, poor beast, and doesn't
quite know where he is. She's just a good-hearted woman who wants a good
home for her children and isn't going to let anything get in her way. She's
playing up the religious stuff at j the moment for all it's worth. I daresay
she'll ease up a bit when she's settled."

The divorces were much talked of among our friends; even in that summer
of general alarm there were still corners where private affairs commanded
first attention. My wife was able to put it across that the business was a
matter of congratulation for her and reproach for me; that she had behaved
wonderfully, had stood it longer than anyone but she would have done; Robin
was seven years younger and a little immature for his age, they whispered in
their private corners, but he was absolutely devoted to poor Celia, and
really she deserved it after all she had been through. As for Julia and me,
that was an old story. "To put it crudely," said my cousin Jasper, as though
he had ever in his life put anything otherwise: "I don't see why you bother
to marry."

Summer passed; delirious crowds cheered Neville Chamberlain's return
from Munich; Rex made a rabid speech in the House of Commons which sealed
his fate one way or the other; sealed it, as is sometimes done with naval
orders, to be opened later at sea. Julia's family lawyers, whose black, tin
boxes, painted marquis of marchmain, seemed to fill a room, began the slow
process of her divorce; my own, brisker firm, two doors down, were weeks
ahead with my affairs. It was necessary for Rex and Julia to separate
formally, and since, for the time being, Brideshead was still her home, she
remained there and Rex removed his trunks and valet to their house in
London. Evidence was taken against Julia and me in my flat. A date was fixed
for Brideshead's wedding, early in the Christmas holidays, so that his
future stepchildren might take part.
One afternoon in November Julia and I stood at a window in the
drawing-room watching the wind at work stripping the lime-trees, sweeping
down the yellow leaves, sweeping them up and round and along the terrace and
lawns, trailing them through puddles and over the wet grass, pasting them on
walls and window-panes, leaving them at length in sodden piles against the
stonework.

"We shan't see them in spring," said Julia; "perhaps never again."

"Once before," I said, "I went away, thinking I should never return."

"Perhaps years later, to what's left of it, with what's left of us ..."

A door opened and shut in the darkling room behind us. Wilcox
approached through the firelight into the dusk about the long windows.

"A telephone message, my lady, from Lady Cordelia."

"Lady Cordelia! Where was she?"

"In London, my lady."

"Wilcox, how lovely! Is she coming home?"

"She was just starting for the station. She will be here after dinner."

"I haven't seen her for twelve years," I said -- not since the evening
when we dined together and she spoke of being a nun; the evening when I
painted the drawing-room at Marchmain House.

"She was an enchanting child."

"She's had an odd life. First, the convent; then, when that was no
good, the war in Spain. I've not seen her since then. The other girls who
went with the ambulance came back when the war was over; she stayed on,
getting people back to their homes, helping in the prison camps. An odd
girl. She's grown up quite plain, you know."

"Does she know about us?"

"Yes, she wrote me a sweet letter."

It hurt to think of Cordelia growing up quite plain; to think of all
that burning love spending itself on serum injections and delousing powder.
When she arrived, tired from her journey, rather shabby, moving in the
manner of one who has no interest in pleasing, I thought her an ugly woman.
It was odd, I thought, how the same ingredients, differently dispensed,
could produce Brideshead, Sebastian, Julia and her. She was unmistakably
their sister, without any of Julia's or Sebastian's grace, without
Brideshead's gravity. She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact, steeped in the
atmosphere of camp and dressing station, so accustomed to gross suffering as
to lose the finer shades of pleasure. She looked more than her twenty-six
years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign
tongue had worn away the nuances of speech; she straddled a little as she
sat by the fire, and when she said, "It's wonderful to be home," it sounded
to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.

Those were the impressions of the first half-hour, sharpened by the
contrast with Julia's white skin and silk and jewelled hair and with my
memories of her as a child.

"My job's over in Spain," she said; "the authorities were very polite,
thanked me for all I'd done, gave me a medal and sent me packing. It looks
as though there'll be plenty of the same sort of work over here soon."

Then she said: "Is it too late to see Nanny?"

"No, she sits up to all hours with her wireless." We went up, all three
together, to the old nursery. Julia and I always spent part of our day
there. Nanny Hawkins and my father were two people who seemed impervious to
change; neither an hour older than when I first knew them. A wireless set
had now been added to Nanny Hawkins's small assembly of pleasures--the
rosary, the Peerage with its neat brown-paper wrapping protecting the red
and gold covers, the photographs and holiday souvenirs -- on her table. When
we broke it to her that Julia and I were to be married, she said, "Well,
dear, I hope it's all for the best," for it was not part of her religion to
question the propriety of Julia's actions.

Brideshead had never been a favourite with her; she greeted the news of
his engagement with "He's certainly taken long enough to make up his mind,"
and, when the search through Debrett afforded no information about Mrs.
Muspratt's connections: "She's caught him, I daresay."
We found her, as always in the evening, at the fireside with her
teapot, and the wool rug she was making.

"I knew you'd be up," she said. "Mr. Wilcox sent to tell me you were
coming."

"I brought you some lace."

"Well, dear, that is nice. Just like her poor Ladyship used to wear at
mass. Though why they made it black I never did understand, seeing lace is
white naturally. That is very welcome, I'm sure."

"May I turn off the wireless, Nanny?"

"Why, of course; I didn't notice it was still on, in the pleasure of
seeing you. What have you done to your hair?"

"I know it's terrible. I must get all that put right now I'm back.
Darling Nanny."

As we sat there talking, and I saw Cordelia's fond eyes on all of us, I
began to realize that she, too, had a beauty of her own.

"I saw Sebastian last month."

"What a time he's been gone! Was he quite well?"

"Not very. That's why I went. It's quite near you know from Spain to
Tunis. He's with the monks there."

"I hope they look after him properly. I expect they find him a regular
handful. He always sends to me at Christmas, but it's not the same as having
him home. Why you must all always be going abroad I never did understand.
Just like his Lordship. When there was that talk about going to war with
Munich, I said to myself, there's Cordelia and Sebastian and his Lordship
all abroad; that'll be very awkward for them."

"I wanted him to come home with me, but he wouldn't. He's got beard
now, you know, and he's very religions."

"That I won't believe, not even if I see it. He was always a little
heathen. Brideshead was one for church, not Sebastian. And a beard, only
fancy; such a nice fair skin as he had; always looked clean though he'd not
been near water all day, while Brideshead there was no doing anything with
scrub as you might."

"It's frightening," Julia once said, "to think how completely you have
forgotten Sebastian."

"He was the forerunner."

"That's what you said in the storm. I've thought since: perhaps I am
only a forerunner, too."

Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us
like a wisp of tobacco smoke -- a thought to fade and vanish like smoke
without a trace -- perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a
hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only
a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types
and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from
disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other,
snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always
a pace or two ahead of us.

I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather
it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant, Arcadian days.

"That's cold comfort for a girl," she said when I tried to explain.
"How do I know I shan't suddenly turn out to be somebody else? It's an easy
way to chuck."

I had not forgotten Sebastian; every stone of the house had a memory of
him, and when I heard him spoken of by Cordelia as someone she had seen a
month ago, my lost friend filled my thoughts. When we left the nursery, I
said, "I want to hear all about Sebastian."

"To-morrow. It's a long story."

And next day, walking through the wind-swept park, she told me: --

"I heard he was dying," she said. "A journalist in Burgos told me,
who'd just arrived from North Africa. A down-and-out called Flyte, who
people said was an English lord, whom the fathers had found starving and
taken in at a monastery near Carthage. That was how the story reached me. I
knew it couldn't be quite true--however little we did for Sebastian, he at
least got his money sent him--but I started off at once.

"It was all quite easy. I went to the consulate first and they knew all
about him; he was in the infirmary of the head house of some missionary
fathers. The consul's story was that Sebastian had turned up in Tunis one
day, some weeks before, in a motor bus from Algiers, and had applied to be
taken on as a missionary lay brother. The fathers took one look at him and
turned him down. Then he started drinking. He lived in a little.' hotel on
the edge of the Arab quarter. I went to see the place later; it was a bar
with a few rooms over it, kept by a Greek, smelling of hot oil and garlic
and stale wine and old clothes, a place where the small Greek traders came
and played draughts and listened to the wireless. He stayed there a month
drinking Greek absinthe, occasionally wandering out, they didn't know where,
coming back and drinking again. They were afraid he j would come to harm and
followed him sometimes, but he only went to the church or took a car to the
monastery outside the town. They loved him there. He's still loved, you see,
wherever he goes, whatever condition he's in. It's a thing about him he'll
never lose. You should have heard the proprietor and his family talk of him,
tears running down their cheeks; they'd clearly robbed him right and left,
but they'd looked after him and tried j to make him eat'his meals. That was
the thing that shocked them about him: that he wouldn't eat; there he was
with all that money, so thin. Some of the clients of the place came in while
we were talking in very peculiar French; they all had the same story: such a
good man, they said, it made them unhappy to sec him so low. They thought
very ill of his family for leaving him like that; it couldn't happen with
their people, they said, and I daresay they're right.

"Anyway, that was later; after the consulate I went straight to the
monastery and saw the Superior. He was a grim old Dutch man who had spent
fifty years in Central Africa. He told me his part of the story; how
Sebastian had turned up, just as the consul said, with his beard and a
suitcase, and asked to be admitted as a lay brother. 'He was very earnest,'
the Superior said -- Cordelia imitated his guttural tones; she had had an
aptitude for mimicry, I remembered, in the schoolroom -- " 'please do not
think there is any doubt of that -- he is quite sane and quite in earnest.
He wanted to go to the bush, as far away as he could get, among the simplest
people, to the cannibals. The Superior said: 'We have no cannibals in our
missions.' He said, well, pygmies would do, or just a primitive village
somewhere on a river; or lepers--lepers would do best of anything. The
Superior said: 'We have plenty of lepers, but they live in our settlements
with doctors and nuns. It is all very orderly.' He thought again, and said
perhaps lepers were not what he wanted, was there not some small church by a
river -- he always wanted a river you see --which he could look after when
the priest was away. The Superior said; 'Yes, there are such churches. Now
tell me about, yourself.' 'Oh, I'm nothing,' he said. 'We see some queer
fish'" -- Cordelia lapsed again into mimicry; " 'he was a queer fish, but he
was very earnest.' The Superior told him about the novitiate and the
training and said: 'You are not a young man. You do not seem strong to me.'
He said: 'No, I don't want to be trained. I don't want to do things that
need training.' The Superior said: 'My friend, you need a missionary for
yourself,' and he said: 'Yes, of course.' Then he sent him away.

"Next day he came back again. He had been drinking. He said he had
decided to become a novice and be trained. 'Well,' said the Superior, 'there
are certain things that are impossible for a man in the bush. One of them is
drinking. It is not the worst thing, but it is nevertheless quite fatal. I
sent him away.' Then he kept coming two or three times a week, always drunk,
until the Superior gave orders that the porter was to keep him out. I said,
'Oh dear, I'm afraid he was a terrible nuisance to you,' but of course
that's a thing they don't understand in a place like that. The Superior
simply said, 'I did not think there was anything I could do to help him
except pray.' He was a very holy old man and recognized it in others."

"Holiness?"

"Oh yes, Charles, that's what you've got to understand about Sebastian.

"Well, finally one day they found Sebastian lying outside the main gate
unconscious; he had walked out -- usually he took a car -- and fallen down
and lain there all night. At first they thought he was merely drunk again;
then they realized he was very ill, so they put him in the infirmary, where
he'd been ever since.

"I stayed a fortnight with him till he was over the worst of his
illness. He looked terrible, any age, rather bald with a straggling beard,
but he had his old sweet manner. They'd given him a room to himself; it was
barely more than a monk's cell with a bed and a crucifix and white walls. At
first he couldn't talk much and was not at all surprised to see me; then he
was surprised and wouldn't talk much, until just before I was going, when he
told me all that had been happening to him. It was' mostly about Kurt, his
German friend. Well, you met him, so you know all about that. He sounds
gruesome, but as long as Sebastian had him to look after, he was happy. He
told me he'd practically given up drinking at one time while he and Kurt
lived together. Kurt was ill and had a wound that wouldn't heal. Sebastian
saw him through that. Then they went to Greece when Kurt got well. You know
how Germans sometimes seem to discover a sense of decency when they get to a
classical country. It seems to have worked with Kurt. Sebastian says he
became quite human in Athens. Then he got sent to prison; I couldn't quite
make out why; apparently it wasn't particularly his fault-- some brawl with
an official. Once he was locked up the German authorities got at him. It was
the time when they were rounding up all their nationals from all parts of
the world to make them into Nazis. Kurt didn't at all want to leave Greece.
But the Greeks didn't want him, and he was marched straight from prison with
a lot of other toughs into a German boat and shipped home.

"Sebastian went after him, and for a year could find no trace. Then in
the end he ran him to earth dressed as a storm trooper in a provincial town.
At first he wouldn't have anything to do with Sebastian; spouted all the
official jargon about the rebirth of his country, and his belonging to his
country and finding t self-realization in the life of the race. But it was
only skin-deep with him. Six years of Sebastian had taught him more than a
year of Hitler; eventually he chucked it, admitted he hated Germany, and
wanted to get out. I don't know how much it was simply the call of the easy
life, sponging on Sebastian, bathing in the Mediterranean, sitting about in
caf&, having his shoes polished. Sebastian says it wasn't entirely that;
Kurt had just begun to grow up in Athens. It may be he's right. Anyway, he
decided to try and get out. But it didn't work. He always got into trouble
whatever he did, Sebastian said. They caught him and put him in a
concentration camp. Sebastian couldn't get near him or hear a word of him;
he couldn't even find what camp he was in; he hung about for nearly a year
in Germany, drinking again, until one day in his cups he took up with a man
who was just out of the camp where Kurt had been, and learned that he had
hanged himself in his hut the first week.

"So that was the end of Europe for Sebastian. He went back to Morocco,
where he had been happy, and gradually drifted down the coast, from place to
place, until one day when he had sobered up -- his drinking goes in pretty
regular bouts now--he conceived the idea of escaping to the savages. And
there he was.

"I didn't suggest his coming home. I knew he wouldn't, and he was too
weak still to argue it out. He seemed quite happy by the time I left. He'll
never be able to go into the bush, of course, or join the order, but the
Father Superior is going to take charge of him. They had the idea of making
him a sort of under-porter; there are usually a few odd hangers-on in a
religious house, you know; people who can't quite fit in either to the world
or the monastic rule. I suppose I'm something of the sort myself. But as I
don't happen to drink, I'm more employable."

We had reached the turn in our walk, the stone bridge at the foot of
the last and smallest lake, under which the swollen waters fell in a
cataract to the stream below; beyond the path doubled back towards the
house. We paused at the parapet looking down into the dark water.

"I once had a governess who jumped off this bridge and drowned
herself."

"Yes, I know."

"How could you know?"

"It was the first thing I ever heard about you---before I ever met
you."

"How very odd. . . ."

"Have you told Julia this about Sebastian?"

"The substance of it; not quite as I told you. She never loved him, you
know, as we do."

"Do" The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia's verb
"to love."

"Poor SebastianI" I said. "It's too pitiful. How will it end?"

"I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I've seen others like him,
and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He'll live on, half in,
half out of the community, a familiar figure pottering round with his broom
and his bunch of keys. He'll be a great favourite with the old fathers,
something of a joke I to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking;
he'll disappear for two or three days every month or so, and they'll all nod
and smile and say in their various accents, 'Old Sebastian's on the spree
again,' and then he'll come back dishevelled and shamefaced and be more
devout for a day or two in the chapel. He'll probably have little hiding
places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and
then on the sly. They'll bring him forward to act as guide, whenever they
have an English-speaking visitor; and he will be completely charming, so
that before they go they'll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that
he has high connections at home. If he lives long enough, generations of
missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old
character who was somehow part of the Hope of their student days, and
remember him in their masses. He'll develop little eccentricities of
devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he'll be found in the chapel at
odd times and missed when he's expected. Then one morning, after one of his
drinking bouts, he'll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere
flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last
sacraments. It's not such a bad way of getting through one's life."

I thought of the joyful youth with the Teddy-bear under the flowering
chestnuts. "It's not what one would have foretold," I said. "I suppose he
doesn't suffer?"

"Oh, yes, I think he does. One can have no idea what the suffering may
be, to be maimed as he is -- no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever
holy without suffering. It's taken that form with him. . . . I've seen so
much suffering in the last few years; there's so much coming for everybody
soon. It's the spring of love . . ." And then in condescension to my
paganism, she added: "He's in a very beautiful place, you know, by the sea
-- white cloisters, a bell tower, rows of green vegetables, and a monk
watering them when the sun is low."

I laughed. "You knew I wouldn't understand?"

"You and Julia . . ."she said. And then, as we moved on towards the
house, "When you met me last night did you think, 'Poor Cordelia, such an
engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works'?
Did you think 'thwarted'?"

It was no time for prevarication. "Yes," I said, "I did; I don't now,
so much."

"It's funny," she said, "that's exactly the word I thought of for you
and Julia. When we were up in the nursery with Nanny. Thwarted passion,' I
thought."

She spoke with that gentle, infinitesimal inflection of mockery which
descended to her from her mother, but later that evening the words came back
to me poignantly.

Julia wore the embroidered Chinese robe which she often used when we
were dining alone at Brideshead; it was a robe whose weight and stiff folds
stressed her repose; her neck rose exquisitely from the plain gold circle at
her throat; her hands lay still among the dragons in her lap. It was thus
that I had rejoiced to see her nights without number, and that night,
watching her as she sat between the firelight and the shaded lamp, unable to
look away for love of her beauty, I suddenly thought, When else have I seen
her like this? Why am I reminded of another moment of vision? And it came
back to me that this was how she had sat in the liner, before the storm;
this was how she had looked; and I realized that she had regained what I
thought she had lost for ever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to
her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some
other purpose than this?"

That night I woke in the darkness and lay awake turning over in my mind
the conversation with Cordelia. How I had said, "You knew I would not
understand?" How often, it seemed to me, I was brought up short, like a
horse in full stride suddenly refusing an obstacle, backing from the spurs,
too shy even to put his nose at it and look at the thing.

And another image came to me, of an arctic hut and a trapper alone with
his furs and oil lamp and log fire; the remains of supper on the table, a
few books, skis in the corner; everything dry and neat and warm inside, and
outside the last blizzard of winter raging and the snow piling up against
the door. Quite silently a great weight forming against the timber; the bolt
straining in its socket; minute by minute in the darkness outside the white
heap sealing the door, until quite soon, when the wind dropped and the sun
came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in, a block would move, slide
and tumble, high above, gather way, gadier weight, till the whole hillside
seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would crash open and
splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine.

Brideshead Revisited: Book II. A twitch upon the thread. Chapter Three

2008-08-06T14:06:00.000+02:00

Chapter Three

"Do you remember," said Julia, in the tranquil, lime-scented evening,
"do you remember the storm?"

"The bronze doors banging."

"The roses in cellophane."

"The man who gave the 'get-together' party and was never seen again."

"Do you remember how the sun came out on our last evening just as it
has done to-day?"

It had been an afternoon of low cloud and summer squalls, so overcast
that at times I had stopped work and roused Julia from the light trance in
which she sat -- she had sat so often; I never tired of painting her,
forever finding in her new wealth and delicacy -- until at length we had
gone early to our baths, and on coming down, dressed for dinner, in the last
half-hour of the day, we found the world transformed; the sun had emerged;
the wind had fallen to a soft breeze which gently stirred the blossom in the
limes and carried its fragrance, fresh from the late rains, to merge with
the sweet breath of box and the drying stone. The shadow of the obelisk
spanned the terrace.

I had carried two garden cushions from the shelter of the colonnade and
put them on the rim of the fountain. There Julia sat, in a tight little gold
tunic and a white gown, one hand in the water idly turning an emerald ring
to catch the fire of the sunset; the carved animals mounted over her dark
head in a cumulus of green moss and glowing stone and dense shadow, and the
waters round them flashed and bubbled and broke into scattered beads of
flame.

". . . So much to remember," she said. "How many days have there been
'since then, when we haven't seen each other; a hundred, do you think?"

"Not so many."

"Two Christmases" -- those bleak, annual excursions into propriety.
Boughton, home of my family, home of my cousin Jasper, with what glum
memories of childhood I revisited its pitch-pine corridors and dripping
walls! How querulously my father and I, seated side by side in my uncle's
Humber, approached the avenue of Wellingtonias knowing that at the end of
the drive we should find my uncle, my aunt, my Aunt Philippa, my cousin
Jasper and, of recent years, Jasper's wife and children; and besides them,
perhaps already arrived, perhaps every moment expected, my wife and my
children. This annual sacrifice united us; here among the holly and
mistletoe and the cut spruce, the parlour games ritually performed, the
brandy-butter and the Carlsbad plums, the village choir in the pitch-pine
minstrekl gallery, gold twine and sprigged wrapping-paper, she and I weril
accepted, whatever ugly rumours had been afloat in the past yeafJ as man and
wife. "We must keep it up, whatever it costs us, fc the sake of the
children," my wife said.

"Yes, two Christmases. . . . And the three days of good tas before I
followed you to Capri."

"Our first summer."

"Do you remember how I hung about Naples, then followe how we met by
arrangement on. the hill path and how flat fell?"

"I went back to the villa and said, 'Papa, who do you think arrived at
the hotel?' and he said, 'Charles Ryder, I suppose.' said, 'Why did you
think of him?' and Papa replied, 'Cara came back from Paris with the news
that you and he were inseparable He seems to have a penchant for my
children. However, brir him here. I think we have the room.'"

"There was the time you had jaundice and wouldn't let see you."

"And when I had flu and you were afraid to come."

"Countless visits to Rex's constituency."

"And Coronation Week, when you ran away from Londc Your goodwill
mission to your father-in-law. The time you went to Oxford to paint the
picture they didn't like. Oh, yes, quite' hundred days."

"A hundred days wasted out of two years and a bit ... a day when you
were not in my heart; not a day's coldness mistrust or disappointment."

"Never that."

We fell silent; only the birds spoke in a multitude of smalj clear
voices in the lime-trees; only the waters spoke among the carved stones.

Julia took the handkerchief from my breast pocket and her hand; then
lit a cigarette. I feared to break the spell of memories, but for once our
thoughts had not kept pace together, for when at length Julia spoke, she
said sadly: "How many more? Another hundred?"

"A lifetime."

"I want to marry you, Charles."

"One day; why now?"

"War," she said, "this year, next year, sometime soon. I want a day or
two with you of real peace."

"Isn't this peace?"

The sun had sunk now to the line of woodland beyond the valley; all the
opposing slope was already in twilight, but the lakes below us were aflame;
the light grew in strength and splendour as it neared death, spreading long
shadows across the pasture, falling full on the rich stone spaces of the
house, firing the panes in the windows, glowing on cornices and colonnade
and dome, drawing out all the hidden sweetness of colour and scent from
earth and stone and leaf, glorifying the head and golden shoulders of the
woman beside me.

"What do you mean by 'peace'; if not this?"

"So much more"; and then in a chill, matter-of-fact tone she continued:
"Marriage isn't a thing we can take when the impulse moves us. There must be
a divorce -- two divorces. We must make plans."

"Plans, divorce, war -- on an evening like this."

"Sometimes," said Julia, "I feel the past and the future pressing so
hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all."

Then Wilcox came down the steps into the sunset to tell us that dinner
was ready.

Shutters were up, curtains drawn, candles lit, in the Painted Parlour.

"Hullo, it's laid for three." "Lord Brideshead arrived half an hour
ago, my lady. He sent a message would you please not wait dinner for him as
he may be a little late."

"It seems months since he was here last," said Julia. "What does he do
in London?"

It was often a matter for speculation between us -- giving birth to
many fantasies, for Bridey was a mystery; a creature from under ground; a
hard-snouted, burrowing, hibernating animal who shunned the light. He had
been completely without action in all his years of adult life; the talk of
his going into the army, 1 and into Parliament, and into a monastery, had
all come to nothing. All that he was known with certainty to have done--andi
this because in a season of scant news it had formed the subject of a
newspaper article entitled peer's unusual hobby -- was to form a collection
of match-boxes; he kept them mounted on boards, card-indexed, yearly
occupying a larger and larger space in his small house in Westminster. At
first he was bashful about the notoriety which the newspaper caused, but
later greatly pleased, for he found it the means of his getting into touch
with other collectors in all parts of the world with whom he now
corresponded and swapped duplicates. Other than this he was not known to
have any interests. He remained Joint-Master of the Marchmain and hunted
with them dutifully on their two days a week when he was at home; he never
hunted with the neighbouring pack, who had the better country. He had no
real zest for sport, and had not been out a dozen times that season; he had
few friends; he visited his aunts; he went to public dinners held in the
Catholic interest. At Brideshead he performed all unavoidable local duties,
bringing with him to platform and fettfil and committee room his own thin
mist of clumsiness and aloofness.

"There was a girl found strangled with a piece of barbed wire at
Wandsworth last week," I said, reviving an old fantasy.

"That must be Bridey. He is naughty."

When we had been a quarter of an hour at the table he joined us, coming
ponderously into the room in the bottle-green velvet smoking suit which he
kept at Brideshead and always wore when he was there. At thirty-eight he had
grown heavy and bald, and might have been taken for forty-five.

"Well," he said, "well, only you two; I hoped to find Rex here."

I often wondered what he made of me and of my continual presence; he
seemed to accept me, without curiosity, as one of the household. Twice in
the past two years he had surprised me by what seemed to be acts of
friendship; last Christmas he sent me a photograph of himself in the robes
of a Knight of Malta, and shortly afterwards he asked me to go with him to a
dining club. Both acts had an explanation: he had had more copies of his
portrait printed than he knew what to do with; he was proud of his club. It
was a surprising association of men quite eminent in their professions who
met once a month for an cvp-ning of ceremonious buffoonery; each had his
sobriquet-- Bridey was called "Brother Grandee"--and a specially designed
jewel worn like an order of chivalry, symbolizing it; they had club buttons
for their waistcoats and an elaborate ritual for the introduction of guests;
after dinner a paper was read and facetious speeches made. There was plainly
some competition to bring guests of distinction, and since Bridey had few
friends, and since I was tolerably well-known, I was invited. Even on that
convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of
social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about
himself in which he floated with loglike calm.

He sat down opposite me and bowed his sparse, pink head over his plate.

"Well, Bridey. What's the news?"

"As a matter of fact," he said, "I have some news. But it can wait."

"Tell us now."

He made a grimace which I took to mean "not in front of the f
servants," and said, "How is the painting, Charles?"

"Which painting?"

"Whatever you have on the stocks."

"I began a sketch of Julia, but the light was tricky all to-day."

"Julia? I thought you'd done her before. I suppose it's a change from
architecture, and much more difficult."

His conversation abounded in long pauses during which his mind seemed
to remain motionless; he always brought one back with a start to the exact
point where he had stopped. Now after more than a minute he said: "The world
is full of different subjects."

"Very true, Bridey."

"If I were a painter," he said, "I should choose an entirely different
subject every time; subjects with plenty of action in them like . . ."
Another pause. What, I wondered, was coming? "The Flying Scotsman"'? "The
Charge of the Light Brigade"? "Henley' Regatta"? Then surprisingly he
said:". . . like 'Macbeth.'" There was something supremely preposterous in
the idea of Bridey as a painter of action pictures; he was usually
preposterous yet seldom quite absurd. He achieved dignity by his remoteness
and agelessness; he was still half-child, already half-veteran; there seemed
no spark of contemporary life in him; he had a kind of massive rectitude and
impermeability, an indifference to the world, which compelled respect.
Though we often laughed at: him, he was never wholly ridiculous;
at times he was even formidable.

We talked of the news from Central Europe until, suddenly ill cutting
across this barren topic, Bridey asked: "Where are Mummy's jewels?"

"This was hers," said Julia, "and this. Cordelia and I had all her own
things. The family jewels went to the bank."

"It's so long since I've seen them--I don't know that I ever saw them
all. What is there? Aren't there some rather famous rubies, someone was
telling me?"

"Yes, a necklace. Mummy used often to wear it, don't you remember ? And
there are the pearls -- she always had those out. But most of it stayed in
the bank year after year. There are some hideous diamond fenders, I
remember, and a Victorian diamond collar no one could wear now. There's a
mass of good stones. Why?"

"I'd like to have a look at them some day."

"I say, Papa isn't going to pop them, is he? He hasn't got into debt
again?"

"No, no, nothing like that."

Bridey was a slow and copious eater. Julia and I watched him between
the candles. Presently he said: "If I was Rex . . .".His mind seemed full of
such suppositions: "If I was Archbishop of Westminster," "If I was head of
the Great Western Railway," "If I was an actress"--as though it were a mere
trick of fate that he was none of these things, and he might awake any
morning to find the matter adjusted. "If I was Rex I should want to live in
my constituency."

"Rex says it saves four days' work a week not to."

"I'm sorry he's not here. I have a little announcement to make."

"Bridey, don't be so mysterious. Out with it."

He made the grimace, which seemed to mean "not before the servants."

Later, when port was on the table and we three were alone, Julia said:
"I'm not going till I hear the announcement."

"Well," said Bridey sitting back in his chair and gazing fixedly at his
glass. "You have only to wait until Monday to see it in black and white in
the newspapers. I am engaged to be married. I hope you are pleased."

"Bridey. How . . . how very exciting! Who to?."

"Oh, no one you know."

"Is she pretty?"

"I don't think you would exactly call her pretty; 'comely' is the word
I think of in her connection. She is a big woman."

"Fat?"

"No, big. She is called Mrs. Muspratt; her Christian name is Beryl. I
have known her for a long time, but until last year she had a husband; now
she is a widow. Why do you laugh?"

"I'm sorry. It isn't the least funny. It's just so unexpected. Is she .
. . is she about your own age?"

"Just about, I believe. She has three children, the eldest boy has just
gone to Ampleforth. She is not at all well off."

"But Bridey, where did you find her?"

"Her late husband, Admiral Muspratt, collected match-boxes," he said
with complete gravity.
Julia trembled on the verge of laughter, recovered her self-possession
and asked: "You're not marrying her for her matchboxes?"

"No, no; the whole collection was left to the Falmouth Town Library. I
have a great affection for her. In spite of all her difficulties she is a
very cheerful woman,, very fond of acting. She is connected with the
Catholic Players' Guild."

"Does Papa know?"

"I had a letter from him this morning giving me his approval. He has
been urging me to marry for some time."

It occurred to both Julia and myself simultaneously that we were
allowing curiosity and surprise to predominate; now we congratulated him in
gentler tones from which mockery was almost excluded.

"Thank you," he said, "thank you. I think I am very fortunate."

"But when are we going to meet her? I do think you might have brought
her down with you."

He said nothing, sipped and gazed.

"Bridey," said Julia. "You sly, smug old brute, why haven't you brought
her here?"

"Oh I couldn't do that, you know."

"Why couldn't you? I'm dying to meet her. Let's ring her up now and
invite her. She'll think us most peculiar leaving her alone at a time like
this."

"She has the children," said Brideshead. "Besides, you are peculiar,
aren't you?"

"What can you mean?"

Brideshead raised his head and looked solemnly at his sister, and
continued in the same simple way, as though he were saying nothing
particularly different from what had gone before, "I couldn't ask her here,
as things are. It wouldn't be suitable. After all, I am a lodger here. This
is Rex's house at the moment, as far as it's anybody's. What goes on here is
his business. But I couldn't bring Beryl here."

"I simply don't understand," said Julia rather sharply. I looked at
her. All the gentle mockery had gone; she was alert, almost scared, it
seemed. "Of course, Rex and I want her to come."

"Oh yes, I don't doubt that. The difficulty is quite otherwise." He
finished his port, refilled his glass, and pushed the decanter towards me.
"You must understand that Beryl is a woman of strict Catholic principle
fortified by the prejudices of the middle class. I couldn't possibly bring
her here. It is a matter of indifference whether you choose to live in sin
with Rex or Charles or both -- I have always avoided enquiry into the
details of your menage --but in no case would Beryl consent to be your
guest."

Julia rose. "Why, you pompous ass . . ." she said, stopped, and turned
towards the door.

At first I thought she was overcome by laughter; then, as I opened the
door to her, I saw with consternation that she was in tears. I hesitated.
She slipped past me without a glance.

"I may have given the impression that this was a marriage of
convenience," Brideshead continued placidly. "I cannot speak for Beryl; no
doubt the security of my position has some influence on her. Indeed, she has
said as much. But for myself, let me emphasize, I am ardently attracted."

"Bridey, what a bloody offensive thing to say to Julia!"

"There was nothing she should object to. I was merely stating! a fact
well known to her."

She was not in the library; I mounted to her room, but she J was not
there. I paused by her laden dressing-table wonderingT if she would come.
Then through the open window, as the light I streamed out across the
terrace, into the dusk, to the fountain which in that house seemed always to
draw us to itself for comfort and refreshment, I caught the glimpse of a
white skirt against I the stones. It was nearly night. I found her in the
darkest refuge, on a wooden seat, in a bay of the clipped box which
encircled the basin. I took her in my arms and she pressed her face to my
heart.

"Aren't you cold out here?"

She did not answer, only clung closer to me and shook with sobs.

"My darling, what is it? Why do you mind? What does it matter what that
old booby says?"

"I don't; it doesn't. It's just the shock. Don't laugh at me."

In the two years of our love, which seemed a lifetime, I had not seen
her so moved or felt so powerless to help.

"How dare he speak to you like that?" I said. "The cold-blooded old
humbug . . ." But I was failing her in sympathy.

"No," she said, "it's not that. He's quite right. They know all about
it, Bridey and his widow; they've got it in black and white; they bought it
for a penny at the church door. You cat get anything there for a penny, in
black and white, and nobody to see that you pay; only an old woman with a
broom at the other end, rattling round the confessionals, and a young woman
lighting a candle at the Seven Dolours. Put a penny in the box or not, just
as you like; take your tract. There you've got it in black and white.

"All in one word, too, one little, flat, deadly word that cover a
lifetime.

" 'Living in sin'; not just doing wrong, as I did when I went to
America; doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting.
That's not what they mean. That's not Bridey's pennyworth. He means just
what it says in black and white.

"Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year
in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn
on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it,
showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a
tablet of Dial if it's fretful.

"Always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from
the world. 'Poor Julia,' they say, 'she can't go out. She's got to take care
of her little sin. A pity it ever lived,' they say, 'but it's so strong.
Children like that always are. Julia's so good to her little, mad sin.'"

An hour ago, I thought, under the sunset, she sat turning her ring in
the water fend counting the days of happiness; now under the first stars and
the last grey whisper of day, all this mysterious tumult of sorrow! What had
happened to us in the Painted Parlour? What shadow had fallen in the
candlelight? Two rough sentences and a trite phrase. She was beside herself;
her voice, now muffled in my breast, now clear and anguished, came to me in
single words and broken sentences, which may be strung together thus: --

"Past and future; the years when I was trying to be a good wife, in the
cigar smoke, while time crept on and the counters clicked on the backgammon
board, and the man who was 'dummy' at the men's table filled the glasses;
when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already
dead; putting him, away, forgetting him, finding you, the past two years
with you, all the future with you, all the future with or without you, war
coming, world ending -- sin.

"A word from so long ago, from Nanny Hawkins stitching by the hearth
and the nightlight burning before the Sacred Heart. Cordelia and me with the
catechism, in Mummy's room, before luncheon on Sundays. Mummy carrying my
sin with her to church, bowed under it and the black lace veil, in the
chapel; slipping out with it in London before the fires were lit; taking it
with her through the empty streets, where the milkman's ponies stood with
their forefeet on the pavement; Mummy dying with my sin eating at her, more
cruelly than her own deadly illness.

"Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot;
hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the
dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the
dark church where only the old char- woman raises the dust and one candle
burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort
except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging forever;
never the cool sepulchre and the grave clothes spread on the stone slab,
never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always I the midday sun and the
dice clicking for the seamless coat.

"Never the shelter of the cave or of the castle walls. Outcast il in
the desolate spaces where the hyenas roam at night and the 1 rubbish heaps
smoke in the daylight. No way back; the gates barred; all the saints and
angels posted along the walls. Nothing but bare stone and dust and the
smouldering dumps. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down; the old man with
lupus and the forked stick who limps out at nightfall to turn the rubbish,,
hoping for something to put in his sack, something marketable, turns away
with disgust.

"Nameless and dead, like the baby they wrapped up and took away before
I had seen her."

Between her tears she talked herself into silence. I could do nothing;
I was adrift in a strange sea; my hands on the metal-spun threads of her
tunic were cold and stiff, my eyes dry; I was as far from her in spirit, as
she clung to me in the darkness, as when years ago I had lit her cigarette
on the way from the station; as far as when she was out of mind, in the dry,
empty years at the Old Rectory and in the jungle.

Tears spring from speech; presently in the silence her weeping stopped.
She sat up, away from me, took my handkerchief, shivered, rose to her feet.

"Well," she said, in a voice much like normal. "Bridey is one for
bombshells, isn't he?"

I followed her into the house and to her room; she sat at her
looking-glass. "Considering that I've just recovered from a fit of
hysteria," she said, "I don't call that at all bad." Her eyes seemed
unnaturally large and bright, her cheeks pale with two spots of high colour,
where, as a girl, she used to put a dab of rouge. "Most hysterical women
look as if they had a bad cold. You'd better change your shirt before going
down; it's all tears and lipstick."

"Are we going down?"

"Of course, we mustn't leave poor Bridey on his engagement night."

When I came back to her she said: "I'm sorry for that appalling '
scene, Charles. I can't explain."

Brideshead was in the library, smoking his pipe, placidly reading a
detective story.

"Was it nice out? If I'd known you were going I'd have come, too."

"Rather cold."

"I hope it's not going to be inconvenient for Rex moving out of here.
You see, Barton Street is much too small for us and the three children.
Besides, Beryl likes the country. In his letter Papa proposed making over
the whole estate right away."

I remembered how Rex had greeted me on my first arrival at Brideshead
as Julia's guest. "A very happy arrangement," he had said. "Suits me down to
the ground. The old boy keeps the place up; Bridey does all the feudal stuff
with the tenants; I have the run of the house rent-free. All it costs me is
the food and the wages of the indoor servants. Couldn't ask faker than that,
could you?"

"I should think he'll be sorry to go," I said.

"Oh, he'll find another bargain somewhere," said Julia; "trust him."

"Beryl's got some furniture of her own she's very attached to. I don't
know that it would go very well here. You know, oak dressers and coffin
stools and things. I thought she could put it in Mummy's old room."

"Yes, that would be the place."

So brother and sister sat and talked about the arrangement of the house
until bed-time. An hour ago, I thought, in the black refuge in the box
hedge, she wept her heart out for the death of her God; now she is
discussing whether Beryl's children shall take the old smoking-room or the
schoolroom for their own. I was all at sea.

"Julia," I said later, when Brideshead had gone upstairs, "have you
ever seen a picture of Holman Hunt's called 'The Awakened Conscience'?"

"No."

I had seen a copy of Pre-Raphaelitism in the library some days before;
I found it again and read her Ruskin's description. She laughed quite
happily.

"You're perfectly right. That's exactly what I did feel."

"But, darling, I can't believe that all that tempest of emotion came
just from a few words of Bridey's. You must have been thinking about it
before."

"Hardly at all; now and then; more, lately, with the Last Trump so
near."

"Of course it's a thing psychologists could explain; a preconditioning
from childhood; feelings of guilt from the nonsense you were taught in the
nursery. You do know at heart that it's all bosh, don't you?"

"How I wish it was!"

"Sebastian once said almost the same thing to me."

"He's gone back to the Church, you know. Of course, he never left it as
definitely as I did. I've gone too far; there's no turning back now; I know
that, if that's wha you mean by thinking it all bosh. All I can hope to do
is to put my life in some sort of order in a human way, before all human
order comes to an end. That's why I want to marry you. I should like to have
a child. That's one thing I can do. . . . Let's go out again. The moon
should be up by now."

The moon was full and high. We walked round the house; under the limes
Julia paused and idly snapped off one of the long shoots, last year's
growth, that fringed their boles, and stripped it as she walked, making a
switch, as children do, but with petulant movements that were not a child's,
snatching nervously at the leaves and crumpling them between her fingers;
she began peeling the bark, scratching it with her nails.

Once more we stood by the fountain.

"It's like the setting of a comedy," I said. "Scene: a baroque fountain
in a nobleman's grounds. Act One, Sunset; Act Two, Dusk; Act Three,
Moonlight. The characters keep assembling at the fountain for no very clear
reason."

"Comedy?"

"Drama. Tragedy. Farce. What you will. This is the reconciliation
scene."

"Was there a quarrel?"

"Estrangement and misunderstanding in Act Two."

"Oh, don't talk in that damned bounderish way. Why must you see
everything secondhand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a
Pre-Raphaelite picture?"

"It's a way I have."

"I hate it."

Her anger was as unexpected as every change on this evening of swift
veering moods. Suddenly she cut me across the face with her switch, a
vicious, stinging little blow as hard as she could strike.

"Now do you see how I hate it?"

She hit me again.

"All right," I said, "go on."

Then, though her hand was raised, she stopped and threw | the
half-peeled wand into the water, where it floated white and black in the
moonlight.

"Did that hurt?"

"Yes."

"Did it? ... Did I?"

In the instant her rage was gone; her tears, newly flowing, were on my
cheek. I held her at arm's length and she put down her head, stroking my
hand on her shoulder with her face, catlike, but, unlike a cat, leaving a
tear there.

"Cat on the roof-top," I said.

"Beast!"

She bit at my hand, but when I did not move it and her teeth touched
me, she changed the bite to a kiss, the kiss to a lick of her tongue.

"Cat in the moonlight."

This was the mood I knew. We turned towards the house. When we came to
the lighted hall she said: "Your poor face," touching the weals with her
fingers. "Will there be a mark to-morrow?"

"I expect so."

"Charles, am I going crazy? What's happened to-night? I'm so tired."

She yawned; a fit of yawning took her. She sat at her dressing-table,
head bowed, hair over her face, yawning helplessly; when she looked up I saw
over her shoulder in the glass a face that was dazed with weariness like a
retreating soldier's, and beside it my own, streaked with two crimson lines.

"So tired," she repeated, taking off her gold tunic and letting, it
fall to the floor, "tired and crazy and good for nothing."

I saw her to bed; the blue lids fell over her eyes; her pale lips moved
on the pillow, but whether to wish me good-night or to murmur a prayer -- a
jingle of the nursery that came to her now in the twilit world between
sorrow and sleep; some ancient pious rhyme that had come down to Nanny
Hawkins from centuries of bedtime whispering, through all the changes of
language, from the days of pack-horses on the Pilgrim's Way -- I did not
know.

Next night Rex and his political associates were with us.

"They won't fight."

"They can't fight. They haven't the money; they haven't the oil."

"They haven't the wolfram; they haven't the men."

"They haven't the guts."

"They're afraid."

"Scared of the French; scared of the Czechs; scared of the Slovaks;
scared of us." '

"It's a bluff."

"Of course it's a bluff. Where's their tungsten? Where's their
manganese?"

"Where's their chrome?"

"I'll tell you a thing . . ."

"Listen to this; it'll be good; Rex will tell you a thing."

"... Friend of mine motoring in the Black Forest, only the other day,
just came back and told me about it while we played a round of golf. Well,
this friend driving along, turned down a lane into the high road. What
should he find but a military convoy? Couldn't stop, drove right into it,
smack into a tank, broadside-on. Gave himself up for dead. . . . Hold on,
this is the funny part."

"This is the funny part."

"Drove clean through it, didn't scratch his paint. What do you think?
It was made of canvas -- a bamboo frame and painted canvas."

"They haven't the steel."

"They haven't the tools. They haven't the labour. They're half
starving. They haven't the fats. The children have rickets."

"The women are barren."

"The men are impotent."

"They haven't the doctors."

"The doctors were Jewish."

"Now they've got consumption."

"Now they've got syphilis."

"Goering told a friend of mine . . ."

"Goebbels told a friend of mine . . ."

"Ribbentrop told me that the army just kept Hitler in power, so long as
he was able to get things for nothing. The moment anyone stands up to him,
he's finished. The army will shoot him."

"The liberals will hang him."

"The Communists will tear him limb from limb."

"He'll scupper himself."

"He'd do it now if it wasn't for Chamberlain."

"If it wasn't for Halifax."

"If it wasn't for Sir Samuel Hoare."

"And the 1920 Committee."

"Peace Pledge."

"Foreign Office."

"New York banks."

"All that's wanted is a good strong line."

"A line from Rex."

"And a line from me."

"We'll give Europe a good strong line. Europe is waiting for | a speech
from' Rex."

"And a speech from me."

"And a speech from me. Rally the freedom-loving peoples of 'the world.
Germany will rise; Austria will rise. The Czechs and the Slovaks are bound
to rise."

"To a speech from Rex and a speech from me."

"What about a rubber? How about a whiskey? Which of you chaps will have
a big cigar? Hullo, you two going out?"

"Yes, Rex," said Julia. "Charles and I are going into the moon-light."

We shut the windows behind us and the voices ceased; the moonlight lay
like hoar-frost on the terrace and the music of the fountain crept in our
ears; the stone balustrade of the terrace might have been the Trojan walls,
and in the silent park might have stood the Grecian tents where Cressid lay
that night.

"A few days, a few months."

"No time to be lost."

"A lifetime between the rising of the mooii and its setting. Then the
dark."

Brideshead Revisited: Book II. A twitch upon the thread. Chapter Two

2008-08-06T14:02:00.000+02:00

Chapter Two

it was my wife's idea to hold the private view on Friday.

"We are out to catch the critics this time," she said. "It's high time
they began to take you seriously, and they know it. This is their chance. If
you open on Monday they'll most of them have just come up from the country,
and they'll dash off a few paragraphs before dinner -- I'm only worrying
about the weeklies of course. If we give them the week-end to think about
it, we shall have them in an urbane Sunday-in-the-country mood. They'll
settle down after a good luncheon, tuck up their cuffs, and turn out a nice,
leisurely, full-length essay, which they'll reprint later in a nice little
book. Nothing less will do this time."

She was up and down from the Old Rectory several times during the month
of preparation, revising the list of invitations and helping with the
hanging.

On the morning of the private view I telephoned to Julia and said: "I'm
sick of the pictures already and never want to see them again, but I suppose
I shall have to put in an appearance."

"D'you want me to come?"

"I'd much rather you didn't."

"Celia sent a card with 'Bring everyone' written across it in green
ink. When do we meet?"

"In the train. You might pick up my luggage."

"If you'll have it packed soon I'll pick you up, too, and drop you at
the gallery. I've got a fitting next door at twelve."

When I reached the gallery my wife was standing looking through the
window to the street. Behind her half a dozen unknown picture-lovers were
moving from canvas to canvas, catalogue in hand; they were people who had
once bought a woodcut and were consequently on the gallery's list of
patrons.

"No one has come yet," said my wife. "I've been here since ten and it's
been very dull. Whose car was that you came in?"

"Julia's."

"Julia's? Why didn't you bring her in? Oddly enough, I've just been
talking about Brideshead to a funny little man who seemed to know us very
well. He said he was called Mr. Samgrass. Apparently he's one of Lord
Copper's middle-aged young men on the Daily Beast. I tried to feed him some
paragraphs, but he seemed to know more about you than I do. He said he'd met
me years ago at Brideshead. I wish Julia had come in; then we could have
asked her about him."

"I remember him well. He's a crook."

"Yes, that stuck out a mile. He's been talking all about what he calls
'the Brideshead set.' Apparently Rex Mottram has made the place a nest of
party mutiny. Did you know? What would Teresa Marchmain have thought?"

"I'm going there to-night."

"Not to-night, Charles; you can't go there to-night. You're expected at
home. You promised, as soon as the exhibition was J ready, you'd come home.
Johnjohn and Nanny have made a banner with 'Welcome' on it. And you haven't
seen Caroline yet."

"I'm sorry, it's all settled."

"Besides, Daddy will think it so odd. And Boy is home for Sunday. And
you haven't seen the new studio. You can't go tonight. Did they ask me?"

"Of course; but I knew you wouldn't be able to come."

"I can't now. I could have if you'd let me know earlier. I should adore
to see the 'Brideshead set' at home. I do think you're perfectly beastly,
but this is no time for a family rumpus. The Clarences promised to come in
before luncheon; they may be here any minute."

We were interrupted, however, not by royalty, but by a woman reporter
from one of the dailies, whom the manager of the gallery now led up to us.
She had not come to see the pictures but to get a "human story" of the
dangers of my journey. I left her to my wife, and next day read in her
paper: --

charles "stately homes" ryder steps off the map

That the snakes and vampires of the jungle have nothing on Mayfair is
the opinion of socialite artist Ryder, who has abandoned the houses of the
great for the ruins of equatorial Africa. ...

The rooms began to fill and I was soon busy being civil. My wife was
everywhere, greeting people, introducing people, deftly transforming the
crowd into a party. I saw her lead friends forward one after another to the
subscription list that had been opened for the book of Ryder's Latin
America; I heard her say: "No, darling, I'm not at all surprised, but you
wouldn't expect me to be, would you? You see Charles lives for one thing --
Beauty. I think he got bored with finding it ready-made in England; he had
to go and create it for himself. He wanted new worlds to conquer. After all,
he has said the last word about country houses, hasn't he? Not, I mean, that
he's given that up altogether. I'm sure he'll always do one or two more for
friends".

A photographer brought us together, flashed a lamp in our faces, and
let us part.

Presently there was the slight hush and edging away which follows the
entry of a royal party. I saw my wife curtsey and heard her say: "Oh, sir,
you are sweet"; then I was led into the clearing and the Duke of Clarence
said: "Pretty hot out there I should think."

"It was, sir."

"Awfully clever the way you've hit off the impression of heat. Makes me
feel quite uncomfortable in my great-coat."

"Ha, ha."

When they had gone my wife said: "Goodness, we're late for lunch.
Margot's giving a party in your honour," and in the taxi she said: "I've
just thought of something. Why don't you write and ask the Duchess's
permission to dedicate Latin America to her?"

"Why should I?"

"She'd love it so."

"I wasn't thinking of dedicating it to anyone."

"There you are; that's typical of you, Charles. Why miss an opportunity
to give pleasure?"

There were a dozen at luncheon, and though it pleased my hostess and my
wife to say that they were there in my honour, it was plain to me that half
of them did not know of my exhibition and had come because they had been
invited and had no other engagement. Throughout luncheon they talked without
stopping of Mrs. Simpson, but they all, or nearly all, came back with us to
the gallery.

The hour after luncheon was the busiest time. There were
representatives of the Tate Gallery, the Chantrey Bequest, the National Art
Collections Fund, who all promised to return shortly with colleagues and, in
the meantime, reserved certain pictures for further consideration. The most
influential critic, who in the past had dismissed me with a few wounding
commendations, peered out at me from between his slouch hat and woollen
muffler, gripped my arm, and said: "I knew you had it. I saw it there. I've
been waiting for it."

From fashionable and unfashionable lips alike I heard fragments of
praise. "If you'd asked me to guess," I overheard, "Ryder's is the last name
would have occurred to me. They're so virile, so passionate."

They all thought they had found something new. It had not been thus at
my last exhibition in these same rooms, shortly before my going abroad. Then
there had been an unmistakable note of weariness. Then the talk had been
less of me than of the houses, anecdotes of their owners. That same woman,
it came back to me, who how applauded my virility and passion, had stood
quite near me, before a painfully laboured canvas, and said, "So facile."

I remembered the exhibition, too, for another reason; it was the week I
detected my wife in adultery. Then, as now, she was a tireless hostess, and
I heard her say: "Whenever I see anything lovely nowadays -- a building or a
piece of scenery -- I think to -myself, 'That's by Charles.' I see
everything through his eyes. He is England to me."

I heard her say that; it was the sort of thing she had the habit of
saying. Throughout our married life, again and again, I had felt my bowels
shrivel within me at the things she said. But that ,j day, in this gallery,
I heard her unmoved, and suddenly realized that she was powerless to hurt me
any more; I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief,
sly lapse of hers; my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest.

At the end of the day my wife said: "Darling, I must go. It's been a
terrific success, hasn't it? I'll think of something to tell them at home,
but I wish it hadn't got to happen quite this way."

So she knows, I thought. She's a sharp one. She's had her nose down
since luncheon and picked up the scent.

I let her get clear of the place and was about to follow--the rooms
were nearly empty -- when I heard a voice at the turnstile I had not heard
for many years, an unforgettable self-taught stammer, a sharp cadence of
remonstration.

"No. I have not brought a card of invitation. I do not even know
whether I received one. I have not come to a social function; I do not seek
to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the
Tatler; I have not come to exhibit myself. I have come to see the pictures.
Perhaps you are unaware that there are any pictures here. I happen to have a
personal interest in the artist--if that word has any meaning for
you."

"Antoine," I said, "come in."

"My dear, there is a g-g-gorgon here who thinks I am g-g-gate-crashing.
I only arrived in London yesterday, and heard quite by chance at luncheon
that you were having an exhibition, so of course I dashed impetuously to the
shrine to pay homage. Have I changed? Would you recognize me? Where are the
pictures? Let me explain them to you."

Anthony Blanche had not changed from when I last saw him; not, indeed,
from when I first saw him. He swept lightly across the room to the most
prominent canvas -- a jungle landscape -- paused a moment, his head cocked
like a knowing terrier, and asked: "Where, my dear Charles, did you find
this sumptuous greenery? The corner of a hothouse at T-t-trent or T-t-tring?
What gorgeous usurer nurtured these fronds for your pleasure?"

Then he made a tour of the two rooms; once or twice he sighed deeply,
otherwise he kept silence. When he came to the end he sighed once more, more
deeply than ever, and said: "But they tell me, my dear, you are happy in
love. That is everything, is it not, or nearly everything?"

"Are they as bad as that?"

Anthony dropped his voice to a piercing whisper: "My dear, let us not
expose your little imposture before these good, plain people" -- he gave a
conspiratorial glance to the last remnants o the crowd -- "let us not spoil
their innocent pleasure. We know, you and I, that this is all t-t-terrible
t-t-tripe. Let us go, before we offend the connoisseurs. I know of a louche
little bar, quite near here. Let us go there and talk of your other
c-c-conquests."

It needed this voice from the past to recall me; the indiscriminate
chatter of praise all that crowded day had worked on me like a succession of
advertisement hoardings on a long road, kilometre after kilometre between
the poplars, commanding one to stay at some new hotel, so that when at the
end of the drive, stiff and dusty, one arrives at the destination, it seems
inevitable to turn into the yard under the name that had first bored, then
angered one, and finally become an inseparable part of one's fatigue.

Anthony led me from the gallery and down a side street to a door
between a disreputable news agent and a disreputable chemist, painted with
the words blue grotto club. Members Only.

"Not quite your milieu, my dear, but mine, I assure you. After all, you
have been in your milieu all day."

He led me downstairs, from a smell of cats to a smell of gin and
cigarette-ends and the sound of a wireless.

"I was given the address by a dirty old man in the Bceuf sur le Toit. I
am most grateful to him. I have been out of England so long, and really
sympathetic little joints like this change so fast. J I presented myself
here for the first time yesterday evening, and already I feel quite at home.
Good evening, Cyril."

"'Lo, Toni, back again?" said the youth behind the bar.

"We will take our drinks and sit in a corner. You must remember, my
dear, that here you are just as conspicuous and, may I say, abnormal, my
dear, as I should be in B-b-bratt's."

The place was painted cobalt; there was cobalt linoleum on the floor.
Fishes of Silver and gold paper had been pasted haphazard on ceiling and
walls. Half a dozen youths were drinking and playing with the slot-machines;
an older, natty, crapulous-looking man seemed to be in control; there was
some sniggering round the fruit-gum machine; then one of the youths came up
to us and said, "Would your friend care to rumba?"

"No, Tom, he would not, and I'm not going to give a drink; not yet,
anyway. . . . That's a very impudent boy, a regular little gold-digger, my
dear."

"Well," I said, affecting an ease I was far from feeling in that den,
"what have you been up to all these years?"

"My dear, it is what you have been up to that we are here to talk
about. I've been watching you, my dear. I'm a faithful old body and I've
kept my eye on you." As he spoke the bar and the bar-tender, the blue wicker
furniture, the gambling-machines, the wireless, the couple of youths dancing
on the oilcloth, the youths sniggering round the slots, the purple-veined,
stiffly dressed elderly man drinking in the corner opposite us, the whole
drab and furtive joint, seemed to fade, and I was back in Oxford looking out
over Christ Church meadow through a window of Ruskin Gothic. "I went to your
first exhibition," said Anthony; "I found it -- charming. There was an
interior of Marchmain House, very English, very correct, but quite
delicious. 'Charles has done something,' I said; 'not all he will do, not
all he can do, but something.'

"Even then, my dear, I wondered a little. It seemed to me that there
was something a little gentlemanly about your painting. You must remember I
arm not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English
snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals. However, I said,
'Charles has done something delicious. What will he do next?'

"The next thing I saw was your very handsome volume -- Village and
Provincial Architecture, was it called? Quite a tome, my dear, and what did
I find? Charm again. 'Not quite my cup of tea,' I thought; 'this is too
English.' I have the fancy I for rather spicy things, you know, not for the
shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the
English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis -- not
that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford. Then, to be frank, dear
Charles, I despaired of you. 'I am a degenerate old d-d-dago,' I said, 'and
Charles -- I speak of your art, my dear -- is a dean's daughter in flowered
muslin.'

"Imagine then my excitement at luncheon to-day. Everyone was talking
about you. My hostess was a friend of my mother's, a Mrs. Stuyvesant
Oglander; a friend of yours, too, my dear. Such a frump! Not at all the
society I imagined you to keep. 1 However, they had all been to your
exhibition, but it was you f they talked of, how you had broken away, my
dear, gone to the tropics, become a Gauguin, a Rimbaud. You can imagine how
my old heart leaped.

"' Poor Celia,' they said, 'after all she's done for him.' 'He owes
everything to her. It's too bad.' 'And with Julia,' they said, 'after the
way she behaved in America.' 'Just as she was going back 1 to Rex.'

" 'But the pictures,' I said; 'tell me about them'

'"Oh, the pictures,' they said: 'they're most peculiar.' 'Not at 1 all
what he usually does.' 'Very forceful.' 'Quite barbaric.' 'if call them
downright unhealthy,' said Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander.

"My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted tof dash out
of the house and leap in a taxi and say, 'Take me to Charles's unhealthy
pictures.' Well, I went, but the gallery after J luncheon was so full of
absurd women in the sort of hats they'i] should be made to eat, that I
rested a little --I rested here witfcl Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys.
Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o'clock, all agog, my
dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very
successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so
much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple,
creamy English charm, playing tigers."

"You're quite right," I said.

"My dear, of course I'm right. I was right years ago--more years, I am
happy to say, than either of us shows -- when I warned you. I took you out
to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail
of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist
outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills
love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you."

The youth called Tom approached us again. "Don't be a tease, Toni; buy
me a drink." I remembered my train and left Anthony with him.

As I stood on the platform by the restaurant-car I saw my luggage and
Julia's go past with Julia's sour-faced maid strutting beside the porter.
They had begun shutting the carriage-doors when Julia arrived, unhurried,
and took her place in front of me. I had a table for two. This was a very
convenient train; there was half an hour before dinner and half an hour
after it; then, instead of changing to the branch line, as had been the rule
in Lady Marchmain's day, we were met at the junction. It was night as we
drew out of Paddington, and the glow of the town gave place first to the
scattered lights of the suburbs, then to the darkness of the fields.

"It seems days since I saw you," I said.

"Six hours; and we were together all yesterday. You look worn out."

"It's been a day of nightmare -- crowds, critics, the Clarences, a
luncheon party at Margot's, ending up with half an hour's well-reasoned
abuse of my pictures in a pansy bar. ... I think Celia knows about us."

"Well, she had to know some time."

"Everyone seems to know. My pansy friend had not been in London
twenty-four hours before he'd heard."

"Damn everybody."

"What about Rex?"

"Rex isn't anybody at all," said Julia; "he just doesn't exist."

The knives and forks jingled on the tables as we sped through the
darkness; the little circle of gin and vermouth in the glasses i lengthened
to oval, contracted again, with the sway of the carriage, touched the lip,
lapped back again, never spilt; I was leaving the day behind me. Julia
pulled off her hat and tossed it into the rack above her, and shook her
night-dark hair with a little sigh of ease -- a sigh fit for the pillow, the
sinking firelight and a bedroom window open to the stars and the whisper of
bare trees.

"It's great to have you back, Charles; like the old days."

Like the old days? I thought.

Rex, in his early forties, had grown heavy and ruddy; he had lost his
Canadian accent and acquired instead the hoarse, loud tone that was common
to all his friends, as though their voices were perpetually strained to make
themselves heard above a crowd, as though, with youth forsaking them, there
was no timdi to wait the opportunity to speak, no time to listen, no time
ten reply; time for a laugh -- a throaty mirthless laugh, the base| currency
of goodwill.

There were half a dozen of these friends in the Tapestry Hall ill
politicians, "young conservatives" in the early forties, with spar hair and
high blood-pressure; a socialist from the coal mines wh had already caught
their clear accents, whose cigars came lid pieces in his lips, whose hand
shook when he poured hir out a drink; a lovesick columnist, who alone was
silent, glc ing sombrely on the only woman of the party; a financier oldafl
than the rest, and, one might guess from the way they treated him, richer; a
woman they called "Grizel," a knowing rake whom, in their hearts, they all
feared a little.

They all feared Julia, too, Grizel included. She greeted them and
apologized for not being there to welcome them, with a formality which
hushed them for a minute; then she came and sat with me near the fire, and
the storm of talk arose once more and whirled about bur ears.

"Of course, he can marry her and make her queen to-morrow."

"We had our chance in October. Why didn't we send the Italian fleet to
the bottom of Mare Nostrum? Why didn't we blow Spezia to blazes. Why didn't
we land on Pantelleria?"

"Franco's simply a German agent. They tried to put him in to prepare
air'bases to bomb France. That bluff has been called, anyway."

"It would make the monarchy stronger than it's been since Tudor times.
The people are with him."

"The press arc with him."

"I'm with him."

"Who cares about divorce now except a few old maids who aren't married,
anyway?"

"If he has a showdown with the old gang, they'll just disappear like,
like . . ."

"Why didn't we close the Canal? Why didn't we bomb Rome?"

"It wouldn't have been necessary. One firm note . . ."

"One firm speech."

"One showdown."

"Anyway, Franco will soon be skipping back to Morocco. Chap I saw
to-day just come from Barcelona . . ."

". . . Chap just come from Fort Belvedere . . ."

". . . Chap just come from the Palazzo Venezia . . ."

"All we want is a showdown."

"A showdown with Baldwin."

"A showdown with Hitler."

"A showdown with the Old Gang."

". . . That I should live to see my country, the land of Clive and
Nelson ..."

". . . My country of Hawkins and Drake."

". . . My country of Palmerston . . ."

"Would you very much mind not doing that?"'said Grizel the columnist,
who had been attempting in a maudlin manner to twist her wrist. "I don't
happen to enjoy it."

"I wonder which is the more horrible," I said, "Celia's Art and Fashion
or Rex's Politics and Money."

"Why worry about them?"

"Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's
supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though' all mankind,
and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us."

"They are, they are."

"But we've got our happiness in spite of them; here and noW| we've
taken possession of it. They can't hurt us, can they?"

"Not to-night; not now."

"Not for how many nights?"

Brideshead Revisited: Book II. A twitch upon the thread. Chapter One

2008-08-06T14:01:00.000+02:00

BOOK II A TWITCH UPON THE THREAD

Chapter One

my theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey
morning of war-time.
These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly
except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they
were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced
congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of
their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking
a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed
and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare
and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that
morning.

These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a
lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art,
are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for
centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging,
eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and
nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all
manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end
in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards
won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of
survival starts again.

The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from
them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a
hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves -- the
sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and
the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image,
indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out
of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind
unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, j| breathe freely and take
our bearings, or to push ahead, out-' distance our shadows, lead them a
dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one
another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share.

For nearly ten years I was thus borne along a road outwardly full of
change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my
painting -- and that at longer and longer intervals-- did I come alive as I
had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be
youth, not life, that I was losing. My work upheld me, for I had chosen to
do what I could do well, did better daily, and liked doing; incidentally it
was something which no one else at that time was attempting to do. I became
an architectural painter. I have always loved building, holding it to be not
only the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of
consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected,
without his intention, by other means, and I regarded men as something much
less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and
short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the-long, fruitful life of
their homes.

More even than the work of the great architects, 1 loved buildings that
grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each
generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's
vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. In such
buildings England abounded, and in the last decade of their grandeur,
Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of what before was
taken for granted, and to salute their achievements at the moment of
extinction. Hence my prosperity, far beyond my merits; my work had nothing
to recommend it except my growing technical skill, enthusiasm for my subject
and independence of popular notions. The financial slump of the period,
which left many painters without employment, served to enhance my success,
which was, indeed, itself a symptom of the decline. When the water-holes
were dry people sought to drink at the mirage. After my first exhibition I
was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were
soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a
few paces ahead of the auctioneers, a presage of doom.

I published three splendid folios--Ryder's Country Seats, Ryder's
English Homes, and Ryder's Village and Provincial Architecture, which each
sold its thousand copies at five guineas apiece. I seldom failed to please,
for there was no conflict between myself and my patrons; we both wanted the
same thing. But as the years passed I began to mourn the loss of something I
had known in the drawing-room of Marchmain House and once or twice since,
the intensity and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by
hand--in a word, the inspiration.

In quest of this fading light I went abroad, in the Augustan manner,
laden with the apparatus of my trade, for two years' refreshment among alien
styles. I did not go to Europe; her treasures were safe, too safe, swaddled
in expert care, obscured by reverence. Europe could wait. There would be a
time for Europe, I thought; all too soon the days would come when I should
need a man at my side to put up my easel and carry my paints; when I could
not venture more than an hour's journey from a good hotel; when I should
need soft breezes and mellow sunshine all day long; then I would take my old
eyes to Germany and Italy. Now while I had the strength I would go to the
wild lands where man had deserted his post and the jungle was creeping back
to its old strongholds.

Accordingly, by slow but not easy stages, I travelled through Mexico
and Central America in a world which had all I needed, and the change from
parkland and hall should have quickened me and set me right with myself. I
sought inspiration among gutted palaces and cloisters embowered in weed,
derelict churches where the vampire-bats hung in the dome like dry seed-pods
and only the ants were ceaselessly astir tunnelling in the rich stalls;
cities where no road led, and mausoleums where a single, agued family of
Indians sheltered from the rains. There in great labour, sickness and
occasionally in some danger, I made the first drawings for Ryder's Latin
America. Every few weeks I came to rest, finding myself once more in the
zone of trade or tourism, recuperated, set up my studio, transcribed my
sketches, anxiously packed the completed canvasses, despatched them to my
New York agent, and then set out again, with my small retinue, into the
wastes.

I was at no great pains to keep touch with England. I followed local
advice for my itinerary and had no settled route, so that much of my mail
never reached me, and the rest accumulated until there was more than could
be read at a sitting. I used to stuff a bundle of letters into my bag and
read them when I felt inclined, which was in circumstances so incongruous --
swinging in my hammock under the net by the light of a storm lantern;
drifting down-river, sprawled amidships in the canoe, with the boys astern
of me lazily keeping our nose out of the bank, with the dark water keeping
pace with us, in the green shade, with the great trees towering above us and
the monkeys screeching in the sunlight, high overhead among the flowers on
the roof of the forest; on the verandah of a hospitable ranch, where the ice
and the dice clicked, and a tiger cat played with its chain on the mown
grass -- that they seemed voices so distant as to be meaningless; their
matter passed clean through the mind, and out, leaving no mark, like the
facts about themselves which fellow travellers distribute so freely in
American railway trains.

But despite this isolation and this long sojourn in a strange world, I
remained unchanged, still a small part of myself pretending to be whole. I
discarded the experiences of those two years with my tropical kit and
returned to New York as I had set out. I had a fine haul -- eleven paintings
and fifty odd drawings-- and when eventually I exhibited them in London, the
art critics, many of whom hitherto had been patronizing in tone as my
success invited, acclaimed a new and richer note in my work.

Mr. Ryder [the most respected of them wrote] rises like a fresh young
trout to the hypodermic injection of a new culture and discloses a powerful
facet in the vista of his potentialities ... By focusing the frankly
traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of
barbarism, Mr. Ryder has at last found himself.

Grateful words, but, alas, not true by a long chalk. My wife, who
crossed to New York to meet me, and saw the fruits of our separation
displayed in my agent's office, summed the thing up better by saying: "Of
course, I can see they're perfectly brilliant and really rather beautiful in
a sinister way, but somehow I don't feel they are quite you"

In Europe my wife was sometimes taken for an American because of her
dapper and jaunty way of dressing, and the curiously hygienic quality of her
prettiness; in America she assumed an English softness and reticence. She
arrived a day or two before me, and was on the pier when my ship docked.

"It has been a long time," she said fondly when we met.

She had not joined the expedition; she explained to our friends that
the country was unsuitable and she had her son at home. There was also a
daughter now, she remarked, and it came back to me that there had been talk
of this before I started, as an additional reason for her staying behind.
There had been some mention of it, too, in her letters.

"I don't believe you read my letters," she said that night at last,
late, after a dinner party and some hours at a cabaret, we found ourselves
alone in our hotel bedroom.

"Some went astray. I remember distinctly your telling me that the
daffodils in the orchard were a dream, that the nurserymaid was a jewel,
that the Regency four-poster was a find, but frankly I do not remember
hearing that your new baby was called Caroline. Why did you call it that?"

"After Charles, of course."

"Ah!"

"I made Bertha Van Halt godmother. I thought she was safe for a good
present. What do you think she gave?"

"Bertha Van Halt is a well-known trap. What?"

"A fifteen-shilling book token. Now that Johnjohn has a companion -- "

"Who?"

"Your son, darling. You haven't forgotten him, too?"

"For Christ's sake," I said, "why do you call him that?"

"It's the name he invented for himself. Don't you think it sweet? Now
that Johnjohn has a companion I think we'd better not have any more for some
time, don't you?"

"Just as you please."

"Johnjohn talks of you such a lot. He prays every night for your safe
return."

She talked in this way while she undressed, with an effort to appear at
ease; then she sat at the dressing table, ran a comb through her hair, and
with her bare back towards me, looking at herself in the glass, said, "I
hope you admire my self-restraint."

"Restraint?"

"I'm not asking awkward questions. I may say I've been tormented with
visions of voluptuous half-castes ever since you went away. But I determined
not to ask and I haven't."

"That suits me," I said.

She left the dressing-table and crossed the room.

"Lights out?"

"As you like. I'm not sleepy."

We lay in our twin beds, a yard or two distant, smoking. I looked at my
watch; it was four o'clock, but neither of us was ready to sleep, for in
that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for
energy.

"I don't believe you've changed at all, Charles."

"No, I'm afraid not."

"D'you want to change?"

"It's the only evidence of life."

"But you might change so that you didn't love me any more."

"There is that risk."

"Charles, you haven't stopped loving me?"

"You said yourself I hadn't changed."

"Well, I'm beginning to think you have. I haven't."

"No," I said, "no; I can see that."

"Were you at all frightened at meeting me to-day?"

"Not the least."

"You didn't wonder if I should have fallen in love with someone else in
the meantime?"

"No. Have you?"

"You know I haven't. Have you?"

"No. I'm not in love."

My wife seemed content with this answer. She had married me six years
ago at the time of my first exhibition, and had done much since then to push
our interests. People said she had "made" me, but she herself took credit
only for supplying me with a congenial background; she had firm faith in my
genius and in the "artistic temperament," and in the principle that things
done on the sly are not really done at all. .

Presently she said: "Looking forward to getting home?" (My father gave
me as a wedding present the price of a house, and I bought an old rectory in
my wife's part of the country.) "I've got a surprise for you."

"Yes?"

"I've turned the old tithe barn into a studio for you, so that you
needn't be disturbed by the children or when we have people to stay. I got
Emden to do it. Everyone thinks it a great success. There was an article on
it in Country Life; I brought it for you to see."

She showed me the article:. . . happy example of architectural good
manners. . . . Sir Joseph Emden's tactful adaptation of traditional material
to modern needs . . . ; there were some photographs; wide oak boards now
covered the earthen floor; a high, stone-mullioned bay-window had been built
in the north wall, and the great timbered roof, which before had been lost
in shadow, now stood out stark, well lit, with clean white plaster between
the beams; it looked like a village hall. I remembered the smell of the
place, which would now be lost.

"I rather liked that barn," I said.

"But you'll be able to work there, won't you?"

"After squatting in a cloud of sting-fly," I said, "under a sun which
scorched the paper off the block as I drew, I could work on the top of an
omnibus. I expect the vicar would like to borrow the place for whist
drives."

"There's a lot of work waiting for you. I promised Lady Anchorage you
would do Anchorage House as soon as you got back. That's coming down, too,
you know--shops underneath and two-roomed flats above. You don't think, do
you, Charles, that all this exotic work you've been doing is going to spoil
you for that sort of thing?"

"Why should it?"

"Well, it's so different. Don't be cross."

"It's just another jungle closing in."

"I know just how you feel, darling. The Georgian Society made such a
fuss, but we couldn't do anything. . . . Did you ever get my letter about
Boy?"

"Did I? What did it say?"

(Boy Mulcaster was her brother.)

"About his engagement. It doesn't matter now because it's all off, but
Father and Mother were terribly upset. She was an awful girl. They had to
give her money in the end."

"No, I heard nothing of Boy."

"He and Johnjohn are tremendous friends, now. It's so sweet to see them
together. Whenever he comes home the first thing he does is to drive
straight to the Old Rectory. He just walks into the house, pays no attention
to anyone else, and hollers out: 'Where's my chum Johnjohn?' and Johnjohn
comes tumbling downstairs and off they go into the spinney together and play
for hours. You'd think, to hear them talk to each other, they were the same
age. It was really Johnjohn who made him see reason about that girl;
seriously, you know, he's frightfully sharp. He must have heard Mother and
me talking, because next time Boy came he said: 'Uncle Boy shan't marry
horrid girl and leave Johnjohn,' and that was the very day -he settled for
two thousand pounds out of court. Johnjohn admires Boy so tremendously and
imitates him in everything. It's so good for them both."

I crossed the room and tried once more, ineffectively, to moderate the
heat of the radiators; I drank some iced water and opened the window, but,
besides the sharp night air, music was borne in from the next room where
they were playing the wireless. I shut it and turned,back towards my wife.

At length she began talking again, more drowsily. . . . "The garden's
come on a lot. . . . The box hedges you planted grew five inches last year.
... I had some men down from London to put the tennis court right . . .
first-class cook at the moment . . .' As the city below us began to wake we
both fell asleep, but not for long; the telephone rang and a voice of
hermaphroditic gaiety said: "Savoy-Carlton-Hotelgoodmorning. It is now a
quarter of eight."

"I didn't ask to be called, you know."

"Pardon me?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter."

"You're welcome."

As I was shaving, my wife from the bath said: "Just like old times. I'm
not worrying any more, Charles."

"Good."

"I was so terribly afraid that two years might have made a difference.
Now I know we can start again exactly where we left off."

I paused in my shaving.

"When?" I asked. "What? When we left off what?"

"When you went away, of course."

"You are npt thinking of something else, a little time before?"

"Oh, Charles, that's old history. That was nothing. It was never
anything. It's all over and forgotten."

"I just wanted to know," I said. "We're back as we were the day I went
abroad, is that it?"

So we started that day exactly where we left off two years before, with
my wife in tears.
My wife's softness and English reticence, her-very white, small,
regular teeth, her neat rosy finger-nails, her schoolgirl air of innocent
mischief and her schoolgirl dress, her modern jewellery, which was made at
great expense to give the impression, at a distance, of having been
mass-produced, her ready, rewarding smile, her deference to me and her zeal
in my interests, her motherly heart which made her cable daily to the nanny
at home -- in short, her peculiar charm -- made her popular among the
Americans, and our cabin on the day of departure was full of cellophane
packages -- flowers, fruit, sweets, books, toys for the children--from
friends she had known for a week. Stewards, like sisters in a nursing home,
used to judge their passengers' importance by the number and value of these
trophies; we therefore started the voyage in high esteem.

My wife's first thought on coming aboard was of the passenger list.

"Such a lot of friends," she said. "It's going to be a lovely trip.
Let's have a cocktail party this evening."

The companion-ways were no sooner cast off than she was busy with the
telephone.

"Julia. This is Celia -- Celia Ryder. It's lovely to find you on board.
What have you been up to? Come and have a cocktail this evening and tell me
all about it."

"Julia who?"

"Mottram. I haven't seen her for years."

Nor had I; not, in fact, since my wedding day, not to speak to for any
time, since the private view of my exhibition where the four canvasses of
Marchmain House, lent by Brideshead, had hung together attracting much
attention. Those pictures were my last contact with the Flytes; our lives,
so close for a year or two, had drawn apart. Sebastian, I knew, was still
abroad; Rex and Julia, I sometimes heard said, were unhappy together. Rex
was not prospering quite as well as had been predicted; he remained on the
fringe of the Government, prominent but vaguely suspect. He lived among the
very rich, and in his speeches seemed to incline to revolutionary policies,
flirting with Communists and fascists. I heard the Mottrams' names in
conversation; I saw their faces now and again peeping from the Tatler, as I
turned the pages impatiently waiting for someone to come, but they and I had
fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds,
little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a
perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in
which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves
in separate magnetic systems, a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can
speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that
England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as
in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in
London, see at times, a few miles distant, the same rural horizon, could
have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other's
fortunes, a regret, even, that we 1 should be separated, and the knowledge
that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other's
pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the
morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the
centripetal force of our own worlds, and the coldj interstellar space
between them.

My wife, perched on the back of the sofa in a litter of cellophane and
silk ribbons, continued telephoning, working brightly through the passenger
list ... "Yes, do of course bring him, I'm told he's sweet. . . . Yes, I've
got Charles back from the wilds atyj last; isn't it lovely. . . . What a
treat seeing your name in the list! It's made my trip . . . darling, we were
at the Savoy-Car Iton, too; how can we have missed you? . . ." Sometimes she
turned to me and said: "I have to make sure you're still really there. I
haven't got used to it yet."

I went up and out as we steamed slowly down the river to one of the
great glass cases where the passengers stood to watch the land slip by.
"Such a lot of friends," my wife had said. They looked a strange crowd to
me; the emotions of leave-taking were just beginning to subside; some of
them, who had been drinking till the last moment with those who were seeing
them off, were still boisterous; others were planning where they would have
their deck chairs; the band played unnoticed -- all were as restless as
ants.

I turned into some of the halls of the ship, which were huge without
any splendour, as though they had been designed for a railway coach and
preposterously magnified. I passed through vast bronze gates whose ornament
was like the trade mark of a cake of soap which had been used once or twice;
I trod carpets the colour of blotting paper; the painted panels of the walls
were like blotting paper, too: kindergarten work in flat, drab colours; and
between the walls were yards and yards of biscuit-coloured wood which no
carpenter's tool had ever touched, wood that had been bent round corners,
invisibly joined strip to strip, steamed and squeezed and polished; all over
the blotting-paper carpet were strewn tables designed perhaps by a sanitary
engineer, square blocks of stuffing, with square holes for sitting in, and,
upholstered, it seemed, in blotting paper also; the light of the hall was
suffused from scores of hollows, giving an even glow, casting no shadows --
the whole place hummed from its hundred ventilators and vibrated with the
turn of the great engines below.

Here I am, I thought, back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here,
where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity. Quomodo sedet
sola civitas (for I had heard that great lament, which Cordelia once quoted
to me in the drawing-room of Marchmain House, sung by a half-caste choif in
Guatemala, nearly a year ago).

A steward came up to me.

"Can I get you anything, sir?"

"A whiskey-and-soda, not iced."

"I'm sorry, sir, all the soda is iced."

"Is the water iced, too?"

"Oh yes, sir."

"Well, it doesn't matter."

He trotted off, puzzled, soundless in the pervading hum.

"Charles."

I looked behind me. Julia was sitting in a cube of blotting-paper, her
hands folded in her lap, so still that I had passed by without noticing her.

"I heard you were here. Celia telephoned to me. It's delightful."

"What are you doing?"

She opened the empty hands in her lap with a little eloquent gesture.
"Waiting. My maid's unpacking; she's been so disagreeable ever since we left
England. She's complaining now about my cabin. I can't think why. It seems a
lap to me."

The steward returned with whiskey and two jugs, one of iced water, the
other of boiling water; I mixed them to the right temperature. He watched
and said: "I'll remember that's how you take it, sir."

Most passengers had fads; he was paid to fortify their self-esteem.
Julia asked for a cup of hot chocolate. I sat by her in the next cube.

"I never see you now," she said. "I never seem to see anyone I like. I
don't know why."

But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years;
as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead
contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to
have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid
a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more
often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the
tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms
of long and unbroken intimacy.

"What have you been doing in America?"

She looked up slowly from her chocolate and, her splendid, serious eyes
in mine, said: "Don't you know? I'll tell you about it sometime. I've been a
mug. I thought I was in love with someone, but it didn't turn out that way."
And my mind went back ten years to the evening at Brideshead, when that
lovely, spidery child of nineteen, as though brought in for an hour from the
nursery and nettled by lack of attention from the grown-ups, had said: "I'm
causing anxiety, too, you know," and I had thought at the time, though
scarcely, it now seemed to me, in long trousers myself: "How important these
girls make themselves with their love affairs."

Now it was different; there was nothing but humility and friendly
candour in the way she spoke.
I wished I could respond to her confidence, give some token of
acceptance, but there was nothing in my last, flat, eventful years that I
could share with her. I began instead to talk of my time in the jungle, of
the comic characters I had met and the lost places I had visited, but in
this mood of old friendship the tale faltered and came to an end abruptly.
"I long to see the paintings," she said.

"Celia wanted me to unpack some and stick them round the cabin for her
cocktail party. I couldn't do that."

"No. ... Is Celia as pretty as ever? I always thought she had the most
delicious looks of any girl of my year." "She hasn't changed."

"You have, Charles. So lean and grim, not at all the pretty boy
Sebastian brought home with him. Harder, too." "And you're softer."

"Yes, I think so ... and very patient now." She was not yet thirty, but
was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise
abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spidery look; the head
that I used to think Quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was
now part of herself and not at all Florentine--not connected in any way with
painting or the arts or with anything except herself, so that it would be
idle to itemize and dissect her beauty, which was her own essence, and could
only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have
for her.

Time had wrought another change, too; not for her the sly, complacent
smile of La Gioconda; the years had been more than "the sound of lyres and
flutes," and had saddened her. She seemed to say, "Look at me. I have done
my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this
beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is
my reward?"

That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her
reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and
struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.

"Sadder, too," I said.

"Oh yes, much sadder."

My wife was in exuberant spirits when, two hours later, I returned to
the cabin.

"I've had to do everything. How does it look?"

We had been given, without paying more for it, a large suite of rooms,
one so large, in fact, that it was seldom booked except by directors of the
line, and on most voyages, the chief purser admitted, was given to those he
wished to honour. (My wife was adept in achieving such small advantages,
first impressing the impressionable with her chic and my celebrity and,
superiority once firmly established, changing quickly to a pose of almost
flirtatious affability.) In token of her appreciation the chief purser had
been asked to our party and he, in token of his appreciation, had sent
before him the life-size effigy of a swan, moulded in ice and filled with
caviar. This chilly piece of magnificence now dominated the room, standing
on a table in the centre, thawing gently, dripping at the beak into its
silver dish. The flowers of the morning delivery hid as much as possible of
the panelling (for this room was a miniature of the monstrous hall above).

"You must get dressed at once. Where have you been all this time?"

"Talking to Julia Mottram."

"D'you know her? Oh, of course, you were a friend of the dipso brother.
Goodness, her glamour!"

"She greatly admires your looks, too."

"She used to be a girl friend of Boy's."

"Surely not?"

"He always said so."

"Have you considered," I asked, "how your guests are going to eat this
caviar?"

"I have. It's insoluble. But there's all this" -- she revealed some
trays of glassy tit-bits -- "and anyway, people always find ways of eating
things at parties. D'you remember we once ate potted shrimps with a paper
knife?"

"Did we?"

"Darling, it was the night you popped the question."

"As I remember, you popped."

"Well, the night we got engaged. But you haven't said how you like the
arrangements."
The arrangements, apart from the swan and the flowers, consisted of a
steward already inextricably trapped in the corner behind an improvised bar,
and another steward, tray in hand, in comparative freedom.

"A cinema actor's dream," I said.

"Cinema actors," said my wife; "that's what I want to talk about."

She came with me to my dressing-room and talked while I changed. It had
occurred to her that, with my interest in architecture, my true metier was
designing scenery for the films, and she had asked two Hollywood magnates to
the party with whom she wished to ingratiate me.

We returned to the sitting-room.

"Darling, I believe you've taken against my bird. Don't be beastly
about it in front of the purser. It was sweet of him to think of it.
Besides, you know, if you had read about it in a description of a
sixteenth-century banquet in Venice, you would have said those were the days
to live."

"In sixteenth-century Venice it would have been a somewhat different
shape."

"Here is Father Christmas. We were just in raptures over your swan."

The chief purser came into the room and shook hands powerfully.

"Dear Lady Celia," he said, "if you'll put on your warmest clothes and
come an expedition into the cold storage with me to-morrow, I can show you a
whole Noah's Ark of such objects. The toast will be along in a minute.
They're keeping it hot."

"Toast!" said my wife, as though this was something beyond the dreams
of gluttony. "Do you hear that, Charles? Toast."

Soon the guests began to arrive; there was nothing to delay them.
"Celia," they said, "what a grand cabin and what a beautiful swan!" and, for
all that it was one of the largest in the ship, our room was soon painfully
crowded; they began to put out their cigarettes in the little pool of
ice-water which now surrounded the swan.

The purser made a sensation, as sailors like to do, by predicting a
storm. "How can you be so beastly?" asked my wife, conveying the flattering
suggestion that not only the cabin and the caviar, but the waves, too, were
at his command. "Anyway, storms don't affect a ship like this, do they?"

"Might hold us back a bit."

"But it wouldn't make us sick?"

"Depends if you're a good sailor. I'm always sick in storms, ever since
I was a boy."

"I don't believe it. He's just being sadistic. Come over here, there's
something I want to show you."

It was the latest photograph of her children. "Charles hasn't even seen
Caroline yet. Isn't it thrilling for him?"

There were no friends of mine there, but I knew about a third of the
party, and talked away civilly enough. An elderly woman said to me, "So
you're Charles. I feel I know you through and through, Celia's talked so
much about you."

Through and through, I thought. Through and through is a long way,
madam. Can you indeed see into those dark places where my own eyes seek in
vain to guide me? Can you tell me, dear Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander -- if I am
correct in thinking that is how I heard my wife speak of you -- why it is
that at this moment, while I talk to you, here, about my forthcoming
exhibition, I am thinking all the time only of when Julia will come? Why can
I talk like this to you, but not to her? Why have I already set her apart
from humankind, and myself with her? What is going on in those secret places
of my spirit with which you make so free? What is cooking, Mrs. Stuyvesant
Oglander?

Still Julia did not come, and the noise of twenty people in that tiny
room, which was so large that no one hired it, was the noise of a multitude.

Then I saw a curious thing. There was a little red-headed man whom no
one seemed to know, a dowdy fellow quite unlike the general run of my wife's
guests; he had been standing by the caviar for twenty minutes eating as fast
as a rabbit. Now he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief and, on the
impulse apparently, leaned forward and dabbed the beak of the swan, removing
the drop of water that had been swelling there and would soon have fallen.
Then he looked round furtively to see if he had been observed, caught my
eye, and giggled nervously.

"Been wanting to do that for a long time," he said. "Bet you don't know
how many drops to the minute. I do, I counted."

"I've no idea."

"Guess. Tanner if you're wrong; half a dollar if you're right. That's
fair."

"Three," I said.

"Coo, you're a sharp one. Been counting 'em yourself." But he showed no
inclination to pay this debt. Instead he said: "How d'you figure this out?
I'm an Englishman born and bred, but this is my first time on the Atlantic."

"You flew out perhaps?"

"No, nor over it."

"Then I presume you went round the world and came across the Pacific."

"You are a sharp one and no mistake. I've made quite a bit getting into
arguments over that one."

"What was your route?" I asked, wishing to be agreeable.

"Ah, that'd be telling. Well, I must skedaddle. So long."

"Charles," said my wife, "this is Mr. Kramm, of Interastral Films."

"So you are Mr. Charles Ryder," said Mr. Kramm.

"Yes."

"Well, well, well." He paused. I waited. "The purser here says we're
heading for dirty weather. What d'you know about that?"
"Far less than the purser."

"Pardon me, Mr. Ryder, I don't quite get you."

"I mean I know less than the purser."

"Is that so? Well, well, well. I've enjoyed our talk very much. I hope
that it will be the first of many."

An Englishwoman said: "Oh, that swan! Six weeks in America has given me
an absolute phobia of ice. Do tell me, how did it feel meeting Celia again
after two years? I know I should feel indecently bridal. But Celia's never
quite got the orange blossom out of her hair, has she?"

Another woman said: "Isn't it heaven saying good-bye and I knowing we
shall meet again in half an hour and go on meeting every half-hour for
days?"

Our guests began to go, and each on leaving informed me ofj something
my wife had promised to bring me to in the near future; it was the theme of
the evening that we should all be seeing a lot of each other, that we had
formed one of those molecular systems that physicists can illustrate. At
last the swan was wheeled out, too, and I said to my wife, "Julia never
came."

"No, she telephoned. I couldn't hear what she said, there was such a
noise going on--something about a dress. Quite lucky really, there wasn't
room for a cat. It was a lovely party, wasn't it? Did you hate it very much?
You behaved beautifully and looked so distinguished. Who was your red-baked
chum?"

"No chum of mine."

"How very peculiar! Did you say anything to Mr. Kramm about working in
Hollywood?"

"Of course not."

"Oh, Charles, you are a worry to me. It's not enough just to stand
about looking distinguished and a martyr for Art. Let's go to dinner. We're
at the Captain's table. I don't suppose he'll dine down to-night, but it's
polite to be fairly punctual."

By the time that we reached the table the rest of the party had
arranged themselves. On either side of the Captain's empty chair sat Julia
and Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander; besides them there were an English diplomat
and his wife, Senator Stuyvesant Oglander, and an American clergyman at
present totally isolated between two pairs of empty chairs. This clergyman
later described himself -- redundantly it seemed -- as an Episcopalian
Bishop. Husbands and wives sat together here. My wife was confronted with a
quick decision, and although the steward attempted to direct us otherwise,
sat so that she had the Senator and I the Bishop. Julia gave us both a
little dismal signal of sympathy.

"I'm miserable about the party," she said, "my beastly maid totally
disappeared with every dress I have. She only turned up half an hour ago.
She'd been playing ping-pong."

"I've been telling the Senator what he missed," said Mrs. Stuyvesant
Oglander. "Wherever Celia is, you'll find she knows all the significant
people."

"On my right," said the Bishop, "a significant couple are expected.
They take all their meals in their cabin except when they have been informed
in advance that the Captain will be present."

We were a gruesome circle; even my wife's high social spirit faltered.
At moments I heard bits of her conversation.

"... an extraordinary little red-haired man. Captain Foulenough in
person."

"But I understood. you to say, Lady Celia, that you unacquainted with
him."

"I mean he was like Captain Foulenough."

"I begin to comprehend. He impersonated this friend of yourtl in order
to come to your party."

"No, no. Captain Foulenough is simply a comic character."

"There seems to have been nothing very amusing about this other man.
Your friend is a comedian?"

"No, no. Captain Foulenough is an imaginary character in an English
paper. You know, like your 'Popeye.'"

The Senator laid down knife and fork. "To recapitulate: an impostor
came to your party and you admitted him because of a fancied resemblance to
a fictitious character in a cartoon."

"Yes, I suppose that was it really."

The Senator looked at his wife as much as to say: "Significant" people,
huh!"

I heard Julia across the table trying to trace, for the benefit of the
diplomat, the marriage-connections of her Hungarian and Italian cousins. The
diamonds in her hair and on her fingers flashed with fire, but her hands
were nervously rolling little balls, of crumb, and her starry head drooped
in despair.

The Bishop told me of the goodwill mission on which he was travelling
to Barcelona ... "a very, very valuable work of clearance has been
performed, Mr. Ryder. The time has now come to rebuild on broader
foundations. I have made it my aim to reconcile the so-called Anarchists and
the so-called Communists, and with that in view I and my committee have
digested all the available literature of the subject. Our conclusion, Mr.
Ryder, is unanimous. There is no fundamental diversity between the two
ideologies. It is a matter of personalities, Mr. Ryder, and what
personalities have put asunder personalities can unite. . . ."

On the other side I heard: --

"And may I make so bold as to ask what institutions sponsored your
husband's expedition?"

The diplomat's wife bravely engaged the Bishop across the gulf that
separated them.

"And what language will you speak when you get to Barcelona?"

"The language of Reason and Brotherhood, madam," and, turning back to
me, "The speech of the coming century is in thoughts not in words. Do you
not agree, Mr. Ryder?"

"Yes," I said. "Yes."

"What are words?" said the Bishop.

"What indeed?"

"Mere conventional symbols, Mr. Ryder, and this is an age rightly
sceptical of conventional symbols."

My mind reeled; after the parrot-house fever of my wife's party, and
the deep, unplumbed emotions of the afternoon, after all the exertions of my
wife's pleasures in New York, after the months of solitude in the steaming,
green shadows of the jungle, this was too much. I felt like Lear on the
heath, like the Duchess of Main bayed by madmen. I summoned cataracts and
hurri-canoes, and as if by conjUry the call was immediately answered.

For some time now, though whether it was a mere trick of the nerves I
did not then know, I had felt a recurrent and persistently growing motion --
a heave and shudder of the large dining-room as of the breast of a man in
deep sleep. Now my wife turned to me and said: "Either I am a little drunk
or it's getting rough," and even as she spoke we found ourselves leaning
sideways in our chairs; there was a crash and tinkle of falling cutlery by
the wall, and on our table the wine-glasses all together toppled and rolled
over, while each of us steadied the plate and forks and looked at the others
with expressions that varied between frank horror in the diplomat's wife and
relief in Julia.

The gale which, unheard, unseen, unfelt, in our enclosed and insulated
world, had for an hour been-mounting over us, had now veered and fallen full
on our bows.

Silence followed the crash, then a high, nervous babble of laughter.
Stewards laid napkins on the pools of spilt wineJ We tried to resume the
conversation, but all were waiting, as the little ginger man had watched the
drop swell and fall from the swan's beak, for the next great blow; it came,
heavier than the last.

"This is where I say good-night to you all," said the diplomat's wife,
rising.

Her husband led her to their cabin. The dining-room was emptying fast.
Soon only Julia, my wife and I were left at the table, and telepathically,
Julia said, "Like King Lear."

"Only each of us is all three of them."

"What can you mean?" asked my wife.

"Lear, Kent, Fool."

"Oh, dear, it's like that agonizing Foulenough conversation over again.
Don't try and explain."

"I doubt if I could," I said.

Another climb, another vast drop. The stewards were at work making
things fast, shutting things up, hustling away unstable ornaments.

"Well, we've finished dinner and set a fine example of British phlegm,"
said my wife. "Let's go and see what's on."

Once on our way to the lounge we had all three to cling to a pillar;
when we got there we found it almost deserted; the band played but no one
danced; the tables were set for tombola but no one bought a card, and the
ship's officer, who made a ' specialty of calling the numbers with all the
patter of the lower j deck -- "sweet sixteen and never been kissed -- key of
the door, twenty-one -- clickety-click, sixty-six" -- was idly talking to
his i colleagues; there were a score of scattered novel readers, a few games
of bridge, some brandy drinking in the smoking-room, but all our guests of
two hours before had disappeared.

The three of us sat for a little by the empty dance floor; my wife was
full of schemes by which, without impoliteness, we could move to another
table in the dining-room. "It's crazy to go to the restaurant," she said,
"and pay extra for exactly the same dinner. Only film people go there,
anyway. I don't see why we should be made to."

Presently she said: "It's making my head ache and I'm tired, anyway.
I'm going to bed."

Julia went with her. I walked round the ship, on one of the covered
decks where the wind howled and the spray leaped up from the darkness and
smashed white and brown against the glass screen; men were posted to keep
the passengers off the open decks. Then I, too, went below.

In my dressing-room everything breakable had been stowed away, the door
to the cabin was hooked open, and my wife called plaintively from within.

"I feel terrible. I didn't know a ship of this size could pitch like
this," she said, and her eyes were full of consternation and resentment,
like those of a woman who, at the end of her time, at length realizes that
however luxurious the nursing home, and however well paid the doctor, her
labour is inevitable; and the lift and fall of the ship came regularly as
the pains of childbirth.

I slept next door; or, rather, I lay there between dreaming and waking.
In a narrow bunk, on a hard mattress, there might have been rest, but here
the beds were broad and buoyant; I collected what cushions I could find and
tried to wedge myself firm, but through the night I turned with each swing
and twist of the ship -- she was rolling now as well as pitching -- and my
head rang with the creak and thud which now succeeded the hum of fine
weather.

Once, an hour before dawn, my wife appeared like a ghost in the
doorway, supporting herself with either hand on the jambs, saying: "Are you
awake? Can't you do something? Can't you get something from the doctor?"

I rang for the night steward, who had a draught ready prepared, which
comforted her a little. And all night between dreaming and waking I thought
of Julia; in my brief dreams she took a hundred fantastic and terrible and
obscene forms, but in my waking thoughts she returned with her sad, starry
head just as I had seen her at dinner.

After first light I slept for an hour or two, then awoke clearheaded,
with a joyous sense of anticipation.

The wind had dropped a little, the steward told me, but was still
blowing hard and there was a very heavy swell; "which there's nothing worse
than a heavy swell," he said, "for the If enjoyment of the passengers.
There's not many breakfasts wanted this morning."

I looked in at my wife, found her sleeping, and closed the door I
between us; then I ate salmon kedgeree and cold Bradenham ham and telephoned
for a barber to come and shave me.

"There's a lot of stuff in the sitting-room for the lady," said the
steward; "shall I leave it for the time?"

I went to see. There was a second delivery of cellophane parcels from
the shops on board, some ordered by radio from ' 1 friends in New York whose
secretaries had failed to remind them of our departure in time, some by our
guests as they left the cocktail party. It was no day for flower vases; I
told him to leave them on the floor and then, struck by the thought, removed
the car^ from Mr. Kramm's roses and sent them with my love to Julia.

She telephoned while I was being shaved.

"What a deplorable thing to do, Charles! How unlike you!"

"Don't you like them?" "What can I do with roses on a day like this?"

"Smell them."

There was a pause and a rustle of unpacking. "They've absolutely no
smell at all."

"What have you had for breakfast?"

"Muscat grapes and cantaloup."

"When shall I see you?"

"Before lunch. I'm busy till then with a masseuse."

"A masseuse?"

"Yes, isn't it peculiar. I've never had one before, except once when I
hurt my shoulder hunting. What is it about being on a boat that makes
everyone behave like a film star?"

"I don't."

"How about these very embarrassing roses ?"

The barber did his work with extraordinary dexterity -- indeed, with
agility, for he stood like a swordsman in a ballet sometimes on the point of
one foot, sometimes on the other, lightly flicking the lather off his blade
and swooping back to my chin as the ship righted herself; I should not have
dared use a safety razor on myself.

The telephone rang again.

It was my wife.

"How are you, Charles ?"

"Tired."

"Aren't you coming to see me ?"

"I came once. I'll be in again."

I .brought her the flowers from the sitting-room; they completed the
atmosphere of a maternity ward which she had managed to create in the cabin;
the stewardess had the air of a midwife, standing by the bed, a pillar of
starched linen and composure. My wife turned her head on the pillow and
smiled wanly; she stretched out a bare arm and caressed with the tips of her
fingers the cellophane and silk ribbons of the largest bouquet. "How sweet
people are," she said faintly, as though the gale were a private misfortune
of her own which the world in its love was condoling.

"I take it you're not getting up."

"Oh no, Mrs. Clark is being so sweet." She was always quick to get
servants' names. "Don't 'bother. Come in sometimes and tell me what's going
on."

"Now, now, dear," said the stewardess, "the less we are disturbed
to-day the better."

My wife seemed to make a sacred, female rite even of seasickness.

Julia's cabin, I knew, was somewhere below ours. I waited for her by
the lift on the main deck; when she came we walked once round the promenade;
I held the rail, she took my other arm. It was hard going; through the
streaming glass we saw a distorted world of grey sky and black water. When
the ship rolled heavily I swung her round so that she could hold the rail
with her other hand; the howl of the wind was subdued, but the whole ship
creaked with strain. We made the circuit once; then Julia said: "It's no
good. That woman beat hell out of me, and I feel limp, anyway. Let's sit
down."

The great bronze doors of the lounge had torn away from their hooks and
were swinging free with the roll of the ship; regularly and, it seemed,
irresistibly, first one, then the other, opened and shut; they paused at the
completion of each half circle, began to move slowly and finished fast with
a resounding-clash. There was no real risk in passing them, except of
slipping and being caught by that swift, final blow; there was ample time to
walk through unhurried, but there was something forbidding in the sight of
that great weight of uncontrolled metal, flapping to and fro, which might
have made a timid man flinch or skip through too quickly; I rejoiced to feel
Julia's hand perfectly steady on my arm and know, as I walked beside her,
that she was wholly undismayed.

"Bravo," said a man sitting near by. "I confess I went round the other
way. I didn't like the look of those doors somehow. They've been trying to
fix them all the morning."

There were few people about that day, and that few seemed bound
together by a camaraderie of reciprocal esteem; they did nothing except sit
rather glumly in their armchairs, drink occasionally and exchange
congratulations on not being seasick.

"You're the first lady I've seen," said the man.

"I'm very lucky."

"We are very lucky," he said, with a movement which began as a bow and
ended as a lurch forward to his knees, as the blotting-paper floor dipped
steeply between us. The roll carried us away from him, clinging together but
still on our feet, and we quickly sat where our dance led us, on the further
side, in isolation; a web of life-lines had been stretched across the
lounge, and we seemed like boxers, roped into the ring.

The steward approached. "Your usual, sir? Whiskey and tepid water, I
think. And for the lady? Might I suggest a nip of champagne?"

"D'you know, the awful thing is I would like champagne very much?" said
Julia. "What a life of pleasure -- roses, half an hour with a female
pugilist, and now champagne!"

"I wish you wouldn't go on about the roses. It wasn't my idea in the
first place. Someone sent them to Celia."

"Oh, that's quite different. It lets you out completely. But it makes
my massage worse."

"I was shaved in bed."

"I'm glad about the roses," said Julia. "Frankly, they were a shock.
They made me think we were starting the day on quite the wrong footing."

I knew what she meant, and in that moment felt as though I had shaken
off some of the dust and grit of ten dry years; then and always, however she
spoke to me -- in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of
contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or
hands -- however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had
glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often
did, straight from the surface to the depths, I knew; even that day when I
still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant.

We drank our wine and soon our new friend came lurching towards us down
the life-line.

"Mind if I join you? Nothing like a bit of rough weather for bringing
people together. This is my tenth crossing, and I've never seen anything
like it. I can see you are an experienced sailor, young lady."

"No. As a matter of fact, I've never been at sea before except coming
to New York and, of course, crossing the Channel. I don't feel sick, thank
God, but I feel tired. I thought at first it was only the massage, but I'm
coming to the conclusion it's the ship."

"My wife's in a terrible way. She's an experienced sailor. Only shows,
doesn't it?"

He joined us at luncheon, and I did not mind his being there; he had
clearly taken a fancy to Julia, and he thought we were man and wife; this
misconception and his gallantry seemed.in some way to bring her and me
closer together. "Saw you two last night at the Captain's table," he said,
"with all the nobs."

"Very, dull nobs."

"If you ask me, nobs always are. When you get a storm like this you
find out what people are really made of."

"You have a predilection for good sailors?"

"Well, put like that I don't know that I do--what I mean is, it makes
for getting together."

"Yes."

"Take us for example. But for this we might never have met. I've had
some very romantic encounters at sea in my time. If the lady will excuse me,
I'd like to tell you about a little adventure I had in the Gulf of Lyons
when I was younger than I am now."

We were both weary; lack of sleep, the incessant din and the strain
every movement required, wore us down. We spent that afternoon apart in our
cabins. I slept, and when I awoke the sea was as high as ever, inky clouds
swept over us and the glass streamed still with water, but I had grown used
to the storm in my sleep, had made its rhythm mine, had become part of it,
so that I arose strongly and confidently and found Julia already up and in
the same temper.

"What d'you think?" she said. "That man's giving a little 'get-together
party' to-night in the smoking-room for all the good sailors. He asked me to
bring my husband."

"Are we going?"

"Of course. ... I wonder if I ought to feel like the lady our friend
met on the way to Barcelona. I don't, Charles, not a bit'."

There were eighteen people at the "get-together party"; we had nothing
in common except immunity from seasickness. We drank champagne, and
presently our host said: "Tell you what, I've got a roulette wheel. Trouble
is we can't go to my cabin on account of the wife, and we aren't allowed to
play in public."

So the party adjourned to my sitting-room and we played for low stakes
until late into the night, when Julia left and our host had drunk too much
wine to be surprised that she and I were not in the same quarters. When all
but he had gone he fell asleep in his chair, and I left him there. It was
the last I saw of him, for later, so the steward told me when he came from
returning the roulette things to the man's cabin, he broke his collar-bone,
falling in the corridor, and was taken to the ship's hospital.

All next day Julia and I spent together without interruption; talking,
scarcely moving, held in our chairs by the swell of the sea. After luncheon
the last hardy passengers went to rest and we were alone as though the place
had been cleared for us, as though tact on a Titanic scale had sent everyone
tiptoeing out to leave us to one another.

The bronze doors of the lounge had been fixed, but not before two
seamen had been injured and removed to the sick-bay. They had tried various
devices, lashing with ropes and, later, when these failed, with steel
hawsers, but there was nothing to which they could be made fast; finally,
they drove wooden wedges under them, catching them in the brief moment of
repose when they were full open, and these held them.

When, before dinner, she went to her cabin to get ready (no one dressed
that night) and I came with her, uninvited, unopposed, expected, and behind
closed doors took her in my arms and first kissed her, there was no
alteration from the mood of the afternoon. Later, turning it over in my
mind, as I turned in my bed with the rise and fall of the ship, through the
long, lonely, drowsy night, I recalled the courtships of the past, dead, ten
years; how, knotting my tie before setting out, putting the gardenia in my
buttonhole, I would plan my evening and think, At such and such a time, at
such and such an opportunity, I shall cross the start-line and open my
attack for better or worse; this phase of the battle has gone on long
enough, I would think; a decision must be reached. With Julia there were no
phases, no start-line, no tactics at all.

But later that night when she went to bed and I followed her to her
door she stopped me.

"No, Charles, not yet. Perhaps never. I don't know. I don't know if I
want love."

Then something, some surviving ghost from those dead ten years--for one
cannot die, even for a little, without some loss -- made me say, "Love? I'm
not asking for love."

"Oh yes, Charles, you are," she said, and putting up her hand gently
stroked my cheek; then shut her door.

And I reeled back, first on one wall, then on the other, of the long,
softly lighted, empty corridor; for the storm, it appeared, had the form of
a ring. All day we had been sailing through its still centre; now we were
once more in the full fury of the wind -- and that night was to be rougher
than the one before.

Ten hours of talking: what had we to say? Plain fact mostly, the record
of our two lives, so long widely separate, now being knit to one. Through
all that storm-tossed night I rehearsed what she had told me; she was no
longer the alternate succubus and starry vision of the night before; she had
given all that was transferable of her past into my keeping. She told me, as
I have already retold, of her courtship and marriage; she told me, as though
fondly turning the pages of an old nursery-book, of her childhood; and I
lived long, sunny days with her in the meadows, with Nanny Hawkins on her
camp stool and Cordelia asleep in the pram, slept quiet nights under the
dome with the religious pictures fading round the cot as the nightlight
burned low and the embers settled in the grate. She told me of her life with
Rex and of the secret, vicious, disastrous escapade that had taken her to
New York. She, too, had had her dead years. She told me of her long struggle
with Rex as to whether she should have a child; at first she wanted one, but
learned after a year that an operation was needed to make it possible; by
that time Rex and she were out of love, but he still wanted his child, and
when at last she consented, it was born dead.

"Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally," she said. "It's just
that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man
highly developed; the rest simply isn't there. He couldn't imagine why it
hurt me to find, two months after we came back to London from our honeymoon,
that he was still keeping up with Brenda Champion."

"I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful," I said. "I felt it was
all right for me to dislike her."

"Is she? Do you? I'm glad. I don't like her either. Why did you marry
her?"

"Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she's the ideal wife
for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian."

"You loved him, didn't you?"

"Oh yes. He was the forerunner."

Julia understood.

The ship creaked and shuddered, rose and fell. My wife called to me
from the next room:

"Charles, are you there?"

"Yes."

"I've been asleep such a long while. What time is it?"

"Half-past three."

"It's no better, is it?"

"Worse."

"I feel a little better, though. D'you think they'd bring me some tea
or something if I rang the bell?"

I got her some tea and biscuits from the night steward.

"Did you have an amusing evening?"

"Everyone's seasick."

"Poor Charles. It was going to have been such a lovely trip, too. It
may be better to-morrow."
I turned out the light and shut the door between us.
Waking and dreaming, through the strain and creak and heave of the long
night, flat on my back with my arms and legs spread wide to check the roll,
and my eyes open to the darkness, I lay thinking of Julia.

". . . We thought Papa might come back to England after Mummy died, or
that he might marry again, but he lives just as he did. Rex and I often go
to see him now. I've grown fond of him. . . . Sebastian's disappeared
completely . . . Cordelia's in Spain with an ambulance . . . Bridey leads
his own extraordinary life. He wanted to shut Brideshead after Mummy died,
but Papa wouldn't have it for some reason, so Rex and I live there now, and
Bridey has two rooms up in the dome, next to Nanny Hawkins, part of the old
nurseries. He's like a character from Chekhov. One meets him sometimes
coming out of the library or on the stairs -- I never know when he's at home
-- and now and then- he suddenly comes in to dinner like a ghost quite
unexpectedly. ,

". . . Oh, Rex's parties! Politics and money. They can't do anything
except for money; if they walk round the lake they have to make bets about
how many swans they see ... sitting up till two, amusing Rex's girls,
hearing them gossip, rattling away endlessly on the backgammon board while
the men play cards and smoke cigars. The cigar smoke ... I can smell it in
my hair when I wake up in the morning; it's in my clothes when I dress at
night. Do I smell of it now? D'you think that woman who rubbed me felt it in
my skin?

". . . At first I used to stay away with Rex in his friends' houses. He
doesn't make me any more. He was ashamed of me when he found I didn't cut
the kind of figure he wanted, ashamed of himself for having been taken in. I
wasn't at all the article he'd bargained for. He can't see the point of me,
but whenever v he's made up his mind there isn't a point and he's
begun to feel comfortable, he gets a surprise -- some man, or even woman, he
respects takes a fancy to me and he suddenly sees that there is a whole
world of things we understand and he doesn't. . . . He was upset when I went
away. He'll be delighted to have me , back. I was faithful to him until this
last thing came along. There's nothing like a good upbringing. Do you know
last year, when I thought I was going to have a child, I'd decided to have
it brought up a Catholic? I hadn't thought about religion before; I haven't
since; but just at that time, when I was waiting for the birth, I thought,
'That's one thing I can give her. It doesn't seem to have done me much good,
but my child shall have it.' It was odd, wanting to give something one had
lost oneself. Then, in the end, I couldn't even give that: I couldn't even
give her life. I never saw her; I was too ill to know what was going on, and
afterwards for a long time, until now, I didn't want to speak about her --
she was a daughter, so Rex didn't so much mind her being dead.

"I've been punished a little for marrying Rex. You see, I can't get all
that sort of thing out of my mind, quite -- Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell,
Nanny Hawkins, and the Catechism. It becomes part of oneself, if they give
it one early enough. And yet I wanted my child to have it. ... Now I suppose
I shall be punished for what I've just done. Perhaps that is why you and I
are here together like this . . . part of a plan."

That was almost the last thing she said to me -- "part of a plan" --
before we went below and parted at her cabin door.

Next day the wind had again dropped, and again we were wallowing in the
swell. The talk was less of seasickness now than of broken bones; people had
been thrown about in the night, and there had been many nasty accidents on
bathroom floors. That day, because we had talked so much the day before and
because what we had to say needed few words, we spoke little. We had books;
Julia found a game she liked. When after long silences we spoke, our
thoughts, we found, had kept pace together side by side.

Once I said, "You are standing guard over your sadness."

"It's all I have earned. You said yesterday. My wages."

"An I.O.U. from life. A promise to pay on demand."

Rain ceased at midday; at evening the clouds dispersed and the sun,
astern of us, suddenly broke into the lounge where we sat, putting all the
lights to shame.

"Sunset," said Julia, "the end of our day."

She rose and, though the roll and pitch of the ship seemed unabated,
led me up to the boat-deck. She put her arm through mine and her hand into
mine, in my great-coat pocket. The deck was dry and empty, swept only by the
wind of the ship's speed. As we made our halting, laborious way forward,
away from the 1 flying smuts of the smoke-stack, we were alternately jostled
together, then strained, nearly sundered, arms and fingers interlocked as I
held the rail and Julia clung to me, thrust together again, drawn apart;
then, in a plunge deeper than the rest, I found myself flung across her,
pressing her against the rail, warding myself off her with the arms that
held her prisoner on either side, and as the ship paused at the end of its
drop as though gathering strength for the ascent, we stood thus embraced, in
the open, cheek against cheek, her hair blowing across my eyes; the dark
horizon of tumbling water, flashing now with gold, stood still above us,
then came sweeping down till I was staring through Julia's dark hair into a
wide and golden sky, and she was thrown forward on my heart, held up by my
hands on the rail, her face still pressed to mine.

In that minute, with her lips to my ear and her breath warm in the salt
wind, Julia said, though I had not spoken, "Yes, now," and as the ship
righted herself and for the moment ran into calmer waters, Julia led me
below.

So at sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover. It was no
time for the sweets of luxury; they would come, in then-season, with the
swallow and the lime-flowers. Now on the rough water, as I was made free of
her narrow loins and, it seemed now, in assuaging that fierce appetite, cast
a burden which I had borne all my life, toiled under, not knowing its nature
-- now, while the waves still broke and thundered on the prow, the act of
possession was a symbol, a rite of ancient origin and solemn meaning.

We dined that night high up in the ship, in the restaurant, and saw
through the bow windows the stars come out and sweep across the sky as once,
I remembered, I had seen them sweep above the towers and gables of Oxford.
The stewards promised that to-morrow night the band would play again and the
place be full. We had better book now, they said, if we wanted a good table.

"Oh dear," said Julia, "where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans
of the storm?"
I could not leave her that night, but early next morning, as once again
I made my way back along the corridor, I found I could walk without
difficulty; the ship rode easily on a smooth sea, and I knew that our
solitude was broken.

My wife called joyously from her cabin: "Charles, Charles, I feel so
well. What do you think I am having for breakfast?" I went to see. She was
eating a beef-steak.

"I've fixed up for a visit to the hairdresser -- do you know they
couldn't take me till four o'clock this afternoon, they're so busy suddenly?
So I shan't appear till the evening, but lots of people are coming in to see
us this morning, and I've asked Miles and Janet to lunch with us in our
sitting-room. I'm afraid I've been a worthless wife to you the last two
days. What have you been up to?"

"One gay evening," I said, "we played roulette till two o'clock, next
door in the sitting-room, and our host passed out."

"Goodness. It sounds very disreputable. Have you been behaving,
Charles? You haven't been picking up sirens?"

"There was scarcely a woman about. I spent most of the time with
Julia."

"Oh, good. I always wanted to bring you together. She's one of my
friends I knew you'd like. I expect you were a godsend to her. She's had
rather a gloomy time lately. I don't expect she mentioned it, but . . ." my
wife proceeded to relate a current version of Julia's journey to New York.
"I'll ask her to cocktails this morning," she concluded.

Julia came, and it was happiness enough, now, merely to be near her.

"I hear you've been looking after my husband for me," my wife said.

"Yes, we've become very matey. He and I and a man whose name we don't
know."

"Mr. Kramm, what have you done to your arm?"

"It was the bathroom floor," said Mr. Kramm, and explained at length
how he had fallen.

That night the Captain dined at his table and the circle was complete,
for claimants came to the chairs on the Bishop's right, two Japanese who
expressed deep interest in his projects for world-brotherhood. The Captain
was full of chaff at Julia's endurance in the storm, offering to engage her
as a seaman; years of sea-going had given him jokes for every occasion. My
wife, fresh from the beauty parlour, was unravaged by her three days of
distress, and in the eyes of many seemed to outshine Julia, whose sadness
had gone and been replaced by an incommunicable content and tranquillity;
incommunicable save to me; she and I, separated by the crowd, sat alone
together close enwrapped, as we had lain in each other's arms the night
before.

There was a gala spirit in the ship that night. Though it meant rising
at dawn to pack, everyone was determined that for this one night he would
enjoy the luxury the storm had denied him. There was no solitude. Every
corner of the ship was thronged; dance music and high, excited chatter,
stewards darting everywhere with trays of glasses, the voice of the officer
in charge of tombola: "Kelly's eye --number one; legs, eleven; and we'll
Shake the Bag" -- Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander in a paper cap, Mr. Kramm and his
bandages, the two Japanese decorously throwing paper streamers and hissing
like geese.

I did not speak to Julia, alone, all that evening.

We met for a minute next day on the starboard side of the ship while
everyone else crowded to port to see the officials come aboard and to gaze
at the green coastline of Devon.

"What are your plans?"

"London for a bit," she said.

"Celia's going straight home. She wants to see the children."

"You, too?"

"No."

"In London then."

"Charles, the little red-haired man -- Foulenough. Did you see? Two
plain-clothes police have taken him off."

"I missed it. There was such a crowd on that side of the ship."

"I found out the trains and sent a telegram. We shall be home by
dinner. The children will be asleep. Perhaps we might wake Johnjohn up, just
for once."

"You go down," I said. "I shall have to stay in London."

"Oh, but Charles, you must come. You haven't seen Caroline."

"Will she change much in a week or two?"

"Darling, she changes every day."

"Then what's the point of seeing her now? I'm sorry, my dear, but I
must get the pictures unpacked and see how they've travelled. I must fix up
for the exhibition right away."

"Must you?" she said, but I knew that her resistance ended when I
appealed to the mysteries of my trade. "It's very disappointing. Besides, I
don't know if Andrew and Cynthia will be out of the flat. They took it till
the end of the month."

"I can go to a hotel."

"But that's so grim. I can't bear you to be alone your first night
home. I'll stay and go down to-morrow."

"You mustn't disappoint the children."

"No." Her children, my art, the two mysteries of our trades . . .

"Will you come for the week-end?"

"If I can."

"All British passports to the smoking-room, please," said a steward.

"I've arranged with that sweet Foreign Office man at our table to get
us off early with him," said my wife.

Brideshead Revisited: Book I. Et in Arcadia Ego. Chapter Seven

2008-08-06T13:56:00.000+02:00

Chapter Seven

it is time to speak of Julia, who till now has played an intermittent
and somewhat enigmatic part in Sebastian's drama. It was thus she appeared
to me at the time, and I to her. We pursued separate aims which brought us
near to one another, but we remained strangers. She told me later that she
had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a
particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another,
take it down, glance at the title page and, saying "I must read that, too,
when I've the time," replace it and continue the search. On my side the
interest was keener, for there was always the physical likeness between
brother and sister, which, caught repeatedly in different poses, under
different lights, each time pierced me anew; and, as Sebastian in his sharp
decline seemed daily to fade and crumble, so much the more did Julia stand
out clear and firm.

She was thin in those days, flat-chested, leggy; she seemed all limbs
and neck, bodiless, spidery; thus far she conformed to the fashion, but the
hair-cut and the hats of the period, and the blank stare and gape of the
period, and the clownish dabs of rouge high on the cheekbones, could not
reduce her to type.

When I first met her, when she met me in the station yard and drove me
home through the twilight that high summer of 1923, she was just eighteen
and fresh from her first London season.
Some said it was the most brilliant season since the war, that things
were getting into their stride again. Julia, by right, was at the centre of
it. There were then remaining perhaps half a dozen London houses which could
be called "historic"; March-main House in St. James's was one of them, and
the ball given for Julia, in spite of the ignoble costume of the time, was
by all accounts a splendid spectacle. Sebastian went down for it and
half-heartedly suggested my coming with him; I refused and came to regret my
refusal, for it was the last ball of its kind given there; the last of a
splendid series.

How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days;
the world was open to be explored at leisure. I was so full of Oxford that
summer; London could wait, I
thought.

The other great houses belonged to kinsmen or to childhood friends of
Julia's, and besides them there were countless substantial houses in the
squares of Mayfair and Belgravia, alight and thronged, one or other of them,
night after night, their music floating out among the plane-trees, couples
outside sauntering on the quiet pavements or breathing the summer air from
the balconies. Foreigners returning on post from their own waste lands wrote
home that here they seemed to catch a glimpse of the world they had believed
lost for ever among the mud and wire, and through those halcyon weeks Julia
darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the trees, part of the
candlelight in the mirror's spectrum, so that elderly men and women, sitting
aside with their memories, saw her as herself the blue-bird.

"'Bridey' Marchmain's eldest girl," they said. "Pity he can't see her
to-night."

That night and the night after and the night after, wherever she went,
always in her own little circle of intimates, she brought to all whose eyes
were open to it a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the
river's bank when the kingfisher suddenly flames across dappled water.
This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through
the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power
of her own beauty, hesitating on the steps of life; one who had suddenly
found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in
her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips, and
whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth
her Titanic servant, die fawning monster who would bring her whatever she
asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.
She h?A no interest in me that evening; the jinn rumbled below us
uncalled; she lived apart in a little world, within a little world, the
innermost of a system of concentric spheres, like the ivory balls
laboriously carved in ancient China; a little problem troubling her mind --
little, as she saw it, in abstract terms and symbols. She was wondering,
dispassionately and leagues distant from reality, whom she should marry.
Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured
chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches,
which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf
past, present and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then,
lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of
pin and line; she knew nothing of war.

"If only one lived abroad," she thought, "where these things are
arranged between parents and lawyers."

To be married, soon and splendidly, was the unquestioned aim of all her
friends. If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as
the beginning of individual existence; the skirmish where one gained one's
spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.

She outshone by far all the girls of her age, but she knew that, in
that little world within a world which she inhabited, there were certain
grave disabilities from which she suffered. On the sofas against the wall
where the old people counted up the points, there were things against her.
There was the scandal of her father; they had all loved him in the past, the
women along the wall, and they most of them loved her mother, yet there was
that slight, inherited stain upon her brightness that seemed deepened by
something in her own way of life -- waywardness and wil-fulness, a less
disciplined habit than most of her contemporaries' -- that unfitted her for
the highest honours; but for that, who knows? . . .

One subject eclipsed all others in importance for the ladies along the
wall; whom would the young princes marry? They Could not hope for purer
lineage or a more gracious presence than Julia's; but there was this faint
shadow on her that unfitted her for the highest honours; there was also her
religion.

Nothing could have been further from Julia's ambitions than a royal
marriage. She knew, or thought she knew, what she wanted and it was not
that. But wherever she turned, it seemed, her religion stood as a barrier
between her and her natural goal.

As it seemed to her, the thing was a dead loss. If she apos-tasized
now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the
Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could
marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before
her. There could be no eldest son for her, and younger sons were indelicate
things, necessary, but not to be much spoken of. Younger sons had none of
the privileges of obscurity; it was their plain duty to remain hidden until
some disaster perchance promoted them to their brothers' places, and, since
this was their function, it was desirable that they should keep themselves
wholly suitable for succession. Perhaps in a family of three or four boys, a
Catholic might get the youngest without opposition. There were of course the
Catholics themselves, but these came seldom into the little world Julia had
made for herself; those who did were her mother's kinsmen, who, to her,
seemed grim and eccentric. Of the dozen or so wealthy and noble Catholic
families, none at that time had an heir of the right age. Foreigners --
there were many among her mother's family -- were tricky about money, odd in
their ways, and a sure mark of failure in the English girl who wed them.
What was there left?

This was Julia's problem after her weeks of triumph in London. She knew
it was not insurmountable. There must, she thought, be a number of people
outside her own world who were well qualified to be drawn into it; the shame
was that she must seek them. Not for her the cruel, delicate luxury of
choice, the indolent, cat-and-mouse pastimes of the hearth-rug. No Penelope
she; she must hunt in the forest.

She had made a preposterous little picture of the kind of man ' who
would do: he was an English diplomat of great but not very virile beauty,
now abroad, with a house smaller than Brideshead, nearer to London; he was
old, thirty-two or three, and had been recently and tragically widowed;
Julia thought she would prefer a man a little subdued by earlier grief. He
had a great career before him but had grown listless in his loneliness; she
was not sure he was not in danger of falling into the hands of an
unscrupulous foreign adventuress; he needed a new infusion of young life to
carry him to the Embassy at Paris. While professing a mild agnosticism
himself, he had a liking for the shows of religion and was perfectly
agreeable to having his children brought up Catholic; he believed, however,
in the prudent restriction of his family to two boys and a girl, comfortably
spaced over twelve years, and did not demand, as a Catholic husband might,
yearly pregnancies. He had twelve thousand a year above his pay, and no near
relations. Someone like that would do, Julia thought, and she was in search
of him when she met me at the railway station. I was not her man. She told
me as much, without a word, when she took the cigarette from my lips.

All this I learned about Julia, bit by bit, from the stories she told,
from guesswork, knowing her, from what her friends said, from the odd
expressions she now and then let slip, from occasional dreamy monologues of
reminiscences; I learned it as one does learn the former -- as it seems at
the time, the preparatory -- life of a woman one loves, so that one thinks
of oneself as part of it, directing it by devious ways, towards oneself.

Julia left Sebastian and me at Brideshead and went to stay with an
aunt, Lady Rosscommon, in her villa at Cap Ferrat. All the way she pondered
her problem. She had given a name to her widower-diplomat; she called him
"Eustace," and from that moment he became a figure of fun to her, a little
interior, incommunicable joke, so that when at last such a man did cross her
path -- though he was not a diplomat but a wistful major in the Life Guards
-- and fall in love with her and offer her just those gifts she had chosen,
she sent him away moodier and more wistful than ever, for by that time she
had met Rex Mottram.

Rex's age was greatly in his favour, for among Julia's friends there
was a kind of gerontophilic snobbery; young men were held to be gauche and
pimply; it was thought very much more chic to be seen lunching alone at the
Ritz -- a thing, in any case, allowed to few girls of that day, to the tiny
circle of Julia's intimates; a thing looked at askance by the elders who
kept the score, chatting pleasantly against the walls of the ballrooms -- at
the table on the left as you came in, with a starched and wrinkled old roue
whom your mother had been warned of as a girl, than in the centre of the
room with a party of exuberant young bloods. Rex, indeed, was neither
starched nor wrinkled; his seniors thought him a pushful young cad, but
Julia recognized the unmistakable chic -- the flavour of "Max" and "F.E."
and the Prince of Wales, of the big table in the Sporting Club, the second
magnum and the fourth cigar, of the chauffeur kept waiting hour after hour
without compunction -- which her friends would envy. His social position was
unique; it had an air of mystery, even of crime, about it; people said Rex
went about armed. Julia and her friends had a fascinated abhorrence of what
they called "Pont Street"; they collected phrases that damned their user,
and among themselves -- and often, disconcertingly, in public -- talked a
language made up of them. It was "Pont Street" to wear a signet ring and to
give chocolates at the theatre; it was "Pont Street" at a dance to say, "Can
I forage for you?" Whatever Rex might be, he was definitely not "Pont
Street." He had stepped straight from the underworld into the world of
Brenda Champion, who was herself the innermost of a number of concentric
ivory spheres. Perhaps Julia recognized in Brenda Champion an intimation of
what she and her friends might be in twelve years' time; there was an
antagonism between the girl and the woman that was hard to explain
otherwise. Certainly the fact of his being Brenda Champion's property
sharpened Julia's appetite for him.

Rex and Brenda Champion were staying at the next villa on Cap Ferrat,
taken that year by a newspaper magnate and frequented by politicians. .They
would not normally have come within Lady Rosscommon's ambit, but, living so
close, the parties mingled and at once Rex began warily to pay his court.

All that summer he had been feeling restless. Mrs. Champion had proved
a dead end; it had all been intensely exciting at first, but now those
bonds, so much more rigid than the bonds of marriage, had begun to chafe.
Mrs. Champion lived as, he found, the English seemed apt to do, in a little
world within a little world; Rex demanded a wider horizon. He wanted to
consolidate his gains; to strike the black ensign, go ashore, hang the
cutlass up over the chimney and think about the crops. It was time he
married; he, too, was in search of a "Eustace," but, living as he did, he
met few girls. He knew of Julia; she was by all accounts top debutante, a
suitable prize.
With Mrs. Champion's cold eyes watching behind her sun glasses, there
was little Rex could do at Cap Ferrat except establish a friendliness which
could be widened later. He was never entirely alone with Julia, but he saw
to it that she was included in most things they did; he taught her
chemin-de-fer, he arranged that it was always in his car that they drove to
Monte Carlo or Nice; he did enough to make Lady Rosscommon write to Lady
Marchmain, and Mrs. Champion move him, sooner than they had planned, to
Antibes.

Julia went to Salzburg to join her mother.

"Aunt Fanny tells me you made great friends with Mr. Mottram. I'm sure
he can't be very nice."

"I don't think he is," said Julia. "I don't know that I like nice
people."

There is proverbially a mystery among most men of new wealth, how they
made their first ten thousand; it is the qualities they showed then, before
they became bullies, when every man was someone to be placated, when only
hope sustained them and they could count on nothing from the world but what
could be charmed from it, that make them, if they survive their triumph,
successful with women. Rex, in the comparative freedom of London, became
abject to Julia; he planned his life about hers, going where he would meet
her, ingratiating himself with those who could report well of him to her; he
sat on a number of charitable committees in order to be near Lady Marchmain;
he offered his services to Brideshead in getting him a seat in Parliament
(but was there rebuffed); he expressed a keen interest in the Catholic
Church until he found that this was no way to Julia's heart. He was always
ready to drive her in his Hispano wherever she wanted to go; he took her and
parties of her friends to ring-side seats at prize-fights and introduced
them afterwards to the pugilists; and all the time he never once made love
to her. From being agreeable, he became indispensable to her; from having
been proud of him in public she became a little ashamed, but by that time,
between Christmas and Easter, he had become indispensable. And then, without
in the least expecting it, she suddenly found herself in love.

It came to her, this disturbing and unsought revelation, one evening in
May, when Rex had told her he would be busy at the House, and, driving by
chance down Charles Street, she saw him leaving what she knew to be Brenda
Champion's house. She was so hurt and angry that she could barely keep up
appearances through dinner; as soon as she could, she went home and cried
bitterly for ten minutes; then she felt hungry, wished she had eaten more at
dinner, ordered some bread-and-milk, and went to bed saying: "When Mr.
Mottram telephones in the morning, whatever time it is, say I am not to be
disturbed."

Next day she breakfasted in bed as usual, read the papers, telephoned
to her friends. Finally she asked: "Did Mr. Mottram ring up by any chance?"

"Oh yes, my lady, four times. Shall I put him through when he rings
again?"

"Yes. No. Say I've gone out."
When she came downstairs there was a message for her on the hall table.
Mr. Mottram expects Lady Julia at the Ritz at 1:30. "I shall lunch at home
to-day," she said.

That afternoon she went shopping with her mother; they had tea with an
aunt and returned at six.

"Mr. Mottram is waiting, my lady. I've shown him into the library."

"Oh, Mummy. I can't be bothered with him. Do tell him to go home."

"That's not at all kind, Julia. I've often said he's not my favourite
among your friends, but I have grown quite used to him, almost to like him.
You really mustn't take people up and drop them like this -- particularly
people like Mr. Mottram."

"Oh, Mummy, must I see him? There'll be a scene if I do."

"Nonsense, Julia, you twist that poor man round your finger."

So Julia went into the library and came out an hour later engaged to be
married.

"Oh, Mummy, I warned you this would happen if I went in there."

"You did nothing of the kind. You merely said there would be a scene. I
never conceived of a scene of this kind."

"Anyway, you do like him, Mummy. You said so."

"He has been very kind in a number of ways. I regard him as entirely
unsuitable as your husband. So will everyone."

"Damn everybody."

"We know nothing about him. He may have black blood -- in fact he is
suspiciously dark. Darling, the whole thing's impossible. I can't see how
you can have been so foolish."

"Well, what right have I got otherwise to be angry with him if he goes
with that horrible old woman? You make a great thing about rescuing fallen
women. Well, I'm rescuing a fallen man for a change. I'm saving Rex from
mortal sin."

"Don't be irreverent, Julia."

"Well, isn't it mortal sin to sleep with Brenda Champion?"

"Or indecent."

"He's promised never to see her again. I couldn't ask him to do that
unless I admitted I was in love with him, could I?"

"Mrs. Champion's morals, thank God, are not my business. Your happiness
is. If you must know, I think Mr. Mottram a kind and useful friend, but I
wouldn't trust him an inch, and I'm sure he'll have very unpleasant
children. They always, revert. I've no doubt you'll regret the whole thing
in a few days. Meanwhile nothing is to be done. No one must be told anything
or allowed to suspect. You must stop lunching with him. You may see him
here, of course, but nowhere in public. You had better send him to me and I
will have a little talk to him about it."

Thus began a year's secret engagement for Julia; a time of great
stress, for Rex made love to her that afternoon for the first time; not as
had happened to her once or twice before with sentimental and uncertain
boys, but with a passion that disclosed the corner of something like it in
her. Their passion frightened her, and she came back from the confessional
one flay determined to put an end to it.

"Otherwise I must stop seeing you," she said.

Rex was humble at once, just as he had been in the winter, day after
day, when he used to wait for her in the cold in his big car.

"If only we could be married immediately," she said.

For six weeks they remained at arm's length, kissing when they met and
parted, sitting meantime at a distance, talking of what they would do and
where they would live and of Rex's chances of an under-secretaryship. Julia
was content, deep in love, living in the future. Then, just before the end
of the session, . she learned that Rex had been staying the week-end with a
stockbroker at Sunningdale, when he said he was at his constituency, and
that Mrs. Champion had been there, too.

On the evening she heard of this, when Rex came as usual to Marchmain
House, they re-enacted the scene of two months before.

"What do you expect?" he said. "What right have you to ask so much,
when you give so little?"

She took her problem to Farm Street and propounded it in general terms,
not in the confessional, but in a dark little parlour kept for such
interviews.

"Surely, Father, it can't be wrong to commit a small sin myself in
order to keep him from a much worse one?"

But the gentle old Jesuit was unyielding as rock. She barely listened
to him; he was refusing her what she wanted, that was all she needed to
know.

When he had finished he said, "Now you had better come to the church
and make your confession."

"No, thank you," she said, as though refusing the offer of something in
a shop, "I don't think I want to to-day," and walked angrily home.

From that moment she shut her mind against her religion.

And Lady Marchmain saw this and added it to her new grief for Sebastian
and her old grief for her husband and to the deadly sickness in her body,
and took all these sorrows with her daily to church; it seemed her heart was
transfixed with the swords of her dolours, a living heart to match the
plaster and paint; what comfort she took home with her, God knows.

So the year wore on and the secret of the engagement spread from
Julia's confidantes to their confidantes, and so, like ripples on the water,
in ever-widening circles, till there were hints of it in the press, and Lady
Rosscommon as Lady-in-Waiting was closely questioned about it, and something
had to be done. Then, after Julia had refused to make her Christmas
communion and Lady Marchmain had found herself betrayed first by me, then by
Mr. Samgrass, then by Cordelia, in the first grey days of 1925, she decided
to act. She forbade all talk of an engagement; she forbade Julia and Rex
ever to meet; she made plans for shutting Marchmain House for six months and
taking Julia on a tour of visits to their foreign kinsmen. It was
characteristic of an old, atavistic callousness that went with her delicacy
that, even at this crisis, she did not think it unreasonable to put

Sebastian in Rex's charge on the journey to Dr. Borethus, and Rex,
having failed her in that matter, went on to Monte Carlo, where he completed
her rout. Lord Marchmain did not concern himself with the finer points of
Rex's character; those, he believed, were his daughter's business. Rex
seemed a rough, healthy, prosperous fellow whose name was already familiar
to him from reading the political reports; he gambled in an open-handed but
sensible manner; he seemed to keep reasonably good company; he had a future;
Lady Marchmain disliked him. Lord Marchmain was, on the whole, relieved that
Julia should have chosen so well, and gave his consent to an immediate
marriage.

Rex gave himself to the preparations with gusto. He bought her a ring,
not, as she expected, from a tray at Cartier's, but in a back room in Hatton
Garden from a man who brought stones out of a safe in little bags and
displayed them for her on a writing-desk; then another man in another back
room made designs for the setting with a stub of pencil on a sheet of
note-paper, and the result excited the admiration of all her friends.

"How d'you know about these things, Rex?" she asked. She was daily
surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the
time, added to his attraction.

His present house in Westminster was large enough for them both, and
had lately been furnished and decorated by the most expensive firm. Julia
said she did not want a home in the country yet; they could always take
places furnished when they wanted to go away.

There was trouble about the marriage settlement, with which Julia
refused to interest herself. The lawyers were in despair. Rex absolutely
refused to settle any capital. "What do I want with trustee stock?" he
asked.

"I don't know, darling."

"I make money work for me," he said. "I expect fifteen, twenty per
cent, and I get it. It's pure waste tying up capital at three and a half."

"I'm sure it is, darling."

"These fellows talk as though I were trying to rob you. It's they who
are doing the robbing. They want to rob you of two thirds of the income I
can make you." "Does it matter, Rex? We've got heaps, haven't we?" Rex hoped
to have the whole of Julia's dowry in his hands, to make it work for him.
The lawyers insisted on tying it up, but they could not get, as they asked,
a like sum from him. Finally, grudgingly, he agreed to insure his life,
after explaining at length to the lawyers that this was mertly a device for
putting part of his legitimate profits into other people's pockets; but he
had some connection with an insurance office which made the arrangement
slightly less painful to him, by which he took for himself the agent's
commission which the lawyers were themselves expecting.

Last and least tame the question of Rex's religion. He had once
attended a royal wedding in Madrid, and he wanted something of die kind for
himself.

"That's one thing your Church can do," he said: "put on a good show.
You never saw anything to equal the cardinals. How many do you have in
England?"

"Only one, darling."

"Only one? Can we hire some others from abroad?" It was then explained
to him that a mixed marriage was a very unostentatious affair.

"How d'you mean 'mixed'? I'm not a nigger or anything."

"No, darling --between a Catholic and a Protestant."

"Oh, that? Well, if that's all, it's soon unmixed. I'll become a
Catholic. What does one have to do?"

Lady Marchmain was dismayed and perplexed by this new development; it
was no good her telling herself that in charity she must assume his good
faith; it brought back memories of
another courtship and another conversion.

"Rex," she said. "I sometimes wonder if you realize how big a thing you
are taking on in the Faith. It would be very wicked to take a step like this
without believing sincerely."

He was masterly in his treatment of her.

"I don't pretend to be a very devout man," he said, "nor much of a
theologian, but I know it's a bad plan to have two religions in one house. A
man needs a religion. If your Church is good enough for Julia, it's good
enough for me."

"Very well," she said, "I will see about having you instructed."

"Look, Lady Marchmain, I haven't the time. Instruction will be wasted
on me. Just you give me the form and I'll sign on the dotted line."

"It usually takes some months - often a lifetime."

"Well, I'm a quick learner. Try me."

So Rex was sent to Farm Street to Father Mowbray, a priest renowned for
his triumphs with obdurate catechumens. After the third interview he came to
tea with Lady Marchmain.

"Well, how do you find my future son-in-law?"

"He's the most difficult convert I have ever met."

"Oh dear, I thought he was going to make it so easy."

"That's exactly it. I can't get anywhere near him. He doesn't seem to
have the least intellectual curiosity or natural piety.

"The first day I wanted to find out what sort of religious life he had
had till now, so I asked him what he meant by prayer. He said: 'I don't mean
anything. You tell me'. I tried to, in a few words, and he said: 'Right. So
much for prayer. What's the next thing?' I gave him the catechism to take
away. Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He
said: 'Just as many as you say, Father.'

"Then again I asked him: 'Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud
and said "It's going to rain," would that be bound to happen?' 'Oh, yes,
Father.' 'But supposing it didn't?' He thought a moment and said, 'I suppose
it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.'

"Lady Marchmain, he doesn't correspond to any degree of paganism known
to the missionaries."

"Julia," said Lady Marchmain, when the priest had gone, "are you sure
that Rex isn't doing this thing purely with the idea of pleasing us?"

"I don't think it enters his head," said Julia.

"He's really sincere in his conversion?"

"He's absolutely determined to become a Catholic, Mummy," and to
herself she said: In her long history the Church must have had some pretty
queer converts. I don't suppose all Clevis's army were exactly
Catholic-minded. One more won't hurt.

Next week the Jesuit came to tea again. It was the Easter holidays and
Cordelia was there, too.

"Lady Marchmain," he said. "You should have chosen one of the younger
fathers for this task. I shall be dead long before Rex is a Catholic."

"Oh dear, I thought it was going so well."

"It was, in a sense. He was exceptionally docile, said he accepted
everything I told him, remembered bits of it, asked no questions. I wasn't
happy about him. He seemed to have no sense of reality, but I knew he was
coming under a steady Catholic influence, so I was willing to receive him.
One has to take a chance sometimes -- with semi-imbeciles, for instance. You
never know quite how much they have understood. As long as you know there's
someone to keep an eye on them, you do take the chance."

"How I wish Rex could hear this!" said Cordelia. "But yesterday I got a
regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how
ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident
what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have
such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly
breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.
Take yesterday. He seemed to be doing very well. He'd learned large bits of
the catechism by heart, and the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary. Then I
asked him as usual if there was anything troubling him, and he looked 'at me
in a crafty way and said, 'Look, Father, I don't think you're being straight
with me. I want to join your Church and I'm going to join your Church, but
you're holding too much back.' I asked what he meant, and he said: 'I've had
a long talk with a Catholic -- a very pious, well-educated one, and I've
learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet
pointing East because that's the direction of heaven, and if you die in the
night you can walk there. Now I'll sleep with my feet pointing any way that
suits Julia, but d'you expect a grown man to believe about walking to
heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a cardinal? And
what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound
note with someone's name on it, they get sent to hell. I don't say there
mayn't be a good reason for all this,' he said, 'but you ought to tell me
about it and not let me find out for myself.'"

"What can the poor man have meant?" said Lady Marchmain.

"You see he's a long way from the Church yet," said Father Mowbray.

"But who can he have been talking to? Did he dream it all? Cordelia,
what's the matter?"

"What a chump! Oh, Mummy, what a glorious chump!"

"Cordelia, it was you."

"Oh, Mummy, who could have dreamed he'd swallow it? I told him such a
lot besides. About the sacred monkeys in the Vatican -- all kinds of
things."

"Well, you've very considerably increased my work," said Father
Mowbray.

"Poor Rex," said Lady Marchmain. "You know, I think it makes him rather
lovable. You must treat him like an idiot child, Father Mowbray."

So the instruction was continued, and Father Mowbray at length
consented to receive Rex a week before his wedding.

"You'd think they'd be all over themselves to have me in," Rex
complained. "I can be a lot of help to them one way and another; instead
they're like the chaps who issue cards for a casino. What's more," he added,
"Cordelia's got me so muddled I don't know what's in the catechism and what
she's invented."

Thus things stood three weeks before the wedding; the cards had gone
out, presents were coming in fast, the bridesmaids were delighted with their
dresses. Then came what Julia called "Bridey's bombshell."

With characteristic ruthlessness he tossed his load of explosive
without warning into what, till then, had been a happy family party. The
library at Marchmain House was being devoted to wedding presents; Lady
Marchmain, Julia, Cordelia and Rex were busy unpacking and listing them.
Brideshead came in and watched them for a moment.

"Chinky vases from Aunt Betty," said Cordelia. "Old stuff. I remember
them on the stairs at Buckborne."

"What's all this?" asked Brideshead.

"Mr., Mrs., and Miss Pendle-Garthwaite, one early-morning tea set.
Goode's, thirty shillings, jolly mean."

"You'd better pack all that stuff up again."

"Bridey, what do you mean?"

"Only that the wedding's off."

"Bridey."

"I thought I'd better make some enquiries about my prospective
brother-in-law, as no one else seemed interested," said Brideshead. "I got
the final answer to-night. He was married in Montreal hi 1915 to a Miss
Sarah Evangeline Cutler, who is still living there."

"Rex, is this true?"

Rex stood with a jade dragon in his hand looking at it critically; then
he set it carefully on its ebony stand and smiled openly and innocently at
them all.

"Sure it's true," he said. "What about it? What are you all looking so
hit-up about? She isn't a thing to me. She never meant any good. I was only
a kid, anyhow. The sort of mistake anyone might make. I got my divorce back
in 1919. I didn't even know where she was living till Bridey here told me.
What's all the rumpus?"

"You might have told me," said Julia.

"You never asked. Honest, I've not given her a thought in years."

His sincerity was so plain that they had to sit down and talk about it
calmly.

"Don't you realize, you poor sweet oaf," said Julia, "that you can't
get married as a Catholic when you've another wife alive?"

"But I haven't. Didn't I just tell you we were divorced six years ago?"

"But you can't be divorced as a Catholic."

"I wasn't a Catholic and I was divorced. I've got the papers
somewhere."

"But didn't Father Mowbray explain to you about marriage?"

"He said I wasn't to be divorced from you. Well, I don't want to be. I
can't remember all he told me -- sacred monkeys, plenary indulgences, four
last things -- if I remembered all he told" me I shouldn't have time for
anything else. Anyhow, what about your Italian cousin, Francesca? She
married twice."

"She had an annulment."

"All right then, I'll get an annulment. What does it cost? Who do I get
it from? Has Father Mowbray got one? I only want to do what's right. Nobody
told me."

It was a long time before Rex could be convinced of the existence of a
serious impediment to his marriage. The discussion took them to dinner, lay
dormant in the presence of the servants, started again as soon as they were
alone, and lasted long after midnight. Up, down and round the argument
circled and swooped like a gull, now out to sea, out of sight, cloud-bound,
among irrelevances and repetitions, now right on the patch where the offal
floated.'

"What d'you want me to do? Who should I see?" Rex kept asking. "Don't
tell me there isn't someone who can fix this."

"There's nothing to do, Rex," said Brideshead. "It simply means your
marriage can't take place. I'm sorry from everyone's point of view that it's
come so suddenly. You ought to have told us yourself."

"Look," said Rex. "Maybe what you say is right; maybe strictly by law I
shouldn't get married in your cathedral. But the cathedral is booked; no one
there is asking any questions; the Cardinal knows nothing about it; Father
Mowbray knows nothing about it. Nobody except us knows a thing. So why make
a lot of trouble? Just stay mum and let the thing go through, as if nothing
had happened. Who loses anything by that? Maybe I risk going to hell. Well,
I'll risk it. What's it got to do with anyone else?"

"Why not?" said Julia. "I don't believe these priests know everything.
I don't believe in hell for things like that. I don't know that I believe in
it for anything. Anyway, that's our lookout. We're not asking you to risk
your souls. Just keep away."

"Julia, I hate you," said Cordelia, and left the room.

"We're all tired," said Lady Marchmain. "If there is anything to say,
I'd suggest our discussing it in the morning."

"But there's nothing to discuss," said Brideshead, "except what is the
least offensive way we can close the whole incident. Mother and I will
decide that. We must put a notice in The Times and the Morning Post; the
presents will have to go back. I don't know what is usual about the
bridesmaids' dresses."

"Just a moment," said Rex. "Just a moment. Maybe you can stop us
marrying in your cathedral. All right, to hell, we'll be married in a
Protestant church."

"I can stop that, too," said Lady Marchmain.

"But I don't think you will, Mummy," said Julia. "You see, I've been
Rex's mistress for some time now, and I shall go on being, married or not."

"Rex, is this true?"

"No, damn it, it's not," said Rex. "I wish it were."

"I see we shall have to discuss it all again in the morning," said Lady
Marchmain faintly. "I can't go on any more now."

And she needed her son's help up the stairs.

"What on earth made you tell your mother that?" I asked, when, years
later, Julia described the scene to me.

"That's exactly what Rex wanted to know. I suppose because I thought it
was true. Not literally -- though you must remember I was only twenty, and
no one really knows the 'facts of life' by being told them -- but, of
course, I didn't mean it was true literally. I didn't know how else to
express it. I meant I was much too deep with Rex just to be able to say 'the
marriage arranged will not now take place,' and leave it at that. I wanted
to be made an honest woman. I've been wanting it ever since -- come to think
of it."

"And then?"

"And then the talks went on and on. Poor Mummy. And priests came into
it and aunts came into it. There were all kinds of suggestions -- that Rex
should go to Canada, that Father Mowbray should go to Rome and see if there
were any possible grounds for an annulment; that I should go abroad for a
year. In the middle of it Rex just telegraphed to Papa: 'Julia and I prefer
wedding ceremony take place by Protestant rites. Have you any objection?' He
answered, 'Delighted,' and that settled the matter as far as Mummy stopping
us legally went. There was a lot of personal appeal after that. I was sent
to talk to priests and nuns and aunts. Rex just went on quietly -- or fairly
quietly -- with the plans.

"Oh, Charles, what a squalid wedding! The Savoy Chapel was the place
where divorced couples got married in those days--a poky little place not at
all what Rex had intended. I wanted just to slip into a registry office one
morning and get the thing over with a couple of charwomen as witnesses, but
nothing else would do but Rex had to have bridesmaids and orange blossoms
and the wedding march. It was gruesome.

"Poor Mummy behaved like a martyr and insisted on my having her lace in
spite of everything. Well, she more or less had to--the dress had been
planned round it. My own friends came, of course, and the curious
accomplices Rex called his friends; the rest bf the party were very oddly
assorted. None of Mummy's family came, of course; one or two of Papa's. All
the stuffy people stayed away--you know, the Anchorages and Chasms and
Vanbrughs -- and I thought, Thank God for that, they always look down their
noses at me, anyhow; but Rex was furious, Because it was just them he wanted
apparently.

"I hoped at one moment there'd be no party at all. Mummy said we
couldn't use Marchers, and Rex wanted to telegraph Papa and invade the place
with an army of caterers headed by the family solicitor. In the end it was
decided to have a party the evening before at home to see the presents --
apparently that was all right according to Father Mowbray. Well, no one can
ever resist going to see her own present, so that was quite a success, but
the reception Rex gave next day at the Savoy for the wedding guests was very
squalid.

"There was great awkwardness about the tenants. In the end Bridey went
down and gave them a dinner and bonfire there, which wasn't at all what they
expected in return for their silver
soup-tureen.

"Poor Cordelia took it hardest. She had looked forward so much to being
my bridesmaid -- it was a thing we used to talk about long before I came
out--and of course she was a very pious child, too. At first she wouldn't
speak to me. Then on the morning of the wedding --I'd moved to Aunt Fanny
Ross-common's the evening before; it was thought more suitable--she came
bursting in before I was up, straight from Farm Street, in floods of tears,
begged me not to marry, then hugged me, gave me a dear little brooch she'd
bought, and said she prayed I'd always be happy. Always happy, Charles!

"It was an awfully unpopular wedding, you know. Everyone took Mummy's
side, as everyone always did -- not that she got any benefit from it. All
through her life Mummy had all the sympathy of everyone except those she
loved. They all said I'd behaved abominably to her. In fact, poor Rex found
he'd married an outcast, which was exactly the opposite of all he'd wanted.
"So you see things never looked like going right. There was a hoodoo on
us from the start. But I was still nuts about Rex.

"Funny to think of, isn't it?

"You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it
took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn't all there. He wasn't a
complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally
developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I
thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely
modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny ,bit
of a man pretending he was the whole.
"Well, it's all over now."

It was ten years later that she said this to me in a storm in the
Atlantic.

Chapter Eight

I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike.

It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the
discomfiture of their former friends, 'and transposing into their own
precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold
revolution and civil war. Every evening the kiosks displayed texts of doom,
and in the cafes acquaintances greeted one half-derisively with: "Ha, my
friend, you are better off here than at home, are you not?" until I, and
several friends in circumstances like my own, came seriously to believe that
our country was in danger and that our duty lay there. We were joined by a
Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de
Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere
against the lower classes.
We crossed together, in a high-spirited, male party, expecting to find
unfolding before us at Dover the history so often repeated of late, with so
few variations, from all parts of Europe, that I, at any rate, had formed in
my mind a clear, composite picture of Revolution -- the red flag on the post
office, the overturned tram, the drunken N.C.O-'s, the gaol open and gangs
of released criminals prowling the streets, the train from the capital that
did not arrive. One had read it in the papers, seen it in the films, heard
it at cafe tables again and again for six or seven years now, till it had
become part of one's experience, at second hand, like the mud of Flanders
and the flies of Mesopotamia.

Then we landed and met the old routine of the customs sheds, the
punctual boat-train, the porters lining the platform at Victoria and
converging on the first-class carriages; the long line of waiting taxis.

"We'll separate," we said, "and see what's happening. We'll meet and
compare notes at dinner," but we knew already in our hearts that nothing was
happening; nothing, at any rate, which needed our presence.

"Oh dear," said my father, meeting me by chance on the stairs, "how
delightful to see you again so soon." (I had been abroad fifteen months.)
"You've come at a very awkward time, you know. They're having another of
those strikes in two days -- such a lot of nonsense--and I don't know when
you'll be able to get away."

I thought of the evening I was forgoing, with the lights coming out
along the banks of the Seine, and the company I should have had there -- for
I was at the time concerned with two emancipated American girls who shared a
garconniere in Auteuil -- and wished I had not come.

We dined that night at the Cafe" Royal. There things were a little more
warlike, for the cafe" was full of undergraduates who had come down for
"National Service." One group, from Cambridge, had that afternoon signed on
to run messages for Transport House, and their table backed on another
group's, who were enrolled as special constables. Now and then one or other
party would shout provocatively over the shoulder, but it is hard to come
into serious conflict back to back, and the affair ended-with their giving
each other tall glasses of lager beer.

"You should have been in Budapest when Horthy marched in," said Jean.
"That was politics."

A party was being given that night in Regent's Park for the "Black
Birds," who had newly arrived in England. One of us had been asked and
thither we all went.

To us, who frequented Bricktop's and the Bal Negre in the Rue Blomet,
there was nothing particularly remarkable in the spectacle; I was scarcely
inside the door when I heard an unmistakable voice, an echo from what now
seemed a distant past.

"No" it said, "they are not animals in a zoo, Mulcaster, to be goggled
at. They are artists, my dear, very great artists, to be revered."

Anthony Blanche and Boy Mulcaster were at the table where the wine
stood.

"Thank God here's someone I know," said Mulcaster, as I joined them.
"Girl brought me. Can't see her anywhere."

"She's given you the slip, my dear, and do you know why? Because you
look ridiculously out of place, Mulcaster. It isn't your kind of party at
all; you ought not to be here; you ought to go away, you know, to the Old
Hundredth or some lugubrious dance in Belgrave Square."

"Just come from one," said Mulcaster. "Too early for the Old Hundredth.
I'll stay on a bit. Things may cheer up."

"I spit on you," said Anthony. "Let me talk to you, Charles."

We took a bottle and our glasses and found a corner in another room. At
our feet, five members of the "Black Birds" orchestra squatted on their
heels and threw dice.

"That one," said Anthony, "the rather pale one, my dear, konked Mrs.
Arnold Frickheimer the other morning on the nut, my dear, with a bottle of
milk."

Almost immediately, inevitably, we began to talk of Sebastian.

"My dear, he's such a sot. He came to live with me in Marseilles last
year when you threw him over, and really it was as much as I could stand.
Sip, sip, sip like a dowager all day long. And so sly. I was always missing
little things, my dear, things I rather liked; once I lost two suits that
had arrived from Lesley and Roberts that morning. Of course, I didn't know
it was Sebastian--there were some rather queer fish, my dear, in and out of
my little apartment. Who knows better than you my taste for queer fish?
Well, eventually, my dear, we found the pawnshop where Sebastian was
p-p-popping them and then he hadn't got the tickets; there was a market for
them, too, at the Bistro.

"I can see that puritanical, disapproving look in your eye, dear
Charles, as though you thought I had led the boy on. It's one of Sebastian's
less lovable qualities that he always gives the impression of being l-l-led
on -- like a little horse at a circus. But I assure you I did everything. I
said to him again and again, 'Why drink? If you want to be intoxicated there
are so many much
more delicious things.' I took him to quite the best man; well, you
know him as well as I do, Nada Alopov; and Jean Luxmore and everyone we know
has been to him for years -- he's always
in the Regina Bar -- and then we had trouble over that because
Sebastian gave him a bad cheque--a s-s-stumer, my dear-- and a whole lot of
very menacing men came round to the flat --thugs, my dear -- and Sebastian
was making no sense at the time and it was all most unpleasant."

Boy Mulcaster wandered towards us and sat down, without encouragement,
by my side.

"Drink running short in there," he said, helping himself from our
bottle and emptying it. "Not a soul in the place I ever set eyes on before
-- all black fellows."

Anthony ignored him and continued: "So then we left Marseilles and went
to Tangier, and there, my dear, Sebastian took up with his new friend. How
can I describe him? He is like the footman in 'Warning Shadows' -- a great
clod of a German who'd been in the Foreign Legion. He got put by shooting
off his great toe. It hadn't healed yet. Sebastian found him, starving as
tout to one of the houses in the Kasbah, and brought him to stay with us. It
was too macabre. So back I came, my dear, to good old England -- good old
England" he repeated, indicating in an ample gesture the Negroes gambling at
our feet, Mulcaster, staring blankly before him, and our hostess who, in
pyjamas, now introduced herself to us.

"Never seen you before," she said. "Never asked you. Who are all this
white trash, anyway? Seems to me I must be in the wrong house."

"A time of national emergency," said Mulcaster. "Anything may happen."

"Is the party going well?" she asked anxiously. "D'you think Florence
Mills would sing? We've met before," she added to Anthony.

"Often, my dear, but you never asked me to-night."

"Oh dear, perhaps I don't like you. I thought I liked everyone."

"Do you think," asked Mulcaster, when our hostess had left us, "that it
might be witty to give the fire alarm?"

"Yes, Boy, run away and ring it."

"Might cheer things up, I mean."

"Exactly."

So Mulcaster left us in search of the telephone.

"I think Sebastian and his lame chum went to French Morocco," continued
Anthony. "They were in trouble with the Tangier police when I left them. The
Marchioness has been a positive pest ever since I came to London, trying to
make me get into touch with them. What a time that poor woman's having! It
only shows there's some justice in life."

Presently Miss Mills began to sing and everyone, except the crap
players, crowded to the next room.

"That's my girl," said Mulcaster. "Over there with that black fellow.
That's the girl who brought me."

"She seems to have forgotten you now."

"Yes. I wish I hadn't come. Let's go on somewhere."

Two fire engines drove up as we left and a host of helmeted figures
joined the throng upstairs.

"That chap, Blanche," said Mulcaster, "not a good fellow. I put him in
Mercury once."

We went to a number of night clubs. In two years Mulcaster seemed to
have attained his simple ambition of being known and liked in such places.
At the last of them he and I were kindled by a great flame of patriotism.

"You and I," he said, "were too young to fight in the war. Other chaps
fought, millions of them dead. Not us. We'll show them. We'll show the dead
chaps we can fight, too."

"That's why I'm here," I said. "Come from overseas, rallying to old
country in hour of need."

"Like Australians."

"Like the poor dead Australians."

"What you in?"

"Nothing yet. War not ready."

"Only one thing to join -- Bill Meadows's show--Defence Corps. All good
chaps. Being fixed in Bratt's."

"Ill join."

"You member Bratt's?"

"No. I'll join that, too."

"That's right. All good chaps like the dead chaps."

So I joined Bill Meadows's show, which was a flying squad, protecting
food deliveries in the poorer parts of London. First I was enrolled in the
Defence Corps, took an oath of loyalty, and was given a helmet and
truncheon; then I was put up for Bratt's Club and, with a number of other
recruits, elected at a committee meeting specially called for the occasion.
For a week we sat under orders in Bratt's, and thrice a day we drove out in
a lorry at the head of a convoy of milk vans. We were jeered at and
sometimes pelted with muck, but only once did we go into action.
We were sitting round after luncheon that day when Bill Meadows came
back from the telephone in high spirits.

"Come on," he said. "There's a perfectly good battle in the Commercial
Road."

We drove at great speed and arrived to find a steel hawser stretched
between lamp-posts, an overturned truck and a policeman, alone on the
pavement, being kicked by half a dozen youths. On either side of this centre
of disturbance, and at a little distance from it, two opposing parties had
formed. Near us, as we disembarked, a second policeman was sitting on the
pavement, dazed, with his head in his hands and blood running through his
fingers; two or three sympathizers were standing over him; on the other side
of the hawser was a hostile knot of. young dockers. We charged in
cheerfully, relieved the policeman, and were just falling upon the main body
of the enemy when we came into collision with a party of local clergy and
town councillors who arrived simultaneously by another route, to try
persuasion. They were our only victims, for just as they went down there was
a cry of "Look out. The coppers," and a lorry load of police drew up in our
rear.

The crowd broke and disappeared. We picked up the peacemakers (only one
of whom was seriously hurt), patrolled some of the side streets looking for
trouble and finding none, and at length returned to Bratt's. Next day the
General Strike was called off and the country everywhere, except in the
coal-fields, returned to normal. It was as though a beast long fabled for
its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger, and slunk back to its
lair. It had not been worth leaving Paris.

Jean, who joined another company, had a pot of ferns dropped on his
head by an elderly widow in Camden Town and was in hospital for a week.

It was through my membership of Bill Meadows's squad that Julia learned
I was in England. She telephoned to say her mother was anxious to see me.

"You'll find her terribly ill," she said.

I went to Marchmain House on the first morning of peace. Sir Adrian
Porson passed me in the hall, leaving, as I arrived; he held a bandanna
handkerchief to his face and felt blindly for his hat and stick; he was in
tears.

I was shown into the library and in less than a minute Julia joined me.
She shook hands with a gentleness and gravity that were unfamiliar; in the
gloom of that room she seemed a ghost.

"It's sweet of you to come. Mummy has kept asking for you, but I don't
know if she'll be able to see you now, after all. She's just said 'good-bye'
to Adrian Porson and it's tired her."

"Good-bye?"

"Yes. She's dying. She may live a week or two or she may go at any
minute. She's so weak. I'll go and ask nurse."

The stillness of death seemed in the house already. No one ever sat in
the library at Marchmain House. It was the one ungracious room in either of
their houses. The bookcases of Victorian oak held volumes of Hansard and
obsolete encyclopedias that were never opened; the bare mahogany table
seemed set for the meeting of a committee; the place had the air of being
both public and unfrequented; outside lay the forecourt, the railings, the
quiet cul-de-sac.

Presently Julia returned.

"No, I'm afraid you can't see her. She's asleep. She may lie like that
for hours; I can tell you what she wanted. Let's go somewhere else. I hate
this room."

We went across the hall to the small drawing-room where luncheon
parties used to assemble, and sat on either side of the fireplace. Julia
seemed to reflect the crimson and gold of the walls and lose some of her
wanness.

"First, I know, Mummy wanted to say how sorry she is she was so beastly
to you last time you met. She's spoken of it often. She knows now she was
wrong about you. I'm quite sure you understood and put it out of your mind
immediately, but it's the kind of thing Mummy can never forgive herself --
it's the kind of thing she so seldom did."

"Do tell her I understood completely."

"The other thing, of course, you have guessed -- Sebastian. She wants
him. I don't know if that's possible. Is it?"

"I hear he's in a very bad way."

"We heard that, too. We cabled to the last address we had, but there
was no answer. There still may be time for him to see her. I thought of you
as the only hope, as soon as I heard you were in England. Will you try and
get him? It's an awful lot to ask, but I think Sebastian would want it, too,
if he realized."

"I'll try."

"There's no one else we can ask. Rex is so busy."

"Yes. I heard reports of all he'd been doing organizing the gas works."

"Oh yes," Julia said with a touch of her old dryness. "He's made a lot
of kudos out of the strike."

Then we talked for a few minutes about the Bratt's squad. She told me
Brideshead had refused to take any public service because he was not
satisfied with the justice of the cause; Cordelia was in London, in bed now,
as she had been watching by her mother all night. I told her I had taken up
architectural painting and that I enjoyed it. All this talk was nothing; we
had said all we had to say in the first two minutes; I stayed for ten and
then left her.

Air France ran a service of a kind to Casablanca; there I took the bus
to Fez, starting at dawn and arriving in the new town at evening. I
telephoned from the hotel to the British Consul and dined with him that
evening, in his charming house by the walls of the old town. He was a kind,
serious man.

"I'm delighted someone has come to look after young Flyte at last," he
said. "He's been something of a thorn in our sides here. This is no place
for a remittance man. The French don't understand him at all. They think
everyone who's not engaged in trade is a spy. It's not as though he lived
like a milord. Things aren't easy here. There's war going on not thirty
miles from this house, though you might not think it. We had some young
fools on bicycles only last week who'd come to volunteer for Abdul Krim's
army.

"Then the Moors are a tricky lot; they don't hold with drink and our
young friend, as you may know, spends most of his day drinking. What does he
want to come here for? There's plenty of room for him at Rabat or Tangier,
where they cater for tourists. He's taken a house in the native town, you
know. I tried to stop him, but he got it from a Frenchman in the Department
of Arts. I don't say there's any harm in him but he's an anxiety. There's an
awful fellow sponging on him -- a German out of the Foreign Legion. A
thoroughly bad lot by all accounts. There's bound to be trouble.

"Mind you, I like Flyte. I don't see much of him. He used to come here
for baths until he got fixed up at his house. He was always perfectly
charming, and my wife took a great fancy to him. What he needs is
occupation."

I explained my errand.

"You'll probably find him at home now. Goodness knows there's nowhere
to go in the evenings in the old town. If you like I'll send the porter to
show you the way."

So I set out after dinner, with the consular porter going ahead,
lantern in hand. Morocco was a new and strange country to me. Driving that
day, mile after mile, up the smooth, strategic road, past the vineyards and
military posts and the new, white settlements and the early crops already
standing high in the vast, open fields, and the hoardings advertising the
staples of France -- Dubonnet, Michelin, Magasin du Louvre --I had thought
it all very suburban and up-to-date; now, under the stars, in the walled
city, whose streets were gentle, dusty stairways, and whose walls rose
windowless on either side, closed overhead, then opened again to the stars;
where the dust lay thick among the smooth paving stones and figures passed
silently, robed in white, on soft slippers or hard, bare soles; where the
air was scented with cloves and incense and wood smoke -- now I knew what
had drawn Sebastian here and held him so long.

The consular porter strode arrogantly ahead with his light swinging and
his tall cane banging; sometimes an open doorway revealed a silent group
seated in golden lamplight round a brazier.
"Very dirty peoples," the porter said scornfully, over his shoulder.
"No education. French leave them dirty. Not like' British peoples. My
peoples," he said, "always very British peoples."
For he was from the Sudan Police, and regarded this ancient centre of
his culture as a New Zealander might regard Rome.

At length we came to the last of many studded doors, and the porter
beat on it with his stick.

"British Lord's house," he said.

Lamplight and a dark face appeared at the grating. The consular porter
spoke peremptorily; bolts were withdrawn and we entered a small courtyard
with a well in its centre and a vine trained overhead.

"I wait here," said the porter. "You go with this native fellow."

I entered the house, down a step, and into the living-room. I found a
gramophone, an oil-stove and, between them, a young man. Later, when I
looked about me, I noticed other, more agreeable things -- the rugs on the
floor, the embroidered silk on the walls, the carved and painted beams of
the ceiling, the heavy, pierced lamp that hung from a chain and cast the
soft shadows of its own tracery about the room. But on first entering, these
three things -- the gramophone for its noise -- it was playing a French
record of a jazz band; the stove for its smell; and the young man for his
wolfish look -- struck my senses. He was lolling in a basket chair, with a
bandaged foot stuck forward on a box; he was dressed in a kind of thin,
mid-European imitation tweed with a tennis shirt open at the neck; the
unwounded foot wore a brown canvas shoe. There was a brass tray by his side
on wooden legs, and on it were two beer bottles, a dirty plate, and a saucer
full of cigarette ends; he held a glass of beer in his hand and a cigarette
lay on his lower lip and stuck there when he spoke. He had long fair hair
combed back without a parting and a face that was unnaturally lined for a
man of his obvious youth; one of his front teeth was missing, so that his
sibilants came sometimes with a lisp, sometimes with a disconcerting
whistle, which he covered with a giggle; the teeth he had were stained with
tobacco and set far apart.

This was plainly the "thoroughly bad lot" of the consul's description,
the film footman of Anthony's.

"I'm looking for Sebastian Flyte. This is his house, is it not?" I
spoke loudly to make myself heard above the dance music, but he answered
softly in English fluent enough to suggest that it was now habitual to him.

"Yeth. But he isn't here. There's no one but me."

"I've come from England to see him on important business; Can you tell
me where I can find him?"

The record came to its end. The German turned it over, wound up the
machine, and started it playing again before answering.

"Sebastian's sick. The brothers took him away to the infirmary. Maybe
they'll let you thee him, maybe not. I got to go there myself one day thoon
to have my foot dressed. I'll ask them then. When he's better they'll let
you thee him, maybe."

There was another chair and I sat down on it. Seeing that I meant to
stay, the German offered me some beer.

"You're not Thebastian's brother?" he said. "Cousin maybe? Maybe you
married hith thister?"

"I'm only a friend. We were at the University together."

"I had a friend at the University. We studied History. My friend was
cleverer than me; a little weak fellow -- I used to pick him up and shake
him when I was angry -- but tho clever. Then one day we said: 'What the
hell? There is no work in Germany. Germany is down the drain,' so we said
good-bye to our professors, and they said: 'Yes, Germany is down the drain.
There is nothing for a student to do here now,' and we went away anckj
walked and walked and at last we came here. Then we said, 'There is no army
in Germany now, but we must be tholdiers,' so we joined the Legion. My
friend died of dysentery last year, campaigning in the Atlas. When he was
dead, I said, 'What the hell?' so I shot my foot. It is now full of pus,
though I have done it one year."

"Yes," I said. "That's very interesting. But my immediate concern is
with Sebastian. Perhaps you would tell me about him."

"He is a very good fellow, Sebastian. He is all right for me. Tangier
was a stinking place. He brought me here--nice house, nice food, nice
servant -- everything is all right for me here, I reckon. I like it all
right."

"His mother is very ill," I said. "I have come to tell him."

"She rich?"

"Yes."

"Why don't she give him more money? Then we could live at Casablanca,
maybe, in a nice flat.
You know her well? You could make her give him more money?"

"What's the matter with him?"

"I don't know. I reckon maybe he drink too much. The brothers will look
after him. It's all right for him there. The brothers are good fellows. Very
cheap there."

He clapped his hands and ordered more beer.

"You thee? A nice thervant to look after me. It is all right."

When I had got the name of the hospital I left.

"Tell Thebastian I am still here and all right. I reckon he's worrying
about me, maybe."

The hospital, where I went next morning, was a collection of bungalows
between the old and the new towns. It was kept by Franciscans. I made my way
through a crowd of diseased Moors to the doctor's room. He was a layman,
clean-shaven, dressed in white, starched overalls. We spoke in French, and
he told me Sebastian was in no danger, but quite unfit to travel. He had had
the grippe, with one lung slightly affected; he was very weak; he lacked
resistance; what could one expect? He was an alcoholic. The doctor spoke
dispassionately, almost brutally, with the relish men of scidnce sometimes
have for limiting themselves to inessentials, for pruning back their work to
thcharge he put me, the man of no scientific pretensions who did the dirty
jobs of the ward, had a different story.

"He's so patient. Not like a young man at all. He lies there and never
complains -- and there is much to complain of. We have no facilities. The
Government give us what they can spare from the soldiers. And he is so kind.
There is a poor German boy with a foot that will not heal and secondary
syphilis, who comes here for treatment. Lord Flyte found him starving in
Tangier
and took him in and gave him a home. A real Samaritan."

Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby. God forgive me!

Sebastian was in the wing kept for Europeans, where the beds were
divided by low partitions into cubicles with some air of privacy. He was
lying with his hands on the quilt staring at the 1
wall, where the only ornament was a religious oleograph.

"Your friend," said the brother.

He looked round slowly.

"Oh, I thought he meant Kurt. What are you doing here, Charles?"

He was more than ever emaciated; drink, which made others fat and red,
seemed to wither Sebastian. The brother left us, and I sat by his bed and
talked about his illness.

"I was out of my mind for a day or two," he said. "I kept thinking I
was back in Oxford. You went to my house? Did you like it? Is Kurt still
there? I won't ask you if you liked Kurt; no one does. It's funny -- I
couldn't get on without him, you know."

Then I told him about his mother. He said nothing for some time, but
lay gazing at the oleograph of the Seven Dolours. Then: --

"Poor Mummy. She really was a femme fatale, wasn't she. She killed at a
touch."

I telegraphed to Julia that Sebastian was unable to travel, and stayed
a week at Fez, visiting the hospital daily until he was well' enough to
move. His first sign of returning strength, on the second day of my visit,
was to ask for brandy. By next day he had got some, somehow, and kept it
under the bedclothes.

The doctor said: "Your friend is drinking again. It is forbidden here.
What can I do? This is not a reformatory school. I cannot police the wards.
I am here to cure people, not to protect them from vicious habits, or teach
them self-control. Cognac will not hurt him now. It will make him weaker for
the next time he is ill, and then one day some little trouble will carry him
off, pouff. This is not a home for inebriates. He must go at the end of the
week."

The lay brother said: "Your friend is so much happier to-day, it is
like one transfigured."

Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby; but he added, "You know why?
He has a bottle of cognac in bed with him. It is the second I have found. No
sooner do I take one away than he gets another. He is so naughty. It is the
Arab boys who fetch it for him. But it is good to see him happy again when
he has been so sad."

On my last afternoon I said, "Sebastian, now your mother's dead" -- for
the news had reached us that morning -- "do you think of going back to
England?"

"It would be lovely, in some ways," he said, "but do you think Kurt
would like it?"

"For God's sake," I said, "you don't mean to spend your life with Kurt,
do you?"

"I don't know. He seems to mean to spend it with me. 'It'th all right
for him, I reckon, maybe,'" he said, mimicking Kurt's accent, and then he
added what, if I had paid more attention, should have given me the key I
lacked; at the time I heard and remembered it, without taking notice.

"You know, Charles," he said, "it's rather a pleasant change when all
your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after
yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need
looking after by me."

I was able to straighten his money affairs before I left. He had lived
till then by getting into difficulties and then telegraphing for odd sums to
his lawyers. I saw the branch manager of the Bank of Indo-China and arranged
for him, if funds were forthcoming from London, to receive Sebastian's
quarterly allowance and pay him a weekly sum of pocket money with a reserve
to be drawn in emergencies. This sum was only to be given to Sebastian
personally, and only when the manager was satisfied that he had a proper use
for it. Sebastian agreed readily to all this.

"Otherwise," he said, "Kurt will get me to sign a cheque for the whole
lot when I'm tight and then he'll go off and get into all kinds of trouble."

I saw Sebastian home from the hospital. He seemed weaker in his basket
chair than he had been in bed. The two sick men, he and Kurt, sat opposite
one another with the gramophone between them.

"It was time you came back," said Kurt. "I need you."

"Do you, Kurt?"

"I reckon so. It's not so good being alone when you're sick. That boy's
a lazy fellow -- always slipping off when I want him. Once he stayed out all
night and there was no one to make my coffee when I woke up. It's no good
having a foot full of pus. Times I can't sleep good. Maybe another time I
shall slip off, too, and go where I can be looked after." He clapped his
hands but no servant came. "You see?" he said.

"What d'you want?"

"Cigarettes. I got some in the bag under my bed."

Sebastian began painfully to rise from his chair.

"I'll get them," I said. "Where's his bed?"

"No, that's my job," said Sebastian.

"Yeth," said Kurt, "I reckon that's Sebastian's job."

So I left him with his friend in the little enclosed house at the end
of the alley. There was nothing more I could do for Sebastian.

I had meant to return direct to Paris, but this business of Sebastian's
allowance meant that I must go to London and see Brideshead. I travelled by
sea, taking the P. & O. from Tangier, and was home in early June.

"Do you consider," asked Brideshead, ''that there is anything vicious
in my brother's connection with this German?"

"No. I'm sure not. It's simply a case of two waifs coming together."

"You say he'is a criminal?"

"I said 'a criminal type.' He's been in the military prison and was
dishonourably discharged."

"And the doctor says Sebastian is killing himself with drink?"

"Weakening himself. He hasn't D.T.'s or cirrhosis."

"He's not insane?"

"Certainly hot. He's found a companion he happens to like and a place
where he happens to like living."

"Then he must have his allowance as you suggest. The thing is quite
clear."

In some ways Brideshead was an easy man to deal with. He had a kind of
mad certainty about everything which made his decisions swift and easy.

"Would you like to paint this house?" he asked suddenly. "A picture of
the front, another of the back on the park, another of the staircase,
another of the big drawing-room? Four small oils; that is what my father
wants done for a record, to keep at Brideshead. I don't know any painters.
Julia said you specialized in architecture."

"Yes," I said. "I should like to very much."

"You know it's being pulled down? My father's selling it. They are
going to put up a block of flats here. They're keeping the name -- we can't
stop them apparently."

"What a very sad thing."

"Well, I'm sorry of course. But you think it good architecturally?"

"One of the most beautiful houses I know."

"Can't see it. I've always thought it rather ugly. Perhaps your
pictures will make me see it differently."

This was my first commission; I had to work against time, for the
contractors were only waiting for the final signature to start their work of
destruction. In spite, or perhaps because, of that -- for it is my vice to
spend too long on a canvas, never content to leave well alone -- those four
paintings are particular favourites of mine, and it was their success, both
with myself and others, that confirmed me in what has since been my career.

I began in the long drawing-room, for they were anxious to shift the
furniture, which had stood there since it was built. It was a long,
elaborate, symmetrical Adam room, with two bays, of windows opening into
Green Park. The light, streaming in from the west on the afternoon when I
began to paint there, was fresh green from the young trees outside.

I had the perspective set out in pencil and the detail carefully
placed. I held back from painting, like a diver on the water's edge; once in
I found myself buoyed and exhilarated. I was normally a slow and deliberate
painter; that afternoon and all next day, and the day after, I worked fast.
I could do nothing wrong. At the end of each passage I paused, tense, afraid
to start , the next, fearing, like a gambler, that luck must turn and the
pile be lost. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There
were no difficulties; the intricate multiplicity of light and colour became
a whole; the right colour was where I wanted it on the palette; each brush
stroke, as soon as it was complete, seemed to have been there always.

Presently on the last afternoon I heard a voice behind me say; "May I
stay here and watch?"
I turned and found Cordelia.

"Yes," I said, "if you don't talk," and I worked on, oblivious of her,
until the failing sun made me. put up my brushes.

"It must be lovely to be able to do that."

I had forgotten she was there.

"It is."

I could not even now leave my picture, although the sun was down and
the room fading to monochrome. I took it from the easel and held it up to
the windows, put it back and lightened a shadow. Then, suddenly weary in
head and eyes and back and arm, I gave it up for the evening and turned to
Cordelia.

She was now fifteen and had grown tall, nearly to her full height, in
the last eighteen months. She had not the promise of Julia's full
Quattrocento loveliness; there was a touch of Brideshead already in her
length of nose and high cheekbone; she was in black, mourning for her
mother.

"I'm tired," I said.

"I bet you are. Is it finished?"

"Practically. I must go over it again to-morrow."

"D'you know it's long past dinner-time? There's no one here to cook
anything now. I only came up to-day, and didn't realize how far the decay
had gone. You wouldn't like to take me out to dinner, would you?"

We left by the garden door, into the park, and walked in the twilight
to the Ritz Grill.

"You've seen Sebastian? He won't come home, even now?"

I did not realize till then that she had understood so much. I said so.

"Well, I love him more than anyone," she said. "It's sad about
Marchers, isn't it? Do you know they're going tp build a block of flats, and
that Rex wanted to take what he called a 'penthouse' at the top. Isn't it
like him? Poor Julia. That was too much for her. He couldn't understand at
all; he thought she would like to keep up with her old home. Things have all
come to an end very quickly, haven't they? Apparently Papa has been terribly
in debt for a long time. Selling Marchers has put him straight again and
saved I don't know how much a year in rates. But it seems a shame to pull it
down. Julia says she'd sooner that than to have someone else live there."

"What's going to happen to you?"

"What, indeed? There are all kinds of suggestions. Aunt Fanny
Rosscommon wants me to live with her. Then Rex and Julia talk o taking over
half Brideshe'ad and living there. Papa won't come back. We thought he
might, but no.

"They've closed the chapel at Brideshead, Bridey and the Bishop;
Mummy's requiem was the last mass said there. After she was buried the
priest came in -- I was there alone. I don't think he saw me--and took out
the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with
the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water
stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open
and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose
none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there
till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't any chapel there any
more, just an oddly decorated room. I can't tell you what it felt like.
You've never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?"

"Never."

"Well, if you had you'd know what the Jews felt about their temple.
Quomodo sedet sola civitas . . . it's a beautiful chant. You ought to go
once, just to hear it."

"Still trying to convert me, Cordelia?"

"Oh, no. That's all over, too. D'you know what Papa said when he became
a Catholic? Mummy told me once. He said to her: 'You have brought back my
family to the faith of their ancestors.' Pompous, you know. It takes people
different ways. Anyhow, the family haven't been very constant, have they?
There's him gone and Sebastian gone and Julia gone. But God won't let them
go for long, you know. I wondtx if you remember the story Mummy read us the
evening Sebastian first got drunk -- I mean the bad evening. Father Brown
said something like 'I caught him' (the thief) 'with an unseen hook and an
invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the
world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.'"
We scarcely mentioned her mother. All the time we talked, she ate
voraciously. Once she said: --

"Did you see Sir Adrian Person's poem in The Times? It's funny, he knew
her best of anyone--he loved her all his life, you know -- and yet it
doesn't seem to have anything to do with her at all.

"I got on best with her of any of us, but I don't believe I ever really
loved her. Not as she wanted or deserved. It's odd I didn't, because I'm
full of natural affections."

"I never really knew your mother," I said.

"You didn't like her. I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God
they hated Mummy."

"What do you mean by that, Cordelia?"

"Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn't a saint. No one could
really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When
they want to hate Him and His saints they have to find something like
themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. I suppose you think that's
all bosh."

"I heard almost the same thing once before--from someone very
different."

"Oh, I'm quite serious. I've thought about it a lot. It seems to
explain poor Mummy."

Then this odd child tucked into her dinner with renewed relish.

"First time I've ever been taken our. to dinner alone at a restaurant,"
she said.

Later: "When Julia heard they were selling Marchers she said: 'Poor
Cordelia. She won't have her coming-out ball there after all.' It's a thing
we used to talk about--like my being her bridesmaid. That didn't come off
either. When Julia had her ball I was allowed down for an hour, to sit in
the corner with Aunt Fanny, and she said, 'In six years' time you'll have
all this.' ... I hope I've got a vocation."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good
however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away
from it, however much you hate it. Bridey thinks he has a vocation and
hasn't. I used to think Sebastian had and hated it--but I don't know now.
Everything has changed so much suddenly."

But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush
take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great,
succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening--of
Browning's Renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa
velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars
with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed
hair-splitting speech.

"You'll fall in love," I said.

"Oh, I pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those
scrumptious meringues?"

Brideshead Revisited: Book I. Et in Arcadia Ego. Chapter Six

2008-08-06T13:00:00.000+02:00

Chapter Six

"And when we reached the top of the pass," said Mr. Samgrass, "we heard
the galloping horses behind, and two soldiers rode up to the head of the
caravan and turned us back. The General had sent them, and they reached us
only just in time. There was a band, not a mile ahead."

He paused, and his small audience sat silent, conscious that he had
sought to impress them but in doubt as to how they could politely show their
interest.

"A band?" said Julia. "Goodness!"

Still he seemed to expect more. At last Lady Marchmain said, "I suppose
the sort of folk-music you get in those parts is very monotonous."

"Dear Lady Marchmain, a band of brigands." Cordelia, beside me on the
sofa, began to giggle noiselessly. "The mountains are full of them.
Stragglers from Kemal's army; Greeks who got cut off in the retreat. Very
desperate fellows, I assure you."

"Do pinch me," whispered Cordelia.

I pinched her and the agitation of the sofa-springs cedsed.

"Thanks," she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

"So you never got to wherever-it-was," said Julia. "Weren't you
terribly disappointed, Sebastian?"

"Me?" said Sebastian from the shadows beyond the lamplight, beyond the
warmth of the burning logs, beyond the family circle and the photographs
spread out on the card-table. "Me? Oh, I don't think I was there that day,
was I, Sammy?"

"That was the day you were ill."

"I was ill," he repeated like an echo, "so I never should have got to
wherever-it-was, should I, Sammy?"

"Now this, Lady Marchmain, is the caravan at Aleppo in the-courtyard of
the inn. That's our Armenian cook, Begedbian; that's me on the pony; that's
the tent folded up; that's a rather tiresome Kurd who would follow us about
at the time. . . . Here I am in Pontus, Ephesus, Trebizond,
Krak-des-chevaliers, Samothrace, Batum -- of course, I haven't got them in
chronological order yet."

"All guides and ruins and mules," said Cordelia. "Where's Sebastian?"

"He," said Mr. Samgrass, with a hint of triumph in his voice, as though
he had expected the question and prepared the answer, "he held the camera.
He became quite an expert as soon as he learned not to put his hand over the
lens, didn't you, Sebastian?"

There was no answer from the shadows. Mr. Samgrass delved again into
his pig-skin satchel.

"Here," he said, "is a group taken by a street photographer on the
terrace of the St. George Hotel at Beirut. There's Sebastian."

"Why," I said, "there's Anthony Blanche, surely?"

"Yes, we saw quite a lot of him; met him by chance at Constantinople. A
delightful companion. I can't think how I missed knowing him. He came with
us all the way to Beirut."

Tea had been cleared away and the curtains drawn. It was two days after
Christmas, the first evening of my visit; the first, too, of Sebastian's and
Mr. Samgrass's, whom to my surprise I had found on the platform when I
arrived.

Lady Marchmain had written three weeks before: I have just heard from
Mr. Samgrass that he and Sebastian will be home for Christmas as we hoped. I
had not heard from them for so long that I was afraid they were lost and did
not want to make any arrangements until I knew. Sebastian will be longing to
see you. Do come to us for Christmas if you can manage it, or as soon after
as you can.

Christmas with my uncle was an engagement I could not break, so I
travelled across country and joined the local train midway, expecting to
find Sebastian already established; there he was, however, in the next
carriage to mine, and when I asked him what he was doing Mr. Samgrass
replied with such glibness and at such length, telling rne of mislaid
luggage and of Cook's being shut over the holidays, that I was at once aware
of some other explanation which was being withheld.

Mr. Samgrass was not at ease; he maintained all the physical habits of
self-confidence, but guilt hung about him like stale cigar smoke, and in
Lady Marchmain's greeting of him I caught a note of anticipation. He kept up
a lively account of his tour during tea, and then Lady Marchmain drew him
away with her, upstairs, for a "little talk." I watched him go with
something near compassion; it was plain to anyone with a poker sense that
Mr. Samgrass held a very imperfect hand and, as I watched him at tea, I
began to suspect that he was not only bluffing but cheating. There was
something he must say, did not want to say, and did not quite know how to
say to Lady Marchmain about his doings over Christmas, but, more than that,
I guessed, there was a great deal he ought to say and had no intention at
all of saying about the whole Levantine tour.

"Come and see Nanny," said Sebastian.

"Please, can I come, too?" said Cordelia.

"Come on."

We climbed to the nursery in the dome. On the way Cordelia said:
"Aren't you at all pleased to be home?"

"Of course I'm pleased," said Sebastian.

"Well, you might show it a bit. I've been looking forward to it so
much."

Nanny did not particularly wish to be talked to; she liked visitors
best when they paid no attention to her and let her knit away, and watch
their faces and think of them as she had known them as small children; their
present goings-on did not signify much beside those early illnesses and
crimes.

"Well," she said, "you are looking peaky. I expect it's all that
foreign food doesn't agree with you. You must fatten up now you're back.
Looks as though you'd been having some late nights, too, by the look of your
eyes -- dancing, I suppose." (It was ever Nanny Hawkins's belief that the
upper classes spent most of their leisure evenings in the ballroom.) "And
that shirt wants darning. Bring it to me before it goes to the wash."

Sebastian certainly did look ill; five months had wrought the change of
years in him. He was paler, thinner, pouchy under the eyes, drooping in the
corners of his mouth, and he showed
the scars of a boil on the side of his chin; his voice seemed flatter
and his movements alternately listless and jumpy; he looked down-at-heel,
too, with clothes and hair, which formerly had been happily negligent, now
unkempt; worst of all, there was a wariness in his eye which I had surprised
there at Easter, and which now seemed habitual to him.

Restrained by this wariness I asked him nothing of himself, but told
him instead about my autumn and winter. I told him about my rooms in the Ile
St.-Louis and the art school, and how good the old teachers were and how bad
the students.

"They never go near the Louvre," I said, "or, if they do, it's only
because one of their absurd reviews has suddenly 'discovered' a master who
fits in with that month's aesthetic theory. Half of them are out to make a
popular splash like Picabia; the other half quite simply want to earn their
living doing advertisements for Vogue and decorating night clubs. And the
teachers still go on trying to make them paint like Delacroix."

"Charles," said Cordelia, "Modern Art is all bosh, isn't it?"

"Great bosh."

"Oh, I'm so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said
we shouldn't try and criticize what we didn't understand. Now I shall tell
her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her."

Presently it was time for Cordelia to go to her supper, and for
Sebastian and me to go down to the drawing-room for our cocktails.
Brideshead was there alone, but Wilcox followed on our heels to say to him:
"Her Ladyship would like to speak to you upstairs, my lord."

"That's unlike Mummy, sending for anyone. She usually lures them up
herself."

There was no sign of the cocktail tray. After a few minutes Sebastian
rang the bell. A footman answered. "Mr. Wilcox is upstairs with her
Ladyship."

"Well, never mind, bring in the cocktail things."

''Mr. Wilcox has the keys, my lord."

"Oh . . . well, send him in with them when he comes down."

We talked a little about Anthony Blanche -- "He had a beard in
Istanbul, but I made him take it off" -- and after ten minutes Sebastian
said: "Well, I don't want a cocktail, anyway; I'm off to my bath," and left
the room.

It was half-past seven; I supposed the others had gone to dress, but,
as I was going to follow them, I met Brideshead coming down.

"Just a moment, Charles, there's something I've got to explain. My
mother has given orders that no drinks are to be left in any of the rooms.
You'll understand why. If you want anything, ring and ask Wilcox -- only
better wait until you're alone. I'm sorry, but there it is."

"Is that necessary?"

"I gather very necessary. You may or may not have heard, Sebastian had
another outbreak as soon as he got back to England. He was lost over
Christmas. Mr. Samgrass only found him yesterday evening."

"I guessed something of the kind had happened. Are you sure this is the
best way of dealing with it?"

"It's my mother's way. Will you have a cocktail, now that he's gone
upstairs?"

"It would choke me."

I was always given the room I had on my first visit; it was next to
Sebastian's, and we shared what had once been a dressing-room and had been
changed to a bathroom twenty years back by the substitution for the bed of a
deep, copper, mahogany-framed bath, that was filled by pulling a brass lever
heavy as a piece of marine engineering; the rest of the room remained
unchanged; a coal fire always burned there in winter. I often think of that
bathroom -- the water colours dimmed by steam and the huge towel warming on
the back of the chintz armchair -- and contrast it with the uniform,
clinical little chambers, glittering with chromium plate and looking-glass,
which pass for luxury itf f the modern world.

I lay in the bath and then dried slowly by the fire, thinking all'' the
time of my friend's black home-coming. Then I put on my dressing-gown and
went to Sebastian's room, entering, as I always did, without knocking. He
was sitting by his fire half-dressed, and he started angrily when he heard
me and put down a tooth-glass.

"Oh, it's you. You gave me a fright."

"So you got a drink," I said.

"I don't know what you mean."

"For Christ's sake," I said, "you don't have to pretend with me! You
might offer me some."

"It's just something I had in my flask. I've finished it now."

"What's going on?"

"Nothing. A lot. I'll tell you sometime."

I dressed and called in for Sebastian, but found him still sitting 1 as
I had left him, half-dressed over his fire.

Julia was alone in the drawing-room.

"Well," I asked, "what's going on?"

"Oh, just another boring family potin. Sebastian got tight again, so
we've all got to keep an eye on him. It's too tedious."

"It's pretty boring for him, too."

"Well, it's his fault. Why can't he behave like anyone else? Talking of
keeping an eye on people, what about Mr. Samgrass? Charles, do you notice
anything at all fishy about that man?"

"Very fishy. Do you think your mother saw it?"

"Mummy only sees what suits her. She can't have the whole I household
under surveillance. I'm causing anxiety, too, you know."

"I didn't know," I said, adding humbly, "I've only just come from
Paris," so as to avoid giving the impression that any trouble she might be
in was not widely notorious.

It was an evening of peculiar gloom. We dined in the Painted Parlour.
Sebastian was late, and so painfully excited were we, that I think it was in
all our minds that he would make some sort of low-comedy entrance, reeling
and hiccuping. When he came it was, of course, with perfect propriety; he
apologized, sat in the empty place and allowed Mr. Samgrass to resume his
monologue, uninterrupted and, it seemed, unheard. Druses, patriarchs, icons,
bed-bugs, romanesque remains, curious dishes of goat and sheep s' eyes,
French and Turkish officials--all the catalogue of Near Eastern travel was
provided for our amusement.

I watched the champagne go round the table. When it came to Sebastian
he said: "I'll have whiskey, please," and I saw Wilcox glance over his head
to Lady Marchmain and saw her give a tiny, hardly perceptible nod. At
Brideshead they used small individual spirit decanters which held about a
quarter 6 a bottle, and were always placed, full, before anyone who asked
for it; the decanter which Wilcox put before Sebastian was half empty.
Sebastian raised it very deliberately, tilted it, looked at it, and then in
silence poured the liquor into his glass, where it covered two fingers. We
all began talking at once, all except Sebastian, so that for a moment Mr.
Samgrass found himself talking to no one, telling the candlesticks about the
Maronites; but soon we fell silent again, and he had the table until Lady
Marchmain and Julia left the room.

"Don't be long, Bridey," she said, at the door, as she always said, and
that evening we had no inclination to delay. Our glasses were filled with
port and the decanter at once taken from the room. We drank quickly and went
to the drawing-room, where Brideshead asked his mother to read, and she read
The Diary of a Nobody with great spirit until ten o'clock, when she closed
the book and said she was unaccountably tired, so tired that she would not
visit the chapel that night.

"Who's hunting to-morrow?" she asked.

"Cordelia," said Brideshead. "I'm taking that young horse of Julia's,
just to show him the hounds; I shan't keep him out more than a couple of
hours."

"Rex is arriving sometime," said Julia. "I'd better stay in to greet
him."

"Where's the meet?" said Sebastian suddenly.

"Just here at Flyte St. Mary."

"Then I'd like to hunt, please, if there's anything for me."

"Of course. That's delightful. I'd have asked you, only you used always
to complain so of being made to go out. You can have Tinkerbell. She's been
going very nicely this season."

Everyone was suddenly pleased that Sebastian wanted to hunt; it seemed
to undo some of the mischief of the evening. Brides-head rang the bell for
whiskey.

"Anyone else want any?"

"Bring me some, too," said Sebastian, and, though it was a footman this
time and not Wilcox, I saw the same exchange of glance and nod between the
servant and Lady Marchmain. Everyone had been warned. The two drinks were
brought in, poured out already in the glasses, like "doubles" at a bar, and
all our eyes followed the tray, as though we were dogs in a dining-room
smelling game.

The good humour engendered by Sebastian's wish to hunt persisted,
however; Brideshead wrote out a note for the stables, and we all went up to
bed quite cheerfully.

Sebastian got straight to bed; I sat by his fire and smoked a pipe. I
said: "I rather wish I was coming out with you tomorrow."

"Well," he said, "you wouldn't see much sport. I can tell you exactly
what I'm going to do. I shall leave Bridey at the first covert, hack over to
the nearest good pub and spend the entire day quietly soaking in the bar
parlour. If they treat me like a dipsomaniac, they can bloody well have a
dipsomaniac. I hate hunting, anyway."

"Well, I can't stop you."

"You can, as a matter of fact--by not giving me any money. They stopped
my banking account, you know, in the summer. It's been one of my chief
difficulties. I pawned my watch and cigarette case to ensure a happy
Christmas, so I shall have to come to you to-morrow for my day's expenses."

"I won't. You know perfectly well I can't."

"Won't you, Charles? Well, I daresay I shall manage on my own somehow.
I've got rather clever at that lately -- managing on my own. I've had to."

"Sebastian, what have you and Mr. Samgrass been up to?"

"He told you at dinner -- ruins and guides and mules, that's what
Sammy's been up to. We decided to go our own ways, that's all. Poor Sammy's
really behaved rather well so far. I hoped he would keep it up, but he seems
to have been very indiscreet about my happy Christmas. I suppose he thought
if he gave too good an account of me, he might lose his job as keeper.

"He makes quite a good thing out of it, you know. I don't mean that he
steals. I should think he's fairly honest about money. He certainly keeps an
embarrassing little note-book in which he puts down all the travellers'
cheques he cashes and what he spends it on, for Mummy and the lawyer to see.
But he wanted to go to all these places, and it's very convenient for him to
have me to take him in comfort, instead of going as dons usually do. The
only disadvantage was having to put up with my company, and we soon solved
that for him.

"We began very much on a Grand Tour, you know, with letters to all the
chief people everywhere, and stayed with the Military Governor at Rhodes and
the Ambassador at Constantinople. That was what Sammy had signed on for in
the first place. Of course, he had his work cut out keeping his eye on me,
but he warned all our hosts beforehand that I was not responsible."

"Sebastian."

"Not quite responsible--and as I had no money to spend I couldn't get
away very much. He even did the tipping for me, put the note into the man's
hand and jotted the amount down then and there in his note-book. My lucky
time was at Constantinople. I managed to make some money at cards one
evening when Sammy wasn't looking. Next day I gave him the slip and was
having a very happy hour in the bar at the Tokatlian when who should come in
but Anthony Blanche with a beard and a Jew boy. Anthony lent me a tenner
just before Sammy came panting in and recaptured me. After that I didn't get
a minute out of sight; the Embassy staff put us in the boat to Piraeus and
watched us sail away. But in Athens it was easy. I simply walked out of the
Legation one day after lunch, changed my money at Cook's, and asked about
sailings to Alexandria just to fox Sammy, then went down to the port in a
bus, found a sailor who spoke American, lay up with him till his ship
sailed, and popped back to Constantinople, and that was that.

"Anthony and the Jew boy shared a very nice, tumble-down house near the
bazaars. I stayed there till it got too cold, then Anthony and I drifted
South till we met Sammy by appointment in Syria three weeks ago."

"Didn't Sammy mind?"

"Oh, I think he quite enjoyed himself in his own ghastly way -- only of
course there was no more high life for him. I think he was a bit anxious at
first. I didn't want him to get the whole Mediterranean Fleet out, so I
cabled him from Constantinople that I was quite well and would he send money
to the Ottoman Bank. He came hopping over as soon as he got my cable. Of
course he was in a difficult position, because I'm o age and not certified
yet, so he couldn't have me arrested. He couldn't leave me to starve while
he was living on my money, and he couldn't tell Mummy without looking pretty
silly. I had him all ways, poor Sammy. My original idea had been to leave
him flat, but Anthony was very helpful about that, and said it was far
better to arrange things amicably; and he did arrange things very amicably.
So here I am."

"After Christmas."

"Yes, I was determined to have a happy Christmas."

"Did you?"

"I think so. I don't remember it much, and that's always a good sign,
isn't it?"

Next morning at breakfast Brideshead wore scarlet; Cordelia, very smart
herself, with her chin held high over her white stock, wailed when Sebastian
appeared in a tweed coat: "Oh, Sebastian, you can't come out like that. Do
go and change. You look so lovely in hunting clothes."

"Locked away somewhere. Gibbs couldn't find them."

"That's a fib. I helped get them out myself before you were called."

"Half the things are missing."

"It's so bad for local prestige. If you only knew how unsmart the
Strickland-Venableses are this year. They've even taken their grooms out of
top-hats."

It was quarter to eleven before the horses were brought round, but no
one else appeared downstairs; it was as though they were in hiding,
listening for Sebastian's retreating hooves before showing themselves.

Just as he was about to start, when the others were already mounted,
Sebastian beckoned me into the hall. On the table beside his hat, gloves,
whip and sandwiches, lay the flask he had put out to be filled. He picked it
up and shook it; it was empty.

"You see," he said, "I can't even be trusted that far. It's they who
are mad, not me. Now you can't refuse me money."

I gave him a pound.

"More," he said.

I gave him another and watched him mount and trot after his brother and
sister.

Then, as though it were his cue on the stage, Mr. Samgrass came to my
elbow, put an arm in mine, and led me back to the fire. He warmed his neat
little hands and then turned to warm his seat.

"So Sebastian is in pursuit of the fox," he said, "and our little
problem is shelved for an hour or two?"

I was not going to stand this from Mr. Samgrass.

"I heard all about your Grand Tour, last night," I said.

"Ah, I rather supposed you might have." Mr. Samgrass was undismayed,
relieved, it seemed, to have someone else in the know. "I did not harrow our
hostess with all that. After all, it turned out far better than one had any
right to expect. I did feel, however, that some explanation was due to her
of Sebastian's Christmas festivities. You may have observed last night that
there were certain precautions."

"I did."

"You thought them excessive? I am with you, particularly , as they tend
to compromise the comfort of our own little visit. I have seen Lady
Marchmain this morning. You must not suppose I am just out of bed. I have
had a little talk upstairs with our hostess. I think we may hope for some
relaxation to-night. Yesterday was not an evening that'any of us would wish
to have repeated. I earned less gratitude than I deserved, I think, for my
efforts to distract you."

It was repugnant to me to talk about Sebastian to Mr. Sam-grass, but I
was compelled to say: "I'm not sure that to-night would be the best time to
start the relaxation."

"But surely ? Why not to-night, after a day in the field under
Brideshead's inquisitorial eye? Could one choose better?"

"Oh, I suppose it's none of my business really."

"Nor mine strictly, now that he is safely home. Lady March-main did me
the honour of consulting me. But it is less Sebastian's welfare than our own
I have at heart at the moment. I need my third glass of port; I need that
hospitable tray in the library. And yet you specifically advise against it
to-night. I wonder why. Sebastian can come to no mischief to-day. For one
thing, he has no money. I happen to know. I saw to it. I even have his watch
and cigarette case upstairs. He will be quite harmless . . . as long as no
one is so wicked as to give him any . . . Ah, Lady Julia, good morning to
you, good morning. And how is the Peke this hunting morning?"

"Oh, the Peke's all right. Listen. I've got Rex Mottram coming here
to-day. We simply can't have another evening like last night. Someone must
speak to Mummy."

"Someone has. I spoke. I think it will be all right."

"Thank God for that. Are you painting to-day, Charles?"

It had been the custom that on every visit to Brideshead I painted a
medallion on the walls of the garden-room. The custom suited me well, for it
gave me a good reason to detach myself from the rest of the party; when the
house was full the garden-room became a rival to the nursery, where from
time to time people took refuge to complain about the others; thus without
effort I kept in touch with the gossip of the place. There were three
finished medallions now, each rather pretty in its way, but unhappily each
in a different way, for my tastes had changed and I had become more
dexterous in the eighteen months since the series was begun. As a decorative
scheme, they were a failure. That morning was typical of the many mornings
when I had found the garden-room a sanctuary. There I went and was soon at
work. Julia came with me to see me started and we talked, inevitably, of
Sebastian.

"Don't you get bored with the subject?" she asked. "Why must everyone
make such a Thing about it?"

"Just because we're fond of him."

"Well, I'm fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he'd
behave like anybody else. I've grown up with one family skeleton, you know
-- Papa. Not to be talked of before the servants, not to be talked of before
us when we were children. If Mummy is going to start making a skeleton out
of Sebastian, it's too much. If he wants to be always tight, why doesn't he
go to Kenya or somewhere where it doesn't matter?"

"Why does it matter less being unhappy in Kenya than anywhere else?"

"Don't pretend to be stupid, Charles. You understand perfectly."

"You mean there won't be so many embarrassing situations for you? Well,
all I was trying to say was that I'm afraid there may be an embarrassing
situation to-night if Sebastian gets the chance. He's in a bad mood."

"Oh, a day's hunting will put that all right."

It was touching to see the faith which everybody put in the value of a
day's hunting. Lady Marchmain, who looked in on me during the morning,
mocked herself for it with that delicate irony for which she was famous.

"I've always detested hunting," she said, "because it seems to produce
a particularly gross kind of caddishness in the nicest people. I don't know
what it is, but the moment they dress np and get on a horse they become like
a lot of Prussians. And so boastful after it. The evenings I've sat at
dinner appalled at seeing the men and women I know, transformed into
half-awake, self-opinionated, monomaniac louts! . . . And yet, you know --
it must be something derived from centuries ago -- my heart is quite light
to-day to think of Sebastian out with them. 'There's nothing wrong with him
really,' I say, "he's gone hunting' -- as though it were an answer to
prayer."

She asked me about my life in Paris. I told her of my rooms with their
view of the river and the towers of Notre Dame. "I'm hoping Sebastian will
come and stay with me when I go back."

"It would have been lovely," said Lady Marchmain, sighing as though for
the unattainable.

"I hope he's coming to stay with me in London."

"Charles, you know it isn't possible. London's the worst place.

Even Mr. Samgrass couldn't hold him there. We have no secrets in this
house. He was lost, you know, all through Christmas. Mr. Samgrass only found
him because he couldn't pay his bill in the place where he was, so they
telephoned our house. It's too horrible. No, London is impossible; if he
can't behave himself here, with us ... We must keep him happy and healthy
here for a bit, hunting, and then send him abroad again with Mr. Samgrass. .
. . You see, I've been through all this before."

The retort was there, unspoken, well-understood by both of us--You
couldn't keep him; he ran away. So will Sebastian. Because they both hate
you.

A horn and the huntsman's cry sounded in the valley below us.

"There they go now, drawing the home woods. I hope he's having a good
day."

Thus with Julia and Lady Marchmain I reached deadlock, not because we
failed to understand one another, but because we understood too well. With
Brideshead, who came home to luncheon and talked to me on the subject--for
the subject was everywhere in the house like a fire deep in the hold of a
ship, below the water-line, black and red in the darkness, coming to light
Hi acrid wisps of smoke that curled up the ladders, crept between decks,
oozed under hatches, hung in wreaths on the flats, billowed suddenly from
the scuttles and air pipes--with Brideshead, I was in a strange world, a
dead world to me, in a moon-landscape of barren lava, on a plateau where the
air struck chill, a high place of unnaturally clear eyes and of toiling
lungs.

He said: "I hope it is dipsomania. That is simply a great misfortune
that we must all help him bear. What I used to fear was that he just got
drunk deliberately when he liked and because he liked."

"That's exactly what he did--what we both did. It's what he does with
me now. I can keep him to that, if only your mother would trust me. If you
wqrry him with keepers and cures he'll be a physical wreck in a few years."

"There's nothing wrong in being a physical wreck, you know. There's no
moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live
to walk ten miles at eighty."

"Wrong" I said. "Moral obligation -- now you're back on religion
again."

"I never left it," said Brideshead.

"D'you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a
Catholic, 1 should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured.
You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark
nonsense."

"It's odd you should say that. I've heard it before from other people.
It's one of the many reasons why I don't think I should make a good priest.
It's something in the way my mind works I suppose. I have to turn a thing
round and round, like a piece of ivory in a Chinese puzzle, until -- click!
--it fits into place -- but by that time it's upside down to everyone else.
But it's the same bit of ivory, you know."

At luncheon Julia had no thoughts except for her guest who was coming
that day. She drove to the station to meet him and brought him home to tea.

"Mummy, do look at Rex's Christmas present."

It was a small tortoise with Julia's initials set in diamonds in the
living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on
the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over
a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its
withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of
those needle-hooks of experience which catch the attention when larger
matters are at stake, and remain in the mind when they are forgotten, so
that years later it is a bit of gilding, or a certain smell, or the tone of
a clock's striking which recalls one to a tragedy.

"Dear me," said Lady Marchmain. "I wonder if it eats the same sort of
things as an ordinary tortoise."

"What will you do when it's dead?" asked Mr. Samgrass. "Can you have
another tortoise fitted into the shell?"

Rex had been told about the problem of Sebastian--he could scarcely
have endured in that atmosphere without -- and had a solution pat. He
propounded it cheerfully and openly at tea, and after a day of whispering it
was a relief to hear the thing discussed. "Send him to Borethus at Zurich.
Borethus is the man. He works miracles every day at that sanatorium of his.
You know how Charlie Kilcartney used to drink."

"No," said Lady Marchmain, with that sweet irony of hers. "No, I'm
afraid I don't know how Charlie Kilcartney drank."

Julia, hearing her lover mocked, frowned at the tortoise, but Rex
Mottram was impervious to such delicate mischief.

"Two wives despaired of him," he said. "When he got engaged to Sylvia,
she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it
worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn't touched
a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him."

"Why did she do that?"

"Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But
that's not really the point of the story."

"No, I suppose not. In fact, I suppose, really, it's meant to be an
encouraging story."

Julia scowled at her jewelled tortoise.

"He takes sex cases, too, you know."

"Oh dear, what very peculiar friends poor Sebastian will make in
Zurich."

"He's booked up for months ahead, but I think he'd find room if I asked
him. I could telephone him from here to-night."

(In his kindest moments Rex displayed a kind of hectoring zeal as if he
were thrusting a vacuum cleaner on an unwilling housewife.).

"We'll think about it."

And we were thinking about it when Cordelia returned from hunting.

"Oh, Julia, what's that? How beastly"

"It's Rex's Christmas present."

"Oh, sorry. I'm always putting my foot in it. But how cruel! It must
have hurt frightfully."

"They can't feel."

"How d'you know? Bet they can."

She kissed her mother, whom she had not seen that day, shook hands with
Rex, and rang for eggs.

"I had one tea at Mrs. Barney's, where I telephoned for the car, but
I'm still hungry. It was a spiffing day. Jean Strickland-Venables fell in
the mud. We ran from Bengers to Upper Eastrey without a check. I reckon
that's five miles, don't you, Bridey?"

"Three."

"Not as he ran. . . ." Between mouthfuls of scrambled egg she told us
about the hunt. . . . "You should have seen Jean when she came out of the
mud."

"Where's Sebastian?"

"He's in disgrace." The words, in that clear, child's voice, had the
ring of a bell tolling, but she went on: "Coming out in that beastly
rat-catcher coat and mean little tie like something from Captain Morvin's
Riding Academy. I just didn't recognize him at the meet, and I hope nobody
else did. Isn't he back? I expect he got lost."

When Wilcox came to clear the tea, Lady Marchmain asked: "No sign of
Lord Sebastian?"

"No, my lady."

"He must have stopped for tea with someone. How very unlike him."

Half an hour later, when Wilcox brought in the cocktail tray, he said:
"Lord Sebastian has just rung up to be fetched from South Twining."

"South Twining? Who lives there?"

"He was speaking from the hotel, my lady."

"South Twining?" said Cordelia. "Goodness, he did get lost!"

When he arrived he was flushed and his eyes were feverishly bright; I
saw that he was two-thirds drunk.

"Dear boy," said Lady Marchmain. "How nice to see you looking so well
again. Your day in the open has done you good. The drinks are on the table;
do help yourself."

There was nothing unusual in her speech but the fact of her saying it.
Six months ago it would not have been said.

"Thanks," said Sebastian. "I will."

A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock
of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another
like it could be borne -- that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian
at dinner that night, seeing his clouded eye and groping movements, hearing
his thickened voice breaking in, ineptly, after long brutish silences. When
at length Lady Marchmain and Julia and the servants left us, Brideshead
said: "You'd best go to bed, Sebastian."

"Have some port first."

"Yes, have some port if you want it. But don't come into the
drawing-room."

"Too bloody drunk," said Sebastian nodding heavily. "Like olden times.
Gentlemen always too drunk join ladies in olden times."

("And yet, you know, it wasn't" said Mr. Samgrass, trying to be chatty
with me about it afterwards, "it wasn't at all like olden times. I wonder
where the difference lies. The lack of good humour? The lack of
companionship? You know I think he must have been drinking by himself
to-day. Where did he get the money?")

"Sebastian's gone up," said Brideshead when we reached the
drawing-room.

"Yes? Shall I read?"

Julia and Rex played bezique; the tortoise, teased by the Pekinese,
withdrew into his shell; Lady Marchmain read The Diary of a Nobody aloud
until, quite early, she said it was time for bed.

"Can't I stay up and play a little longer, Mummy? Just three games?"

"Very well, darling. Come in and see me before you go to bed. I shan't
be asleep."

It was plain to Mr. Samgrass and me that Julia and Rex wanted to be
left alone, so we went, too; it was not plain to Brideshead, who settled
down to read The Times, which he had not yet seen that day. Then, going to
our side of the house, Mr. Samgrass said: "It wasn't at all like olden
times."

Next morning I said to Sebastian: "Tell me honestly, do you want me to
stay on here?"

"No, Charles, I don't believe I do."

"I'm no help?"

"No help."

So I went to make my excuses to his mother.

"There's something I must ask you, Charles. Did you give Sebastian
money yesterday?"

"Yes."

"Knowing how he was likely to spend it?"

"Yes."

"I don't understand it," she said. "I simply don't understand how
anyone can be so callously wicked."

She paused, but I do not think she expected any answer; there was
nothing I could say unless I were to start all over again on that familiar,
endless argument.

"I'm not going to reproach you," she said. "God knows it's not for me
to reproach anyone. Any failure in my children is my failure. But I don't
understand it. I don't understand how you can have been so nice in so many
ways, and then do something so wantonly cruel. I don't understand how we all
liked you somuch. Did you hate us all the time? I don't understand how we
deserved it."

I was unmoved; there was no part of me remotely touched by her
distress. It was as I had often imagined being expelled from school. I
almost expected to hear her say: "I have already written to inform your
unhappy father." But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what
promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of
myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of
it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the
spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay
their way to the nether world.

"I shall never go back," I said to myself.

A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in
Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.

I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh
sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving
forests of the ocean bed.

I had left behind me -- what ? Youth ? Adolescence ? Romance ? The
conjuring stuff of these things, "the Young Magician's Compendium," that
neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard
balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be
drawn into a hollow candle.
,
"I have left behind illusion," I said to myself. "Henceforth I live in
a world of three dimensions -- with the aid of my five senses."

I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car
turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all
about me at the end of the avenue.

Thus I returned to Paris, and to the friends I had found there and the
habits I had formed. I thought I should hear no mote of Brideshead, but life
has few separations as sharp as that. It was not three weeks before I
received a letter in Cordelia's Frenchified convent hand: --

Darling Charles [she'said],

I was so very miserable when you went. You might have come and said
good-bye I
I heard all about your disgrace, and I am writing to say that I am in
disgrace, too. I sneaked Wilcox's keys and got whiskey for Sebastian and got
caught. He did seem to want it so. And there was (and is) an awful row.

Mr. Samgrass has gone (good!), and I think he is a bit in disgrace,
too, but I don't know why.

Mr. Mottram is very popular with Julia (bad!) and is taking Sebastian
away (bad! bad!) to a German doctor.

Julia's tortoise disappeared. We think it buried itself, as they do, so
there goes a packet (expression of Mr. Mottram's).

I am very well.

With love from,

cordelia

It must have been about a week after receiving this letter that I
returned to my rooms one afternoon to find Rex waiting for me.

It was about four, for the light began to fail early in the studio at
that time of year. I could see by the expression on the concierge's face,
when she told me I had a visitor waiting that there was something impressive
upstairs; she had a vivid gift of expressing differences of age or
attraction; this was the expression which meant someone of the first
consequence, and Rex indeed seemed to justify it, as I found him in his big
travelling coat, filling the window that looked over the river.

"Well," I said. "Well."

"I came this morning. They told me where you usually lunched but I
couldn't see you there. Have you got him?"

I did not need to ask whom. "So he's given you the slip, too?"

"We got here last night and were going on to Zurich to-day. I left him
at the Lotti after dinner, as he said he was tired, and went round to the
Travellers' for a game."

I noticed how, even with me, he was making excuses, as though
rehearsing his story for re-telling elsewhere. "As he said he was tired" was
good. I could not well imagine Rex letting a half-tipsy boy interfere with
his cards. "So you came back and found him gone ?" "Not at all. I wish I
had. I found him sitting up for me. I had a run of luck at the Travellers'
and cleaned up a packet. Sebastian pinched the lot while I was asleep. All
he left me was two first-class tickets to Zurich stuck in the edge of the
looking-glass. I had. nearly three hundred quid, blast him!"

"And now he may be almost anywhere."

"Anywhere. You're not hiding him by any chance?"

"No. My dealings with that family are over."

"I think mine are just beginning," said Rex. "I say, I've got a lot to
talk about, and I promised a chap at the Travellers' I'd give him his
revenge this afternoon. Won't you dine with me?"

"Yes. Where?"

"I usually go to Ciro's."

"Why not Paillard's?"

"Never heard of it. I'm paying you know."

"I know you are. Let me order dinner."

"Well, all right. What's the place again?" I wrote it down for him. "Is
it the sort of place you see native life?"

"Yes, you might call it that."

"Well, it'll be an experience. Order something good."

"That's my intention."

I was there twenty minutes before Rex. If I had to spend an evening
with him, it should, at any rate, be in my own way. I remember the dinner
well -- soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a
caneton la presse, a lemon souffle. At the last minute, fearing that the
whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviare aux blinis. And for wine
I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with
the duck, a Clos de Bre of 1904.

Living was easy in France then; with the exchange as it was, my
allowance went a long way and I did not live frugally. It was very seldom,
however, that I had a dinner like this, and I felt well disposed to Rex,
when at last he arrived and gave up his hat and coat with the air of not
expecting to see them again. He looked round the sombre little place with
suspicion, as though hoping to see apaches or a drinking party of students.
All he saw was four senators with napkins tucked under their beards eating
in absolute silence. I could imagine him telling his commercial friends
later: "... interesting fellow I know; an art student living in Paris. Took
me to a funny little restaurant -- sort of place you'd pass without looking
at -- where there was some of the best food I ever ate. There were half a
dozen senators there, too, which shows you it was the right place. Wasn't at
all cheap either."

"Any sign of Sebastian?" he asked.

"There won't be," I said, "until he needs money."

"It's a bit thick, going off like that. I was rather hoping that if I
made a good job of him, it might do me a bit of good in another direction."

He plainly wished to talk of his own affairs; they could wait, I
thought, for the hour of tolerance and repletion, for the cognac; they could
wait until the attention was blunted and one could listen with half the mind
only; now in the keen moment when the maitre d'hotel was turning the blinis
over in the pan, and, in the background, two humbler men were preparing the
press, we would talk of myself.

"Did you stay long at Brideshead? Was my name mentioned after I left?"

"Was it mentioned? I got sick of the sound of it, old boy. The
Marchioness got what she called a 'bad conscience' about you. She piled it
on pretty thick, I gather, at your last meeting."

" 'Callously wicked', 'wantonly cruel.'"

"Hard words."

" 'It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon
pie and eat you up.'"

"Eh?"

"A saying."

"Ah." The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed separating each
glaucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.

"I like a bit of chopped onion with mine," said Rex. "Chap-who-knew
told me it brought out the flavour."

"Try it without first," I said. "And tell me more news of myself."

"Well, of course, Greenacre, or whatever he was called -- the snooty
don -- he came a cropper. That was well received by all.; He was the
blue-eyed boy for a day or two after you left. Shouldn't wonder if he hadn't
put the old girl up to pitching you out. He was always being pushed down our
throats, so in the end Julia couldn't bear it any more and gave him
away."

"Julia did?"

"Well, he'd begun to stick his nose into our affairs you see. Julia
spotted he was a fake, and one afternoon when Sebastian was tight--he was
tight most of the time -- she got the whole story of the Grand Tour out of
him. And that was the end of Mr. Samgrass. After that the Marchioness began
to think she might have been a bit rough with you."

"And what about the row with Cordelia?"

"That eclipsed everything. That kid's a walking marvel -- she'd been
feeding Sebastian whiskey right under our noses for a week. We couldn't
think where he was getting it. That's when the
Marchioness finally crumbled."

The soup was delicious after the rich blinis--hot, thin, bitter,
frothy.

"I'll tell you a thing, Charles, that Ma Marchmain hasn't let on to
anyone. She's a very sick woman. Might peg out any minute. George Anstruther
saw her in the autumn and put it at two years."

"How on earth do you know?"

"It's the kind of thing I hear. With the way her family are going on at
the moment, I wouldn't give her a year. I know just the man for her in
Vienna. He put Sonia Bamfshire on her feet when everyone including
Anstruther had despaired of her. But Ma Marchmain won't do anything about
it. I suppose it's something to do with her crack-brain religion, not to
take care of the body."

The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. We
ate to the music of the press--the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood
and marrow, the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast. There
was a pause here of a quarter of an hour, while I drank the first glass of
the Clos de Bere and Rex smoked his first cigarette. He leaned back, blew a
cloud of smoke across the table and remarked, "You know, the food here isn't
half bad; someone ought to take this place up and make something of it."

Presently he began again on the Marchmains: --

"I'll tell you another thing, too -- they'll get a jolt financially
soon if they don't look out."

"I thought they were enormously rich."

"Well, they are rich in the way people are who just let their money sit
quiet. Everyone of that sort is poorer than they were in 1914, and the
Flytes don't seem to realize it. I reckon those lawyers who manage their
affairs find it convenient to give them all the cash they want and no
questions asked. Look at the way they live--Brideshead and Marchmain House
both going full blast, pack of foxhounds, no rents raised, nobody sacked,
dozens of old servants doing damn all, being waited on by other servants,
and then besides all that there's the old boy setting up a separate
establishment -- and setting it up on no humble scale either. D'you
know how much they're overdrawn?"

"Of course I don't."

"Jolly near a hundred thousand in London. I don't know what they owe
elsewhere. Well, that'siquite a packet, you know, for people who aren't
using their money. Ninety-eight thousand last November. It's the kind of
thing I hear."

Those were the kind of things he heard, mortal illness and debt, I
thought.

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy
resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been
strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the
stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and
triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex
knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his.
By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St.
James's Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in
the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of
its prime and, that day, as at Paillard's with Rex Mottram years before, it
whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.

"I don't mean that they'll be paupers; the old boy will always be good
for an odd thirty thousand a year, but there'll be a shake-up coming soon,
and when the upper classes get the wind up, their first idea is usually to
cut down on the girls. I'd like to get the little matter of a marriage
settlement through, before it comes."

We had by no means reached the cognac, but here we were on the subject
of himself. In twenty minutes I should have been ready for all he had to
tell. I closed my mind to him as best I could and gave myself to the food
before me, but sentences came breaking in on my happiness, recalling me to
the harsh, acquisitive world which Rex inhabited. He wanted a woman; he
"wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her cheap; that was what it
amounted to.

"... Ma Marchmain doesn't like me. Well, I'm not asking her to. It's
not her I want to marry. She hasn't the guts to say openly: 'You're not a
gentleman. You're an adventurer from the Colonies.' She says we live in
different atmospheres. That's all right, but Julia happens to fancy my
atmosphere. . . . Then she brings up religion. I've nothing against her
Church; we don't take much account of Catholics in Canada, but that's
different; in Europe you've got some very posh Catholics. All right, Julia
can go to church whenever she wants to. I shan't try and stop her. It
doesn't mean two pins to her, as a matter of fact, but I like a girl to have
religion. What's more, she can bring the children up Catholic. I'll make all
the 'promises' they want. . . . Then there's my past. 'We know so little
about you.' She knows a sight too much. You may know I've been tied up with
someone else for a year or two."

I knew; everyone who had ever met Rex knew of his affair with Brenda
Champion; knew also that it was from this affair that he derived everything
which distinguished him from every other stock-jobber: his golf with the
Prince of Wales, his membership of Bratt's, even his smoking-room
comradeship at the House of Commons; for, when he first appeared there, his
party chiefs did not say of him, "Look, there is the promising young member
for North Gridley who spoke so well on Rent Restrictions." They said:
"There's Brenda Champion's latest"; it had done him a great deal of good
with men; women he could usually charm.

"Well, that's all washed up. Ma Marchmain was too delicate to mention
the subject; all she said was that I had 'notoriety.' Well, what does she
expect as a son-in-law--a sort of half-baked monk like Brideshead? Julia
knows all about the other thing; if she doesn't care, I don't see it's
anyone else's business."

After the duck came a salad of watercress and chicory in a faint mist
of chives. I tried to think only of the salad. I succeeded for a time in
thinking only of the souffle. Then came the cognac and the proper hour for
these confidences.

"... Julia's just rising twenty. I don't want to wait till she's of
age. Anyway, I don't want to marry without doing the thing properly . . .
nothing hole-in-corner. ... I have to see she isn't jockeyed out of her
proper settlement. I've got to the time now when 'notoriety,' as Ma
Marchmain calls it, has done its bit. I need setting up solidly. You know --
St. Margaret's, Westminster, or Whatever Catholics have, royalty and the
Prime Minister photographed going in ... and, afterwards 'the beautiful Lady
Julia Mottram, leading young political hostess' . . . nothing
hole-in-corner. So as the Marchioness won't play ball I'm off to see the old
man and square him. I gather he's likely to agree to anything he knows will
upset her. He's at Monte Carlo at the moment. I'd planned to go on there
after dropping Sebastian off at Zurich. That's why it's such a bloody bore
having lost him."

The cognac was not to Rex's taste. It was clear and pale and it came to
us in a bottle free from grime and Napoleonic cyphers. It was only a year or
two older than Rex and lately bottled. They gave it to us in very thin
tulip-shaped glasses of modest size.

"Brandy's one of the things I do know a bit about," said Rex. "This is
a bad colour. What's more, I can't taste it in this thimble."

They brought him a balloon the size of his head. He made them warm it
over the spirit lamp.

Then he rolled the splendid spirit round, buried his face in the fumes,
and pronounced it the sort of stuff he put soda in at home.

So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and
mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex's sort.

"That's the stuff," he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it
left dark rings round the sides of his glass. "They've always got some
tucked away, but they won't bring it out unless you
make a fuss. Have some."

"I'm quite happy with this."

"Well, it's a crime to drink it, if you don't really appreciate it." He
lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in
another world than his. We both were happy.

He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great
distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night.

At the beginning of May the engagement was announced. I saw the notice
in the Continental Daily Mail and assumed that Rex had "squared the old
man." But things did not go as expected. The next news I had of them was in
the middle of June, when I read that they had been married very quietly at
the Savoy Chapel. No royalty was present; nor was the Prime Minister; nor
were any of Julia's family. It sounded like a "hole-in-the-corner" affair,
but it was not for several years that I heard the full story.