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."
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