tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53432577246605032952024-02-20T11:15:25.021+01:00brideshead revisitedI am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the startAlbertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-82840255253238337272008-08-06T14:11:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:12:43.928+02:00Brideshead Revisited: EpilogueEpilogue<br /><br />"the worst place we've struck yet," said the commanding officer; "no<br />facilities, no amenities, and Brigade sitting right on top of us. There's<br />one pub in Flyte St. Mary with capacity for about twenty -- that, of course,<br />will be out of bounds for officers; there's a Naafi in the camp area. I hope<br />to run transport once a week to Melstead Carbury. Marchmain is ten miles<br />away and damn-all when you get there. It will therefore be the first concern<br />of company officers to organize recreation for their men. M.O., I want you<br />to take a look at the lakes to see if they're fit for bathing."<br /><br />"Very good, sir."<br /><br />"Brigade expects us to clean up the house for them. I should have<br />thought some of those half-shaven scrimshankers I see lounging round<br />Headquarters might have saved us the trouble; however . . . Ryder, you will<br />find a fatigue party of fifty and report to the quartering commandant at the<br />house at 10-45 hours; he'll show you what we're taking over."<br /><br />"Very good, sir."<br /><br />"Our predecessors do not seem to have been very enterprising. The<br />valley has great potentialities for an assault course and a mortar range.<br />Weapon-training officer, make a recce this morn-' ing and get something laid<br />on before Brigade arrives."<br /><br />"Very good, sir."<br /><br />"I'm going out myself with the adjutant to recce training areas. Anyone<br />happen to know this district?"<br /><br />I said nothing.<br /><br />"That's all then, get cracking."<br /><br />"Wonderful old place in its way," said the quartering commandant; "pity<br />to knock it about too much."<br /><br />He was an old, retired, re-appointed lieutenant-colonel from some miles<br />away. We met in the space before the main doors, where I had my half-company<br />fallen-in, waiting for orders.<br /><br />"Come in. I'll soon show you over. It's a great warren of a place, but<br />we've only requisitioned the ground floor and half a dozen bedrooms.<br />Everything else upstairs is still private property, mostly cram full of<br />furniture; you never saw such stuff, priceless some of it.<br /><br />"There's a caretaker and a couple of old servants live at the top --<br />they won't be any trouble to you -- and a blitzed R.C. padre whom Lady Julia<br />gave a home to -- jittery old bird, but no trouble. He's opened the chapel;<br />that's in bounds for the troops; surprising lot use it, too.<br /><br />"The place belongs to Lady Julia Flyte, as she calls herself now. She<br />was married to Mottram, the Minister of whatever-it-is. She's abroad in some<br />woman's service, and I try to keep an eye on things for her. Queer thing the<br />old marquis leaving everything to her -- rough on the boys.<br />"Now this is where the last lot put the clerks; plenty of room, anyway.<br />I've had the walls and fireplaces boarded up you see -- valuable old work<br />underneath. Hullo, someone seems to have been making a beast of himself<br />here; destructive beggars, soldiers are! Lucky we spotted it, or it would<br />have been charged to you chaps.<br /><br />"This is another good-sized room, used to be full of tapestry.., I'd<br />advise you to use this for conferences."<br /><br />"I'm only here to clean up, sir. Someone from Brigade will allot the<br />rooms."<br /><br />"Oh, well, you've got an easy job. Very decent fellows the last lot.<br />They shouldn't have done that to the fireplace though. How did they manage<br />it? Looks solid enough. I wonder if it can be mended?<br /><br />"I expect the brigadier will take this for his office; the last did.<br />It's got a lot of painting that can't be moved, done on the walla.<br /><br />As you see, I've covered it up as best I can, but soldiers get through<br />anything -- as the brigadier's done in the corner. There was another painted<br />room, outside under the pillars -- modern work but, if you ask me, the<br />prettiest in the place; it was the signal office and they made absolute hay<br />of it; rather a shame.<br /><br />"This eye-sore is what they used as the mess; that's why I didn't cover<br />it up; not that it would matter much if it did get damaged; always reminds<br />me of one of the costlier knocking-shops, you know--'Maison Japonaise' . . .<br />and this was the ante-room . . ."<br /><br />It did not take us long to make our tour of the echoing rooms. Then we<br />went outside on the terrace.<br /><br />"Those are die other ranks' latrines and wash-house; can't think why<br />they built them just there; it was done before I took the job over. All this<br />used to be cut off from the front. We laid the road through the trees<br />joining it up with the main drive; unsightly but very practical; awful lot<br />of transport comes in and out; cuts the place up, too. Look where one<br />careless devil went smack through the box-hedge and carried away all that<br />balustrade; did it with a three-ton lorry, too; you'd think he had a<br />Churchill tank at least.<br /><br />"That fountain is rather a tender spot with our landlady; the young<br />officers used to lark about in it on guest nights and it was looking a bit<br />the worse for wear, so I wired it in and turned the water off. Looks a bit<br />untidy now; all the drivers throw their cigarette-ends and the remains of<br />the sandwiches there, and you can't get to it to clean it up, since I put<br />the wire round it. Florid great thing, isn't it? ...<br /><br />"Well, if you've seen everything I'll push off. Good day to you."<br /><br />His driver threw a cigarette into the dry basin of the fountain;<br />saluted and opened the door of the car. I saluted and the quartering<br />commandant drove away through the new, metalled gap in the lime-trees.<br /><br />"Hooper," I said, when I had seen my men started, "do you think I can<br />safely leave you in charge of the work-party for half an hour?"<br /><br />"I was just wondering where we could scrounge some tea."<br /><br />"For Christ's sake," I said, "they've only just begun work."<br /><br />"They're awfully browned-off."<br /><br />"Keep them at it."<br /><br />"Rightyoh."<br /><br />I did not spend long hi the desolate ground-floor rooms, but went<br />upstairs and wandered down the familiar corridors, trying doors that were<br />locked, opening doors into rooms piled to the ceiling with furniture. At<br />length I met an old housemaid carrying a cup of tea. "Why," she said, "isn't<br />it Mr. Ryder ?"<br /><br />"It is. I was wondering when I should meet sorheone I knew."<br /><br />"Mrs. Hawkins is up in her old room. I was just taking her some tea."<br /><br />"I'll take it for you," I said, and passed through the baize doors, up<br />the uncarpeted stairs, to the nursery.<br /><br />Nanny Hawkins did not recognize me until I spoke, and my arrival threw<br />her into some confusion; it was not until I had been sitting some time by<br />her fireside that she recovered her old calm. She, who had changed so little<br />in all the years I knew her, had lately become greatly aged. The changes of<br />the last years had come too late in her life to be accepted and understood;<br />her sight was failing, she told me, and she could see only the coarsest<br />needlework. Her speech, sharpened by years of gentle conversation, had<br />reverted now to the soft, peasant tones of its origin.<br /><br />". . . only myself here and the two girls and poor Father Membling who<br />was blown up, not a roof to his head nor a stick of furniture till Julia<br />took him in with the kind heart she's got, , and his nerves something<br />shocking. . . . Lady Brideshead, too, who I ought by rights to call her<br />Ladyship now, but it doesn't come natural, it was the same with her. First,<br />when Julia and Cordelia left to the war, she came here with the two boys and<br />then the military turned them out, so they went to London, nor they hadn't<br />been in their house not a month, and Bridey away with the yeomanry the same<br />as his poor Lordship, when they were blown up too, everything gone, all the<br />furniture she brought here and kept in the coach-house. Then she had another<br />house outside London, and the military took that, too, and there she is now,<br />when I last heard, in a hotel at the seaside, which isn't the same as your<br />own home, is it? It doesn't seem right.<br /><br />". . . Did you listen to Mr. Mottram last night? Very nasty he was<br />about Hitler. I said to the girl Effie who does for me: 'If Hitler was<br />listening, and if he understands English, which I doubt, he must feel very<br />Small.' Who would have thought of Mr. Mottram doing so well? And so many of<br />his friends, too, that used to stay here? I said to Mr. Wilcox, who comes to<br />see me regular on the bus from Melstead twice a month, which is very good of<br />him and I appreciate it, I said: 'We were entertaining angels unawares,'<br />because Mr. Wilcox never liked Mr. Mottram's friends, which I never saw,,<br />but used to hear about from all of you, nor Julia didn't like them, but<br />they've done very well, haven't they?"<br /><br />At last I asked her: "Have you heard from Julia?"<br /><br />"From Cordelia, only last week, and they're together still as they have<br />been all the time, and Julia sent me love at the bottoni of the page.<br />They're both very well, though they couldn't say where, but Father Membling<br />said, reading between the lines, it was Palestine, which is where Bridey's<br />yeomanry is, so that's very nice for them all. Cordelia said they were<br />looking forward to coming home after the war, which I am sure we all are,<br />though whether I live to see it, is another story."<br /><br />I stayed with her for half an hour, and left promising to return often.<br />When I reached the hall I found no sign of work and Hooper looking guilty.<br /><br />"They had to go off to draw the bed-straw. I didn't know till Sergeant<br />Block told me. I don't know whether they're coming back."<br /><br />"Don't know? What orders did you give?"<br /><br />"Well, I told Sergeant Block to bring them back if he thought it was<br />worth while; I mean if there was time before dinner."<br /><br />It was nearly twelve. "You've been hotted again, Hooper. That straw was<br />to be drawn any time before six to-night."<br /><br />"Oh Lor; sorry Ryder. Sergeant Block -- "<br /><br />"It's my own fault for going away. . . . Fall-in the same party<br />immediately after dinner, bring them back here and keep them here till the<br />job's done."<br /><br />"Rightyoh. I say, did you say you knew this place before?"<br /><br />"Yes, very well. It belongs to friends of mine," and as I said the<br />words they sounded as odd in my ears as Sebastian's had done, when, instead<br />of saying, "It is my home," he said, "It is where my family live."<br /><br />"It doesn't seem to make any sense--one family in a place this size.<br />What's the use of it?"<br /><br />"Well, I suppose Brigade are finding it useful."<br /><br />"But that's not what it was built for, is it?"<br /><br />"No," I said, "not what it was built for. Perhaps that's one of the<br />pleasures of building, like having a son, wondering how he'll grow up. I<br />don't know; I never built anything, and I forfeited the right to watch my<br />son grow up. I'm homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless, Hooper." He<br />looked to see if I was being funny, decided that I was, and laughed. "Now go<br />back to camp, keep out of the C.O.'s way, if he's back from his recce, and<br />don't let on to anyone that we've made a nonsense of the morning."<br /><br />"Okey, Ryder."<br /><br />There was one part of the house I had not yet visited, and I went there<br />now. The chapel showed no ill-effects of its long neglect; the art-nouveau<br />paint was as fresh and bright as ever; the art-nouveau lamp burned once more<br />before the altar. I said a prayer, an ancient, newly learned form of words,<br />and left, turning towards the camp; and as I walked back, and the cookhouse<br />bugle sounded ahead of me, I thought: --<br /><br />The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend;<br />they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year,<br />generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the<br />great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden<br />frost, came the -age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all<br />brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is<br />vanity.<br /><br />And yet, I thought, stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where<br />the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call and were sounding<br />Pic-em-up, Pic-em-up, hot potatoes -- and yet that is not the last word; it<br />is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.<br /><br />Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out<br />of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played;<br />something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame -- a<br />beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper<br />doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs,<br />which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from<br />home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit<br />but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning,<br />burning anew among the old stones.<br /><br />I quickened my pace and reached the hut which served us for our<br />ante-room.<br /><br />"You're looking unusually cheerful to-day," said the second-in-command.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />chagford, February-June, 1944<br /><br /><br />THE ENDAlbertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-72279696412502811332008-08-06T14:08:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:11:10.695+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book II. A twitch upon the thread. Chapter FiveChapter Five<br /><br />my divorce case, or rather my wife's, was due to be heard at about the<br />same time as Brideshead was to be married. Julia's would not come up till<br />the following term; meanwhile the game of General Post--moving my property<br />from the Old Rectory to my flat, my wife's from my flat to the Old Rectory,<br />Julia's from Rex's house and from Brideshead to my flat, Rex's from Brides,<br />head to his house, and Mrs. Muspratt's from Falmouth to Brides, head -- was<br />in full swing and we were all, in varying degrees, homeless, when a halt was<br />called and Lord Marchmain, with a taste for the dramatically inopportune<br />which was plainly the prototype of his elder son's, declared his intention,<br />in view of the international situation, of returning to England and passing<br />his declining years in his old home.<br /><br />The only member of the family to whom this change promised any benefit<br />was Cordelia, who had been sadly abandoned in the turmoil. Brideshead,<br />indeed, had made a formal request to her to consider his house her home for<br />as long as it suited her, but when she learned that her sister-in-law<br />proposed to install her children there for the holidays immediately after<br />the wedding, in the charge of a sister of hers and the sister's friend,<br />Cordelia had decided to move, too, and was talking of setting up alone in<br />London. She now found herself, Cinderella-like, promoted chatelaine, while<br />her brother and his wife, who had till that moment expected to find<br />themselves, within a matter of days, absolute owners of the entire property,<br />were without a roof; the deeds of conveyance, engrossed and ready for<br />signing, were rolled up, tied and put away in one of the black tin boxes in<br />Lincoln's Inn. It was bitter for Mrs. Muspratt; she was not an ambitious<br />woman; something very much less grand than Brideshead would have contented<br />her heartily; but she did aspire to finding some shelter for her children<br />over Christmas. The house at Falmouth was stripped and up for sale;<br />moreover, Mrs. Muspratt had taken leave of the place with some justifiably<br />rather large talk of her new establishment; they could not return there. She<br />was obliged in a hurry to move her furniture from Lady Marchmain's room to a<br />disused coachhouse and to take a furnished villa at Torquay. She was not, as<br />I have said, a woman of high ambition, but, having had her expectations so<br />much raised, it was disconcerting to be brought so low so suddenly. In the<br />village the working party who had been preparing the decorations for the<br />bridal entry began unpicking the B's on the bunting and substituting M's,<br />obliterating the Earl's points and stencilling balls and strawberry leaves<br />on the painted coronets, in preparation for Lord Marchmain's return.<br /><br />News of his intentions came first to the solicitors, then to, Cordelia,<br />then to Julia and me, in a rapid succession of contradictory cables. Lord<br />Marchmain would arrive in time for the wedding; he would arrive after the<br />wedding, having seen Lord and Lady Brideshead on their way through Paris; he<br />would see them in Rome. He was not well enough to travel at all; he was just<br />starting; he had unhappy memories of winter at Brideshead and would not come<br />until spring was well advanced and the heating apparatus overhauled; he was<br />coming alone; he was bringing his Italian household; he wished his return to<br />be unannounced and to lead a life of complete seclusion; he would give a<br />ball. At last a date in January was chosen which proved to be the correct<br />one.<br />Plender preceded him by some days; there was a difficulty here. Plender<br />was not an original member of the Brideshead household; he had been Lord<br />Marchmain's servant in the yeomanry, and had only once met Wilcox, on the<br />painful occasion of the removal of his master's luggage when it was decided<br />not to return from the war; then Plender had been valet, as, officially, he<br />still was, but he had in the past years introduced a kind of curate, a Swiss<br />body-servant, to attend to the wardrobe and also, when occasion arose, lend<br />a hand with less dignified tasks about the house, and had in effect become<br />major-domo of that fluctuating and mobile household; sometimes he even<br />referred to himself on the telephone as the "secretary." There was an acre<br />of thin ice between him and Wilcox.<br /><br />Fortunately the two men took a liking to one anodier, and the thing was<br />solved in a series of three-cornered discussions with Cordelia. Plender and<br />Wilcox became Joint Grooms of the Chambers, like Blues and Life Guards with<br />equal precedence, Plender having as his particular province his Lordship's<br />own apartments, and Wilcox a sphere of influence in the public rooms; the<br />senior footman was given a black coat and promoted butler, the nondescript<br />Swiss, on arrival, was to have full valet's status; there was a general<br />increase in wages to meet the new dignities, and all were content.<br /><br />Julia and I, who had left Brideshead a month before, thinking we should<br />not return, moved back for the reception. When the day came, Cordelia went<br />to the station and we remained to greet him at home. It was a bleak and<br />gusty day. Cottages and lodges were decorated; plans for a bonfire that<br />night and for the village silver band to play on the terrace were put down,<br />but the house flag that had not flown for twenty-five years was hoisted over<br />the pediment, and flapped sharply against the leaden sky. Whatever harsh<br />voices might be bawling into the microphones of Central Europe, and whatever<br />lathes spinning in the armament factories, the return of Lord Marchmain was<br />a matter of first importance in his own neighbourhood.<br /><br />He was due at three o'clock. Julia and I waited in the drawing-room<br />until Wilcox, who had arranged with the station-master to be kept informed,<br />announced "The train is signalled," and a minute later, "The train is in;<br />his Lordship is on the way." Then we went to the front portico and waited<br />there with the upper,' servants. Soon the Rolls appeared at the turn in the<br />drive, followed at some distance by the two vans. It drew up; first Cordelia<br />got out, then Cara; there was a pause, a rug was handed to theu chauffeur, a<br />stick to the footman; then a leg was cautiously thrust I forward. Plender<br />was by now at the car door; another servant -- the Swiss valet -- had<br />emerged from a van; together they lifted jj Lord Marchmain out and set him<br />on his feet; he felt for his stick grasped it, and stood for a minute<br />collecting his strength for the I few low steps which led to the front door.<br /><br />Julia gave a little sigh of surprise and touched my hand. We had seen<br />him nine months ago at Monte Carlo, when he had j been an upright and<br />stately figure, little changed from when I first met him in Venice. Now he<br />was an old man. Plender had told us his master had been unwell lately; he<br />had not prepared us for j this.<br /><br />Lord Marchmain stood bowed and shrunken, weighed down ... by his<br />great-coat, a white muffler fluttering untidily at his throat, a cloth cap<br />pulled low on his forehead, his face white and lined, his nose coloured by<br />the cold; the tears which gathered in his eyes came not from emotion but<br />from the east wind; he breathed heavily. Cara tucked in the end of his<br />muffler and whispered something to him. He raised a gloved hand -- a<br />schoolboy's glove of grey wool -- and made a small, weary gesture of<br />greeting to the group at the door; then, very slowly, with his eyes on thfl<br />ground before him, he made his way into the house.<br /><br />They took off his coat and cap and muffler and the kind of leather<br />jerkin which he wore under them; thus stripped he seemed more than ever<br />wasted but more elegant; he had cast the shabbiness of extreme fatigue. Cara<br />straightened his tie; he wiped his eyes with a bandanna handkerchief and<br />shuffled with' his stick to the hall fire.<br /><br />There was a little heraldic chair by the chimney-piece, one of a set<br />which stood against the walls, a little, inhospitable, flat-seated thing, a<br />mere excuse for the elaborate armorial painting on its back, on which,<br />perhaps, no one, not even a weary footman, had ever sat since it was made;<br />there Lord Marchmain sat and wiped his eyes.<br /><br />"It's the cold," he said. "I'd forgotten how cold it is in England.<br />Quite bowled me over."<br /><br />"Can I get you anything, my lord?"<br /><br />"Nothing, thank you. Cara, where are those confounded pills?"<br /><br />"Alex, the doctor said not more than three times a day."<br /><br />"Damn the doctor. I feel quite bowled-over."<br /><br />Cara produced a blue bottle from her bag and Lord Marchmain took a<br />pill. Whatever was in it seemed to revive him. He remained seated, his long<br />legs stuck out before him, his cane between them, his chin on its ivory<br />handle, but he began to take notice of us all, to greet us and to give<br />orders.<br /><br />'Tm afraid I'm not at all the thing to-day; the journey's taken it out<br />of me. Ought to have waked a night at Dover. Wilcox, what rooms have you<br />prepared for me?"<br /><br />"Your old ones, my lord."<br /><br />"Won't do; not till I'm fit again. Too many stairs; must be on the<br />ground floor. Plender, get a bed made up for me downstairs."<br /><br />Plender and Wilcox exchanged an anxious glance.<br /><br />"Very good, my lord. Which room shall we put it in?"<br /><br />Lord Marchmain thought' for a moment. "The Chinese drawing-room; and,<br />Wilcox, the 'Queen's bed.'"<br /><br />"The Chinese drawing-room, my lord, the 'Queen's bed'?"<br /><br />"Yes, yes. I may be spending some time there in the next few weeks."<br /><br />The Chinese drawing-room was one I had never seen used; in fact one<br />could not normally go further into it than a small roped area round the<br />door, where sight-seers were corralled on the days the house was open to the<br />public; it was a splendid uninhabitable museum of Chippendale carving and<br />porcelain and lacquer and painted hangings; the "Queen's bed," too, was an<br />exhibition piece, a vast velvet tent like the Baldachino at St. Peter's. Had<br />Lord Marchmain planned this lying-in-state for himself, I wondered, before<br />he left the sunshine of Italy? Had he thought of it during the scudding rain<br />of his long, fretful journey? Had it come to him at that moment, an awakened<br />memory of childhood, a dream in the nursery -- "When I'm grown up I'll sleep<br />in the Queen's bed in the Chinese drawing-room" -- the apotheosis of adult<br />grandeur?<br />Few things, certainly, could have caused more stir in the house. What<br />had been foreseen as a day of formality became one of fierce exertion;<br />housemaids began making a fire, removing covers, unfolding linen; men in<br />aprons, never normally seen, shifted furniture; the estate carpenters were<br />collected to dismantle the bed. It came down the main staircase in pieces,<br />at intervals during the afternoon; huge sections of rococo, velvet-covered<br />cornice; the twisted gilt and velvet columns which formed its posts; beams<br />of unpolished wood, made not to be seen, which performed invisible,<br />structural functions below the draperies; plumes of dyed feathers, which<br />sprang from gold-mounted ostrich eggs and crowned the canopy; finally, the<br />mattresses with four toiling men to each. Lord Marchmain seemed to derive<br />comfort from the consequences of his whim; he sat by the fire watching the<br />bustle, while we stood in a half-circle--Cara, Cordelia," Julia and I -- and<br />talked to him.<br /><br />Colour came back to his cheeks and light to his eyes. "Brides-head and<br />his wife dined with me in Rome," he said. "Since we are all members of the<br />family" -- and his eye moved ironically from Cara to me -- "I can speak<br />without reserve. I found her deplorable. Her former consort, I understand,<br />was a seafaring man and, presumably, the less exacting, but how my son, at<br />the ripe age of thirty-eight, with, unless things have changed very much, a<br />very free choice among the women of England, can have settled on--I suppose<br />I must call her so--Beryl . . ." He left the sentence eloquently unfinished.<br /><br />Lord Marchmain showed no inclination to move, so presently we drew up<br />chairs -- the little heraldic chairs, for everything else in the hall was<br />ponderous--and sat round him.<br /><br />"I daresay I shall not be really fit again until summer comes," he<br />said. "I look to you four to amuse me."<br /><br />There seemed little we could do at the moment to lighten the rather<br />sombre mood; he, indeed, was the most cheerful of us. "Tell me," he said,<br />"the circumstances of Brideshead's courtship."<br /><br />We told him what we knew.<br /><br />"Match-boxes," he said. "Match-boxes. Ithink she's past<br />child-bearing."<br /><br />Tea was brought us at the hall fireplace.<br /><br />"In Italy," he said, "no one believes there will be a war. They think<br />it will all be 'arranged.' I suppose, Julia, you no longer have access to<br />political information? Cara, here, is fortunately a British subject by<br />marriage. It is not a thing she customarily mentions, but it may prove<br />valuable. She is legally Mrs. Hicks, are you not, my dear? We know little of<br />Hicks, but we shall be grateful to him, none the less, if it comes to war.<br />And you," he said, turning the attack to me, "you will no doubt become an<br />official artist?"<br /><br />"No. As a matter of fact I am negotiating now for a commission in the<br />Special Reserve."<br /><br />"Oh, but you should be an artist. I had one with my squadron during the<br />last war, for weeks -- until we went up to the line."<br /><br />This waspishness was new. I had always been aware of a frame of<br />malevolence under his urbanity, now it protruded like his own sharp bones<br />through the sunken skin.<br />It was dark before the bed was finished; we went to see it, Lord<br />Marchmain stepping quite briskly now through the intervening rooms.<br /><br />"I congratulate you. It really looks remarkably well. Wilcox, I seem to<br />remember a silver basin and ewer--they stood in a room we called 'the<br />Cardinal's dressing-room,' I think -- suppostt we had them here on the<br />console. Then if you will send Plender and Gaston to me, the luggage can<br />wait till to-morrow -- simply' the dressingose and what I need for the<br />night. Plender will know. If you will leave me with Plender and Gaston, I<br />will go td ' bed. We will meet later; you will dine here and keep me<br />amused."<br /><br />We turned to go; as I was at the door he called me back.<br /><br />"It looks very well, does it not?"<br /><br />"Very well."<br /><br />"You might paint it, eh --and call it "The Death Bed'?"<br /><br /><br />"Yes," said Cara, "he has come home to die."<br /><br />"But when he first arrived he was talking so confidently of recovery."<br /><br />"That was because he was so ill. When he is himself, he knows he is<br />dying and accepts it. His sickness is up and down; one day, sometimes for<br />several days on end, he is strong and lively and then he is ready for death,<br />then he is down and afraid. I do not | know how it will be when he is more<br />and more down. That must come in good time. The doctors in Rome gave him<br />less than a year. There is someone coining from London, I think to-morrow, j<br />who will tell us more."<br /><br />"What is it?"<br /><br />"His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word."<br /><br />That evening Lord Marchmain was in good spirits; the room I had a<br />Hogarthian aspect, with the dinner-table set for the four of us by the<br />grotesque, chinoiserie chimney-piece, and the old j man propped among his<br />pillows, sipping champagne, tasting,' praising, and failing to eat the<br />succession of dishes which had been prepared for his homecoming. Wilcox had<br />brought out for the occasion the gold plate, which I had not before seen in<br />use; that and the gilt mirrors and the lacquer and the drapery of the great<br />bed and Julia's mandarin coat gave the scene an air of pantomime, of<br />Aladdin's cave.<br /><br />Just at the end, when the time came for us to go, his spirits flagged.<br /><br />"I shall not sleep," he said. "Who is going to sit with me? Cara,<br />carissima, you are fatigued. Cordelia, will you watch for an hour in this<br />Gethsemane?"<br /><br />Next morning I asked her how the night had passed.<br /><br />"He went to sleep almost at once. I came in to see him at two to make<br />up the fire; the lights were on, but he was asleep again. He must have woken<br />up and turned them on; he had to get out of bed to. do that. I think perhaps<br />he is afraid of the dark."<br /><br />It was natural, with her hospital experience, that Cordelia should take<br />charge of her father. When the doctors came that day they gave their<br />instructions to her, instinctively.<br /><br />"Until he gets worse," she said, "I and the valet can look after him.<br />We don't want nurses in the house before they are needed." At this stage the<br />doctors had nothing to recommend except to keep him comfortable and<br />administer certain drugs when his attacks came on. "How long will it be?"<br /><br />"Lady Cordelia, there are men walking about in hearty old age whom<br />their doctors gave a week to live. I have learned one thing in medicine:<br />never prophesy."<br /><br />These two men had made a long journey to tell her this; the local<br />doctor was there to accept the same advice in technical phrases.<br /><br />That night Lord Marchmain reverted to the topic of his new<br />daughter-in-law; it had never been long out of his mind, finding expression<br />in various sly hints throughout the day; now he lay back in his pillows and<br />talked of her at length.<br /><br />"I have never been much moved by family piety until now," he said, "but<br />I am frankly appalled at the prospect of-- of Beryl taking what was once my<br />mother's place in this house. Why<br />should that uncouth pair sit here childless while the place crumbles<br />about their ears? I will not disguise from you that I have take a dislike to<br />Beryl.<br /><br />"Perhaps it was unfortunate that we met in Rome. Anywhere else might<br />have been more sympathetic. And yet, if one comes to consider it, where<br />could I have met her without repugnance? We dined at Ranieri's; it is a<br />quiet little restaurant I have fire quented for years -- no doubt you know<br />it. Beryl seemed to fill the place. I, of course, was host, though to hear<br />Beryl press my son with food, you might have thought otherwise. Brideshead<br />was always a greedy boy; a wife who has his best interests at heart should<br />seek to restrain him. However, that is a matter ol small importance.<br /><br />"She had no doubt heard of me as a man of irregular life. I can only<br />describe her manner to me as roguish. A naughty old man, that's what she<br />thought I was. I suppose she had met naughty old admirals and knew how they<br />should be humoured; a stage-door chappie, a bit of a lad ... I could not<br />attempt to reproduce her conversation. I will give you one example.<br /><br />"They had been to an audience at the Vatican that morning; a blessing<br />for their marriage -- I did not follow attentively ---something of the kind<br />had happened before I gathered, some previous husband, some previous Pope.<br />She described, rather vivaciously, how on this earlier occasion she had gone<br />with a whole body of newly married couples, mostly Italians of all ranks,<br />some of the simpler girls in their wedding dresses, and how each had<br />appraised the other, the bridegrooms looking the brides over, comparing<br />their own with one another's, and so fordi. Then she said, 'This time, of<br />course, we were in private, but do you know, Lord Marchmain, I felt as<br />though it was I who was leading in the bride.'<br /><br />"It was said with great indelicacy. I have not yet quite fathomed her<br />meaning. Was she making a play on my son's name, or was she, do you think,<br />referring to his undoubted virginity? I fancy the latter. Anyway, it was<br />with pleasantries of that kind that we passed the evening.<br /><br />"I don't think she would be quite in her proper element here, do you?<br />Who shall I leave k to? The entail ended with me, you know. Sebastian, alas,<br />is out of the question. Who wants it? Quis? Would you like it, Cara? No, of<br />course you would not. Cordelia? I think I shall leave it to Julia and<br />Charles."<br /><br />"Of course not, Papa, it's Bridey's."<br /><br />"And . . . Beryl's? I will have Gregson down one day soon and go over<br />the matter. It is time I brought my will up to date; it is full of anomalies<br />and anachronisms. ... I have rather a fancy for the idea of installing Julia<br />here; so beautiful this evening, my dear; so beautiful always; much, much<br />more suitable."<br /><br />Shortly after this he sent to London for his solicitor, but, on the day<br />he came, Lord Marchmain was suffering from an attack and would not see him.<br />"Plenty of time," he said, between painful gasps for breath, "another day,<br />when I am stronger," but the choice of his heir was constantly in his mind,<br />and he referred often to the time when Julia and I should be married and in<br />possession.<br />"Do you think he really means to leave it to us?" I asked Julia.<br /><br />"Yes, I think he does.'<br /><br />"But it's monstrous for Bridey."<br /><br />"Is it? I don't think he cares much for the place. I do, you know. He<br />and Beryl would be much more content in some little house somewhere."<br /><br />"You mean to accept it?"<br /><br />"Certainly. It's Papa's to leave as he likes. I think you and I would<br />be very happy here."<br /><br />It opened a prospect; the prospect one gained at the turn of the<br />avenue, as I had first seen it with Sebastian, of the secluded valley, the<br />lakes falling away one below the other, the old house in the foreground, the<br />rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and<br />love and beauty; a soldier's dream in a foreign bivouac; such a prospect<br />perhaps as a hig pinnacle of the temple afforded after the hungry days in<br />desert and the jackal-haunted nights. Need I reproach myself if sometimes I<br />was rapt in the vision?<br /><br />The weeks of illness wore on and the life of the house kept pace with<br />the faltering strength of the sick man. There days when Lord Marchmain was<br />dressed, when he stood at the window or moved on his valet's arm from fire<br />to fire through if the rooms of the ground floor, when visitors came and<br />went -- neighbours and people from the estate, men of business from London<br />-- parcels of new books were opened and discussed, a piano moved into the<br />Chinese drawing-room; once at the end of February, on a single, unexpected<br />day of brilliant sunshine, he called for a car and got as far as the hall,<br />had on his fur coat and reached the front door. Then suddenly he lost<br />interest in the drive, said, "Not now. Later. One day in the summer," took<br />his man's arm again and was led back to his chair. Once ho had the humour of<br />changing his room and gave detailed orders for a move to the Painted<br />Parlour; the chinoiserie, he said disturbed his rest -- he kept the lights<br />full on at night -- but again lost heart, countermanded everything, and kept<br />his room.<br /><br />On other days the house was hushed as he sat high in bed,]' propped by<br />his pillows, with labouring breath; even then Wanted to have us round him;<br />night or day he could not bead to be alone; when he could not speak his eyes<br />followed us, and ii| anyone left the room he would look distressed, and<br />Cara, sitting I often for hours at a time by his side against the pillows<br />with atilj arm .in his, would say, "It's all right, Alex, she's coming<br />back."<br /><br />Brideshead and his wife returned from their honeymoon and stayed a few<br />nights; it was one of the bad times, and Lord Marchmain refused to have them<br />near him. It was Beryl's first visit, and she would have been unnatural if<br />she had shown no" curiosity about what had nearly been, and now again<br />promised soon to be, her home. Beryl was natural enough, and surveyed the<br />place fairly thoroughly in the days she was there. In the strange disorder<br />caused by Lord Marchmain's illness, it must have seemed capable of much<br />improvement; she referred once or twice to the way in which establishments<br />of similar size had been managed at various Government Houses she had<br />visited. Brideshead took her visiting among the tenants by day, and in the<br />evenings she talked to me of painting, or to Cordelia of hospitals, or to<br />Julia of clothes, with cheerful assurance. The shadow of betrayal, the<br />knowledge of how precarious were their just expectations, was all one-sided.<br />I was not easy with them; but that was no new thing to Brideshead; in the<br />little circle of shyness in which he was used to move, my guilt passed<br />unseen.<br />Eventually it became clear that Lord Marchmain did not intend to see<br />more of them. Brideshead was admitted alone for a minute's leave-taking;<br />then they left.<br /><br />"There's nothing we can do here," said Brideshead, "and it's very<br />distressing for Beryl. We'll come back if things get worse."<br /><br />The bad spells became longer and more frequent; a nurse was engaged. "I<br />never saw such a room," she said, "nothing like it anywhere; no conveniences<br />of any sort." She tried to have her patient moved upstairs, where there was<br />running water, a dressing-room for herself, a "sensible" narrow bed she<br />could "get round" --what she was used to--but Lord Marchmain would not<br />budge. Soon, as days and nights became indistinguishable to him, a second<br />nurse was installed; the specialists came again from London; they<br />recommended a new and rather daring treatment, but his body seemed weary of<br />all drugs and did not respond. Presently there were no good spells, merely<br />brief fluctuations in the speed of his decline.<br /><br />Brideshead was called. It was the Easter holidays and Beryl was busy<br />with her children. He came alone, and haying stood silently for some minutes<br />beside his father, who sat silently looking at him, he left the room and,<br />joining the rest of us who wertfj in the library, said, "Papa must see a<br />priest."<br /><br />It was not the first time the topic had come up. In the early days,<br />when Lord Marchmain first arrived, the parish priest-since the chapel was<br />shut there was a new church and presbytery in Melstead -- had come to call<br />as a matter of politeness. Cordelia' I had put him off with apologies and<br />excuses, but when he was gone she said: "Not yet. Papa doesn't want him<br />yet."<br /><br />Julia, Cara and I were there at the time; we each had something to say,<br />began to speak, and thought better of it. It was never mentioned between the<br />four of us, but Julia, alone with me, said, "Charles, I see great Church<br />trouble ahead."<br /><br />"Can't they even let him die in peace?"<br /><br />"They mean something so different by 'peace.'"<br /><br />"It would be an outrage. No one could have made it clearer, all his<br />life, what he thought of religion. They'll come now, when his mind's<br />wandering and he hasn't the strength to resist, and I claim him as a<br />death-bed penitent. I've had a certain respect for their Church up till now.<br />If they do a thing like that I shall know that everything stupid people say<br />about them is quite true -- that it's all superstition and trickery." Julia<br />said nothing. "Don't you agree?" Still Julia said nothing.<br /><br />"Don't you agree?"<br /><br />"I don't know, Charles. I simply don't know."<br /><br />And, though none of us spoke of it, I felt the question ever present,<br />growing through all the weeks of Lord Marchmain's illness; I saw it when<br />Cordelia drove off early in the mornings to mass; I saw it as Cara took to<br />going with her; this little cloud the size of a man's hand, that was going<br />to swell into a storm among us.<br /><br />Now Brideshead, in his heavy, ruthless way, planted the problem down<br />before us.<br /><br />"Oh, Bridey, do you think he would?" asked Cordelia.<br /><br />"I shall see that he does," said Brideshead. "I shall take Father<br />Mackay in to him to-morrow."<br /><br />Still the clouds gathered and did not break; none of us spoke. Cara and<br />Cordelia went back to the sick-room; Brideshead looked for a book, found<br />one, and left us.<br /><br />"Julia," I said, "how can we stop this tomfoolery?"<br /><br />She did not answer for some time; then: "Why should we?"<br /><br />"You know as well as I do. It's just--just an unseemly incident"<br /><br />"Who am I to object to unseemly incidents?" she asked sadly. "Anyway,<br />what harm can it do? Let's ask the doctor."<br /><br />We asked the doctor, who said: "It's hard to say. It might alarm him of<br />course; on the other hand, I have known cases where it has had a wonderfully<br />soothing effect on a patient; I've even known it act as a positive<br />stimulant. It certainly is usually a great comfort to the relations. Really<br />I think it's a thing for Lord Brideshead to decide. Mind you, there is no<br />need for immediate anxiety. Lord Marchmain is very weak to-day; tomorrow he<br />may be quite strong again. Is it not usual to wait a little?"<br /><br />"Well, he wasn't much help," I said to Julia, when we left him.<br /><br />"Help? I really can't quite see why you've taken it so much at heart<br />that my father shall not have the last sacraments."<br /><br />"It's such a lot of witchcraft and hypocrisy."<br /><br />"Is it? Anyway, it's been going on for nearly two thousand years. I<br />don't know why you should suddenly get in a rage now." Her voice rose; she<br />was swift to anger of late months. "For Christ's sake, write to The Times;<br />get up and make a speech in Hyde Park; start a 'No Popery' riot--but don't<br />bore me about it. What's it got to do with you or me whether my father sees<br />his parish priest?"<br /><br />I knew these fierce moods of Julia's, such as had overtaken her at the<br />fountain in moonlight, and dimly surmised their origin; I knew they could<br />not be assuaged by words. Nor could I have spoken, for the answer to her<br />question was still unformed, but lay in a pocket of my mind, like sea-mist<br />in a dip of the sand dunes; the cloudy sense that the fate of more souls<br />than one was at issue; that the snow was beginning to shift on the high<br />slopes.<br /><br />Brideshead and I breakfasted together next morning with the<br />night-nurse, who had just come off duty.<br /><br />"He's much brighter to-day," she said. "Fie slept very nicely for<br />nearly three hours. When Gaston eame to shave him he was quite chatty."<br /><br />"Good," said Brideshead. "Cordelia went to mass. She's driving Father<br />Mackay back here to breakfast."<br /><br />I had met Father Mackay several times; he was a stocky, middle-aged,<br />genial Glasgow-Irishman who, when we met, was apt to ask me such questions<br />as, "Would you say now, Mr. Ryder, I that the painter Titian was more truly<br />artistic than the painter Raphael?" and, more disconcertingly still, to<br />remember my answers: "To revert, Mr. Ryder, to what you said when last I had<br />the pleasure to meet you,'would it be right now to say that the painter<br />Titian . . ." usually ending with some such reflection as: "Ah, it's a grand<br />resource for a man to have the talent you have, Mr. Ryder, and the time to<br />indulge it." Cordelia could imitate him brilliantly.<br /><br />This morning he made a hearty breakfast, glanced at the headlines of<br />the paper, and then said with professional briskness: "And now, Lord<br />Brideshead, would the poor soul be ready to set me, do you think?"<br /><br />Brideshead led him out; Cordelia followed and I was left alone among<br />the breakfast things. In less than a minute I heard the voices of all three<br />outside the door.<br /><br />". . . can only apologize."<br /><br />". . . poor soul. Mark you, it was seeing a strange face; depend upon<br />it, it was that--an unexpected stranger. I well understand it."<br /><br />". . . Father, I am sorry . . . bringing you all this way . . ."<br /><br />"Don't think about it at all, Lady Cordelia. Why, I've had bottles<br />thrown at me in the Gorbals. . . . Give him time. I've known worse cases<br />make beautiful deaths. Pray for him . . . I'll come again . . . and now if<br />you'll excuse me I'll just pay a little visit to Mrs. Hawkins. Yes, indeed,<br />I know the way well."<br /><br />Then Cordelia and Brideshead came into the room.<br /><br />"I gather the visit was not a success."<br /><br />"It was not. Cordelia, will you drive Father Mackay home when he comes<br />down from Nanny?<br /><br />I'm going to telephone to Beryl and see when she needs me home."<br /><br />"Bridey, it was horrible. What are we to do?"<br /><br />"We've done everything we can at the moment." He left the room.<br /><br />Cordelia's face was grave; she took a piece of bacon from the dish,<br />dipped it in mustard and ate it. "Damn Bridey," she said, "I knew it<br />wouldn't work."<br /><br />"What happened?"<br /><br />"Would you like to know? We walked in there in a line; Cara was reading<br />the paper aloud to Papa. Bridey said, Tve brought Father Mackay to see you';<br />Papa said, 'Father Mackay, I am afraid you have been brought here under a<br />misapprehension. I am not in extremis, and I have not been a practising<br />member of your Church for twenty-five years. Brideshead, show Father Mackay<br />the way out.' Then we all turned about and walked away, and I heard Cara<br />start reading the paper again, and that, Charles, was that."<br /><br />I carried the news to Julia, who lay with her bed-table amid a litter<br />of newspapers and envelopes.<br /><br />"Mumbo-jumbo is off," I said, "the witch-doctor has gone."<br /><br />"Poor Papa."<br /><br />"It's great sucks to Bridey."<br /><br />I felt triumphant. I had been right, everyone else had been wrong,<br />truth had prevailed; the thread that I had felt hanging over Julia and me<br />ever since that evening at the fountain had been averted, perhaps dispelled<br />for ever; and there was also--I can now confess it -- another unexpressed,<br />inexpressible, indecent little victory that I was furtively celebrating. I<br />guessed that that morning's business had putBrideshead some considerable way<br />further from his rightful inheritance.<br />In that I was correct; a man was sent for from the solicitors in<br />London; and in a day or two he came and it was known throughout the house<br />that Lord Marchmain had made a new will. But I was wrong in thinking that<br />the religious controversy was quashed; it flamed up again after dinner on<br />Brideshead's last evening.<br /><br />". . . What Papa said was, 'I am not in extremis; I have not been a<br />practising member of the Church for twenty-five years.'"<br /><br />"Not 'the Church,' 'your Church.'"<br /><br />"I don't see the difference."<br /><br />"There's every difference."<br /><br />"Bridey, it's quite plain what he meant."<br /><br />"I presume he meant what he said. He meant that he had not been<br />accustomed regularly to receive the sacraments, and since he was not at the<br />moment dying, he did not mean to change his ways -- yet."<br /><br />"That's simply a quibble."<br />"Why do people always think that one is quibbling when one tries to be<br />precise? His plain meaning was that he did not want to see a priest that<br />day, but that he would when he was in extremis."<br /><br />"I wish someone would explain to me," I said, "quite what the<br />significance of these sacraments is. Do you mean that if he dies alone he<br />goes to hell, and that if a priest puts oil on him -- "<br /><br />"Oh, it's not the oil," said Cordelia, "that's to heal him."<br /><br />"Odder still -- well, whatever it is the priest does -- that he then<br />goes tq heaven? Is that what you believe?"<br /><br />Cara then interposed: "I think my nurse told me, someone did anyway,<br />that if the priest got there before the body was cold it was all right.<br />That's so, isn't it?"<br /><br />The others turned on her.<br /><br />"No, Cara, it's not."<br /><br />"Of course not."<br /><br />"You've got it all wrong, Cara."<br /><br />"Well, I remember when Alphonse de Grenet died, Madame de Grenet had a<br />priest hidden outside the door -- he couldn't bear the sight of a priest --<br />and brought him in before the body was cold; she told me herself, and they<br />had a full requiem for him, and I went to it."<br /><br />"Having a requiem doesn't mean you go to heaven necessarily."<br /><br />"Madame de Grenet thought it did."<br /><br />"Well, she was wrong."<br /><br />"Do any of you Catholics know what good you think this priest can do?"<br />I asked. "Do you simply want to arrange it so that your father can have<br />Christian burial? Do you want to keep him out of hell? I only want to be<br />told."<br /><br />Brideshead told me at some length, and when he had finished Cara<br />slightly marred the unity of the Catholic front by saying in simple wonder,<br />"I never heard that before."<br /><br />"Let's get this clear," I said; "he has to make an act of will; he has<br />to be contrite and wish to be reconciled; is that right? But only God knows<br />whether he has really made an act of will; the priest can't tell; and if<br />there isn't a priest there, and he makes the act of will alone, that's as<br />good as if there were a priest. And it's quite possible that the will may<br />still be working when a man is too weak to make any outward sign of it; is<br />that right? He may be lying, as though for dead, and willing all the time,<br />and being reconciled, and God understands that; is that right?"<br /><br />"More or less," said Brideshead.<br /><br />"Well, for heaven's sake," I said, "what is the priest for?"<br /><br />There was a pause in which Julia sighed and Brideshead drew breath as<br />though to start further subdividing the propositions.<br /><br />In the silence Cara said, "All I know is that I shall take very good<br />care to have a priest."<br /><br />"Bless you," said Cordelia, "I believe that's the best answer."<br /><br />And we let the argument drop, each for different reasons, thinking it<br />had been inconclusive.<br />Later Julia said: "I wish you wouldn't start these religious<br />arguments."<br /><br />"I didn't start it."<br /><br />"You don't convince anyone else and you don't really convince<br />yourself."<br /><br />"I only want to know what these people believe. They say it's all based<br />on logic."<br /><br />"If you'd let Bridey finish, he would have made it all quite logical."<br /><br />"There were four of you," I said. "Cara didn't know the first thing it<br />was about, and may or may not have believed it; you knew a bit and didn't<br />believe a word; Cordelia knew about aS much and believed it madly; only poor<br />Bridey knew and believed, and I thought he made a pretty poor show when it<br />came to explaining. And people go round saying, 'At least Catholics know<br />what they believe.' We had a fair cross-section to-night--"<br /><br />"Oh, Charles, don't rant. I shall begin to think you're getting doubts<br />yourself."<br /><br />The weeks passed and still Lord Marchmain lived on. In June my divorce<br />was made absolute and my former wife married for the second time. Julia<br />would be free in September. The nearer our marriage got, the more wistfully,<br />I noticed, Julia spoke of it; war was growing nearer, too -- we neither of<br />us doubted that-- but Julia's tender, remote, it sometimes seemed desperate<br />longing did not come from any uncertainty outside herself; it suddenly<br />darkened too, into brief accesses of hate when she seemed to throw herself<br />against the restraints of her love for me like a caged animal against the<br />bars.<br /><br />I was summoned to the War Office, interviewed and put on a list in case<br />of emergency; Cordelia also, on another list; lists were becoming part of<br />our lives once more, as they had been at school--those strips of paper on<br />the green baize notice boards which defined success and failure. No one in<br />that dark office spoke the word "war"; it was taboo; we should be called for<br />if there was "an emergency" -- not in case of strife, an act of human will;<br />nothing so clear and simple as wrath or retribution; an emergency; something<br />coming out of the waters, a monster with sightless face and thrashing tail<br />thrown up from the depdis.<br /><br />Lord Marchmain took little interest in events outside his own room; we<br />took him the papers daily and made the attempt to read to him, but he turned<br />his head on the pillows and with his eyes followed the intricate patterns<br />about him. "Shall I go on?" "Please do if it's not boring you." But he was<br />not listening; occasionally at a familiar name he would whisper: "Irwin ...<br />I knew him -- a mediocre fellow"; occasionally some remote comment: "Czechs<br />make good coachmen; nothing else"; but his mind was far from world affairs;<br />it was there, on the spot, turned in on himself; he had no strength for any<br />other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.<br /><br />I said to the doctor, who was with us daily: "He's got a wonderful will<br />to live, hasn't he?"<br /><br />"Would you put it like that? I should say a great fear of death."<br /><br />"Is there a difference?"<br /><br />"Oh dear, yes. He doesn't derive any strength from his fear, you know.<br />It's wearing him out."<br /><br />Next to death, perhaps because they are like death, he feared darkness<br />and loneliness. He liked to have us in his room and the lights burnt all<br />night among the gilt figures; he did not wish us to speak much, but he<br />talked himself, so quietly that we could often not hear him; he talked, I<br />think, because his was the only voice he could trust, when it assured him<br />that he was still alive; what he said was not for us, nor for any ears but<br />his own.<br /><br />"Better to-day. Better to-day. I can see now, in the corner of the<br />fireplace, where the mandarin is holding his gold bell and the crooked tree<br />is in flower below his feet, where yesterday I was confused and took the<br />little tower for another man. Soon I shall see the bridge and the three<br />storks and know where the path leads over the hill.<br /><br />"Better to-morrow. We live long in our family and marry late.<br />Seventy-three is no age. Aunt Julia, my father's aunt, lived to be<br />eighty-eight, born and died here, never married, saw the fire on beacon hill<br />for the battle of Trafalgar, always called it 'the New House'; that Was the<br />name they had for it in the nursery and in the fields when unlettered men<br />had long memories. You can see where the old house stood near the village<br />church; they call the field 'Castle Hill,' Horlick's field where the<br />ground's uneven and half of it is waste, nettle and brier in hollows too<br />deep for ploughing. They dug to the foundations to carry the stone for the<br />new house; the house that was a century old when Aunt Julia was born. Those<br />were our roots in the waste hollows of Castle Hill, in the brier and nettle;<br />among the tombs in the old church and the chantrey where no clerk sings.<br />"Aunt Julia knew the tombs, cross-legged knight and doubleted earl,<br />marquis like a Roman senator, limestone, alabaster, and Italian marble;<br />tapped the escutcheons with her ebony cane, made the casque ring over old<br />Sir Roger. We were knights then, barons since Agincourt; the larger honours<br />came with the Georges. They came the last and they'll go the first; the<br />barony descends in the female line; when Brideshead is buried--he married<br />late -- Julia's son will be called by the name his fathers bore before the<br />fat days; the days of wool shearing and the wide corn lands, the days of<br />growth and building, when the marshes were drained and the waste land<br />brought under the plough, when one built the house, his son added the dome,<br />his son spread the wings and dammed the river. Aunt Julia watched them build<br />the fountain; it was old before it came here, weathered two hundred years by<br />the suns of Naples, brought by man-o'-war in the days of Nelson. Soon the<br />fountain will be dry till the rain fills it, setting the fallen leaves<br />afloat in the basin and over the lakes the reeds will spread and close.<br />Better to-day.<br /><br />"Better to-day. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold<br />winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in<br />my own sheets; I shall live long. I was fifty when they dismounted us and<br />sent us into the line; old men stay at the base, the orders said, but Walter<br />Venables, my commanding officer, my nearest neighbour, said: 'You're as fit<br />as the youngest of them, Alex.' So I was; so I am now, if I could only<br />breathe.<br /><br />"No air; no wind stirring under the velvet canopy; no one has opened<br />the door for a thousand years in Aladdin's treasury, deep underground where<br />the jinns burrow like moles and no wind stirs. When the summer comes," said<br />Lord Marchmain, oblivious of the deep corn and swelling fruit and the<br />surfeited bees who slowly sought their hives in the heavy afternoon sunlight<br />outside his windows, "when the summer comes I shall leave my bed and sit in<br />the open air and breathe more easily.<br /><br />"Better to-morrow, when the wind comes down the valley and a man can<br />turn to meet it and fill himself with air like a beast at water. Who would<br />have thought that all these little gold men-, gentlemen in their own<br />country, could live so long without breathing? Like toads in the coal, down<br />a deep mine, untroubled. God take it, why have they dug a hole for me? Must<br />a man stifle to death in his own cellars? Plender, Gaston, open the<br />windows."<br /><br />"The windows are all wide open, my lord."<br /><br />"I know them. I was born in this house. They open from a cellar into a<br />tunnel. It can only be done by gunpowder; bore the rock, cram it with<br />powder, trace the fuse, crouch under cover round the corner while we touch<br />it off; we'll blast our way to daylight."<br /><br />A cylinder of oxygen was placed beside his bed, with a long1<br />tube, a face-piece, and a little stop-cock he could work himself.<br />Often he said: "It's empty; look, nurse, there's nothing cornel out."<br /><br />"No, Lord Marchmain, it's quite full; the bubble here in the glass bulb<br />shows that; it's at full pressure; listen, don't you hear it hiss? Try and<br />breathe slowly, Lord Marchmain; quite gently, then you get the benefit."<br /><br />"Free as air; that's what they say -- 'free as air.' I was free once. I<br />committed a crime in the name of freedom. Now they bring me my air in an<br />iron barrel."<br /><br />Once he said: "Cordelia, what became of the chapel?"<br /><br />"They locked it up, Papa, when Mummy died."<br /><br />"It was hers, I gave it to her. We've always been builders in our<br />family. I built it for her; pulled down the pavilion that stood there;<br />rebuilt with the old stones; it was the last of the. new house to come, the<br />first to go. There used to be a chaplain until the war. Do you remember<br />him?"<br /><br />"I was too young."<br /><br />"Then I went away -- left her in the chapel praying. It was hers. It<br />was the place for her. I never came back to disturb her prayers. They said<br />we were fighting for freedom; I had my own victory. Was it a crime?"<br /><br />"I think it was, Papa."<br /><br />"Crying to heaven for vengeance? Is that why they've locked me in this<br />cave, do you think, with a black tube of air and the little yellow men along<br />the walls, who live without breathing? Do you think that, child? But the<br />wind will come soon, tomorrow perhaps, and we'll breathe again. The ill wind<br />that will blow me good. Better to-morrow."<br /><br />Thus, till mid-July, Lord Marchmain lay dying, wearing himself down in<br />the struggle to live. Then, since there was no reason to expect an immediate<br />change, Cordelia went to London to see her women's organization about the<br />coming "emergency." That day Lord Marchmain's condition became suddenly<br />worse. He lay silent and quite still, breathing laboriously; only his open<br />eyes, which sometimes moved about the room, gave any sign of consciousness.<br />"Is this the end?" Julia asked.<br /><br />"It is impossible to say," the doctor answered; "when he does die it<br />will probably be like this. He may recover from the present attack. The only<br />thing is not to disturb him. The least shock will be fatal."<br /><br />"I'm going for Father Mackay," she said. I was not surprised. I had<br />seen it in her mind all the summer. When she had gone I said to the doctor,<br />"We must stop this nonsense."<br /><br />He said: "My business is with the body. It's not my business to argue<br />whether people are better alive or dead or what happens to them after death.<br />I only try to keep them alive."<br /><br />"And you said just now any shock would kill him. What could be worse<br />for a man who fears death, as he does, than to have a priest brought to him<br />-- a priest he turned out when he had the strength?"<br /><br />"I think it may kill him." "Then will you forbid it?"<br /><br />"I've no authority to forbid anything. I can only give my opinion."<br /><br />"Cara, what do you think?"<br /><br />"I don't want him made unhappy. That is all there is to hope for now;<br />that he'll die without knowing it. But I should like the priest there, all<br />the same."<br /><br />"Will you try and persuade Julia to keep him away-- until the end?<br />After that he can do no harm." "I will ask her to leave Alex happy, yes." In<br />half an hour Julia was back with Father Mackay. We all met in the library.<br /><br />"I've telegraphed for Bridey and Cordelia," I said. "I hope you agree<br />that nothing must be done till they arrive."<br /><br />"I wish they were here," said Julia.<br /><br />"You can't take the responsibility alone," I said; "everyone else ' is<br />against you. Doctor, tell her what you said to me just now."<br /><br />"I said that the shock of seeing a priest might well kill him; without<br />that he may survive this attack. As his medical man I must protest against<br />anything being done to disturb him."<br /><br />"Cara?"<br /><br />"Julia, dear, I know you are thinking for the best, but, you know, Alex<br />was not a religious man.<br /><br />He scoffed always. We mustn't take advantage of him, now he's weak, to<br />comfort our own consciences. If Father Mackay comes to him when he is<br />unconscious, then he can be buried in the proper way, can he not, Father?"<br /><br />"I'll go and see how he is," said the doctor, leaving us.<br /><br />"Father Mackay," I said. "You know how Lord Marchmain greeted you last<br />time you came; do you think it possible he can have changed now?"<br /><br />"Thank God, by His grace it is possible."<br /><br />"Perhaps," said Cara, "you could slip in while he is sleeping, say the<br />words of absolution over him; he would never know."<br /><br />"I have seen so many men and women die," said the priest; , "I never<br />knew them sorry to have me there at the end."<br /><br />"But they were Catholics; Lord Marchmain has never been one" except in<br />name--at any rate, not for years. He was a scoffer, Cara said so."<br /><br />"Christ came to call, not the righteous, but sinners to repentance."<br /><br />The doctor returned. "There's no change," he said.<br /><br />"Now, Doctor," said the priest, "how would I be a shock to anyone?" He<br />turned his bland, innocent, matter-of-fact face first on the doctor, then<br />upon the rest of us. "Do you know what I want to do? It is something so<br />small, no show about it. I don't wear special clothes, you know. I go just<br />as I am. He knows the look of me now. There's nothing alarming. I just want<br />to ask him if he is sorry for his sins. I want him to make some little sign<br />of assent; I want him, anyway, not to refuse me; then I Want to give him<br />God's pardon. Then, though that's not essential, I want to anoint him. It is<br />nothing, a touch of the fingers, just some oil. from this little box, look,<br />it is pure oil, nothing to hurt him." "Oh, Julia," said Cara, "what are we<br />to say? Let me speak to him."<br /><br />She went to the Chinese drawing-room; we waited in silence; there was a<br />wall of fire between Julia and me. Presently Cara returned.<br /><br />"I don't think he heard," she said. "I thought I knew how to put it to<br />him. I said: 'Alex, you remember the priest from Melstead. You were very<br />naughty when he came to see you. You hurt his feelings very much. Now he's<br />here again. I want you to see him just for my sake, to make friend's.' But<br />he didn't answer. If he's unconscious, it couldn't make him unhappy to see<br />the priest, could it, Doctor?"<br /><br />Julia, who had been standing still and silent, suddenly moved.<br /><br />"Thank you for your advice, Doctor," she said. "I take full<br />responsibility for whatever happens. Father Mackay, will you please come and<br />see my father now," and without looking at me, led him to the door.<br /><br />We all followed. Lord Marchmain was lying as I had seen him that<br />morning, but his eyes were now shut; his hands lay, palm-up wards, above the<br />bed-clothes; the nurse had her fingers on the pulse of one of them. "Come<br />in," she said brightly, "you won't disturb him now."<br /><br />"D'you mean . . . ?"<br /><br />"No, no, but he's past noticing anything."<br /><br />She held the oxygen apparatus to his face and the hiss of escaping gas<br />was the only sound at the bedside.<br /><br />The priest bent over Lord Marchmain and blessed him. Julia and Cara<br />knelt at the foot of the bed. The doctor, the nurse and I stood behind them.<br /><br />"Now," said the priest, "I know you are sorry for all the sins of your<br />life, aren't you? Make a sign, if you can. You're sorry, aren't you?" But<br />there was no sign. "Try and remember your sins; tell God you are sorry. I am<br />going to give you absolution. While I am giving it, tell God you are sorry<br />you have offended Him." He began to speak in Latin. I recognized the words<br />Ego te absolvo in nomine Patris . . . and saw the priest make the sign of<br />the cross. Then I knelt, too, and prayed: "O God, if there is a God, forgive<br />him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin," and the man on the bed<br />opened his eyes and gave a sigh, the sort of sigh I had imagined people made<br />at the moment of death, but his eyes moved so that we knew there was still<br />life in him.<br />I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only of courtesy, if only<br />for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I<br />knew, for a sign. It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare<br />acknowledgment of a present, a nod in the crowd. All over the world people<br />were on their knees before innumerable crosses, and here the drama was being<br />played again by two men -- by one man, rather, and he nearer death than<br />life; the universal drama in which there is only one actor.<br /><br />The priest took the little silver box from his pocket and spoke again<br />in Latin, touching the dying man with an oily wad; he-finished what he had<br />to do, put away the box and gave the final blessing. Suddenly Lord Marchmain<br />moved his hand to his forehead; I thought he had felt the touch of the<br />chrism and was wiping it away. "O God," I prayed, "don't let him do that."<br />But there was no need for fear; the hand moved slowly down his breast, then<br />to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross. Then I knew<br />that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of<br />recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of<br />the temple being rent from top to bottom.<br /><br />It was over; we stood up; the nurse went back to the oxygen cylinder;<br />the doctor bent over his patient. Julia whispered to me: "Will you sec<br />Father Mackay out? I'm staying here for a little."<br />Outside the door Father Mackay became the simple, genial man I had<br />known before. "Well, now, and that was a beautiful thing to see. I've known<br />it happen that way again and again. The devil resists to the last moment and<br />then the Grace of God is too much for him. You're not a Catholic, I think,<br />Mr. Ryder, but at least you'll be glad for the ladies to have the comfort of<br />it.''<br /><br />As we were waiting for the chauffeur, it occurred to me that Father<br />Mackay should be paid for his services. I asked him awkwardly. "Why, don't<br />think about it, Mr. Ryder. It was a pleasure," he said, "but anything you<br />care to give is useful in a parish like mine." I found I had three pounds in<br />my note-case and gave them to him. "Why, indeed, that's more than generous.<br />God bless you, Mr. Ryder. I'll call again, but I don't think the poor soul<br />has long for this world."<br /><br />Julia remained in the Chinese drawing-room until, at five o'clock that<br />evening, her father died, proving both sides right in the dispute, priest<br />and doctor.<br /><br />Thus I come to the broken sentences which were the last words spoken<br />between Julia and me, the last memories.<br /><br />When htr father died Julia remained some minutes with his body; the<br />nurse came to the next room to announce the news and I had a glimpse of her,<br />through the open door, kneeling at the foot of the bed, and of Cara sitting<br />by her. Presently the two women came out together, and Julia said to me:<br />"Not now; I'm just taking Cara up to her room; later."<br /><br />While she was still upstairs Brideshead and Cordelia arrived from<br />London; when at last we met alone it was by stealth, like young lovers.<br /><br />Julia said: "Here in the shadow, in the corner of the stair -- a minute<br />to say good-bye."<br /><br />"So long to say so little."<br /><br />"You knew?"<br /><br />"Since this morning; since before this morning; all this year."<br /><br />"I didn't know till to-day. Oh, my dear, if you could only understand.<br />Then I could bear to part, or bear it better. I should say my heart was<br />breaking, if I believed in broken hearts. I can't marry you, Charles; I<br />can't be with you ever again."<br /><br />"I know."<br /><br />"How can you know?"<br /><br />"What will you do?"<br /><br />"Just go on -- alone. How can I tell what I shall do? You know the<br />whole of me. You know I'm not one for a life of mourning. I've always been<br />bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the<br />more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it<br />would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. One can only hope to see<br />one step ahead. But I saw to-day there was one thing unforgivable-- like<br />things in the schoolroom, so bad they are unpunishable, that only Mummy<br />could deal with -- the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not<br />quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's. Why should I be<br />allowed to understand that, and not you, Charles? It may be because of<br />Mummy, Nanny, Cordelia, Sebastian -- perhaps Bridey and Mrs. Muspratt --<br />keeping my name in their prayers; or it may be a private bargain between me<br />and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am,<br />He won't quite despair of me in the end.<br /><br />"Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you<br />understand."<br /><br />"I don't want to make it easier for you," I said; "I hope your heart<br />may break; but I do understand."<br /><br />The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last<br />echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in<br />the silent valley.Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-4938023924755367172008-08-06T14:07:00.001+02:002008-08-06T14:07:56.626+02:00Brideshead Revisited_12: Book II. A twitch upon the thread. Chapter FourChapter Four<br /><br />"and of course Celia will have custody of the children."<br /><br />"Of course."<br /><br />"Then what about the Old Rectory? I don't imagine you'll want to settle<br />down with Julia bang at our gates. The children look on it as their home,<br />you know. Robin's got no place of his own till his uncle dies. After all,<br />you never used the studio, did you? Robin was saying only the other day what<br />a good playroom it would make--big enough for badminton."<br /><br />"Robin can have the Old Rectory."<br /><br />"Now with regard to money, Celia and Robin naturally don't want to<br />accept anything for themselves, but there's the question of the children's<br />education."<br /><br />"That will be all right. I'll see the lawyers about it."<br /><br />"Well, I think that's everything," said Mulcaster. "You know, I've seen<br />a few divorces in my time, and I've never known one work out so happily for<br />all concerned. Almost always, however matey people are at the start, bad<br />blood crops up when they get down to detail. Mind you, I don't miricl saying<br />there have been times in the last two years when I thought you were treating<br />Celia a bit rough. It's hard to tell with one's own sister, but I've always<br />thought her a jolly attractive girl, the sort of girl any chap would be glad<br />to have--artistic, too, just down your street. But I must admit you're a<br />good picker. I've always had a soft spot for Julia. Anyway, as things have<br />turned out everyone seems satisfied. Robin's been mad about Celia for a year<br />or more. D'you know him?"<br /><br />"Vaguely. A half-baked, pimply youth as I remember him." "Oh, I<br />wouldn't quite say that. He's rather young, of course, but the great thing<br />is that Johnjohn and Caroline adore him. You've got two grand kids there,<br />Charles. Remember me to Julia; wish her all the best for old time's sake."<br /><br /><br />"So you're being divorced," said my father. "Isn't that rather<br />unnecessary, after you've been happy together all these years?"<br /><br />"We weren't particularly happy, you know."<br /><br />"Weren't you? Were you not? I distinctly remember last Christmas seeing<br />you together and thinking how happy you looked, and wondering why. You'll<br />find it very disturbing, you know, starting off again. How old are<br />you--thirty-four? That's no age to be starting. You ought to be settling<br />down. Have you made any plans?"<br /><br />"Yes. I'm marrying again as soon as the divorce is through."<br /><br />"Well, I do call that a lot of nonsense. I can understand a man wishing<br />he hadn't married and trying to get out of it -- though I never felt<br />anything of the kind myself -- but to get rid of one wife and take up with<br />another immediately is beyond all reason. Celia was always perfectly civil<br />to me. I had quite a liking for her, in a way. If you couldn't be happy with<br />her, why on earth should you expect to be happy with anyone else? Take my<br />advice, my dear boy, and give up the whole idea."<br /><br />"Why bring Julia and me into this?" asked Rex. "If Celia wants to marry<br />again, well and good; let her. That's your business and hers. But I should<br />have thought Julia and I were quite happy as we are. You can't say I've been<br />difficult. Lots of chaps would have cut up nasty. I hope I'm a man of the<br />world. I've had my own fish to fry, too. But a divorce is a different thing<br />altogether; I've never known a divorce do anyone any good."<br /><br />"That's your affair and Julia's."<br /><br />"Oh, Julia's set on it. What I hoped was, you might be able to talk her<br />round. I've tried to keep out of the way as much as I could; if I've been<br />around too much, just tell me, I shan't mind. But there's too much going on<br />altogether at the moment, what with Bridey wanting me to clear out of the<br />house; it's disturbing, and I've got a lot on my mind."<br /><br />Rex's public life was approaching a climacteric. Things had not gone as<br />smoothly with him as he had planned. I knew nothing of finance, but I heard<br />it said that his dealings were badly looked on by orthodox conservatives;<br />even his good qualities of geniality and impetuosity counted against him,<br />for his parties at Brideshead got talked about. There was always too much<br />about him in the papers; he was one with the press lords and their sad-eyed,<br />smiling hangers-on; in his speeches he said the sort of thing which "made a<br />story" in Fleet Street, and that did him no good with his party chiefs; only<br />war could put Rex's fortunes right and carry him into power. A divorce would<br />do Him no harm with these cronies; it was rather that with a big bank<br />running he could not look up from the table.<br /><br />"If Julia insists on a divorce, I suppose she must have it," he said.<br />"But she couldn't have chosen a worse time. Tell her to hang on a bit,<br />Charles, there's a good fellow."<br /><br />"Bridey's widow said: 'So you're divorcing one divorced man and<br />marrying another. It sounds rather complicated, but my dear' -- she called<br />me 'my dear' about twenty times -- 'I've usually found every Catholic family<br />has one lapsed member, and it's often the nicest.'"<br /><br />Julia had just returned from a luncheon party given by Lady Rosscommon<br />in honour of Brideshead's engagement.<br /><br />"What's she like?"<br /><br />"Majestic and voluptuous; common, of course; might be Irish or Jewish<br />or both; husky voice, big mouth, small eyes, dyed hair -- I'll tell you one<br />thing, she's lied to Bridey about her age. She's a good forty-five. I don't<br />see her providing an heir. Bridey can't take his eyes off her. He was<br />gloating on her in the most revolting way all through luncheon."<br /><br />"Friendly?"<br /><br />"Goodness, yes, in a condescending way. You see, I imagine 1 she's been<br />used to bossing things rather in naval circles, with flag-lieutenants<br />trotting round and young officers-on-the-make sucking up to her. Well, she<br />clearly couldn't do a great deal of bossing at Aunt Fanny's, so it put her<br />rather at ease to have me there as the black sheep. She concentrated on me,<br />in fact; asked my advice about shops and things; said, rather pointedly, she<br />hoped to see me often in London. I think Bridey's scruples only extend to<br />her sleeping under the same roof with me. Apparently I can do her no serious<br />harm in a hat-shop or hairdresser's ' or lunching at the Ritz. The scruples<br />are all on Bridey's part, anyway; the widow is madly tough."<br /><br />"Does she boss him?"<br /><br />"Not yet, much. He's in an amorous stupor, poor beast, and doesn't<br />quite know where he is. She's just a good-hearted woman who wants a good<br />home for her children and isn't going to let anything get in her way. She's<br />playing up the religious stuff at j the moment for all it's worth. I daresay<br />she'll ease up a bit when she's settled."<br /><br /><br />The divorces were much talked of among our friends; even in that summer<br />of general alarm there were still corners where private affairs commanded<br />first attention. My wife was able to put it across that the business was a<br />matter of congratulation for her and reproach for me; that she had behaved<br />wonderfully, had stood it longer than anyone but she would have done; Robin<br />was seven years younger and a little immature for his age, they whispered in<br />their private corners, but he was absolutely devoted to poor Celia, and<br />really she deserved it after all she had been through. As for Julia and me,<br />that was an old story. "To put it crudely," said my cousin Jasper, as though<br />he had ever in his life put anything otherwise: "I don't see why you bother<br />to marry."<br /><br />Summer passed; delirious crowds cheered Neville Chamberlain's return<br />from Munich; Rex made a rabid speech in the House of Commons which sealed<br />his fate one way or the other; sealed it, as is sometimes done with naval<br />orders, to be opened later at sea. Julia's family lawyers, whose black, tin<br />boxes, painted marquis of marchmain, seemed to fill a room, began the slow<br />process of her divorce; my own, brisker firm, two doors down, were weeks<br />ahead with my affairs. It was necessary for Rex and Julia to separate<br />formally, and since, for the time being, Brideshead was still her home, she<br />remained there and Rex removed his trunks and valet to their house in<br />London. Evidence was taken against Julia and me in my flat. A date was fixed<br />for Brideshead's wedding, early in the Christmas holidays, so that his<br />future stepchildren might take part.<br />One afternoon in November Julia and I stood at a window in the<br />drawing-room watching the wind at work stripping the lime-trees, sweeping<br />down the yellow leaves, sweeping them up and round and along the terrace and<br />lawns, trailing them through puddles and over the wet grass, pasting them on<br />walls and window-panes, leaving them at length in sodden piles against the<br />stonework.<br /><br />"We shan't see them in spring," said Julia; "perhaps never again."<br /><br />"Once before," I said, "I went away, thinking I should never return."<br /><br />"Perhaps years later, to what's left of it, with what's left of us ..."<br /><br />A door opened and shut in the darkling room behind us. Wilcox<br />approached through the firelight into the dusk about the long windows.<br /><br />"A telephone message, my lady, from Lady Cordelia."<br /><br />"Lady Cordelia! Where was she?"<br /><br />"In London, my lady."<br /><br />"Wilcox, how lovely! Is she coming home?"<br /><br />"She was just starting for the station. She will be here after dinner."<br /><br />"I haven't seen her for twelve years," I said -- not since the evening<br />when we dined together and she spoke of being a nun; the evening when I<br />painted the drawing-room at Marchmain House.<br /><br />"She was an enchanting child."<br /><br />"She's had an odd life. First, the convent; then, when that was no<br />good, the war in Spain. I've not seen her since then. The other girls who<br />went with the ambulance came back when the war was over; she stayed on,<br />getting people back to their homes, helping in the prison camps. An odd<br />girl. She's grown up quite plain, you know."<br /><br />"Does she know about us?"<br /><br />"Yes, she wrote me a sweet letter."<br /><br />It hurt to think of Cordelia growing up quite plain; to think of all<br />that burning love spending itself on serum injections and delousing powder.<br />When she arrived, tired from her journey, rather shabby, moving in the<br />manner of one who has no interest in pleasing, I thought her an ugly woman.<br />It was odd, I thought, how the same ingredients, differently dispensed,<br />could produce Brideshead, Sebastian, Julia and her. She was unmistakably<br />their sister, without any of Julia's or Sebastian's grace, without<br />Brideshead's gravity. She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact, steeped in the<br />atmosphere of camp and dressing station, so accustomed to gross suffering as<br />to lose the finer shades of pleasure. She looked more than her twenty-six<br />years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign<br />tongue had worn away the nuances of speech; she straddled a little as she<br />sat by the fire, and when she said, "It's wonderful to be home," it sounded<br />to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.<br /><br />Those were the impressions of the first half-hour, sharpened by the<br />contrast with Julia's white skin and silk and jewelled hair and with my<br />memories of her as a child.<br /><br />"My job's over in Spain," she said; "the authorities were very polite,<br />thanked me for all I'd done, gave me a medal and sent me packing. It looks<br />as though there'll be plenty of the same sort of work over here soon."<br /><br />Then she said: "Is it too late to see Nanny?"<br /><br />"No, she sits up to all hours with her wireless." We went up, all three<br />together, to the old nursery. Julia and I always spent part of our day<br />there. Nanny Hawkins and my father were two people who seemed impervious to<br />change; neither an hour older than when I first knew them. A wireless set<br />had now been added to Nanny Hawkins's small assembly of pleasures--the<br />rosary, the Peerage with its neat brown-paper wrapping protecting the red<br />and gold covers, the photographs and holiday souvenirs -- on her table. When<br />we broke it to her that Julia and I were to be married, she said, "Well,<br />dear, I hope it's all for the best," for it was not part of her religion to<br />question the propriety of Julia's actions.<br /><br />Brideshead had never been a favourite with her; she greeted the news of<br />his engagement with "He's certainly taken long enough to make up his mind,"<br />and, when the search through Debrett afforded no information about Mrs.<br />Muspratt's connections: "She's caught him, I daresay."<br />We found her, as always in the evening, at the fireside with her<br />teapot, and the wool rug she was making.<br /><br />"I knew you'd be up," she said. "Mr. Wilcox sent to tell me you were<br />coming."<br /><br />"I brought you some lace."<br /><br />"Well, dear, that is nice. Just like her poor Ladyship used to wear at<br />mass. Though why they made it black I never did understand, seeing lace is<br />white naturally. That is very welcome, I'm sure."<br /><br />"May I turn off the wireless, Nanny?"<br /><br />"Why, of course; I didn't notice it was still on, in the pleasure of<br />seeing you. What have you done to your hair?"<br /><br />"I know it's terrible. I must get all that put right now I'm back.<br />Darling Nanny."<br /><br />As we sat there talking, and I saw Cordelia's fond eyes on all of us, I<br />began to realize that she, too, had a beauty of her own.<br /><br />"I saw Sebastian last month."<br /><br />"What a time he's been gone! Was he quite well?"<br /><br />"Not very. That's why I went. It's quite near you know from Spain to<br />Tunis. He's with the monks there."<br /><br />"I hope they look after him properly. I expect they find him a regular<br />handful. He always sends to me at Christmas, but it's not the same as having<br />him home. Why you must all always be going abroad I never did understand.<br />Just like his Lordship. When there was that talk about going to war with<br />Munich, I said to myself, there's Cordelia and Sebastian and his Lordship<br />all abroad; that'll be very awkward for them."<br /><br />"I wanted him to come home with me, but he wouldn't. He's got beard<br />now, you know, and he's very religions."<br /><br />"That I won't believe, not even if I see it. He was always a little<br />heathen. Brideshead was one for church, not Sebastian. And a beard, only<br />fancy; such a nice fair skin as he had; always looked clean though he'd not<br />been near water all day, while Brideshead there was no doing anything with<br />scrub as you might."<br /><br />"It's frightening," Julia once said, "to think how completely you have<br />forgotten Sebastian."<br /><br />"He was the forerunner."<br /><br />"That's what you said in the storm. I've thought since: perhaps I am<br />only a forerunner, too."<br /><br />Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us<br />like a wisp of tobacco smoke -- a thought to fade and vanish like smoke<br />without a trace -- perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a<br />hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only<br />a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types<br />and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from<br />disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other,<br />snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always<br />a pace or two ahead of us.<br /><br />I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather<br />it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant, Arcadian days.<br /><br />"That's cold comfort for a girl," she said when I tried to explain.<br />"How do I know I shan't suddenly turn out to be somebody else? It's an easy<br />way to chuck."<br /><br />I had not forgotten Sebastian; every stone of the house had a memory of<br />him, and when I heard him spoken of by Cordelia as someone she had seen a<br />month ago, my lost friend filled my thoughts. When we left the nursery, I<br />said, "I want to hear all about Sebastian."<br /><br />"To-morrow. It's a long story."<br /><br />And next day, walking through the wind-swept park, she told me: --<br /><br />"I heard he was dying," she said. "A journalist in Burgos told me,<br />who'd just arrived from North Africa. A down-and-out called Flyte, who<br />people said was an English lord, whom the fathers had found starving and<br />taken in at a monastery near Carthage. That was how the story reached me. I<br />knew it couldn't be quite true--however little we did for Sebastian, he at<br />least got his money sent him--but I started off at once.<br /><br />"It was all quite easy. I went to the consulate first and they knew all<br />about him; he was in the infirmary of the head house of some missionary<br />fathers. The consul's story was that Sebastian had turned up in Tunis one<br />day, some weeks before, in a motor bus from Algiers, and had applied to be<br />taken on as a missionary lay brother. The fathers took one look at him and<br />turned him down. Then he started drinking. He lived in a little.' hotel on<br />the edge of the Arab quarter. I went to see the place later; it was a bar<br />with a few rooms over it, kept by a Greek, smelling of hot oil and garlic<br />and stale wine and old clothes, a place where the small Greek traders came<br />and played draughts and listened to the wireless. He stayed there a month<br />drinking Greek absinthe, occasionally wandering out, they didn't know where,<br />coming back and drinking again. They were afraid he j would come to harm and<br />followed him sometimes, but he only went to the church or took a car to the<br />monastery outside the town. They loved him there. He's still loved, you see,<br />wherever he goes, whatever condition he's in. It's a thing about him he'll<br />never lose. You should have heard the proprietor and his family talk of him,<br />tears running down their cheeks; they'd clearly robbed him right and left,<br />but they'd looked after him and tried j to make him eat'his meals. That was<br />the thing that shocked them about him: that he wouldn't eat; there he was<br />with all that money, so thin. Some of the clients of the place came in while<br />we were talking in very peculiar French; they all had the same story: such a<br />good man, they said, it made them unhappy to sec him so low. They thought<br />very ill of his family for leaving him like that; it couldn't happen with<br />their people, they said, and I daresay they're right.<br /><br />"Anyway, that was later; after the consulate I went straight to the<br />monastery and saw the Superior. He was a grim old Dutch man who had spent<br />fifty years in Central Africa. He told me his part of the story; how<br />Sebastian had turned up, just as the consul said, with his beard and a<br />suitcase, and asked to be admitted as a lay brother. 'He was very earnest,'<br />the Superior said -- Cordelia imitated his guttural tones; she had had an<br />aptitude for mimicry, I remembered, in the schoolroom -- " 'please do not<br />think there is any doubt of that -- he is quite sane and quite in earnest.<br />He wanted to go to the bush, as far away as he could get, among the simplest<br />people, to the cannibals. The Superior said: 'We have no cannibals in our<br />missions.' He said, well, pygmies would do, or just a primitive village<br />somewhere on a river; or lepers--lepers would do best of anything. The<br />Superior said: 'We have plenty of lepers, but they live in our settlements<br />with doctors and nuns. It is all very orderly.' He thought again, and said<br />perhaps lepers were not what he wanted, was there not some small church by a<br />river -- he always wanted a river you see --which he could look after when<br />the priest was away. The Superior said; 'Yes, there are such churches. Now<br />tell me about, yourself.' 'Oh, I'm nothing,' he said. 'We see some queer<br />fish'" -- Cordelia lapsed again into mimicry; " 'he was a queer fish, but he<br />was very earnest.' The Superior told him about the novitiate and the<br />training and said: 'You are not a young man. You do not seem strong to me.'<br />He said: 'No, I don't want to be trained. I don't want to do things that<br />need training.' The Superior said: 'My friend, you need a missionary for<br />yourself,' and he said: 'Yes, of course.' Then he sent him away.<br /><br />"Next day he came back again. He had been drinking. He said he had<br />decided to become a novice and be trained. 'Well,' said the Superior, 'there<br />are certain things that are impossible for a man in the bush. One of them is<br />drinking. It is not the worst thing, but it is nevertheless quite fatal. I<br />sent him away.' Then he kept coming two or three times a week, always drunk,<br />until the Superior gave orders that the porter was to keep him out. I said,<br />'Oh dear, I'm afraid he was a terrible nuisance to you,' but of course<br />that's a thing they don't understand in a place like that. The Superior<br />simply said, 'I did not think there was anything I could do to help him<br />except pray.' He was a very holy old man and recognized it in others."<br /><br />"Holiness?"<br /><br />"Oh yes, Charles, that's what you've got to understand about Sebastian.<br /><br />"Well, finally one day they found Sebastian lying outside the main gate<br />unconscious; he had walked out -- usually he took a car -- and fallen down<br />and lain there all night. At first they thought he was merely drunk again;<br />then they realized he was very ill, so they put him in the infirmary, where<br />he'd been ever since.<br /><br />"I stayed a fortnight with him till he was over the worst of his<br />illness. He looked terrible, any age, rather bald with a straggling beard,<br />but he had his old sweet manner. They'd given him a room to himself; it was<br />barely more than a monk's cell with a bed and a crucifix and white walls. At<br />first he couldn't talk much and was not at all surprised to see me; then he<br />was surprised and wouldn't talk much, until just before I was going, when he<br />told me all that had been happening to him. It was' mostly about Kurt, his<br />German friend. Well, you met him, so you know all about that. He sounds<br />gruesome, but as long as Sebastian had him to look after, he was happy. He<br />told me he'd practically given up drinking at one time while he and Kurt<br />lived together. Kurt was ill and had a wound that wouldn't heal. Sebastian<br />saw him through that. Then they went to Greece when Kurt got well. You know<br />how Germans sometimes seem to discover a sense of decency when they get to a<br />classical country. It seems to have worked with Kurt. Sebastian says he<br />became quite human in Athens. Then he got sent to prison; I couldn't quite<br />make out why; apparently it wasn't particularly his fault-- some brawl with<br />an official. Once he was locked up the German authorities got at him. It was<br />the time when they were rounding up all their nationals from all parts of<br />the world to make them into Nazis. Kurt didn't at all want to leave Greece.<br />But the Greeks didn't want him, and he was marched straight from prison with<br />a lot of other toughs into a German boat and shipped home.<br /><br />"Sebastian went after him, and for a year could find no trace. Then in<br />the end he ran him to earth dressed as a storm trooper in a provincial town.<br />At first he wouldn't have anything to do with Sebastian; spouted all the<br />official jargon about the rebirth of his country, and his belonging to his<br />country and finding t self-realization in the life of the race. But it was<br />only skin-deep with him. Six years of Sebastian had taught him more than a<br />year of Hitler; eventually he chucked it, admitted he hated Germany, and<br />wanted to get out. I don't know how much it was simply the call of the easy<br />life, sponging on Sebastian, bathing in the Mediterranean, sitting about in<br />caf&, having his shoes polished. Sebastian says it wasn't entirely that;<br />Kurt had just begun to grow up in Athens. It may be he's right. Anyway, he<br />decided to try and get out. But it didn't work. He always got into trouble<br />whatever he did, Sebastian said. They caught him and put him in a<br />concentration camp. Sebastian couldn't get near him or hear a word of him;<br />he couldn't even find what camp he was in; he hung about for nearly a year<br />in Germany, drinking again, until one day in his cups he took up with a man<br />who was just out of the camp where Kurt had been, and learned that he had<br />hanged himself in his hut the first week.<br /><br />"So that was the end of Europe for Sebastian. He went back to Morocco,<br />where he had been happy, and gradually drifted down the coast, from place to<br />place, until one day when he had sobered up -- his drinking goes in pretty<br />regular bouts now--he conceived the idea of escaping to the savages. And<br />there he was.<br /><br />"I didn't suggest his coming home. I knew he wouldn't, and he was too<br />weak still to argue it out. He seemed quite happy by the time I left. He'll<br />never be able to go into the bush, of course, or join the order, but the<br />Father Superior is going to take charge of him. They had the idea of making<br />him a sort of under-porter; there are usually a few odd hangers-on in a<br />religious house, you know; people who can't quite fit in either to the world<br />or the monastic rule. I suppose I'm something of the sort myself. But as I<br />don't happen to drink, I'm more employable."<br /><br />We had reached the turn in our walk, the stone bridge at the foot of<br />the last and smallest lake, under which the swollen waters fell in a<br />cataract to the stream below; beyond the path doubled back towards the<br />house. We paused at the parapet looking down into the dark water.<br /><br />"I once had a governess who jumped off this bridge and drowned<br />herself."<br /><br />"Yes, I know."<br /><br />"How could you know?"<br /><br />"It was the first thing I ever heard about you---before I ever met<br />you."<br /><br />"How very odd. . . ."<br /><br />"Have you told Julia this about Sebastian?"<br /><br />"The substance of it; not quite as I told you. She never loved him, you<br />know, as we do."<br /><br />"Do" The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia's verb<br />"to love."<br /><br />"Poor SebastianI" I said. "It's too pitiful. How will it end?"<br /><br />"I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I've seen others like him,<br />and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He'll live on, half in,<br />half out of the community, a familiar figure pottering round with his broom<br />and his bunch of keys. He'll be a great favourite with the old fathers,<br />something of a joke I to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking;<br />he'll disappear for two or three days every month or so, and they'll all nod<br />and smile and say in their various accents, 'Old Sebastian's on the spree<br />again,' and then he'll come back dishevelled and shamefaced and be more<br />devout for a day or two in the chapel. He'll probably have little hiding<br />places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and<br />then on the sly. They'll bring him forward to act as guide, whenever they<br />have an English-speaking visitor; and he will be completely charming, so<br />that before they go they'll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that<br />he has high connections at home. If he lives long enough, generations of<br />missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old<br />character who was somehow part of the Hope of their student days, and<br />remember him in their masses. He'll develop little eccentricities of<br />devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he'll be found in the chapel at<br />odd times and missed when he's expected. Then one morning, after one of his<br />drinking bouts, he'll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere<br />flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last<br />sacraments. It's not such a bad way of getting through one's life."<br /><br />I thought of the joyful youth with the Teddy-bear under the flowering<br />chestnuts. "It's not what one would have foretold," I said. "I suppose he<br />doesn't suffer?"<br /><br />"Oh, yes, I think he does. One can have no idea what the suffering may<br />be, to be maimed as he is -- no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever<br />holy without suffering. It's taken that form with him. . . . I've seen so<br />much suffering in the last few years; there's so much coming for everybody<br />soon. It's the spring of love . . ." And then in condescension to my<br />paganism, she added: "He's in a very beautiful place, you know, by the sea<br />-- white cloisters, a bell tower, rows of green vegetables, and a monk<br />watering them when the sun is low."<br /><br />I laughed. "You knew I wouldn't understand?"<br /><br />"You and Julia . . ."she said. And then, as we moved on towards the<br />house, "When you met me last night did you think, 'Poor Cordelia, such an<br />engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works'?<br />Did you think 'thwarted'?"<br /><br />It was no time for prevarication. "Yes," I said, "I did; I don't now,<br />so much."<br /><br />"It's funny," she said, "that's exactly the word I thought of for you<br />and Julia. When we were up in the nursery with Nanny. Thwarted passion,' I<br />thought."<br /><br />She spoke with that gentle, infinitesimal inflection of mockery which<br />descended to her from her mother, but later that evening the words came back<br />to me poignantly.<br /><br />Julia wore the embroidered Chinese robe which she often used when we<br />were dining alone at Brideshead; it was a robe whose weight and stiff folds<br />stressed her repose; her neck rose exquisitely from the plain gold circle at<br />her throat; her hands lay still among the dragons in her lap. It was thus<br />that I had rejoiced to see her nights without number, and that night,<br />watching her as she sat between the firelight and the shaded lamp, unable to<br />look away for love of her beauty, I suddenly thought, When else have I seen<br />her like this? Why am I reminded of another moment of vision? And it came<br />back to me that this was how she had sat in the liner, before the storm;<br />this was how she had looked; and I realized that she had regained what I<br />thought she had lost for ever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to<br />her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some<br />other purpose than this?"<br /><br />That night I woke in the darkness and lay awake turning over in my mind<br />the conversation with Cordelia. How I had said, "You knew I would not<br />understand?" How often, it seemed to me, I was brought up short, like a<br />horse in full stride suddenly refusing an obstacle, backing from the spurs,<br />too shy even to put his nose at it and look at the thing.<br /><br />And another image came to me, of an arctic hut and a trapper alone with<br />his furs and oil lamp and log fire; the remains of supper on the table, a<br />few books, skis in the corner; everything dry and neat and warm inside, and<br />outside the last blizzard of winter raging and the snow piling up against<br />the door. Quite silently a great weight forming against the timber; the bolt<br />straining in its socket; minute by minute in the darkness outside the white<br />heap sealing the door, until quite soon, when the wind dropped and the sun<br />came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in, a block would move, slide<br />and tumble, high above, gather way, gadier weight, till the whole hillside<br />seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would crash open and<br />splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine.Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-42989985564402032272008-08-06T14:06:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:07:16.128+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book II. A twitch upon the thread. Chapter ThreeChapter Three<br /><br />"Do you remember," said Julia, in the tranquil, lime-scented evening,<br />"do you remember the storm?"<br /><br />"The bronze doors banging."<br /><br />"The roses in cellophane."<br /><br />"The man who gave the 'get-together' party and was never seen again."<br /><br />"Do you remember how the sun came out on our last evening just as it<br />has done to-day?"<br /><br />It had been an afternoon of low cloud and summer squalls, so overcast<br />that at times I had stopped work and roused Julia from the light trance in<br />which she sat -- she had sat so often; I never tired of painting her,<br />forever finding in her new wealth and delicacy -- until at length we had<br />gone early to our baths, and on coming down, dressed for dinner, in the last<br />half-hour of the day, we found the world transformed; the sun had emerged;<br />the wind had fallen to a soft breeze which gently stirred the blossom in the<br />limes and carried its fragrance, fresh from the late rains, to merge with<br />the sweet breath of box and the drying stone. The shadow of the obelisk<br />spanned the terrace.<br /><br />I had carried two garden cushions from the shelter of the colonnade and<br />put them on the rim of the fountain. There Julia sat, in a tight little gold<br />tunic and a white gown, one hand in the water idly turning an emerald ring<br />to catch the fire of the sunset; the carved animals mounted over her dark<br />head in a cumulus of green moss and glowing stone and dense shadow, and the<br />waters round them flashed and bubbled and broke into scattered beads of<br />flame.<br /><br />". . . So much to remember," she said. "How many days have there been<br />'since then, when we haven't seen each other; a hundred, do you think?"<br /><br />"Not so many."<br /><br />"Two Christmases" -- those bleak, annual excursions into propriety.<br />Boughton, home of my family, home of my cousin Jasper, with what glum<br />memories of childhood I revisited its pitch-pine corridors and dripping<br />walls! How querulously my father and I, seated side by side in my uncle's<br />Humber, approached the avenue of Wellingtonias knowing that at the end of<br />the drive we should find my uncle, my aunt, my Aunt Philippa, my cousin<br />Jasper and, of recent years, Jasper's wife and children; and besides them,<br />perhaps already arrived, perhaps every moment expected, my wife and my<br />children. This annual sacrifice united us; here among the holly and<br />mistletoe and the cut spruce, the parlour games ritually performed, the<br />brandy-butter and the Carlsbad plums, the village choir in the pitch-pine<br />minstrekl gallery, gold twine and sprigged wrapping-paper, she and I weril<br />accepted, whatever ugly rumours had been afloat in the past yeafJ as man and<br />wife. "We must keep it up, whatever it costs us, fc the sake of the<br />children," my wife said.<br /><br />"Yes, two Christmases. . . . And the three days of good tas before I<br />followed you to Capri."<br /><br />"Our first summer."<br /><br />"Do you remember how I hung about Naples, then followe how we met by<br />arrangement on. the hill path and how flat fell?"<br /><br />"I went back to the villa and said, 'Papa, who do you think arrived at<br />the hotel?' and he said, 'Charles Ryder, I suppose.' said, 'Why did you<br />think of him?' and Papa replied, 'Cara came back from Paris with the news<br />that you and he were inseparable He seems to have a penchant for my<br />children. However, brir him here. I think we have the room.'"<br /><br />"There was the time you had jaundice and wouldn't let see you."<br /><br />"And when I had flu and you were afraid to come."<br /><br />"Countless visits to Rex's constituency."<br /><br />"And Coronation Week, when you ran away from Londc Your goodwill<br />mission to your father-in-law. The time you went to Oxford to paint the<br />picture they didn't like. Oh, yes, quite' hundred days."<br /><br />"A hundred days wasted out of two years and a bit ... a day when you<br />were not in my heart; not a day's coldness mistrust or disappointment."<br /><br />"Never that."<br /><br />We fell silent; only the birds spoke in a multitude of smalj clear<br />voices in the lime-trees; only the waters spoke among the carved stones.<br /><br />Julia took the handkerchief from my breast pocket and her hand; then<br />lit a cigarette. I feared to break the spell of memories, but for once our<br />thoughts had not kept pace together, for when at length Julia spoke, she<br />said sadly: "How many more? Another hundred?"<br /><br />"A lifetime."<br /><br />"I want to marry you, Charles."<br /><br />"One day; why now?"<br /><br />"War," she said, "this year, next year, sometime soon. I want a day or<br />two with you of real peace."<br /><br />"Isn't this peace?"<br /><br />The sun had sunk now to the line of woodland beyond the valley; all the<br />opposing slope was already in twilight, but the lakes below us were aflame;<br />the light grew in strength and splendour as it neared death, spreading long<br />shadows across the pasture, falling full on the rich stone spaces of the<br />house, firing the panes in the windows, glowing on cornices and colonnade<br />and dome, drawing out all the hidden sweetness of colour and scent from<br />earth and stone and leaf, glorifying the head and golden shoulders of the<br />woman beside me.<br /><br />"What do you mean by 'peace'; if not this?"<br /><br />"So much more"; and then in a chill, matter-of-fact tone she continued:<br />"Marriage isn't a thing we can take when the impulse moves us. There must be<br />a divorce -- two divorces. We must make plans."<br /><br />"Plans, divorce, war -- on an evening like this."<br /><br />"Sometimes," said Julia, "I feel the past and the future pressing so<br />hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all."<br /><br />Then Wilcox came down the steps into the sunset to tell us that dinner<br />was ready.<br /><br />Shutters were up, curtains drawn, candles lit, in the Painted Parlour.<br /><br />"Hullo, it's laid for three." "Lord Brideshead arrived half an hour<br />ago, my lady. He sent a message would you please not wait dinner for him as<br />he may be a little late."<br /><br />"It seems months since he was here last," said Julia. "What does he do<br />in London?"<br /><br />It was often a matter for speculation between us -- giving birth to<br />many fantasies, for Bridey was a mystery; a creature from under ground; a<br />hard-snouted, burrowing, hibernating animal who shunned the light. He had<br />been completely without action in all his years of adult life; the talk of<br />his going into the army, 1 and into Parliament, and into a monastery, had<br />all come to nothing. All that he was known with certainty to have done--andi<br />this because in a season of scant news it had formed the subject of a<br />newspaper article entitled peer's unusual hobby -- was to form a collection<br />of match-boxes; he kept them mounted on boards, card-indexed, yearly<br />occupying a larger and larger space in his small house in Westminster. At<br />first he was bashful about the notoriety which the newspaper caused, but<br />later greatly pleased, for he found it the means of his getting into touch<br />with other collectors in all parts of the world with whom he now<br />corresponded and swapped duplicates. Other than this he was not known to<br />have any interests. He remained Joint-Master of the Marchmain and hunted<br />with them dutifully on their two days a week when he was at home; he never<br />hunted with the neighbouring pack, who had the better country. He had no<br />real zest for sport, and had not been out a dozen times that season; he had<br />few friends; he visited his aunts; he went to public dinners held in the<br />Catholic interest. At Brideshead he performed all unavoidable local duties,<br />bringing with him to platform and fettfil and committee room his own thin<br />mist of clumsiness and aloofness.<br /><br />"There was a girl found strangled with a piece of barbed wire at<br />Wandsworth last week," I said, reviving an old fantasy.<br /><br />"That must be Bridey. He is naughty."<br /><br />When we had been a quarter of an hour at the table he joined us, coming<br />ponderously into the room in the bottle-green velvet smoking suit which he<br />kept at Brideshead and always wore when he was there. At thirty-eight he had<br />grown heavy and bald, and might have been taken for forty-five.<br /><br />"Well," he said, "well, only you two; I hoped to find Rex here."<br /><br />I often wondered what he made of me and of my continual presence; he<br />seemed to accept me, without curiosity, as one of the household. Twice in<br />the past two years he had surprised me by what seemed to be acts of<br />friendship; last Christmas he sent me a photograph of himself in the robes<br />of a Knight of Malta, and shortly afterwards he asked me to go with him to a<br />dining club. Both acts had an explanation: he had had more copies of his<br />portrait printed than he knew what to do with; he was proud of his club. It<br />was a surprising association of men quite eminent in their professions who<br />met once a month for an cvp-ning of ceremonious buffoonery; each had his<br />sobriquet-- Bridey was called "Brother Grandee"--and a specially designed<br />jewel worn like an order of chivalry, symbolizing it; they had club buttons<br />for their waistcoats and an elaborate ritual for the introduction of guests;<br />after dinner a paper was read and facetious speeches made. There was plainly<br />some competition to bring guests of distinction, and since Bridey had few<br />friends, and since I was tolerably well-known, I was invited. Even on that<br />convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of<br />social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about<br />himself in which he floated with loglike calm.<br /><br />He sat down opposite me and bowed his sparse, pink head over his plate.<br /><br />"Well, Bridey. What's the news?"<br /><br />"As a matter of fact," he said, "I have some news. But it can wait."<br /><br />"Tell us now."<br /><br />He made a grimace which I took to mean "not in front of the f<br />servants," and said, "How is the painting, Charles?"<br /><br />"Which painting?"<br /><br />"Whatever you have on the stocks."<br /><br />"I began a sketch of Julia, but the light was tricky all to-day."<br /><br />"Julia? I thought you'd done her before. I suppose it's a change from<br />architecture, and much more difficult."<br /><br />His conversation abounded in long pauses during which his mind seemed<br />to remain motionless; he always brought one back with a start to the exact<br />point where he had stopped. Now after more than a minute he said: "The world<br />is full of different subjects."<br /><br />"Very true, Bridey."<br /><br />"If I were a painter," he said, "I should choose an entirely different<br />subject every time; subjects with plenty of action in them like . . ."<br />Another pause. What, I wondered, was coming? "The Flying Scotsman"'? "The<br />Charge of the Light Brigade"? "Henley' Regatta"? Then surprisingly he<br />said:". . . like 'Macbeth.'" There was something supremely preposterous in<br />the idea of Bridey as a painter of action pictures; he was usually<br />preposterous yet seldom quite absurd. He achieved dignity by his remoteness<br />and agelessness; he was still half-child, already half-veteran; there seemed<br />no spark of contemporary life in him; he had a kind of massive rectitude and<br />impermeability, an indifference to the world, which compelled respect.<br />Though we often laughed at: him, he was never wholly ridiculous;<br />at times he was even formidable.<br /><br />We talked of the news from Central Europe until, suddenly ill cutting<br />across this barren topic, Bridey asked: "Where are Mummy's jewels?"<br /><br />"This was hers," said Julia, "and this. Cordelia and I had all her own<br />things. The family jewels went to the bank."<br /><br />"It's so long since I've seen them--I don't know that I ever saw them<br />all. What is there? Aren't there some rather famous rubies, someone was<br />telling me?"<br /><br />"Yes, a necklace. Mummy used often to wear it, don't you remember ? And<br />there are the pearls -- she always had those out. But most of it stayed in<br />the bank year after year. There are some hideous diamond fenders, I<br />remember, and a Victorian diamond collar no one could wear now. There's a<br />mass of good stones. Why?"<br /><br />"I'd like to have a look at them some day."<br /><br />"I say, Papa isn't going to pop them, is he? He hasn't got into debt<br />again?"<br /><br />"No, no, nothing like that."<br /><br />Bridey was a slow and copious eater. Julia and I watched him between<br />the candles. Presently he said: "If I was Rex . . .".His mind seemed full of<br />such suppositions: "If I was Archbishop of Westminster," "If I was head of<br />the Great Western Railway," "If I was an actress"--as though it were a mere<br />trick of fate that he was none of these things, and he might awake any<br />morning to find the matter adjusted. "If I was Rex I should want to live in<br />my constituency."<br /><br />"Rex says it saves four days' work a week not to."<br /><br />"I'm sorry he's not here. I have a little announcement to make."<br /><br />"Bridey, don't be so mysterious. Out with it."<br /><br />He made the grimace, which seemed to mean "not before the servants."<br /><br />Later, when port was on the table and we three were alone, Julia said:<br />"I'm not going till I hear the announcement."<br /><br />"Well," said Bridey sitting back in his chair and gazing fixedly at his<br />glass. "You have only to wait until Monday to see it in black and white in<br />the newspapers. I am engaged to be married. I hope you are pleased."<br /><br />"Bridey. How . . . how very exciting! Who to?."<br /><br />"Oh, no one you know."<br /><br />"Is she pretty?"<br /><br />"I don't think you would exactly call her pretty; 'comely' is the word<br />I think of in her connection. She is a big woman."<br /><br />"Fat?"<br /><br />"No, big. She is called Mrs. Muspratt; her Christian name is Beryl. I<br />have known her for a long time, but until last year she had a husband; now<br />she is a widow. Why do you laugh?"<br /><br />"I'm sorry. It isn't the least funny. It's just so unexpected. Is she .<br />. . is she about your own age?"<br /><br />"Just about, I believe. She has three children, the eldest boy has just<br />gone to Ampleforth. She is not at all well off."<br /><br />"But Bridey, where did you find her?"<br /><br />"Her late husband, Admiral Muspratt, collected match-boxes," he said<br />with complete gravity.<br />Julia trembled on the verge of laughter, recovered her self-possession<br />and asked: "You're not marrying her for her matchboxes?"<br /><br />"No, no; the whole collection was left to the Falmouth Town Library. I<br />have a great affection for her. In spite of all her difficulties she is a<br />very cheerful woman,, very fond of acting. She is connected with the<br />Catholic Players' Guild."<br /><br />"Does Papa know?"<br /><br />"I had a letter from him this morning giving me his approval. He has<br />been urging me to marry for some time."<br /><br />It occurred to both Julia and myself simultaneously that we were<br />allowing curiosity and surprise to predominate; now we congratulated him in<br />gentler tones from which mockery was almost excluded.<br /><br />"Thank you," he said, "thank you. I think I am very fortunate."<br /><br />"But when are we going to meet her? I do think you might have brought<br />her down with you."<br /><br />He said nothing, sipped and gazed.<br /><br />"Bridey," said Julia. "You sly, smug old brute, why haven't you brought<br />her here?"<br /><br />"Oh I couldn't do that, you know."<br /><br />"Why couldn't you? I'm dying to meet her. Let's ring her up now and<br />invite her. She'll think us most peculiar leaving her alone at a time like<br />this."<br /><br />"She has the children," said Brideshead. "Besides, you are peculiar,<br />aren't you?"<br /><br />"What can you mean?"<br /><br />Brideshead raised his head and looked solemnly at his sister, and<br />continued in the same simple way, as though he were saying nothing<br />particularly different from what had gone before, "I couldn't ask her here,<br />as things are. It wouldn't be suitable. After all, I am a lodger here. This<br />is Rex's house at the moment, as far as it's anybody's. What goes on here is<br />his business. But I couldn't bring Beryl here."<br /><br />"I simply don't understand," said Julia rather sharply. I looked at<br />her. All the gentle mockery had gone; she was alert, almost scared, it<br />seemed. "Of course, Rex and I want her to come."<br /><br />"Oh yes, I don't doubt that. The difficulty is quite otherwise." He<br />finished his port, refilled his glass, and pushed the decanter towards me.<br />"You must understand that Beryl is a woman of strict Catholic principle<br />fortified by the prejudices of the middle class. I couldn't possibly bring<br />her here. It is a matter of indifference whether you choose to live in sin<br />with Rex or Charles or both -- I have always avoided enquiry into the<br />details of your menage --but in no case would Beryl consent to be your<br />guest."<br /><br />Julia rose. "Why, you pompous ass . . ." she said, stopped, and turned<br />towards the door.<br /><br />At first I thought she was overcome by laughter; then, as I opened the<br />door to her, I saw with consternation that she was in tears. I hesitated.<br />She slipped past me without a glance.<br /><br />"I may have given the impression that this was a marriage of<br />convenience," Brideshead continued placidly. "I cannot speak for Beryl; no<br />doubt the security of my position has some influence on her. Indeed, she has<br />said as much. But for myself, let me emphasize, I am ardently attracted."<br /><br />"Bridey, what a bloody offensive thing to say to Julia!"<br /><br />"There was nothing she should object to. I was merely stating! a fact<br />well known to her."<br /><br /><br />She was not in the library; I mounted to her room, but she J was not<br />there. I paused by her laden dressing-table wonderingT if she would come.<br />Then through the open window, as the light I streamed out across the<br />terrace, into the dusk, to the fountain which in that house seemed always to<br />draw us to itself for comfort and refreshment, I caught the glimpse of a<br />white skirt against I the stones. It was nearly night. I found her in the<br />darkest refuge, on a wooden seat, in a bay of the clipped box which<br />encircled the basin. I took her in my arms and she pressed her face to my<br />heart.<br /><br />"Aren't you cold out here?"<br /><br />She did not answer, only clung closer to me and shook with sobs.<br /><br />"My darling, what is it? Why do you mind? What does it matter what that<br />old booby says?"<br /><br />"I don't; it doesn't. It's just the shock. Don't laugh at me."<br /><br />In the two years of our love, which seemed a lifetime, I had not seen<br />her so moved or felt so powerless to help.<br /><br />"How dare he speak to you like that?" I said. "The cold-blooded old<br />humbug . . ." But I was failing her in sympathy.<br /><br />"No," she said, "it's not that. He's quite right. They know all about<br />it, Bridey and his widow; they've got it in black and white; they bought it<br />for a penny at the church door. You cat get anything there for a penny, in<br />black and white, and nobody to see that you pay; only an old woman with a<br />broom at the other end, rattling round the confessionals, and a young woman<br />lighting a candle at the Seven Dolours. Put a penny in the box or not, just<br />as you like; take your tract. There you've got it in black and white.<br /><br />"All in one word, too, one little, flat, deadly word that cover a<br />lifetime.<br /><br />" 'Living in sin'; not just doing wrong, as I did when I went to<br />America; doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting.<br />That's not what they mean. That's not Bridey's pennyworth. He means just<br />what it says in black and white.<br /><br />"Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year<br />in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn<br />on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it,<br />showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a<br />tablet of Dial if it's fretful.<br /><br />"Always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from<br />the world. 'Poor Julia,' they say, 'she can't go out. She's got to take care<br />of her little sin. A pity it ever lived,' they say, 'but it's so strong.<br />Children like that always are. Julia's so good to her little, mad sin.'"<br /><br />An hour ago, I thought, under the sunset, she sat turning her ring in<br />the water fend counting the days of happiness; now under the first stars and<br />the last grey whisper of day, all this mysterious tumult of sorrow! What had<br />happened to us in the Painted Parlour? What shadow had fallen in the<br />candlelight? Two rough sentences and a trite phrase. She was beside herself;<br />her voice, now muffled in my breast, now clear and anguished, came to me in<br />single words and broken sentences, which may be strung together thus: --<br /><br />"Past and future; the years when I was trying to be a good wife, in the<br />cigar smoke, while time crept on and the counters clicked on the backgammon<br />board, and the man who was 'dummy' at the men's table filled the glasses;<br />when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already<br />dead; putting him, away, forgetting him, finding you, the past two years<br />with you, all the future with you, all the future with or without you, war<br />coming, world ending -- sin.<br /><br />"A word from so long ago, from Nanny Hawkins stitching by the hearth<br />and the nightlight burning before the Sacred Heart. Cordelia and me with the<br />catechism, in Mummy's room, before luncheon on Sundays. Mummy carrying my<br />sin with her to church, bowed under it and the black lace veil, in the<br />chapel; slipping out with it in London before the fires were lit; taking it<br />with her through the empty streets, where the milkman's ponies stood with<br />their forefeet on the pavement; Mummy dying with my sin eating at her, more<br />cruelly than her own deadly illness.<br /><br />"Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot;<br />hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the<br />dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the<br />dark church where only the old char- woman raises the dust and one candle<br />burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort<br />except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging forever;<br />never the cool sepulchre and the grave clothes spread on the stone slab,<br />never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always I the midday sun and the<br />dice clicking for the seamless coat.<br /><br />"Never the shelter of the cave or of the castle walls. Outcast il in<br />the desolate spaces where the hyenas roam at night and the 1 rubbish heaps<br />smoke in the daylight. No way back; the gates barred; all the saints and<br />angels posted along the walls. Nothing but bare stone and dust and the<br />smouldering dumps. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down; the old man with<br />lupus and the forked stick who limps out at nightfall to turn the rubbish,,<br />hoping for something to put in his sack, something marketable, turns away<br />with disgust.<br /><br />"Nameless and dead, like the baby they wrapped up and took away before<br />I had seen her."<br /><br />Between her tears she talked herself into silence. I could do nothing;<br />I was adrift in a strange sea; my hands on the metal-spun threads of her<br />tunic were cold and stiff, my eyes dry; I was as far from her in spirit, as<br />she clung to me in the darkness, as when years ago I had lit her cigarette<br />on the way from the station; as far as when she was out of mind, in the dry,<br />empty years at the Old Rectory and in the jungle.<br /><br />Tears spring from speech; presently in the silence her weeping stopped.<br />She sat up, away from me, took my handkerchief, shivered, rose to her feet.<br /><br />"Well," she said, in a voice much like normal. "Bridey is one for<br />bombshells, isn't he?"<br /><br />I followed her into the house and to her room; she sat at her<br />looking-glass. "Considering that I've just recovered from a fit of<br />hysteria," she said, "I don't call that at all bad." Her eyes seemed<br />unnaturally large and bright, her cheeks pale with two spots of high colour,<br />where, as a girl, she used to put a dab of rouge. "Most hysterical women<br />look as if they had a bad cold. You'd better change your shirt before going<br />down; it's all tears and lipstick."<br /><br />"Are we going down?"<br /><br />"Of course, we mustn't leave poor Bridey on his engagement night."<br /><br />When I came back to her she said: "I'm sorry for that appalling '<br />scene, Charles. I can't explain."<br /><br />Brideshead was in the library, smoking his pipe, placidly reading a<br />detective story.<br /><br />"Was it nice out? If I'd known you were going I'd have come, too."<br /><br />"Rather cold."<br /><br />"I hope it's not going to be inconvenient for Rex moving out of here.<br />You see, Barton Street is much too small for us and the three children.<br />Besides, Beryl likes the country. In his letter Papa proposed making over<br />the whole estate right away."<br /><br />I remembered how Rex had greeted me on my first arrival at Brideshead<br />as Julia's guest. "A very happy arrangement," he had said. "Suits me down to<br />the ground. The old boy keeps the place up; Bridey does all the feudal stuff<br />with the tenants; I have the run of the house rent-free. All it costs me is<br />the food and the wages of the indoor servants. Couldn't ask faker than that,<br />could you?"<br /><br />"I should think he'll be sorry to go," I said.<br /><br />"Oh, he'll find another bargain somewhere," said Julia; "trust him."<br /><br />"Beryl's got some furniture of her own she's very attached to. I don't<br />know that it would go very well here. You know, oak dressers and coffin<br />stools and things. I thought she could put it in Mummy's old room."<br /><br />"Yes, that would be the place."<br /><br />So brother and sister sat and talked about the arrangement of the house<br />until bed-time. An hour ago, I thought, in the black refuge in the box<br />hedge, she wept her heart out for the death of her God; now she is<br />discussing whether Beryl's children shall take the old smoking-room or the<br />schoolroom for their own. I was all at sea.<br /><br />"Julia," I said later, when Brideshead had gone upstairs, "have you<br />ever seen a picture of Holman Hunt's called 'The Awakened Conscience'?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />I had seen a copy of Pre-Raphaelitism in the library some days before;<br />I found it again and read her Ruskin's description. She laughed quite<br />happily.<br /><br />"You're perfectly right. That's exactly what I did feel."<br /><br />"But, darling, I can't believe that all that tempest of emotion came<br />just from a few words of Bridey's. You must have been thinking about it<br />before."<br /><br />"Hardly at all; now and then; more, lately, with the Last Trump so<br />near."<br /><br />"Of course it's a thing psychologists could explain; a preconditioning<br />from childhood; feelings of guilt from the nonsense you were taught in the<br />nursery. You do know at heart that it's all bosh, don't you?"<br /><br />"How I wish it was!"<br /><br />"Sebastian once said almost the same thing to me."<br /><br />"He's gone back to the Church, you know. Of course, he never left it as<br />definitely as I did. I've gone too far; there's no turning back now; I know<br />that, if that's wha you mean by thinking it all bosh. All I can hope to do<br />is to put my life in some sort of order in a human way, before all human<br />order comes to an end. That's why I want to marry you. I should like to have<br />a child. That's one thing I can do. . . . Let's go out again. The moon<br />should be up by now."<br /><br />The moon was full and high. We walked round the house; under the limes<br />Julia paused and idly snapped off one of the long shoots, last year's<br />growth, that fringed their boles, and stripped it as she walked, making a<br />switch, as children do, but with petulant movements that were not a child's,<br />snatching nervously at the leaves and crumpling them between her fingers;<br />she began peeling the bark, scratching it with her nails.<br /><br />Once more we stood by the fountain.<br /><br />"It's like the setting of a comedy," I said. "Scene: a baroque fountain<br />in a nobleman's grounds. Act One, Sunset; Act Two, Dusk; Act Three,<br />Moonlight. The characters keep assembling at the fountain for no very clear<br />reason."<br /><br />"Comedy?"<br /><br />"Drama. Tragedy. Farce. What you will. This is the reconciliation<br />scene."<br /><br />"Was there a quarrel?"<br /><br />"Estrangement and misunderstanding in Act Two."<br /><br />"Oh, don't talk in that damned bounderish way. Why must you see<br />everything secondhand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a<br />Pre-Raphaelite picture?"<br /><br />"It's a way I have."<br /><br />"I hate it."<br /><br />Her anger was as unexpected as every change on this evening of swift<br />veering moods. Suddenly she cut me across the face with her switch, a<br />vicious, stinging little blow as hard as she could strike.<br /><br />"Now do you see how I hate it?"<br /><br />She hit me again.<br /><br />"All right," I said, "go on."<br /><br />Then, though her hand was raised, she stopped and threw | the<br />half-peeled wand into the water, where it floated white and black in the<br />moonlight.<br /><br />"Did that hurt?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"Did it? ... Did I?"<br /><br />In the instant her rage was gone; her tears, newly flowing, were on my<br />cheek. I held her at arm's length and she put down her head, stroking my<br />hand on her shoulder with her face, catlike, but, unlike a cat, leaving a<br />tear there.<br /><br />"Cat on the roof-top," I said.<br /><br />"Beast!"<br /><br />She bit at my hand, but when I did not move it and her teeth touched<br />me, she changed the bite to a kiss, the kiss to a lick of her tongue.<br /><br />"Cat in the moonlight."<br /><br />This was the mood I knew. We turned towards the house. When we came to<br />the lighted hall she said: "Your poor face," touching the weals with her<br />fingers. "Will there be a mark to-morrow?"<br /><br />"I expect so."<br /><br />"Charles, am I going crazy? What's happened to-night? I'm so tired."<br /><br />She yawned; a fit of yawning took her. She sat at her dressing-table,<br />head bowed, hair over her face, yawning helplessly; when she looked up I saw<br />over her shoulder in the glass a face that was dazed with weariness like a<br />retreating soldier's, and beside it my own, streaked with two crimson lines.<br /><br />"So tired," she repeated, taking off her gold tunic and letting, it<br />fall to the floor, "tired and crazy and good for nothing."<br /><br />I saw her to bed; the blue lids fell over her eyes; her pale lips moved<br />on the pillow, but whether to wish me good-night or to murmur a prayer -- a<br />jingle of the nursery that came to her now in the twilit world between<br />sorrow and sleep; some ancient pious rhyme that had come down to Nanny<br />Hawkins from centuries of bedtime whispering, through all the changes of<br />language, from the days of pack-horses on the Pilgrim's Way -- I did not<br />know.<br /><br />Next night Rex and his political associates were with us.<br /><br />"They won't fight."<br /><br />"They can't fight. They haven't the money; they haven't the oil."<br /><br />"They haven't the wolfram; they haven't the men."<br /><br />"They haven't the guts."<br /><br />"They're afraid."<br /><br />"Scared of the French; scared of the Czechs; scared of the Slovaks;<br />scared of us." '<br /><br />"It's a bluff."<br /><br />"Of course it's a bluff. Where's their tungsten? Where's their<br />manganese?"<br /><br />"Where's their chrome?"<br /><br />"I'll tell you a thing . . ."<br /><br />"Listen to this; it'll be good; Rex will tell you a thing."<br /><br />"... Friend of mine motoring in the Black Forest, only the other day,<br />just came back and told me about it while we played a round of golf. Well,<br />this friend driving along, turned down a lane into the high road. What<br />should he find but a military convoy? Couldn't stop, drove right into it,<br />smack into a tank, broadside-on. Gave himself up for dead. . . . Hold on,<br />this is the funny part."<br /><br />"This is the funny part."<br /><br />"Drove clean through it, didn't scratch his paint. What do you think?<br />It was made of canvas -- a bamboo frame and painted canvas."<br /><br />"They haven't the steel."<br /><br />"They haven't the tools. They haven't the labour. They're half<br />starving. They haven't the fats. The children have rickets."<br /><br />"The women are barren."<br /><br />"The men are impotent."<br /><br />"They haven't the doctors."<br /><br />"The doctors were Jewish."<br /><br />"Now they've got consumption."<br /><br />"Now they've got syphilis."<br /><br />"Goering told a friend of mine . . ."<br /><br />"Goebbels told a friend of mine . . ."<br /><br />"Ribbentrop told me that the army just kept Hitler in power, so long as<br />he was able to get things for nothing. The moment anyone stands up to him,<br />he's finished. The army will shoot him."<br /><br />"The liberals will hang him."<br /><br />"The Communists will tear him limb from limb."<br /><br />"He'll scupper himself."<br /><br />"He'd do it now if it wasn't for Chamberlain."<br /><br />"If it wasn't for Halifax."<br /><br />"If it wasn't for Sir Samuel Hoare."<br /><br />"And the 1920 Committee."<br /><br />"Peace Pledge."<br /><br />"Foreign Office."<br /><br />"New York banks."<br /><br />"All that's wanted is a good strong line."<br /><br />"A line from Rex."<br /><br />"And a line from me."<br /><br />"We'll give Europe a good strong line. Europe is waiting for | a speech<br />from' Rex."<br /><br />"And a speech from me."<br /><br />"And a speech from me. Rally the freedom-loving peoples of 'the world.<br />Germany will rise; Austria will rise. The Czechs and the Slovaks are bound<br />to rise."<br /><br />"To a speech from Rex and a speech from me."<br /><br />"What about a rubber? How about a whiskey? Which of you chaps will have<br />a big cigar? Hullo, you two going out?"<br /><br />"Yes, Rex," said Julia. "Charles and I are going into the moon-light."<br /><br />We shut the windows behind us and the voices ceased; the moonlight lay<br />like hoar-frost on the terrace and the music of the fountain crept in our<br />ears; the stone balustrade of the terrace might have been the Trojan walls,<br />and in the silent park might have stood the Grecian tents where Cressid lay<br />that night.<br /><br />"A few days, a few months."<br /><br />"No time to be lost."<br /><br />"A lifetime between the rising of the mooii and its setting. Then the<br />dark."Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-60895530690008944092008-08-06T14:02:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:03:19.299+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book II. A twitch upon the thread. Chapter TwoChapter Two<br /><br />it was my wife's idea to hold the private view on Friday.<br /><br />"We are out to catch the critics this time," she said. "It's high time<br />they began to take you seriously, and they know it. This is their chance. If<br />you open on Monday they'll most of them have just come up from the country,<br />and they'll dash off a few paragraphs before dinner -- I'm only worrying<br />about the weeklies of course. If we give them the week-end to think about<br />it, we shall have them in an urbane Sunday-in-the-country mood. They'll<br />settle down after a good luncheon, tuck up their cuffs, and turn out a nice,<br />leisurely, full-length essay, which they'll reprint later in a nice little<br />book. Nothing less will do this time."<br /><br />She was up and down from the Old Rectory several times during the month<br />of preparation, revising the list of invitations and helping with the<br />hanging.<br /><br />On the morning of the private view I telephoned to Julia and said: "I'm<br />sick of the pictures already and never want to see them again, but I suppose<br />I shall have to put in an appearance."<br /><br />"D'you want me to come?"<br /><br />"I'd much rather you didn't."<br /><br />"Celia sent a card with 'Bring everyone' written across it in green<br />ink. When do we meet?"<br /><br />"In the train. You might pick up my luggage."<br /><br />"If you'll have it packed soon I'll pick you up, too, and drop you at<br />the gallery. I've got a fitting next door at twelve."<br /><br />When I reached the gallery my wife was standing looking through the<br />window to the street. Behind her half a dozen unknown picture-lovers were<br />moving from canvas to canvas, catalogue in hand; they were people who had<br />once bought a woodcut and were consequently on the gallery's list of<br />patrons.<br /><br />"No one has come yet," said my wife. "I've been here since ten and it's<br />been very dull. Whose car was that you came in?"<br /><br />"Julia's."<br /><br />"Julia's? Why didn't you bring her in? Oddly enough, I've just been<br />talking about Brideshead to a funny little man who seemed to know us very<br />well. He said he was called Mr. Samgrass. Apparently he's one of Lord<br />Copper's middle-aged young men on the Daily Beast. I tried to feed him some<br />paragraphs, but he seemed to know more about you than I do. He said he'd met<br />me years ago at Brideshead. I wish Julia had come in; then we could have<br />asked her about him."<br /><br />"I remember him well. He's a crook."<br /><br />"Yes, that stuck out a mile. He's been talking all about what he calls<br />'the Brideshead set.' Apparently Rex Mottram has made the place a nest of<br />party mutiny. Did you know? What would Teresa Marchmain have thought?"<br /><br />"I'm going there to-night."<br /><br />"Not to-night, Charles; you can't go there to-night. You're expected at<br />home. You promised, as soon as the exhibition was J ready, you'd come home.<br />Johnjohn and Nanny have made a banner with 'Welcome' on it. And you haven't<br />seen Caroline yet."<br /><br />"I'm sorry, it's all settled."<br /><br />"Besides, Daddy will think it so odd. And Boy is home for Sunday. And<br />you haven't seen the new studio. You can't go tonight. Did they ask me?"<br /><br />"Of course; but I knew you wouldn't be able to come."<br /><br />"I can't now. I could have if you'd let me know earlier. I should adore<br />to see the 'Brideshead set' at home. I do think you're perfectly beastly,<br />but this is no time for a family rumpus. The Clarences promised to come in<br />before luncheon; they may be here any minute."<br /><br />We were interrupted, however, not by royalty, but by a woman reporter<br />from one of the dailies, whom the manager of the gallery now led up to us.<br />She had not come to see the pictures but to get a "human story" of the<br />dangers of my journey. I left her to my wife, and next day read in her<br />paper: --<br /><br />charles "stately homes" ryder steps off the map<br /><br />That the snakes and vampires of the jungle have nothing on Mayfair is<br />the opinion of socialite artist Ryder, who has abandoned the houses of the<br />great for the ruins of equatorial Africa. ...<br /><br />The rooms began to fill and I was soon busy being civil. My wife was<br />everywhere, greeting people, introducing people, deftly transforming the<br />crowd into a party. I saw her lead friends forward one after another to the<br />subscription list that had been opened for the book of Ryder's Latin<br />America; I heard her say: "No, darling, I'm not at all surprised, but you<br />wouldn't expect me to be, would you? You see Charles lives for one thing --<br />Beauty. I think he got bored with finding it ready-made in England; he had<br />to go and create it for himself. He wanted new worlds to conquer. After all,<br />he has said the last word about country houses, hasn't he? Not, I mean, that<br />he's given that up altogether. I'm sure he'll always do one or two more for<br />friends".<br /><br />A photographer brought us together, flashed a lamp in our faces, and<br />let us part.<br /><br />Presently there was the slight hush and edging away which follows the<br />entry of a royal party. I saw my wife curtsey and heard her say: "Oh, sir,<br />you are sweet"; then I was led into the clearing and the Duke of Clarence<br />said: "Pretty hot out there I should think."<br /><br />"It was, sir."<br /><br />"Awfully clever the way you've hit off the impression of heat. Makes me<br />feel quite uncomfortable in my great-coat."<br /><br />"Ha, ha."<br /><br />When they had gone my wife said: "Goodness, we're late for lunch.<br />Margot's giving a party in your honour," and in the taxi she said: "I've<br />just thought of something. Why don't you write and ask the Duchess's<br />permission to dedicate Latin America to her?"<br /><br />"Why should I?"<br /><br />"She'd love it so."<br /><br />"I wasn't thinking of dedicating it to anyone."<br /><br />"There you are; that's typical of you, Charles. Why miss an opportunity<br />to give pleasure?"<br /><br />There were a dozen at luncheon, and though it pleased my hostess and my<br />wife to say that they were there in my honour, it was plain to me that half<br />of them did not know of my exhibition and had come because they had been<br />invited and had no other engagement. Throughout luncheon they talked without<br />stopping of Mrs. Simpson, but they all, or nearly all, came back with us to<br />the gallery.<br /><br />The hour after luncheon was the busiest time. There were<br />representatives of the Tate Gallery, the Chantrey Bequest, the National Art<br />Collections Fund, who all promised to return shortly with colleagues and, in<br />the meantime, reserved certain pictures for further consideration. The most<br />influential critic, who in the past had dismissed me with a few wounding<br />commendations, peered out at me from between his slouch hat and woollen<br />muffler, gripped my arm, and said: "I knew you had it. I saw it there. I've<br />been waiting for it."<br /><br />From fashionable and unfashionable lips alike I heard fragments of<br />praise. "If you'd asked me to guess," I overheard, "Ryder's is the last name<br />would have occurred to me. They're so virile, so passionate."<br /><br />They all thought they had found something new. It had not been thus at<br />my last exhibition in these same rooms, shortly before my going abroad. Then<br />there had been an unmistakable note of weariness. Then the talk had been<br />less of me than of the houses, anecdotes of their owners. That same woman,<br />it came back to me, who how applauded my virility and passion, had stood<br />quite near me, before a painfully laboured canvas, and said, "So facile."<br /><br />I remembered the exhibition, too, for another reason; it was the week I<br />detected my wife in adultery. Then, as now, she was a tireless hostess, and<br />I heard her say: "Whenever I see anything lovely nowadays -- a building or a<br />piece of scenery -- I think to -myself, 'That's by Charles.' I see<br />everything through his eyes. He is England to me."<br /><br />I heard her say that; it was the sort of thing she had the habit of<br />saying. Throughout our married life, again and again, I had felt my bowels<br />shrivel within me at the things she said. But that ,j day, in this gallery,<br />I heard her unmoved, and suddenly realized that she was powerless to hurt me<br />any more; I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief,<br />sly lapse of hers; my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest.<br /><br />At the end of the day my wife said: "Darling, I must go. It's been a<br />terrific success, hasn't it? I'll think of something to tell them at home,<br />but I wish it hadn't got to happen quite this way."<br /><br />So she knows, I thought. She's a sharp one. She's had her nose down<br />since luncheon and picked up the scent.<br /><br />I let her get clear of the place and was about to follow--the rooms<br />were nearly empty -- when I heard a voice at the turnstile I had not heard<br />for many years, an unforgettable self-taught stammer, a sharp cadence of<br />remonstration.<br /><br />"No. I have not brought a card of invitation. I do not even know<br />whether I received one. I have not come to a social function; I do not seek<br />to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the<br />Tatler; I have not come to exhibit myself. I have come to see the pictures.<br />Perhaps you are unaware that there are any pictures here. I happen to have a<br />personal interest in the artist--if that word has any meaning for<br />you."<br /><br />"Antoine," I said, "come in."<br /><br />"My dear, there is a g-g-gorgon here who thinks I am g-g-gate-crashing.<br />I only arrived in London yesterday, and heard quite by chance at luncheon<br />that you were having an exhibition, so of course I dashed impetuously to the<br />shrine to pay homage. Have I changed? Would you recognize me? Where are the<br />pictures? Let me explain them to you."<br /><br />Anthony Blanche had not changed from when I last saw him; not, indeed,<br />from when I first saw him. He swept lightly across the room to the most<br />prominent canvas -- a jungle landscape -- paused a moment, his head cocked<br />like a knowing terrier, and asked: "Where, my dear Charles, did you find<br />this sumptuous greenery? The corner of a hothouse at T-t-trent or T-t-tring?<br />What gorgeous usurer nurtured these fronds for your pleasure?"<br /><br />Then he made a tour of the two rooms; once or twice he sighed deeply,<br />otherwise he kept silence. When he came to the end he sighed once more, more<br />deeply than ever, and said: "But they tell me, my dear, you are happy in<br />love. That is everything, is it not, or nearly everything?"<br /><br />"Are they as bad as that?"<br /><br />Anthony dropped his voice to a piercing whisper: "My dear, let us not<br />expose your little imposture before these good, plain people" -- he gave a<br />conspiratorial glance to the last remnants o the crowd -- "let us not spoil<br />their innocent pleasure. We know, you and I, that this is all t-t-terrible<br />t-t-tripe. Let us go, before we offend the connoisseurs. I know of a louche<br />little bar, quite near here. Let us go there and talk of your other<br />c-c-conquests."<br /><br />It needed this voice from the past to recall me; the indiscriminate<br />chatter of praise all that crowded day had worked on me like a succession of<br />advertisement hoardings on a long road, kilometre after kilometre between<br />the poplars, commanding one to stay at some new hotel, so that when at the<br />end of the drive, stiff and dusty, one arrives at the destination, it seems<br />inevitable to turn into the yard under the name that had first bored, then<br />angered one, and finally become an inseparable part of one's fatigue.<br /><br />Anthony led me from the gallery and down a side street to a door<br />between a disreputable news agent and a disreputable chemist, painted with<br />the words blue grotto club. Members Only.<br /><br />"Not quite your milieu, my dear, but mine, I assure you. After all, you<br />have been in your milieu all day."<br /><br />He led me downstairs, from a smell of cats to a smell of gin and<br />cigarette-ends and the sound of a wireless.<br /><br />"I was given the address by a dirty old man in the Bceuf sur le Toit. I<br />am most grateful to him. I have been out of England so long, and really<br />sympathetic little joints like this change so fast. J I presented myself<br />here for the first time yesterday evening, and already I feel quite at home.<br />Good evening, Cyril."<br /><br />"'Lo, Toni, back again?" said the youth behind the bar.<br /><br />"We will take our drinks and sit in a corner. You must remember, my<br />dear, that here you are just as conspicuous and, may I say, abnormal, my<br />dear, as I should be in B-b-bratt's."<br /><br />The place was painted cobalt; there was cobalt linoleum on the floor.<br />Fishes of Silver and gold paper had been pasted haphazard on ceiling and<br />walls. Half a dozen youths were drinking and playing with the slot-machines;<br />an older, natty, crapulous-looking man seemed to be in control; there was<br />some sniggering round the fruit-gum machine; then one of the youths came up<br />to us and said, "Would your friend care to rumba?"<br /><br />"No, Tom, he would not, and I'm not going to give a drink; not yet,<br />anyway. . . . That's a very impudent boy, a regular little gold-digger, my<br />dear."<br /><br />"Well," I said, affecting an ease I was far from feeling in that den,<br />"what have you been up to all these years?"<br /><br />"My dear, it is what you have been up to that we are here to talk<br />about. I've been watching you, my dear. I'm a faithful old body and I've<br />kept my eye on you." As he spoke the bar and the bar-tender, the blue wicker<br />furniture, the gambling-machines, the wireless, the couple of youths dancing<br />on the oilcloth, the youths sniggering round the slots, the purple-veined,<br />stiffly dressed elderly man drinking in the corner opposite us, the whole<br />drab and furtive joint, seemed to fade, and I was back in Oxford looking out<br />over Christ Church meadow through a window of Ruskin Gothic. "I went to your<br />first exhibition," said Anthony; "I found it -- charming. There was an<br />interior of Marchmain House, very English, very correct, but quite<br />delicious. 'Charles has done something,' I said; 'not all he will do, not<br />all he can do, but something.'<br /><br />"Even then, my dear, I wondered a little. It seemed to me that there<br />was something a little gentlemanly about your painting. You must remember I<br />arm not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English<br />snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals. However, I said,<br />'Charles has done something delicious. What will he do next?'<br /><br />"The next thing I saw was your very handsome volume -- Village and<br />Provincial Architecture, was it called? Quite a tome, my dear, and what did<br />I find? Charm again. 'Not quite my cup of tea,' I thought; 'this is too<br />English.' I have the fancy I for rather spicy things, you know, not for the<br />shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the<br />English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis -- not<br />that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford. Then, to be frank, dear<br />Charles, I despaired of you. 'I am a degenerate old d-d-dago,' I said, 'and<br />Charles -- I speak of your art, my dear -- is a dean's daughter in flowered<br />muslin.'<br /><br />"Imagine then my excitement at luncheon to-day. Everyone was talking<br />about you. My hostess was a friend of my mother's, a Mrs. Stuyvesant<br />Oglander; a friend of yours, too, my dear. Such a frump! Not at all the<br />society I imagined you to keep. 1 However, they had all been to your<br />exhibition, but it was you f they talked of, how you had broken away, my<br />dear, gone to the tropics, become a Gauguin, a Rimbaud. You can imagine how<br />my old heart leaped. <br /><br />"' Poor Celia,' they said, 'after all she's done for him.' 'He owes<br />everything to her. It's too bad.' 'And with Julia,' they said, 'after the<br />way she behaved in America.' 'Just as she was going back 1 to Rex.'<br /><br />" 'But the pictures,' I said; 'tell me about them'<br /><br />'"Oh, the pictures,' they said: 'they're most peculiar.' 'Not at 1 all<br />what he usually does.' 'Very forceful.' 'Quite barbaric.' 'if call them<br />downright unhealthy,' said Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander.<br /><br />"My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted tof dash out<br />of the house and leap in a taxi and say, 'Take me to Charles's unhealthy<br />pictures.' Well, I went, but the gallery after J luncheon was so full of<br />absurd women in the sort of hats they'i] should be made to eat, that I<br />rested a little --I rested here witfcl Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys.<br />Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o'clock, all agog, my<br />dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very<br />successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so<br />much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple,<br />creamy English charm, playing tigers."<br /><br />"You're quite right," I said.<br /><br />"My dear, of course I'm right. I was right years ago--more years, I am<br />happy to say, than either of us shows -- when I warned you. I took you out<br />to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail<br />of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist<br />outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills<br />love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you."<br /><br />The youth called Tom approached us again. "Don't be a tease, Toni; buy<br />me a drink." I remembered my train and left Anthony with him.<br /><br />As I stood on the platform by the restaurant-car I saw my luggage and<br />Julia's go past with Julia's sour-faced maid strutting beside the porter.<br />They had begun shutting the carriage-doors when Julia arrived, unhurried,<br />and took her place in front of me. I had a table for two. This was a very<br />convenient train; there was half an hour before dinner and half an hour<br />after it; then, instead of changing to the branch line, as had been the rule<br />in Lady Marchmain's day, we were met at the junction. It was night as we<br />drew out of Paddington, and the glow of the town gave place first to the<br />scattered lights of the suburbs, then to the darkness of the fields.<br /><br />"It seems days since I saw you," I said.<br /><br />"Six hours; and we were together all yesterday. You look worn out."<br /><br />"It's been a day of nightmare -- crowds, critics, the Clarences, a<br />luncheon party at Margot's, ending up with half an hour's well-reasoned<br />abuse of my pictures in a pansy bar. ... I think Celia knows about us."<br /><br />"Well, she had to know some time."<br /><br />"Everyone seems to know. My pansy friend had not been in London<br />twenty-four hours before he'd heard."<br /><br />"Damn everybody."<br /><br />"What about Rex?"<br /><br />"Rex isn't anybody at all," said Julia; "he just doesn't exist."<br /><br />The knives and forks jingled on the tables as we sped through the<br />darkness; the little circle of gin and vermouth in the glasses i lengthened<br />to oval, contracted again, with the sway of the carriage, touched the lip,<br />lapped back again, never spilt; I was leaving the day behind me. Julia<br />pulled off her hat and tossed it into the rack above her, and shook her<br />night-dark hair with a little sigh of ease -- a sigh fit for the pillow, the<br />sinking firelight and a bedroom window open to the stars and the whisper of<br />bare trees.<br /><br />"It's great to have you back, Charles; like the old days."<br /><br />Like the old days? I thought.<br /><br />Rex, in his early forties, had grown heavy and ruddy; he had lost his<br />Canadian accent and acquired instead the hoarse, loud tone that was common<br />to all his friends, as though their voices were perpetually strained to make<br />themselves heard above a crowd, as though, with youth forsaking them, there<br />was no timdi to wait the opportunity to speak, no time to listen, no time<br />ten reply; time for a laugh -- a throaty mirthless laugh, the base| currency<br />of goodwill.<br /><br />There were half a dozen of these friends in the Tapestry Hall ill<br />politicians, "young conservatives" in the early forties, with spar hair and<br />high blood-pressure; a socialist from the coal mines wh had already caught<br />their clear accents, whose cigars came lid pieces in his lips, whose hand<br />shook when he poured hir out a drink; a lovesick columnist, who alone was<br />silent, glc ing sombrely on the only woman of the party; a financier oldafl<br />than the rest, and, one might guess from the way they treated him, richer; a<br />woman they called "Grizel," a knowing rake whom, in their hearts, they all<br />feared a little.<br /><br />They all feared Julia, too, Grizel included. She greeted them and<br />apologized for not being there to welcome them, with a formality which<br />hushed them for a minute; then she came and sat with me near the fire, and<br />the storm of talk arose once more and whirled about bur ears.<br /><br />"Of course, he can marry her and make her queen to-morrow."<br /><br />"We had our chance in October. Why didn't we send the Italian fleet to<br />the bottom of Mare Nostrum? Why didn't we blow Spezia to blazes. Why didn't<br />we land on Pantelleria?"<br /><br />"Franco's simply a German agent. They tried to put him in to prepare<br />air'bases to bomb France. That bluff has been called, anyway."<br /><br />"It would make the monarchy stronger than it's been since Tudor times.<br />The people are with him."<br /><br />"The press arc with him."<br /><br />"I'm with him."<br /><br />"Who cares about divorce now except a few old maids who aren't married,<br />anyway?"<br /><br />"If he has a showdown with the old gang, they'll just disappear like,<br />like . . ."<br /><br />"Why didn't we close the Canal? Why didn't we bomb Rome?"<br /><br />"It wouldn't have been necessary. One firm note . . ."<br /><br />"One firm speech."<br /><br />"One showdown."<br /><br />"Anyway, Franco will soon be skipping back to Morocco. Chap I saw<br />to-day just come from Barcelona . . ."<br /><br />". . . Chap just come from Fort Belvedere . . ."<br /><br />". . . Chap just come from the Palazzo Venezia . . ."<br /><br />"All we want is a showdown."<br /><br />"A showdown with Baldwin."<br /><br />"A showdown with Hitler."<br /><br />"A showdown with the Old Gang."<br /><br />". . . That I should live to see my country, the land of Clive and<br />Nelson ..."<br /><br />". . . My country of Hawkins and Drake."<br /><br />". . . My country of Palmerston . . ."<br /><br />"Would you very much mind not doing that?"'said Grizel the columnist,<br />who had been attempting in a maudlin manner to twist her wrist. "I don't<br />happen to enjoy it."<br /><br />"I wonder which is the more horrible," I said, "Celia's Art and Fashion<br />or Rex's Politics and Money."<br /><br />"Why worry about them?"<br /><br />"Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's<br />supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though' all mankind,<br />and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us."<br /><br />"They are, they are."<br /><br />"But we've got our happiness in spite of them; here and noW| we've<br />taken possession of it. They can't hurt us, can they?"<br /><br />"Not to-night; not now."<br /><br />"Not for how many nights?"Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-90707596706003496992008-08-06T14:01:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:15:12.290+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book II. A twitch upon the thread. Chapter OneBOOK II A TWITCH UPON THE THREAD<br /><br /><br />Chapter One<br /><br />my theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey<br />morning of war-time.<br />These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly<br />except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they<br />were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced<br />congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of<br />their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking<br />a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed<br />and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare<br />and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that<br />morning.<br /><br />These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a<br />lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art,<br />are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for<br />centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging,<br />eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and<br />nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all<br />manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end<br />in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards<br />won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of<br />survival starts again.<br /><br />The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from<br />them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a<br />hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves -- the<br />sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and<br />the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image,<br />indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out<br />of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind<br />unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, j| breathe freely and take<br />our bearings, or to push ahead, out-' distance our shadows, lead them a<br />dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one<br />another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share.<br /><br />For nearly ten years I was thus borne along a road outwardly full of<br />change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my<br />painting -- and that at longer and longer intervals-- did I come alive as I<br />had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be<br />youth, not life, that I was losing. My work upheld me, for I had chosen to<br />do what I could do well, did better daily, and liked doing; incidentally it<br />was something which no one else at that time was attempting to do. I became<br />an architectural painter. I have always loved building, holding it to be not<br />only the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of<br />consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected,<br />without his intention, by other means, and I regarded men as something much<br />less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and<br />short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the-long, fruitful life of<br />their homes.<br /><br />More even than the work of the great architects, 1 loved buildings that<br />grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each<br />generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's<br />vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. In such<br />buildings England abounded, and in the last decade of their grandeur,<br />Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of what before was<br />taken for granted, and to salute their achievements at the moment of<br />extinction. Hence my prosperity, far beyond my merits; my work had nothing<br />to recommend it except my growing technical skill, enthusiasm for my subject<br />and independence of popular notions. The financial slump of the period,<br />which left many painters without employment, served to enhance my success,<br />which was, indeed, itself a symptom of the decline. When the water-holes<br />were dry people sought to drink at the mirage. After my first exhibition I<br />was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were<br />soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a<br />few paces ahead of the auctioneers, a presage of doom.<br /><br />I published three splendid folios--Ryder's Country Seats, Ryder's<br />English Homes, and Ryder's Village and Provincial Architecture, which each<br />sold its thousand copies at five guineas apiece. I seldom failed to please,<br />for there was no conflict between myself and my patrons; we both wanted the<br />same thing. But as the years passed I began to mourn the loss of something I<br />had known in the drawing-room of Marchmain House and once or twice since,<br />the intensity and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by<br />hand--in a word, the inspiration.<br /><br />In quest of this fading light I went abroad, in the Augustan manner,<br />laden with the apparatus of my trade, for two years' refreshment among alien<br />styles. I did not go to Europe; her treasures were safe, too safe, swaddled<br />in expert care, obscured by reverence. Europe could wait. There would be a<br />time for Europe, I thought; all too soon the days would come when I should<br />need a man at my side to put up my easel and carry my paints; when I could<br />not venture more than an hour's journey from a good hotel; when I should<br />need soft breezes and mellow sunshine all day long; then I would take my old<br />eyes to Germany and Italy. Now while I had the strength I would go to the<br />wild lands where man had deserted his post and the jungle was creeping back<br />to its old strongholds.<br /><br />Accordingly, by slow but not easy stages, I travelled through Mexico<br />and Central America in a world which had all I needed, and the change from<br />parkland and hall should have quickened me and set me right with myself. I<br />sought inspiration among gutted palaces and cloisters embowered in weed,<br />derelict churches where the vampire-bats hung in the dome like dry seed-pods<br />and only the ants were ceaselessly astir tunnelling in the rich stalls;<br />cities where no road led, and mausoleums where a single, agued family of<br />Indians sheltered from the rains. There in great labour, sickness and<br />occasionally in some danger, I made the first drawings for Ryder's Latin<br />America. Every few weeks I came to rest, finding myself once more in the<br />zone of trade or tourism, recuperated, set up my studio, transcribed my<br />sketches, anxiously packed the completed canvasses, despatched them to my<br />New York agent, and then set out again, with my small retinue, into the<br />wastes.<br /><br />I was at no great pains to keep touch with England. I followed local<br />advice for my itinerary and had no settled route, so that much of my mail<br />never reached me, and the rest accumulated until there was more than could<br />be read at a sitting. I used to stuff a bundle of letters into my bag and<br />read them when I felt inclined, which was in circumstances so incongruous --<br />swinging in my hammock under the net by the light of a storm lantern;<br />drifting down-river, sprawled amidships in the canoe, with the boys astern<br />of me lazily keeping our nose out of the bank, with the dark water keeping<br />pace with us, in the green shade, with the great trees towering above us and<br />the monkeys screeching in the sunlight, high overhead among the flowers on<br />the roof of the forest; on the verandah of a hospitable ranch, where the ice<br />and the dice clicked, and a tiger cat played with its chain on the mown<br />grass -- that they seemed voices so distant as to be meaningless; their<br />matter passed clean through the mind, and out, leaving no mark, like the<br />facts about themselves which fellow travellers distribute so freely in<br />American railway trains.<br /><br />But despite this isolation and this long sojourn in a strange world, I<br />remained unchanged, still a small part of myself pretending to be whole. I<br />discarded the experiences of those two years with my tropical kit and<br />returned to New York as I had set out. I had a fine haul -- eleven paintings<br />and fifty odd drawings-- and when eventually I exhibited them in London, the<br />art critics, many of whom hitherto had been patronizing in tone as my<br />success invited, acclaimed a new and richer note in my work.<br /><br />Mr. Ryder [the most respected of them wrote] rises like a fresh young<br />trout to the hypodermic injection of a new culture and discloses a powerful<br />facet in the vista of his potentialities ... By focusing the frankly<br />traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of<br />barbarism, Mr. Ryder has at last found himself.<br /><br />Grateful words, but, alas, not true by a long chalk. My wife, who<br />crossed to New York to meet me, and saw the fruits of our separation<br />displayed in my agent's office, summed the thing up better by saying: "Of<br />course, I can see they're perfectly brilliant and really rather beautiful in<br />a sinister way, but somehow I don't feel they are quite you"<br /><br />In Europe my wife was sometimes taken for an American because of her<br />dapper and jaunty way of dressing, and the curiously hygienic quality of her<br />prettiness; in America she assumed an English softness and reticence. She<br />arrived a day or two before me, and was on the pier when my ship docked.<br /><br />"It has been a long time," she said fondly when we met.<br /><br />She had not joined the expedition; she explained to our friends that<br />the country was unsuitable and she had her son at home. There was also a<br />daughter now, she remarked, and it came back to me that there had been talk<br />of this before I started, as an additional reason for her staying behind.<br />There had been some mention of it, too, in her letters.<br /><br />"I don't believe you read my letters," she said that night at last,<br />late, after a dinner party and some hours at a cabaret, we found ourselves<br />alone in our hotel bedroom.<br /><br />"Some went astray. I remember distinctly your telling me that the<br />daffodils in the orchard were a dream, that the nurserymaid was a jewel,<br />that the Regency four-poster was a find, but frankly I do not remember<br />hearing that your new baby was called Caroline. Why did you call it that?"<br /><br />"After Charles, of course."<br /><br />"Ah!"<br /><br />"I made Bertha Van Halt godmother. I thought she was safe for a good<br />present. What do you think she gave?"<br /><br />"Bertha Van Halt is a well-known trap. What?"<br /><br />"A fifteen-shilling book token. Now that Johnjohn has a companion -- "<br /><br />"Who?"<br /><br />"Your son, darling. You haven't forgotten him, too?"<br /><br />"For Christ's sake," I said, "why do you call him that?"<br /><br />"It's the name he invented for himself. Don't you think it sweet? Now<br />that Johnjohn has a companion I think we'd better not have any more for some<br />time, don't you?"<br /><br />"Just as you please."<br /><br />"Johnjohn talks of you such a lot. He prays every night for your safe<br />return."<br /><br />She talked in this way while she undressed, with an effort to appear at<br />ease; then she sat at the dressing table, ran a comb through her hair, and<br />with her bare back towards me, looking at herself in the glass, said, "I<br />hope you admire my self-restraint."<br /><br />"Restraint?"<br /><br />"I'm not asking awkward questions. I may say I've been tormented with<br />visions of voluptuous half-castes ever since you went away. But I determined<br />not to ask and I haven't."<br /><br />"That suits me," I said.<br /><br />She left the dressing-table and crossed the room.<br /><br />"Lights out?"<br /><br />"As you like. I'm not sleepy."<br /><br />We lay in our twin beds, a yard or two distant, smoking. I looked at my<br />watch; it was four o'clock, but neither of us was ready to sleep, for in<br />that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for<br />energy.<br /><br />"I don't believe you've changed at all, Charles."<br /><br />"No, I'm afraid not."<br /><br />"D'you want to change?"<br /><br />"It's the only evidence of life."<br /><br />"But you might change so that you didn't love me any more."<br /><br />"There is that risk."<br /><br />"Charles, you haven't stopped loving me?"<br /><br />"You said yourself I hadn't changed."<br /><br />"Well, I'm beginning to think you have. I haven't."<br /><br />"No," I said, "no; I can see that."<br /><br />"Were you at all frightened at meeting me to-day?"<br /><br />"Not the least."<br /><br />"You didn't wonder if I should have fallen in love with someone else in<br />the meantime?"<br /><br />"No. Have you?"<br /><br />"You know I haven't. Have you?"<br /><br />"No. I'm not in love."<br /><br />My wife seemed content with this answer. She had married me six years<br />ago at the time of my first exhibition, and had done much since then to push<br />our interests. People said she had "made" me, but she herself took credit<br />only for supplying me with a congenial background; she had firm faith in my<br />genius and in the "artistic temperament," and in the principle that things<br />done on the sly are not really done at all. .<br /><br />Presently she said: "Looking forward to getting home?" (My father gave<br />me as a wedding present the price of a house, and I bought an old rectory in<br />my wife's part of the country.) "I've got a surprise for you."<br /><br />"Yes?"<br /><br />"I've turned the old tithe barn into a studio for you, so that you<br />needn't be disturbed by the children or when we have people to stay. I got<br />Emden to do it. Everyone thinks it a great success. There was an article on<br />it in Country Life; I brought it for you to see."<br /><br />She showed me the article:. . . happy example of architectural good<br />manners. . . . Sir Joseph Emden's tactful adaptation of traditional material<br />to modern needs . . . ; there were some photographs; wide oak boards now<br />covered the earthen floor; a high, stone-mullioned bay-window had been built<br />in the north wall, and the great timbered roof, which before had been lost<br />in shadow, now stood out stark, well lit, with clean white plaster between<br />the beams; it looked like a village hall. I remembered the smell of the<br />place, which would now be lost.<br /><br />"I rather liked that barn," I said.<br /><br />"But you'll be able to work there, won't you?"<br /><br />"After squatting in a cloud of sting-fly," I said, "under a sun which<br />scorched the paper off the block as I drew, I could work on the top of an<br />omnibus. I expect the vicar would like to borrow the place for whist<br />drives."<br /><br />"There's a lot of work waiting for you. I promised Lady Anchorage you<br />would do Anchorage House as soon as you got back. That's coming down, too,<br />you know--shops underneath and two-roomed flats above. You don't think, do<br />you, Charles, that all this exotic work you've been doing is going to spoil<br />you for that sort of thing?"<br /><br />"Why should it?"<br /><br />"Well, it's so different. Don't be cross."<br /><br />"It's just another jungle closing in."<br /><br />"I know just how you feel, darling. The Georgian Society made such a<br />fuss, but we couldn't do anything. . . . Did you ever get my letter about<br />Boy?"<br /><br />"Did I? What did it say?"<br /><br />(Boy Mulcaster was her brother.)<br /><br />"About his engagement. It doesn't matter now because it's all off, but<br />Father and Mother were terribly upset. She was an awful girl. They had to<br />give her money in the end."<br /><br />"No, I heard nothing of Boy."<br /><br />"He and Johnjohn are tremendous friends, now. It's so sweet to see them<br />together. Whenever he comes home the first thing he does is to drive<br />straight to the Old Rectory. He just walks into the house, pays no attention<br />to anyone else, and hollers out: 'Where's my chum Johnjohn?' and Johnjohn<br />comes tumbling downstairs and off they go into the spinney together and play<br />for hours. You'd think, to hear them talk to each other, they were the same<br />age. It was really Johnjohn who made him see reason about that girl;<br />seriously, you know, he's frightfully sharp. He must have heard Mother and<br />me talking, because next time Boy came he said: 'Uncle Boy shan't marry<br />horrid girl and leave Johnjohn,' and that was the very day -he settled for<br />two thousand pounds out of court. Johnjohn admires Boy so tremendously and<br />imitates him in everything. It's so good for them both."<br /><br />I crossed the room and tried once more, ineffectively, to moderate the<br />heat of the radiators; I drank some iced water and opened the window, but,<br />besides the sharp night air, music was borne in from the next room where<br />they were playing the wireless. I shut it and turned,back towards my wife.<br /><br />At length she began talking again, more drowsily. . . . "The garden's<br />come on a lot. . . . The box hedges you planted grew five inches last year.<br />... I had some men down from London to put the tennis court right . . .<br />first-class cook at the moment . . .' As the city below us began to wake we<br />both fell asleep, but not for long; the telephone rang and a voice of<br />hermaphroditic gaiety said: "Savoy-Carlton-Hotelgoodmorning. It is now a<br />quarter of eight."<br /><br />"I didn't ask to be called, you know."<br /><br />"Pardon me?"<br /><br />"Oh, it doesn't matter."<br /><br />"You're welcome."<br /><br />As I was shaving, my wife from the bath said: "Just like old times. I'm<br />not worrying any more, Charles."<br /><br />"Good."<br /><br />"I was so terribly afraid that two years might have made a difference.<br />Now I know we can start again exactly where we left off."<br /><br />I paused in my shaving.<br /><br />"When?" I asked. "What? When we left off what?"<br /><br />"When you went away, of course."<br /><br />"You are npt thinking of something else, a little time before?"<br /><br />"Oh, Charles, that's old history. That was nothing. It was never<br />anything. It's all over and forgotten."<br /><br />"I just wanted to know," I said. "We're back as we were the day I went<br />abroad, is that it?"<br /><br />So we started that day exactly where we left off two years before, with<br />my wife in tears.<br />My wife's softness and English reticence, her-very white, small,<br />regular teeth, her neat rosy finger-nails, her schoolgirl air of innocent<br />mischief and her schoolgirl dress, her modern jewellery, which was made at<br />great expense to give the impression, at a distance, of having been<br />mass-produced, her ready, rewarding smile, her deference to me and her zeal<br />in my interests, her motherly heart which made her cable daily to the nanny<br />at home -- in short, her peculiar charm -- made her popular among the<br />Americans, and our cabin on the day of departure was full of cellophane<br />packages -- flowers, fruit, sweets, books, toys for the children--from<br />friends she had known for a week. Stewards, like sisters in a nursing home,<br />used to judge their passengers' importance by the number and value of these<br />trophies; we therefore started the voyage in high esteem.<br /><br />My wife's first thought on coming aboard was of the passenger list.<br /><br />"Such a lot of friends," she said. "It's going to be a lovely trip.<br />Let's have a cocktail party this evening."<br /><br />The companion-ways were no sooner cast off than she was busy with the<br />telephone.<br /><br />"Julia. This is Celia -- Celia Ryder. It's lovely to find you on board.<br />What have you been up to? Come and have a cocktail this evening and tell me<br />all about it."<br /><br />"Julia who?"<br /><br />"Mottram. I haven't seen her for years."<br /><br />Nor had I; not, in fact, since my wedding day, not to speak to for any<br />time, since the private view of my exhibition where the four canvasses of<br />Marchmain House, lent by Brideshead, had hung together attracting much<br />attention. Those pictures were my last contact with the Flytes; our lives,<br />so close for a year or two, had drawn apart. Sebastian, I knew, was still<br />abroad; Rex and Julia, I sometimes heard said, were unhappy together. Rex<br />was not prospering quite as well as had been predicted; he remained on the<br />fringe of the Government, prominent but vaguely suspect. He lived among the<br />very rich, and in his speeches seemed to incline to revolutionary policies,<br />flirting with Communists and fascists. I heard the Mottrams' names in<br />conversation; I saw their faces now and again peeping from the Tatler, as I<br />turned the pages impatiently waiting for someone to come, but they and I had<br />fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds,<br />little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a<br />perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in<br />which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves<br />in separate magnetic systems, a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can<br />speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that<br />England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as<br />in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in<br />London, see at times, a few miles distant, the same rural horizon, could<br />have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other's<br />fortunes, a regret, even, that we 1 should be separated, and the knowledge<br />that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other's<br />pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the<br />morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the<br />centripetal force of our own worlds, and the coldj interstellar space<br />between them.<br /><br />My wife, perched on the back of the sofa in a litter of cellophane and<br />silk ribbons, continued telephoning, working brightly through the passenger<br />list ... "Yes, do of course bring him, I'm told he's sweet. . . . Yes, I've<br />got Charles back from the wilds atyj last; isn't it lovely. . . . What a<br />treat seeing your name in the list! It's made my trip . . . darling, we were<br />at the Savoy-Car Iton, too; how can we have missed you? . . ." Sometimes she<br />turned to me and said: "I have to make sure you're still really there. I<br />haven't got used to it yet."<br /><br />I went up and out as we steamed slowly down the river to one of the<br />great glass cases where the passengers stood to watch the land slip by.<br />"Such a lot of friends," my wife had said. They looked a strange crowd to<br />me; the emotions of leave-taking were just beginning to subside; some of<br />them, who had been drinking till the last moment with those who were seeing<br />them off, were still boisterous; others were planning where they would have<br />their deck chairs; the band played unnoticed -- all were as restless as<br />ants.<br /><br />I turned into some of the halls of the ship, which were huge without<br />any splendour, as though they had been designed for a railway coach and<br />preposterously magnified. I passed through vast bronze gates whose ornament<br />was like the trade mark of a cake of soap which had been used once or twice;<br />I trod carpets the colour of blotting paper; the painted panels of the walls<br />were like blotting paper, too: kindergarten work in flat, drab colours; and<br />between the walls were yards and yards of biscuit-coloured wood which no<br />carpenter's tool had ever touched, wood that had been bent round corners,<br />invisibly joined strip to strip, steamed and squeezed and polished; all over<br />the blotting-paper carpet were strewn tables designed perhaps by a sanitary<br />engineer, square blocks of stuffing, with square holes for sitting in, and,<br />upholstered, it seemed, in blotting paper also; the light of the hall was<br />suffused from scores of hollows, giving an even glow, casting no shadows --<br />the whole place hummed from its hundred ventilators and vibrated with the<br />turn of the great engines below.<br /><br />Here I am, I thought, back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here,<br />where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity. Quomodo sedet<br />sola civitas (for I had heard that great lament, which Cordelia once quoted<br />to me in the drawing-room of Marchmain House, sung by a half-caste choif in<br />Guatemala, nearly a year ago).<br /><br />A steward came up to me.<br /><br />"Can I get you anything, sir?"<br /><br />"A whiskey-and-soda, not iced."<br /><br />"I'm sorry, sir, all the soda is iced."<br /><br />"Is the water iced, too?"<br /><br />"Oh yes, sir."<br /><br />"Well, it doesn't matter."<br /><br />He trotted off, puzzled, soundless in the pervading hum.<br /><br />"Charles."<br /><br />I looked behind me. Julia was sitting in a cube of blotting-paper, her<br />hands folded in her lap, so still that I had passed by without noticing her.<br /><br />"I heard you were here. Celia telephoned to me. It's delightful."<br /><br />"What are you doing?"<br /><br />She opened the empty hands in her lap with a little eloquent gesture.<br />"Waiting. My maid's unpacking; she's been so disagreeable ever since we left<br />England. She's complaining now about my cabin. I can't think why. It seems a<br />lap to me."<br /><br />The steward returned with whiskey and two jugs, one of iced water, the<br />other of boiling water; I mixed them to the right temperature. He watched<br />and said: "I'll remember that's how you take it, sir."<br /><br />Most passengers had fads; he was paid to fortify their self-esteem.<br />Julia asked for a cup of hot chocolate. I sat by her in the next cube.<br /><br />"I never see you now," she said. "I never seem to see anyone I like. I<br />don't know why."<br /><br />But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years;<br />as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead<br />contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to<br />have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid<br />a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more<br />often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the<br />tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms<br />of long and unbroken intimacy.<br /><br />"What have you been doing in America?"<br /><br />She looked up slowly from her chocolate and, her splendid, serious eyes<br />in mine, said: "Don't you know? I'll tell you about it sometime. I've been a<br />mug. I thought I was in love with someone, but it didn't turn out that way."<br />And my mind went back ten years to the evening at Brideshead, when that<br />lovely, spidery child of nineteen, as though brought in for an hour from the<br />nursery and nettled by lack of attention from the grown-ups, had said: "I'm<br />causing anxiety, too, you know," and I had thought at the time, though<br />scarcely, it now seemed to me, in long trousers myself: "How important these<br />girls make themselves with their love affairs."<br /><br />Now it was different; there was nothing but humility and friendly<br />candour in the way she spoke.<br />I wished I could respond to her confidence, give some token of<br />acceptance, but there was nothing in my last, flat, eventful years that I<br />could share with her. I began instead to talk of my time in the jungle, of<br />the comic characters I had met and the lost places I had visited, but in<br />this mood of old friendship the tale faltered and came to an end abruptly.<br />"I long to see the paintings," she said.<br /><br />"Celia wanted me to unpack some and stick them round the cabin for her<br />cocktail party. I couldn't do that."<br /><br />"No. ... Is Celia as pretty as ever? I always thought she had the most<br />delicious looks of any girl of my year." "She hasn't changed."<br /><br />"You have, Charles. So lean and grim, not at all the pretty boy<br />Sebastian brought home with him. Harder, too." "And you're softer."<br /><br />"Yes, I think so ... and very patient now." She was not yet thirty, but<br />was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise<br />abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spidery look; the head<br />that I used to think Quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was<br />now part of herself and not at all Florentine--not connected in any way with<br />painting or the arts or with anything except herself, so that it would be<br />idle to itemize and dissect her beauty, which was her own essence, and could<br />only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have<br />for her.<br /><br />Time had wrought another change, too; not for her the sly, complacent<br />smile of La Gioconda; the years had been more than "the sound of lyres and<br />flutes," and had saddened her. She seemed to say, "Look at me. I have done<br />my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this<br />beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is<br />my reward?"<br /><br />That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her<br />reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and<br />struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.<br /><br />"Sadder, too," I said.<br /><br />"Oh yes, much sadder."<br /><br />My wife was in exuberant spirits when, two hours later, I returned to<br />the cabin.<br /><br />"I've had to do everything. How does it look?"<br /><br />We had been given, without paying more for it, a large suite of rooms,<br />one so large, in fact, that it was seldom booked except by directors of the<br />line, and on most voyages, the chief purser admitted, was given to those he<br />wished to honour. (My wife was adept in achieving such small advantages,<br />first impressing the impressionable with her chic and my celebrity and,<br />superiority once firmly established, changing quickly to a pose of almost<br />flirtatious affability.) In token of her appreciation the chief purser had<br />been asked to our party and he, in token of his appreciation, had sent<br />before him the life-size effigy of a swan, moulded in ice and filled with<br />caviar. This chilly piece of magnificence now dominated the room, standing<br />on a table in the centre, thawing gently, dripping at the beak into its<br />silver dish. The flowers of the morning delivery hid as much as possible of<br />the panelling (for this room was a miniature of the monstrous hall above).<br /><br />"You must get dressed at once. Where have you been all this time?"<br /><br />"Talking to Julia Mottram."<br /><br />"D'you know her? Oh, of course, you were a friend of the dipso brother.<br />Goodness, her glamour!"<br /><br />"She greatly admires your looks, too."<br /><br />"She used to be a girl friend of Boy's."<br /><br />"Surely not?"<br /><br />"He always said so."<br /><br />"Have you considered," I asked, "how your guests are going to eat this<br />caviar?"<br /><br />"I have. It's insoluble. But there's all this" -- she revealed some<br />trays of glassy tit-bits -- "and anyway, people always find ways of eating<br />things at parties. D'you remember we once ate potted shrimps with a paper<br />knife?"<br /><br />"Did we?"<br /><br />"Darling, it was the night you popped the question."<br /><br />"As I remember, you popped."<br /><br />"Well, the night we got engaged. But you haven't said how you like the<br />arrangements."<br />The arrangements, apart from the swan and the flowers, consisted of a<br />steward already inextricably trapped in the corner behind an improvised bar,<br />and another steward, tray in hand, in comparative freedom.<br /><br />"A cinema actor's dream," I said.<br /><br />"Cinema actors," said my wife; "that's what I want to talk about."<br /><br />She came with me to my dressing-room and talked while I changed. It had<br />occurred to her that, with my interest in architecture, my true metier was<br />designing scenery for the films, and she had asked two Hollywood magnates to<br />the party with whom she wished to ingratiate me.<br /><br />We returned to the sitting-room.<br /><br />"Darling, I believe you've taken against my bird. Don't be beastly<br />about it in front of the purser. It was sweet of him to think of it.<br />Besides, you know, if you had read about it in a description of a<br />sixteenth-century banquet in Venice, you would have said those were the days<br />to live."<br /><br />"In sixteenth-century Venice it would have been a somewhat different<br />shape."<br /><br />"Here is Father Christmas. We were just in raptures over your swan."<br /><br />The chief purser came into the room and shook hands powerfully.<br /><br />"Dear Lady Celia," he said, "if you'll put on your warmest clothes and<br />come an expedition into the cold storage with me to-morrow, I can show you a<br />whole Noah's Ark of such objects. The toast will be along in a minute.<br />They're keeping it hot."<br /><br />"Toast!" said my wife, as though this was something beyond the dreams<br />of gluttony. "Do you hear that, Charles? Toast."<br /><br />Soon the guests began to arrive; there was nothing to delay them.<br />"Celia," they said, "what a grand cabin and what a beautiful swan!" and, for<br />all that it was one of the largest in the ship, our room was soon painfully<br />crowded; they began to put out their cigarettes in the little pool of<br />ice-water which now surrounded the swan.<br /><br />The purser made a sensation, as sailors like to do, by predicting a<br />storm. "How can you be so beastly?" asked my wife, conveying the flattering<br />suggestion that not only the cabin and the caviar, but the waves, too, were<br />at his command. "Anyway, storms don't affect a ship like this, do they?"<br /><br />"Might hold us back a bit."<br /><br />"But it wouldn't make us sick?"<br /><br />"Depends if you're a good sailor. I'm always sick in storms, ever since<br />I was a boy."<br /><br />"I don't believe it. He's just being sadistic. Come over here, there's<br />something I want to show you."<br /><br />It was the latest photograph of her children. "Charles hasn't even seen<br />Caroline yet. Isn't it thrilling for him?"<br /><br />There were no friends of mine there, but I knew about a third of the<br />party, and talked away civilly enough. An elderly woman said to me, "So<br />you're Charles. I feel I know you through and through, Celia's talked so<br />much about you."<br /><br />Through and through, I thought. Through and through is a long way,<br />madam. Can you indeed see into those dark places where my own eyes seek in<br />vain to guide me? Can you tell me, dear Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander -- if I am<br />correct in thinking that is how I heard my wife speak of you -- why it is<br />that at this moment, while I talk to you, here, about my forthcoming<br />exhibition, I am thinking all the time only of when Julia will come? Why can<br />I talk like this to you, but not to her? Why have I already set her apart<br />from humankind, and myself with her? What is going on in those secret places<br />of my spirit with which you make so free? What is cooking, Mrs. Stuyvesant<br />Oglander?<br /><br />Still Julia did not come, and the noise of twenty people in that tiny<br />room, which was so large that no one hired it, was the noise of a multitude.<br /><br />Then I saw a curious thing. There was a little red-headed man whom no<br />one seemed to know, a dowdy fellow quite unlike the general run of my wife's<br />guests; he had been standing by the caviar for twenty minutes eating as fast<br />as a rabbit. Now he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief and, on the<br />impulse apparently, leaned forward and dabbed the beak of the swan, removing<br />the drop of water that had been swelling there and would soon have fallen.<br />Then he looked round furtively to see if he had been observed, caught my<br />eye, and giggled nervously.<br /><br />"Been wanting to do that for a long time," he said. "Bet you don't know<br />how many drops to the minute. I do, I counted."<br /><br />"I've no idea."<br /><br />"Guess. Tanner if you're wrong; half a dollar if you're right. That's<br />fair."<br /><br />"Three," I said.<br /><br />"Coo, you're a sharp one. Been counting 'em yourself." But he showed no<br />inclination to pay this debt. Instead he said: "How d'you figure this out?<br />I'm an Englishman born and bred, but this is my first time on the Atlantic."<br /><br />"You flew out perhaps?"<br /><br />"No, nor over it."<br /><br />"Then I presume you went round the world and came across the Pacific."<br /><br />"You are a sharp one and no mistake. I've made quite a bit getting into<br />arguments over that one."<br /><br />"What was your route?" I asked, wishing to be agreeable.<br /><br />"Ah, that'd be telling. Well, I must skedaddle. So long."<br /><br />"Charles," said my wife, "this is Mr. Kramm, of Interastral Films."<br /><br />"So you are Mr. Charles Ryder," said Mr. Kramm.<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"Well, well, well." He paused. I waited. "The purser here says we're<br />heading for dirty weather. What d'you know about that?"<br />"Far less than the purser."<br /><br />"Pardon me, Mr. Ryder, I don't quite get you."<br /><br />"I mean I know less than the purser."<br /><br />"Is that so? Well, well, well. I've enjoyed our talk very much. I hope<br />that it will be the first of many."<br /><br />An Englishwoman said: "Oh, that swan! Six weeks in America has given me<br />an absolute phobia of ice. Do tell me, how did it feel meeting Celia again<br />after two years? I know I should feel indecently bridal. But Celia's never<br />quite got the orange blossom out of her hair, has she?"<br /><br />Another woman said: "Isn't it heaven saying good-bye and I knowing we<br />shall meet again in half an hour and go on meeting every half-hour for<br />days?"<br /><br />Our guests began to go, and each on leaving informed me ofj something<br />my wife had promised to bring me to in the near future; it was the theme of<br />the evening that we should all be seeing a lot of each other, that we had<br />formed one of those molecular systems that physicists can illustrate. At<br />last the swan was wheeled out, too, and I said to my wife, "Julia never<br />came."<br /><br />"No, she telephoned. I couldn't hear what she said, there was such a<br />noise going on--something about a dress. Quite lucky really, there wasn't<br />room for a cat. It was a lovely party, wasn't it? Did you hate it very much?<br />You behaved beautifully and looked so distinguished. Who was your red-baked<br />chum?"<br /><br />"No chum of mine."<br /><br />"How very peculiar! Did you say anything to Mr. Kramm about working in<br />Hollywood?"<br /><br />"Of course not."<br /><br />"Oh, Charles, you are a worry to me. It's not enough just to stand<br />about looking distinguished and a martyr for Art. Let's go to dinner. We're<br />at the Captain's table. I don't suppose he'll dine down to-night, but it's<br />polite to be fairly punctual."<br /><br />By the time that we reached the table the rest of the party had<br />arranged themselves. On either side of the Captain's empty chair sat Julia<br />and Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander; besides them there were an English diplomat<br />and his wife, Senator Stuyvesant Oglander, and an American clergyman at<br />present totally isolated between two pairs of empty chairs. This clergyman<br />later described himself -- redundantly it seemed -- as an Episcopalian<br />Bishop. Husbands and wives sat together here. My wife was confronted with a<br />quick decision, and although the steward attempted to direct us otherwise,<br />sat so that she had the Senator and I the Bishop. Julia gave us both a<br />little dismal signal of sympathy.<br /><br />"I'm miserable about the party," she said, "my beastly maid totally<br />disappeared with every dress I have. She only turned up half an hour ago.<br />She'd been playing ping-pong."<br /><br />"I've been telling the Senator what he missed," said Mrs. Stuyvesant<br />Oglander. "Wherever Celia is, you'll find she knows all the significant<br />people."<br /><br />"On my right," said the Bishop, "a significant couple are expected.<br />They take all their meals in their cabin except when they have been informed<br />in advance that the Captain will be present."<br /><br />We were a gruesome circle; even my wife's high social spirit faltered.<br />At moments I heard bits of her conversation.<br /><br />"... an extraordinary little red-haired man. Captain Foulenough in<br />person."<br /><br />"But I understood. you to say, Lady Celia, that you unacquainted with<br />him."<br /><br />"I mean he was like Captain Foulenough."<br /><br />"I begin to comprehend. He impersonated this friend of yourtl in order<br />to come to your party."<br /><br />"No, no. Captain Foulenough is simply a comic character."<br /><br />"There seems to have been nothing very amusing about this other man.<br />Your friend is a comedian?"<br /><br />"No, no. Captain Foulenough is an imaginary character in an English<br />paper. You know, like your 'Popeye.'"<br /><br />The Senator laid down knife and fork. "To recapitulate: an impostor<br />came to your party and you admitted him because of a fancied resemblance to<br />a fictitious character in a cartoon."<br /><br />"Yes, I suppose that was it really."<br /><br />The Senator looked at his wife as much as to say: "Significant" people,<br />huh!"<br /><br />I heard Julia across the table trying to trace, for the benefit of the<br />diplomat, the marriage-connections of her Hungarian and Italian cousins. The<br />diamonds in her hair and on her fingers flashed with fire, but her hands<br />were nervously rolling little balls, of crumb, and her starry head drooped<br />in despair.<br /><br />The Bishop told me of the goodwill mission on which he was travelling<br />to Barcelona ... "a very, very valuable work of clearance has been<br />performed, Mr. Ryder. The time has now come to rebuild on broader<br />foundations. I have made it my aim to reconcile the so-called Anarchists and<br />the so-called Communists, and with that in view I and my committee have<br />digested all the available literature of the subject. Our conclusion, Mr.<br />Ryder, is unanimous. There is no fundamental diversity between the two<br />ideologies. It is a matter of personalities, Mr. Ryder, and what<br />personalities have put asunder personalities can unite. . . ."<br /><br />On the other side I heard: --<br /><br />"And may I make so bold as to ask what institutions sponsored your<br />husband's expedition?"<br /><br />The diplomat's wife bravely engaged the Bishop across the gulf that<br />separated them.<br /><br />"And what language will you speak when you get to Barcelona?"<br /><br />"The language of Reason and Brotherhood, madam," and, turning back to<br />me, "The speech of the coming century is in thoughts not in words. Do you<br />not agree, Mr. Ryder?"<br /><br />"Yes," I said. "Yes."<br /><br />"What are words?" said the Bishop.<br /><br />"What indeed?"<br /><br />"Mere conventional symbols, Mr. Ryder, and this is an age rightly<br />sceptical of conventional symbols."<br /><br />My mind reeled; after the parrot-house fever of my wife's party, and<br />the deep, unplumbed emotions of the afternoon, after all the exertions of my<br />wife's pleasures in New York, after the months of solitude in the steaming,<br />green shadows of the jungle, this was too much. I felt like Lear on the<br />heath, like the Duchess of Main bayed by madmen. I summoned cataracts and<br />hurri-canoes, and as if by conjUry the call was immediately answered.<br /><br />For some time now, though whether it was a mere trick of the nerves I<br />did not then know, I had felt a recurrent and persistently growing motion --<br />a heave and shudder of the large dining-room as of the breast of a man in<br />deep sleep. Now my wife turned to me and said: "Either I am a little drunk<br />or it's getting rough," and even as she spoke we found ourselves leaning<br />sideways in our chairs; there was a crash and tinkle of falling cutlery by<br />the wall, and on our table the wine-glasses all together toppled and rolled<br />over, while each of us steadied the plate and forks and looked at the others<br />with expressions that varied between frank horror in the diplomat's wife and<br />relief in Julia.<br /><br />The gale which, unheard, unseen, unfelt, in our enclosed and insulated<br />world, had for an hour been-mounting over us, had now veered and fallen full<br />on our bows.<br /><br />Silence followed the crash, then a high, nervous babble of laughter.<br />Stewards laid napkins on the pools of spilt wineJ We tried to resume the<br />conversation, but all were waiting, as the little ginger man had watched the<br />drop swell and fall from the swan's beak, for the next great blow; it came,<br />heavier than the last.<br /><br />"This is where I say good-night to you all," said the diplomat's wife,<br />rising.<br /><br />Her husband led her to their cabin. The dining-room was emptying fast.<br />Soon only Julia, my wife and I were left at the table, and telepathically,<br />Julia said, "Like King Lear."<br /><br />"Only each of us is all three of them."<br /><br />"What can you mean?" asked my wife.<br /><br />"Lear, Kent, Fool."<br /><br />"Oh, dear, it's like that agonizing Foulenough conversation over again.<br />Don't try and explain."<br /><br />"I doubt if I could," I said.<br /><br />Another climb, another vast drop. The stewards were at work making<br />things fast, shutting things up, hustling away unstable ornaments.<br /><br />"Well, we've finished dinner and set a fine example of British phlegm,"<br />said my wife. "Let's go and see what's on."<br /><br />Once on our way to the lounge we had all three to cling to a pillar;<br />when we got there we found it almost deserted; the band played but no one<br />danced; the tables were set for tombola but no one bought a card, and the<br />ship's officer, who made a ' specialty of calling the numbers with all the<br />patter of the lower j deck -- "sweet sixteen and never been kissed -- key of<br />the door, twenty-one -- clickety-click, sixty-six" -- was idly talking to<br />his i colleagues; there were a score of scattered novel readers, a few games<br />of bridge, some brandy drinking in the smoking-room, but all our guests of<br />two hours before had disappeared.<br /><br />The three of us sat for a little by the empty dance floor; my wife was<br />full of schemes by which, without impoliteness, we could move to another<br />table in the dining-room. "It's crazy to go to the restaurant," she said,<br />"and pay extra for exactly the same dinner. Only film people go there,<br />anyway. I don't see why we should be made to."<br /><br />Presently she said: "It's making my head ache and I'm tired, anyway.<br />I'm going to bed."<br /><br />Julia went with her. I walked round the ship, on one of the covered<br />decks where the wind howled and the spray leaped up from the darkness and<br />smashed white and brown against the glass screen; men were posted to keep<br />the passengers off the open decks. Then I, too, went below.<br /><br />In my dressing-room everything breakable had been stowed away, the door<br />to the cabin was hooked open, and my wife called plaintively from within.<br /><br />"I feel terrible. I didn't know a ship of this size could pitch like<br />this," she said, and her eyes were full of consternation and resentment,<br />like those of a woman who, at the end of her time, at length realizes that<br />however luxurious the nursing home, and however well paid the doctor, her<br />labour is inevitable; and the lift and fall of the ship came regularly as<br />the pains of childbirth.<br /><br />I slept next door; or, rather, I lay there between dreaming and waking.<br />In a narrow bunk, on a hard mattress, there might have been rest, but here<br />the beds were broad and buoyant; I collected what cushions I could find and<br />tried to wedge myself firm, but through the night I turned with each swing<br />and twist of the ship -- she was rolling now as well as pitching -- and my<br />head rang with the creak and thud which now succeeded the hum of fine<br />weather.<br /><br />Once, an hour before dawn, my wife appeared like a ghost in the<br />doorway, supporting herself with either hand on the jambs, saying: "Are you<br />awake? Can't you do something? Can't you get something from the doctor?"<br /><br />I rang for the night steward, who had a draught ready prepared, which<br />comforted her a little. And all night between dreaming and waking I thought<br />of Julia; in my brief dreams she took a hundred fantastic and terrible and<br />obscene forms, but in my waking thoughts she returned with her sad, starry<br />head just as I had seen her at dinner.<br /><br />After first light I slept for an hour or two, then awoke clearheaded,<br />with a joyous sense of anticipation.<br /><br />The wind had dropped a little, the steward told me, but was still<br />blowing hard and there was a very heavy swell; "which there's nothing worse<br />than a heavy swell," he said, "for the If enjoyment of the passengers.<br />There's not many breakfasts wanted this morning."<br /><br />I looked in at my wife, found her sleeping, and closed the door I<br />between us; then I ate salmon kedgeree and cold Bradenham ham and telephoned<br />for a barber to come and shave me.<br /><br />"There's a lot of stuff in the sitting-room for the lady," said the<br />steward; "shall I leave it for the time?"<br /><br />I went to see. There was a second delivery of cellophane parcels from<br />the shops on board, some ordered by radio from ' 1 friends in New York whose<br />secretaries had failed to remind them of our departure in time, some by our<br />guests as they left the cocktail party. It was no day for flower vases; I<br />told him to leave them on the floor and then, struck by the thought, removed<br />the car^ from Mr. Kramm's roses and sent them with my love to Julia.<br /><br />She telephoned while I was being shaved.<br /><br />"What a deplorable thing to do, Charles! How unlike you!"<br /><br />"Don't you like them?" "What can I do with roses on a day like this?"<br /><br />"Smell them."<br /><br />There was a pause and a rustle of unpacking. "They've absolutely no<br />smell at all."<br /><br />"What have you had for breakfast?"<br /><br />"Muscat grapes and cantaloup."<br /><br />"When shall I see you?"<br /><br />"Before lunch. I'm busy till then with a masseuse."<br /><br />"A masseuse?"<br /><br />"Yes, isn't it peculiar. I've never had one before, except once when I<br />hurt my shoulder hunting. What is it about being on a boat that makes<br />everyone behave like a film star?"<br /><br />"I don't."<br /><br />"How about these very embarrassing roses ?"<br /><br />The barber did his work with extraordinary dexterity -- indeed, with<br />agility, for he stood like a swordsman in a ballet sometimes on the point of<br />one foot, sometimes on the other, lightly flicking the lather off his blade<br />and swooping back to my chin as the ship righted herself; I should not have<br />dared use a safety razor on myself.<br /><br />The telephone rang again.<br /><br />It was my wife.<br /><br />"How are you, Charles ?"<br /><br />"Tired."<br /><br />"Aren't you coming to see me ?"<br /><br />"I came once. I'll be in again."<br /><br />I .brought her the flowers from the sitting-room; they completed the<br />atmosphere of a maternity ward which she had managed to create in the cabin;<br />the stewardess had the air of a midwife, standing by the bed, a pillar of<br />starched linen and composure. My wife turned her head on the pillow and<br />smiled wanly; she stretched out a bare arm and caressed with the tips of her<br />fingers the cellophane and silk ribbons of the largest bouquet. "How sweet<br />people are," she said faintly, as though the gale were a private misfortune<br />of her own which the world in its love was condoling.<br /><br />"I take it you're not getting up."<br /><br />"Oh no, Mrs. Clark is being so sweet." She was always quick to get<br />servants' names. "Don't 'bother. Come in sometimes and tell me what's going<br />on."<br /><br />"Now, now, dear," said the stewardess, "the less we are disturbed<br />to-day the better."<br /><br />My wife seemed to make a sacred, female rite even of seasickness.<br /><br />Julia's cabin, I knew, was somewhere below ours. I waited for her by<br />the lift on the main deck; when she came we walked once round the promenade;<br />I held the rail, she took my other arm. It was hard going; through the<br />streaming glass we saw a distorted world of grey sky and black water. When<br />the ship rolled heavily I swung her round so that she could hold the rail<br />with her other hand; the howl of the wind was subdued, but the whole ship<br />creaked with strain. We made the circuit once; then Julia said: "It's no<br />good. That woman beat hell out of me, and I feel limp, anyway. Let's sit<br />down."<br /><br />The great bronze doors of the lounge had torn away from their hooks and<br />were swinging free with the roll of the ship; regularly and, it seemed,<br />irresistibly, first one, then the other, opened and shut; they paused at the<br />completion of each half circle, began to move slowly and finished fast with<br />a resounding-clash. There was no real risk in passing them, except of<br />slipping and being caught by that swift, final blow; there was ample time to<br />walk through unhurried, but there was something forbidding in the sight of<br />that great weight of uncontrolled metal, flapping to and fro, which might<br />have made a timid man flinch or skip through too quickly; I rejoiced to feel<br />Julia's hand perfectly steady on my arm and know, as I walked beside her,<br />that she was wholly undismayed.<br /><br />"Bravo," said a man sitting near by. "I confess I went round the other<br />way. I didn't like the look of those doors somehow. They've been trying to<br />fix them all the morning."<br /><br />There were few people about that day, and that few seemed bound<br />together by a camaraderie of reciprocal esteem; they did nothing except sit<br />rather glumly in their armchairs, drink occasionally and exchange<br />congratulations on not being seasick.<br /><br />"You're the first lady I've seen," said the man.<br /><br />"I'm very lucky."<br /><br />"We are very lucky," he said, with a movement which began as a bow and<br />ended as a lurch forward to his knees, as the blotting-paper floor dipped<br />steeply between us. The roll carried us away from him, clinging together but<br />still on our feet, and we quickly sat where our dance led us, on the further<br />side, in isolation; a web of life-lines had been stretched across the<br />lounge, and we seemed like boxers, roped into the ring.<br /><br />The steward approached. "Your usual, sir? Whiskey and tepid water, I<br />think. And for the lady? Might I suggest a nip of champagne?"<br /><br />"D'you know, the awful thing is I would like champagne very much?" said<br />Julia. "What a life of pleasure -- roses, half an hour with a female<br />pugilist, and now champagne!"<br /><br />"I wish you wouldn't go on about the roses. It wasn't my idea in the<br />first place. Someone sent them to Celia."<br /><br />"Oh, that's quite different. It lets you out completely. But it makes<br />my massage worse."<br /><br />"I was shaved in bed."<br /><br />"I'm glad about the roses," said Julia. "Frankly, they were a shock.<br />They made me think we were starting the day on quite the wrong footing."<br /><br />I knew what she meant, and in that moment felt as though I had shaken<br />off some of the dust and grit of ten dry years; then and always, however she<br />spoke to me -- in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of<br />contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or<br />hands -- however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had<br />glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often<br />did, straight from the surface to the depths, I knew; even that day when I<br />still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant.<br /><br />We drank our wine and soon our new friend came lurching towards us down<br />the life-line.<br /><br />"Mind if I join you? Nothing like a bit of rough weather for bringing<br />people together. This is my tenth crossing, and I've never seen anything<br />like it. I can see you are an experienced sailor, young lady."<br /><br />"No. As a matter of fact, I've never been at sea before except coming<br />to New York and, of course, crossing the Channel. I don't feel sick, thank<br />God, but I feel tired. I thought at first it was only the massage, but I'm<br />coming to the conclusion it's the ship."<br /><br />"My wife's in a terrible way. She's an experienced sailor. Only shows,<br />doesn't it?"<br /><br />He joined us at luncheon, and I did not mind his being there; he had<br />clearly taken a fancy to Julia, and he thought we were man and wife; this<br />misconception and his gallantry seemed.in some way to bring her and me<br />closer together. "Saw you two last night at the Captain's table," he said,<br />"with all the nobs."<br /><br />"Very, dull nobs."<br /><br />"If you ask me, nobs always are. When you get a storm like this you<br />find out what people are really made of."<br /><br />"You have a predilection for good sailors?"<br /><br />"Well, put like that I don't know that I do--what I mean is, it makes<br />for getting together."<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"Take us for example. But for this we might never have met. I've had<br />some very romantic encounters at sea in my time. If the lady will excuse me,<br />I'd like to tell you about a little adventure I had in the Gulf of Lyons<br />when I was younger than I am now."<br /><br />We were both weary; lack of sleep, the incessant din and the strain<br />every movement required, wore us down. We spent that afternoon apart in our<br />cabins. I slept, and when I awoke the sea was as high as ever, inky clouds<br />swept over us and the glass streamed still with water, but I had grown used<br />to the storm in my sleep, had made its rhythm mine, had become part of it,<br />so that I arose strongly and confidently and found Julia already up and in<br />the same temper.<br /><br />"What d'you think?" she said. "That man's giving a little 'get-together<br />party' to-night in the smoking-room for all the good sailors. He asked me to<br />bring my husband."<br /><br />"Are we going?"<br /><br />"Of course. ... I wonder if I ought to feel like the lady our friend<br />met on the way to Barcelona. I don't, Charles, not a bit'."<br /><br />There were eighteen people at the "get-together party"; we had nothing<br />in common except immunity from seasickness. We drank champagne, and<br />presently our host said: "Tell you what, I've got a roulette wheel. Trouble<br />is we can't go to my cabin on account of the wife, and we aren't allowed to<br />play in public."<br /><br />So the party adjourned to my sitting-room and we played for low stakes<br />until late into the night, when Julia left and our host had drunk too much<br />wine to be surprised that she and I were not in the same quarters. When all<br />but he had gone he fell asleep in his chair, and I left him there. It was<br />the last I saw of him, for later, so the steward told me when he came from<br />returning the roulette things to the man's cabin, he broke his collar-bone,<br />falling in the corridor, and was taken to the ship's hospital.<br /><br />All next day Julia and I spent together without interruption; talking,<br />scarcely moving, held in our chairs by the swell of the sea. After luncheon<br />the last hardy passengers went to rest and we were alone as though the place<br />had been cleared for us, as though tact on a Titanic scale had sent everyone<br />tiptoeing out to leave us to one another.<br /><br />The bronze doors of the lounge had been fixed, but not before two<br />seamen had been injured and removed to the sick-bay. They had tried various<br />devices, lashing with ropes and, later, when these failed, with steel<br />hawsers, but there was nothing to which they could be made fast; finally,<br />they drove wooden wedges under them, catching them in the brief moment of<br />repose when they were full open, and these held them.<br /><br />When, before dinner, she went to her cabin to get ready (no one dressed<br />that night) and I came with her, uninvited, unopposed, expected, and behind<br />closed doors took her in my arms and first kissed her, there was no<br />alteration from the mood of the afternoon. Later, turning it over in my<br />mind, as I turned in my bed with the rise and fall of the ship, through the<br />long, lonely, drowsy night, I recalled the courtships of the past, dead, ten<br />years; how, knotting my tie before setting out, putting the gardenia in my<br />buttonhole, I would plan my evening and think, At such and such a time, at<br />such and such an opportunity, I shall cross the start-line and open my<br />attack for better or worse; this phase of the battle has gone on long<br />enough, I would think; a decision must be reached. With Julia there were no<br />phases, no start-line, no tactics at all.<br /><br />But later that night when she went to bed and I followed her to her<br />door she stopped me.<br /><br />"No, Charles, not yet. Perhaps never. I don't know. I don't know if I<br />want love."<br /><br />Then something, some surviving ghost from those dead ten years--for one<br />cannot die, even for a little, without some loss -- made me say, "Love? I'm<br />not asking for love."<br /><br />"Oh yes, Charles, you are," she said, and putting up her hand gently<br />stroked my cheek; then shut her door.<br /><br />And I reeled back, first on one wall, then on the other, of the long,<br />softly lighted, empty corridor; for the storm, it appeared, had the form of<br />a ring. All day we had been sailing through its still centre; now we were<br />once more in the full fury of the wind -- and that night was to be rougher<br />than the one before.<br /><br /><br />Ten hours of talking: what had we to say? Plain fact mostly, the record<br />of our two lives, so long widely separate, now being knit to one. Through<br />all that storm-tossed night I rehearsed what she had told me; she was no<br />longer the alternate succubus and starry vision of the night before; she had<br />given all that was transferable of her past into my keeping. She told me, as<br />I have already retold, of her courtship and marriage; she told me, as though<br />fondly turning the pages of an old nursery-book, of her childhood; and I<br />lived long, sunny days with her in the meadows, with Nanny Hawkins on her<br />camp stool and Cordelia asleep in the pram, slept quiet nights under the<br />dome with the religious pictures fading round the cot as the nightlight<br />burned low and the embers settled in the grate. She told me of her life with<br />Rex and of the secret, vicious, disastrous escapade that had taken her to<br />New York. She, too, had had her dead years. She told me of her long struggle<br />with Rex as to whether she should have a child; at first she wanted one, but<br />learned after a year that an operation was needed to make it possible; by<br />that time Rex and she were out of love, but he still wanted his child, and<br />when at last she consented, it was born dead.<br /><br />"Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally," she said. "It's just<br />that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man<br />highly developed; the rest simply isn't there. He couldn't imagine why it<br />hurt me to find, two months after we came back to London from our honeymoon,<br />that he was still keeping up with Brenda Champion."<br /><br />"I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful," I said. "I felt it was<br />all right for me to dislike her."<br /><br />"Is she? Do you? I'm glad. I don't like her either. Why did you marry<br />her?"<br /><br />"Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she's the ideal wife<br />for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian."<br /><br />"You loved him, didn't you?"<br /><br />"Oh yes. He was the forerunner."<br /><br />Julia understood.<br /><br />The ship creaked and shuddered, rose and fell. My wife called to me<br />from the next room:<br /><br />"Charles, are you there?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"I've been asleep such a long while. What time is it?"<br /><br />"Half-past three."<br /><br />"It's no better, is it?"<br /><br />"Worse."<br /><br />"I feel a little better, though. D'you think they'd bring me some tea<br />or something if I rang the bell?"<br /><br />I got her some tea and biscuits from the night steward.<br /><br />"Did you have an amusing evening?"<br /><br />"Everyone's seasick."<br /><br />"Poor Charles. It was going to have been such a lovely trip, too. It<br />may be better to-morrow."<br />I turned out the light and shut the door between us.<br />Waking and dreaming, through the strain and creak and heave of the long<br />night, flat on my back with my arms and legs spread wide to check the roll,<br />and my eyes open to the darkness, I lay thinking of Julia.<br /><br />". . . We thought Papa might come back to England after Mummy died, or<br />that he might marry again, but he lives just as he did. Rex and I often go<br />to see him now. I've grown fond of him. . . . Sebastian's disappeared<br />completely . . . Cordelia's in Spain with an ambulance . . . Bridey leads<br />his own extraordinary life. He wanted to shut Brideshead after Mummy died,<br />but Papa wouldn't have it for some reason, so Rex and I live there now, and<br />Bridey has two rooms up in the dome, next to Nanny Hawkins, part of the old<br />nurseries. He's like a character from Chekhov. One meets him sometimes<br />coming out of the library or on the stairs -- I never know when he's at home<br />-- and now and then- he suddenly comes in to dinner like a ghost quite<br />unexpectedly. ,<br /><br />". . . Oh, Rex's parties! Politics and money. They can't do anything<br />except for money; if they walk round the lake they have to make bets about<br />how many swans they see ... sitting up till two, amusing Rex's girls,<br />hearing them gossip, rattling away endlessly on the backgammon board while<br />the men play cards and smoke cigars. The cigar smoke ... I can smell it in<br />my hair when I wake up in the morning; it's in my clothes when I dress at<br />night. Do I smell of it now? D'you think that woman who rubbed me felt it in<br />my skin?<br /><br />". . . At first I used to stay away with Rex in his friends' houses. He<br />doesn't make me any more. He was ashamed of me when he found I didn't cut<br />the kind of figure he wanted, ashamed of himself for having been taken in. I<br />wasn't at all the article he'd bargained for. He can't see the point of me,<br />but whenever v he's made up his mind there isn't a point and he's<br />begun to feel comfortable, he gets a surprise -- some man, or even woman, he<br />respects takes a fancy to me and he suddenly sees that there is a whole<br />world of things we understand and he doesn't. . . . He was upset when I went<br />away. He'll be delighted to have me , back. I was faithful to him until this<br />last thing came along. There's nothing like a good upbringing. Do you know<br />last year, when I thought I was going to have a child, I'd decided to have<br />it brought up a Catholic? I hadn't thought about religion before; I haven't<br />since; but just at that time, when I was waiting for the birth, I thought,<br />'That's one thing I can give her. It doesn't seem to have done me much good,<br />but my child shall have it.' It was odd, wanting to give something one had<br />lost oneself. Then, in the end, I couldn't even give that: I couldn't even<br />give her life. I never saw her; I was too ill to know what was going on, and<br />afterwards for a long time, until now, I didn't want to speak about her --<br />she was a daughter, so Rex didn't so much mind her being dead.<br /><br />"I've been punished a little for marrying Rex. You see, I can't get all<br />that sort of thing out of my mind, quite -- Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell,<br />Nanny Hawkins, and the Catechism. It becomes part of oneself, if they give<br />it one early enough. And yet I wanted my child to have it. ... Now I suppose<br />I shall be punished for what I've just done. Perhaps that is why you and I<br />are here together like this . . . part of a plan."<br /><br />That was almost the last thing she said to me -- "part of a plan" --<br />before we went below and parted at her cabin door.<br /><br /><br />Next day the wind had again dropped, and again we were wallowing in the<br />swell. The talk was less of seasickness now than of broken bones; people had<br />been thrown about in the night, and there had been many nasty accidents on<br />bathroom floors. That day, because we had talked so much the day before and<br />because what we had to say needed few words, we spoke little. We had books;<br />Julia found a game she liked. When after long silences we spoke, our<br />thoughts, we found, had kept pace together side by side.<br /><br />Once I said, "You are standing guard over your sadness."<br /><br />"It's all I have earned. You said yesterday. My wages."<br /><br />"An I.O.U. from life. A promise to pay on demand."<br /><br />Rain ceased at midday; at evening the clouds dispersed and the sun,<br />astern of us, suddenly broke into the lounge where we sat, putting all the<br />lights to shame.<br /><br />"Sunset," said Julia, "the end of our day."<br /><br />She rose and, though the roll and pitch of the ship seemed unabated,<br />led me up to the boat-deck. She put her arm through mine and her hand into<br />mine, in my great-coat pocket. The deck was dry and empty, swept only by the<br />wind of the ship's speed. As we made our halting, laborious way forward,<br />away from the 1 flying smuts of the smoke-stack, we were alternately jostled<br />together, then strained, nearly sundered, arms and fingers interlocked as I<br />held the rail and Julia clung to me, thrust together again, drawn apart;<br />then, in a plunge deeper than the rest, I found myself flung across her,<br />pressing her against the rail, warding myself off her with the arms that<br />held her prisoner on either side, and as the ship paused at the end of its<br />drop as though gathering strength for the ascent, we stood thus embraced, in<br />the open, cheek against cheek, her hair blowing across my eyes; the dark<br />horizon of tumbling water, flashing now with gold, stood still above us,<br />then came sweeping down till I was staring through Julia's dark hair into a<br />wide and golden sky, and she was thrown forward on my heart, held up by my<br />hands on the rail, her face still pressed to mine.<br /><br />In that minute, with her lips to my ear and her breath warm in the salt<br />wind, Julia said, though I had not spoken, "Yes, now," and as the ship<br />righted herself and for the moment ran into calmer waters, Julia led me<br />below.<br /><br />So at sunset I took formal possession of her as her lover. It was no<br />time for the sweets of luxury; they would come, in then-season, with the<br />swallow and the lime-flowers. Now on the rough water, as I was made free of<br />her narrow loins and, it seemed now, in assuaging that fierce appetite, cast<br />a burden which I had borne all my life, toiled under, not knowing its nature<br />-- now, while the waves still broke and thundered on the prow, the act of<br />possession was a symbol, a rite of ancient origin and solemn meaning.<br /><br />We dined that night high up in the ship, in the restaurant, and saw<br />through the bow windows the stars come out and sweep across the sky as once,<br />I remembered, I had seen them sweep above the towers and gables of Oxford.<br />The stewards promised that to-morrow night the band would play again and the<br />place be full. We had better book now, they said, if we wanted a good table.<br /><br />"Oh dear," said Julia, "where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans<br />of the storm?"<br />I could not leave her that night, but early next morning, as once again<br />I made my way back along the corridor, I found I could walk without<br />difficulty; the ship rode easily on a smooth sea, and I knew that our<br />solitude was broken.<br /><br /><br />My wife called joyously from her cabin: "Charles, Charles, I feel so<br />well. What do you think I am having for breakfast?" I went to see. She was<br />eating a beef-steak.<br /><br />"I've fixed up for a visit to the hairdresser -- do you know they<br />couldn't take me till four o'clock this afternoon, they're so busy suddenly?<br />So I shan't appear till the evening, but lots of people are coming in to see<br />us this morning, and I've asked Miles and Janet to lunch with us in our<br />sitting-room. I'm afraid I've been a worthless wife to you the last two<br />days. What have you been up to?"<br /><br />"One gay evening," I said, "we played roulette till two o'clock, next<br />door in the sitting-room, and our host passed out."<br /><br />"Goodness. It sounds very disreputable. Have you been behaving,<br />Charles? You haven't been picking up sirens?"<br /><br />"There was scarcely a woman about. I spent most of the time with<br />Julia."<br /><br />"Oh, good. I always wanted to bring you together. She's one of my<br />friends I knew you'd like. I expect you were a godsend to her. She's had<br />rather a gloomy time lately. I don't expect she mentioned it, but . . ." my<br />wife proceeded to relate a current version of Julia's journey to New York.<br />"I'll ask her to cocktails this morning," she concluded.<br /><br />Julia came, and it was happiness enough, now, merely to be near her.<br /><br />"I hear you've been looking after my husband for me," my wife said.<br /><br />"Yes, we've become very matey. He and I and a man whose name we don't<br />know."<br /><br />"Mr. Kramm, what have you done to your arm?"<br /><br />"It was the bathroom floor," said Mr. Kramm, and explained at length<br />how he had fallen.<br /><br />That night the Captain dined at his table and the circle was complete,<br />for claimants came to the chairs on the Bishop's right, two Japanese who<br />expressed deep interest in his projects for world-brotherhood. The Captain<br />was full of chaff at Julia's endurance in the storm, offering to engage her<br />as a seaman; years of sea-going had given him jokes for every occasion. My<br />wife, fresh from the beauty parlour, was unravaged by her three days of<br />distress, and in the eyes of many seemed to outshine Julia, whose sadness<br />had gone and been replaced by an incommunicable content and tranquillity;<br />incommunicable save to me; she and I, separated by the crowd, sat alone<br />together close enwrapped, as we had lain in each other's arms the night<br />before.<br /><br />There was a gala spirit in the ship that night. Though it meant rising<br />at dawn to pack, everyone was determined that for this one night he would<br />enjoy the luxury the storm had denied him. There was no solitude. Every<br />corner of the ship was thronged; dance music and high, excited chatter,<br />stewards darting everywhere with trays of glasses, the voice of the officer<br />in charge of tombola: "Kelly's eye --number one; legs, eleven; and we'll<br />Shake the Bag" -- Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander in a paper cap, Mr. Kramm and his<br />bandages, the two Japanese decorously throwing paper streamers and hissing<br />like geese.<br /><br />I did not speak to Julia, alone, all that evening.<br /><br />We met for a minute next day on the starboard side of the ship while<br />everyone else crowded to port to see the officials come aboard and to gaze<br />at the green coastline of Devon.<br /><br />"What are your plans?"<br /><br />"London for a bit," she said.<br /><br />"Celia's going straight home. She wants to see the children."<br /><br />"You, too?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"In London then."<br /><br /><br />"Charles, the little red-haired man -- Foulenough. Did you see? Two<br />plain-clothes police have taken him off."<br /><br />"I missed it. There was such a crowd on that side of the ship."<br /><br />"I found out the trains and sent a telegram. We shall be home by<br />dinner. The children will be asleep. Perhaps we might wake Johnjohn up, just<br />for once."<br /><br />"You go down," I said. "I shall have to stay in London."<br /><br />"Oh, but Charles, you must come. You haven't seen Caroline."<br /><br />"Will she change much in a week or two?"<br /><br />"Darling, she changes every day."<br /><br />"Then what's the point of seeing her now? I'm sorry, my dear, but I<br />must get the pictures unpacked and see how they've travelled. I must fix up<br />for the exhibition right away."<br /><br />"Must you?" she said, but I knew that her resistance ended when I<br />appealed to the mysteries of my trade. "It's very disappointing. Besides, I<br />don't know if Andrew and Cynthia will be out of the flat. They took it till<br />the end of the month."<br /><br />"I can go to a hotel."<br /><br />"But that's so grim. I can't bear you to be alone your first night<br />home. I'll stay and go down to-morrow."<br /><br />"You mustn't disappoint the children."<br /><br />"No." Her children, my art, the two mysteries of our trades . . .<br /><br />"Will you come for the week-end?"<br /><br />"If I can."<br /><br />"All British passports to the smoking-room, please," said a steward.<br /><br />"I've arranged with that sweet Foreign Office man at our table to get<br />us off early with him," said my wife.Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-22883528887596533332008-08-06T13:56:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:14:49.589+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book I. Et in Arcadia Ego. Chapter SevenChapter Seven<br /><br />it is time to speak of Julia, who till now has played an intermittent<br />and somewhat enigmatic part in Sebastian's drama. It was thus she appeared<br />to me at the time, and I to her. We pursued separate aims which brought us<br />near to one another, but we remained strangers. She told me later that she<br />had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a<br />particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another,<br />take it down, glance at the title page and, saying "I must read that, too,<br />when I've the time," replace it and continue the search. On my side the<br />interest was keener, for there was always the physical likeness between<br />brother and sister, which, caught repeatedly in different poses, under<br />different lights, each time pierced me anew; and, as Sebastian in his sharp<br />decline seemed daily to fade and crumble, so much the more did Julia stand<br />out clear and firm.<br /><br />She was thin in those days, flat-chested, leggy; she seemed all limbs<br />and neck, bodiless, spidery; thus far she conformed to the fashion, but the<br />hair-cut and the hats of the period, and the blank stare and gape of the<br />period, and the clownish dabs of rouge high on the cheekbones, could not<br />reduce her to type.<br /><br />When I first met her, when she met me in the station yard and drove me<br />home through the twilight that high summer of 1923, she was just eighteen<br />and fresh from her first London season.<br />Some said it was the most brilliant season since the war, that things<br />were getting into their stride again. Julia, by right, was at the centre of<br />it. There were then remaining perhaps half a dozen London houses which could<br />be called "historic"; March-main House in St. James's was one of them, and<br />the ball given for Julia, in spite of the ignoble costume of the time, was<br />by all accounts a splendid spectacle. Sebastian went down for it and<br />half-heartedly suggested my coming with him; I refused and came to regret my<br />refusal, for it was the last ball of its kind given there; the last of a<br />splendid series.<br /><br />How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days;<br />the world was open to be explored at leisure. I was so full of Oxford that<br />summer; London could wait, I<br />thought.<br /><br />The other great houses belonged to kinsmen or to childhood friends of<br />Julia's, and besides them there were countless substantial houses in the<br />squares of Mayfair and Belgravia, alight and thronged, one or other of them,<br />night after night, their music floating out among the plane-trees, couples<br />outside sauntering on the quiet pavements or breathing the summer air from<br />the balconies. Foreigners returning on post from their own waste lands wrote<br />home that here they seemed to catch a glimpse of the world they had believed<br />lost for ever among the mud and wire, and through those halcyon weeks Julia<br />darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the trees, part of the<br />candlelight in the mirror's spectrum, so that elderly men and women, sitting<br />aside with their memories, saw her as herself the blue-bird.<br /><br />"'Bridey' Marchmain's eldest girl," they said. "Pity he can't see her<br />to-night."<br /><br />That night and the night after and the night after, wherever she went,<br />always in her own little circle of intimates, she brought to all whose eyes<br />were open to it a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the<br />river's bank when the kingfisher suddenly flames across dappled water.<br />This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through<br />the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power<br />of her own beauty, hesitating on the steps of life; one who had suddenly<br />found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in<br />her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips, and<br />whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth<br />her Titanic servant, die fawning monster who would bring her whatever she<br />asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.<br />She h?A no interest in me that evening; the jinn rumbled below us<br />uncalled; she lived apart in a little world, within a little world, the<br />innermost of a system of concentric spheres, like the ivory balls<br />laboriously carved in ancient China; a little problem troubling her mind --<br />little, as she saw it, in abstract terms and symbols. She was wondering,<br />dispassionately and leagues distant from reality, whom she should marry.<br />Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured<br />chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches,<br />which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf<br />past, present and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then,<br />lacking the life of both child and woman; victory and defeat were changes of<br />pin and line; she knew nothing of war.<br /><br />"If only one lived abroad," she thought, "where these things are<br />arranged between parents and lawyers."<br /><br />To be married, soon and splendidly, was the unquestioned aim of all her<br />friends. If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as<br />the beginning of individual existence; the skirmish where one gained one's<br />spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.<br /><br />She outshone by far all the girls of her age, but she knew that, in<br />that little world within a world which she inhabited, there were certain<br />grave disabilities from which she suffered. On the sofas against the wall<br />where the old people counted up the points, there were things against her.<br />There was the scandal of her father; they had all loved him in the past, the<br />women along the wall, and they most of them loved her mother, yet there was<br />that slight, inherited stain upon her brightness that seemed deepened by<br />something in her own way of life -- waywardness and wil-fulness, a less<br />disciplined habit than most of her contemporaries' -- that unfitted her for<br />the highest honours; but for that, who knows? . . .<br /><br />One subject eclipsed all others in importance for the ladies along the<br />wall; whom would the young princes marry? They Could not hope for purer<br />lineage or a more gracious presence than Julia's; but there was this faint<br />shadow on her that unfitted her for the highest honours; there was also her<br />religion.<br /><br />Nothing could have been further from Julia's ambitions than a royal<br />marriage. She knew, or thought she knew, what she wanted and it was not<br />that. But wherever she turned, it seemed, her religion stood as a barrier<br />between her and her natural goal.<br /><br />As it seemed to her, the thing was a dead loss. If she apos-tasized<br />now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the<br />Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could<br />marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before<br />her. There could be no eldest son for her, and younger sons were indelicate<br />things, necessary, but not to be much spoken of. Younger sons had none of<br />the privileges of obscurity; it was their plain duty to remain hidden until<br />some disaster perchance promoted them to their brothers' places, and, since<br />this was their function, it was desirable that they should keep themselves<br />wholly suitable for succession. Perhaps in a family of three or four boys, a<br />Catholic might get the youngest without opposition. There were of course the<br />Catholics themselves, but these came seldom into the little world Julia had<br />made for herself; those who did were her mother's kinsmen, who, to her,<br />seemed grim and eccentric. Of the dozen or so wealthy and noble Catholic<br />families, none at that time had an heir of the right age. Foreigners --<br />there were many among her mother's family -- were tricky about money, odd in<br />their ways, and a sure mark of failure in the English girl who wed them.<br />What was there left?<br /><br />This was Julia's problem after her weeks of triumph in London. She knew<br />it was not insurmountable. There must, she thought, be a number of people<br />outside her own world who were well qualified to be drawn into it; the shame<br />was that she must seek them. Not for her the cruel, delicate luxury of<br />choice, the indolent, cat-and-mouse pastimes of the hearth-rug. No Penelope<br />she; she must hunt in the forest.<br /><br />She had made a preposterous little picture of the kind of man ' who<br />would do: he was an English diplomat of great but not very virile beauty,<br />now abroad, with a house smaller than Brideshead, nearer to London; he was<br />old, thirty-two or three, and had been recently and tragically widowed;<br />Julia thought she would prefer a man a little subdued by earlier grief. He<br />had a great career before him but had grown listless in his loneliness; she<br />was not sure he was not in danger of falling into the hands of an<br />unscrupulous foreign adventuress; he needed a new infusion of young life to<br />carry him to the Embassy at Paris. While professing a mild agnosticism<br />himself, he had a liking for the shows of religion and was perfectly<br />agreeable to having his children brought up Catholic; he believed, however,<br />in the prudent restriction of his family to two boys and a girl, comfortably<br />spaced over twelve years, and did not demand, as a Catholic husband might,<br />yearly pregnancies. He had twelve thousand a year above his pay, and no near<br />relations. Someone like that would do, Julia thought, and she was in search<br />of him when she met me at the railway station. I was not her man. She told<br />me as much, without a word, when she took the cigarette from my lips.<br /><br />All this I learned about Julia, bit by bit, from the stories she told,<br />from guesswork, knowing her, from what her friends said, from the odd<br />expressions she now and then let slip, from occasional dreamy monologues of<br />reminiscences; I learned it as one does learn the former -- as it seems at<br />the time, the preparatory -- life of a woman one loves, so that one thinks<br />of oneself as part of it, directing it by devious ways, towards oneself.<br /><br /><br />Julia left Sebastian and me at Brideshead and went to stay with an<br />aunt, Lady Rosscommon, in her villa at Cap Ferrat. All the way she pondered<br />her problem. She had given a name to her widower-diplomat; she called him<br />"Eustace," and from that moment he became a figure of fun to her, a little<br />interior, incommunicable joke, so that when at last such a man did cross her<br />path -- though he was not a diplomat but a wistful major in the Life Guards<br />-- and fall in love with her and offer her just those gifts she had chosen,<br />she sent him away moodier and more wistful than ever, for by that time she<br />had met Rex Mottram.<br /><br />Rex's age was greatly in his favour, for among Julia's friends there<br />was a kind of gerontophilic snobbery; young men were held to be gauche and<br />pimply; it was thought very much more chic to be seen lunching alone at the<br />Ritz -- a thing, in any case, allowed to few girls of that day, to the tiny<br />circle of Julia's intimates; a thing looked at askance by the elders who<br />kept the score, chatting pleasantly against the walls of the ballrooms -- at<br />the table on the left as you came in, with a starched and wrinkled old roue<br />whom your mother had been warned of as a girl, than in the centre of the<br />room with a party of exuberant young bloods. Rex, indeed, was neither<br />starched nor wrinkled; his seniors thought him a pushful young cad, but<br />Julia recognized the unmistakable chic -- the flavour of "Max" and "F.E."<br />and the Prince of Wales, of the big table in the Sporting Club, the second<br />magnum and the fourth cigar, of the chauffeur kept waiting hour after hour<br />without compunction -- which her friends would envy. His social position was<br />unique; it had an air of mystery, even of crime, about it; people said Rex<br />went about armed. Julia and her friends had a fascinated abhorrence of what<br />they called "Pont Street"; they collected phrases that damned their user,<br />and among themselves -- and often, disconcertingly, in public -- talked a<br />language made up of them. It was "Pont Street" to wear a signet ring and to<br />give chocolates at the theatre; it was "Pont Street" at a dance to say, "Can<br />I forage for you?" Whatever Rex might be, he was definitely not "Pont<br />Street." He had stepped straight from the underworld into the world of<br />Brenda Champion, who was herself the innermost of a number of concentric<br />ivory spheres. Perhaps Julia recognized in Brenda Champion an intimation of<br />what she and her friends might be in twelve years' time; there was an<br />antagonism between the girl and the woman that was hard to explain<br />otherwise. Certainly the fact of his being Brenda Champion's property<br />sharpened Julia's appetite for him.<br /><br />Rex and Brenda Champion were staying at the next villa on Cap Ferrat,<br />taken that year by a newspaper magnate and frequented by politicians. .They<br />would not normally have come within Lady Rosscommon's ambit, but, living so<br />close, the parties mingled and at once Rex began warily to pay his court.<br /><br />All that summer he had been feeling restless. Mrs. Champion had proved<br />a dead end; it had all been intensely exciting at first, but now those<br />bonds, so much more rigid than the bonds of marriage, had begun to chafe.<br />Mrs. Champion lived as, he found, the English seemed apt to do, in a little<br />world within a little world; Rex demanded a wider horizon. He wanted to<br />consolidate his gains; to strike the black ensign, go ashore, hang the<br />cutlass up over the chimney and think about the crops. It was time he<br />married; he, too, was in search of a "Eustace," but, living as he did, he<br />met few girls. He knew of Julia; she was by all accounts top debutante, a<br />suitable prize.<br />With Mrs. Champion's cold eyes watching behind her sun glasses, there<br />was little Rex could do at Cap Ferrat except establish a friendliness which<br />could be widened later. He was never entirely alone with Julia, but he saw<br />to it that she was included in most things they did; he taught her<br />chemin-de-fer, he arranged that it was always in his car that they drove to<br />Monte Carlo or Nice; he did enough to make Lady Rosscommon write to Lady<br />Marchmain, and Mrs. Champion move him, sooner than they had planned, to<br />Antibes.<br /><br />Julia went to Salzburg to join her mother.<br /><br />"Aunt Fanny tells me you made great friends with Mr. Mottram. I'm sure<br />he can't be very nice."<br /><br />"I don't think he is," said Julia. "I don't know that I like nice<br />people."<br /><br />There is proverbially a mystery among most men of new wealth, how they<br />made their first ten thousand; it is the qualities they showed then, before<br />they became bullies, when every man was someone to be placated, when only<br />hope sustained them and they could count on nothing from the world but what<br />could be charmed from it, that make them, if they survive their triumph,<br />successful with women. Rex, in the comparative freedom of London, became<br />abject to Julia; he planned his life about hers, going where he would meet<br />her, ingratiating himself with those who could report well of him to her; he<br />sat on a number of charitable committees in order to be near Lady Marchmain;<br />he offered his services to Brideshead in getting him a seat in Parliament<br />(but was there rebuffed); he expressed a keen interest in the Catholic<br />Church until he found that this was no way to Julia's heart. He was always<br />ready to drive her in his Hispano wherever she wanted to go; he took her and<br />parties of her friends to ring-side seats at prize-fights and introduced<br />them afterwards to the pugilists; and all the time he never once made love<br />to her. From being agreeable, he became indispensable to her; from having<br />been proud of him in public she became a little ashamed, but by that time,<br />between Christmas and Easter, he had become indispensable. And then, without<br />in the least expecting it, she suddenly found herself in love.<br /><br />It came to her, this disturbing and unsought revelation, one evening in<br />May, when Rex had told her he would be busy at the House, and, driving by<br />chance down Charles Street, she saw him leaving what she knew to be Brenda<br />Champion's house. She was so hurt and angry that she could barely keep up<br />appearances through dinner; as soon as she could, she went home and cried<br />bitterly for ten minutes; then she felt hungry, wished she had eaten more at<br />dinner, ordered some bread-and-milk, and went to bed saying: "When Mr.<br />Mottram telephones in the morning, whatever time it is, say I am not to be<br />disturbed."<br /><br />Next day she breakfasted in bed as usual, read the papers, telephoned<br />to her friends. Finally she asked: "Did Mr. Mottram ring up by any chance?"<br /><br />"Oh yes, my lady, four times. Shall I put him through when he rings<br />again?"<br /><br />"Yes. No. Say I've gone out."<br />When she came downstairs there was a message for her on the hall table.<br />Mr. Mottram expects Lady Julia at the Ritz at 1:30. "I shall lunch at home<br />to-day," she said.<br /><br />That afternoon she went shopping with her mother; they had tea with an<br />aunt and returned at six.<br /><br />"Mr. Mottram is waiting, my lady. I've shown him into the library."<br /><br />"Oh, Mummy. I can't be bothered with him. Do tell him to go home."<br /><br />"That's not at all kind, Julia. I've often said he's not my favourite<br />among your friends, but I have grown quite used to him, almost to like him.<br />You really mustn't take people up and drop them like this -- particularly<br />people like Mr. Mottram."<br /><br />"Oh, Mummy, must I see him? There'll be a scene if I do."<br /><br />"Nonsense, Julia, you twist that poor man round your finger."<br /><br />So Julia went into the library and came out an hour later engaged to be<br />married.<br /><br />"Oh, Mummy, I warned you this would happen if I went in there."<br /><br />"You did nothing of the kind. You merely said there would be a scene. I<br />never conceived of a scene of this kind."<br /><br />"Anyway, you do like him, Mummy. You said so."<br /><br />"He has been very kind in a number of ways. I regard him as entirely<br />unsuitable as your husband. So will everyone."<br /><br />"Damn everybody."<br /><br />"We know nothing about him. He may have black blood -- in fact he is<br />suspiciously dark. Darling, the whole thing's impossible. I can't see how<br />you can have been so foolish."<br /><br />"Well, what right have I got otherwise to be angry with him if he goes<br />with that horrible old woman? You make a great thing about rescuing fallen<br />women. Well, I'm rescuing a fallen man for a change. I'm saving Rex from<br />mortal sin."<br /><br />"Don't be irreverent, Julia."<br /><br />"Well, isn't it mortal sin to sleep with Brenda Champion?"<br /><br />"Or indecent."<br /><br />"He's promised never to see her again. I couldn't ask him to do that<br />unless I admitted I was in love with him, could I?"<br /><br />"Mrs. Champion's morals, thank God, are not my business. Your happiness<br />is. If you must know, I think Mr. Mottram a kind and useful friend, but I<br />wouldn't trust him an inch, and I'm sure he'll have very unpleasant<br />children. They always, revert. I've no doubt you'll regret the whole thing<br />in a few days. Meanwhile nothing is to be done. No one must be told anything<br />or allowed to suspect. You must stop lunching with him. You may see him<br />here, of course, but nowhere in public. You had better send him to me and I<br />will have a little talk to him about it."<br /><br />Thus began a year's secret engagement for Julia; a time of great<br />stress, for Rex made love to her that afternoon for the first time; not as<br />had happened to her once or twice before with sentimental and uncertain<br />boys, but with a passion that disclosed the corner of something like it in<br />her. Their passion frightened her, and she came back from the confessional<br />one flay determined to put an end to it.<br /><br />"Otherwise I must stop seeing you," she said.<br /><br />Rex was humble at once, just as he had been in the winter, day after<br />day, when he used to wait for her in the cold in his big car.<br /><br />"If only we could be married immediately," she said.<br /><br />For six weeks they remained at arm's length, kissing when they met and<br />parted, sitting meantime at a distance, talking of what they would do and<br />where they would live and of Rex's chances of an under-secretaryship. Julia<br />was content, deep in love, living in the future. Then, just before the end<br />of the session, . she learned that Rex had been staying the week-end with a<br />stockbroker at Sunningdale, when he said he was at his constituency, and<br />that Mrs. Champion had been there, too.<br /><br />On the evening she heard of this, when Rex came as usual to Marchmain<br />House, they re-enacted the scene of two months before.<br /><br />"What do you expect?" he said. "What right have you to ask so much,<br />when you give so little?"<br /><br />She took her problem to Farm Street and propounded it in general terms,<br />not in the confessional, but in a dark little parlour kept for such<br />interviews.<br /><br />"Surely, Father, it can't be wrong to commit a small sin myself in<br />order to keep him from a much worse one?"<br /><br />But the gentle old Jesuit was unyielding as rock. She barely listened<br />to him; he was refusing her what she wanted, that was all she needed to<br />know.<br /><br />When he had finished he said, "Now you had better come to the church<br />and make your confession."<br /><br />"No, thank you," she said, as though refusing the offer of something in<br />a shop, "I don't think I want to to-day," and walked angrily home.<br /><br />From that moment she shut her mind against her religion.<br /><br />And Lady Marchmain saw this and added it to her new grief for Sebastian<br />and her old grief for her husband and to the deadly sickness in her body,<br />and took all these sorrows with her daily to church; it seemed her heart was<br />transfixed with the swords of her dolours, a living heart to match the<br />plaster and paint; what comfort she took home with her, God knows.<br /><br /><br />So the year wore on and the secret of the engagement spread from<br />Julia's confidantes to their confidantes, and so, like ripples on the water,<br />in ever-widening circles, till there were hints of it in the press, and Lady<br />Rosscommon as Lady-in-Waiting was closely questioned about it, and something<br />had to be done. Then, after Julia had refused to make her Christmas<br />communion and Lady Marchmain had found herself betrayed first by me, then by<br />Mr. Samgrass, then by Cordelia, in the first grey days of 1925, she decided<br />to act. She forbade all talk of an engagement; she forbade Julia and Rex<br />ever to meet; she made plans for shutting Marchmain House for six months and<br />taking Julia on a tour of visits to their foreign kinsmen. It was<br />characteristic of an old, atavistic callousness that went with her delicacy<br />that, even at this crisis, she did not think it unreasonable to put<br /><br />Sebastian in Rex's charge on the journey to Dr. Borethus, and Rex,<br />having failed her in that matter, went on to Monte Carlo, where he completed<br />her rout. Lord Marchmain did not concern himself with the finer points of<br />Rex's character; those, he believed, were his daughter's business. Rex<br />seemed a rough, healthy, prosperous fellow whose name was already familiar<br />to him from reading the political reports; he gambled in an open-handed but<br />sensible manner; he seemed to keep reasonably good company; he had a future;<br />Lady Marchmain disliked him. Lord Marchmain was, on the whole, relieved that<br />Julia should have chosen so well, and gave his consent to an immediate<br />marriage.<br /><br />Rex gave himself to the preparations with gusto. He bought her a ring,<br />not, as she expected, from a tray at Cartier's, but in a back room in Hatton<br />Garden from a man who brought stones out of a safe in little bags and<br />displayed them for her on a writing-desk; then another man in another back<br />room made designs for the setting with a stub of pencil on a sheet of<br />note-paper, and the result excited the admiration of all her friends.<br /><br />"How d'you know about these things, Rex?" she asked. She was daily<br />surprised by the things he knew and the things he did not know; both, at the<br />time, added to his attraction.<br /><br />His present house in Westminster was large enough for them both, and<br />had lately been furnished and decorated by the most expensive firm. Julia<br />said she did not want a home in the country yet; they could always take<br />places furnished when they wanted to go away.<br /><br />There was trouble about the marriage settlement, with which Julia<br />refused to interest herself. The lawyers were in despair. Rex absolutely<br />refused to settle any capital. "What do I want with trustee stock?" he<br />asked.<br /><br />"I don't know, darling."<br /><br />"I make money work for me," he said. "I expect fifteen, twenty per<br />cent, and I get it. It's pure waste tying up capital at three and a half."<br /><br />"I'm sure it is, darling."<br /><br />"These fellows talk as though I were trying to rob you. It's they who<br />are doing the robbing. They want to rob you of two thirds of the income I<br />can make you." "Does it matter, Rex? We've got heaps, haven't we?" Rex hoped<br />to have the whole of Julia's dowry in his hands, to make it work for him.<br />The lawyers insisted on tying it up, but they could not get, as they asked,<br />a like sum from him. Finally, grudgingly, he agreed to insure his life,<br />after explaining at length to the lawyers that this was mertly a device for<br />putting part of his legitimate profits into other people's pockets; but he<br />had some connection with an insurance office which made the arrangement<br />slightly less painful to him, by which he took for himself the agent's<br />commission which the lawyers were themselves expecting.<br /><br />Last and least tame the question of Rex's religion. He had once<br />attended a royal wedding in Madrid, and he wanted something of die kind for<br />himself.<br /><br />"That's one thing your Church can do," he said: "put on a good show.<br />You never saw anything to equal the cardinals. How many do you have in<br />England?"<br /><br />"Only one, darling."<br /><br />"Only one? Can we hire some others from abroad?" It was then explained<br />to him that a mixed marriage was a very unostentatious affair.<br /><br />"How d'you mean 'mixed'? I'm not a nigger or anything."<br /><br />"No, darling --between a Catholic and a Protestant."<br /><br />"Oh, that? Well, if that's all, it's soon unmixed. I'll become a<br />Catholic. What does one have to do?"<br /><br />Lady Marchmain was dismayed and perplexed by this new development; it<br />was no good her telling herself that in charity she must assume his good<br />faith; it brought back memories of<br />another courtship and another conversion.<br /><br />"Rex," she said. "I sometimes wonder if you realize how big a thing you<br />are taking on in the Faith. It would be very wicked to take a step like this<br />without believing sincerely."<br /><br />He was masterly in his treatment of her.<br /><br />"I don't pretend to be a very devout man," he said, "nor much of a<br />theologian, but I know it's a bad plan to have two religions in one house. A<br />man needs a religion. If your Church is good enough for Julia, it's good<br />enough for me."<br /><br />"Very well," she said, "I will see about having you instructed."<br /><br />"Look, Lady Marchmain, I haven't the time. Instruction will be wasted<br />on me. Just you give me the form and I'll sign on the dotted line."<br /><br />"It usually takes some months - often a lifetime."<br /><br />"Well, I'm a quick learner. Try me."<br /><br />So Rex was sent to Farm Street to Father Mowbray, a priest renowned for<br />his triumphs with obdurate catechumens. After the third interview he came to<br />tea with Lady Marchmain.<br /><br />"Well, how do you find my future son-in-law?"<br /><br />"He's the most difficult convert I have ever met."<br /><br />"Oh dear, I thought he was going to make it so easy."<br /><br />"That's exactly it. I can't get anywhere near him. He doesn't seem to<br />have the least intellectual curiosity or natural piety.<br /><br />"The first day I wanted to find out what sort of religious life he had<br />had till now, so I asked him what he meant by prayer. He said: 'I don't mean<br />anything. You tell me'. I tried to, in a few words, and he said: 'Right. So<br />much for prayer. What's the next thing?' I gave him the catechism to take<br />away. Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He<br />said: 'Just as many as you say, Father.'<br /><br />"Then again I asked him: 'Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud<br />and said "It's going to rain," would that be bound to happen?' 'Oh, yes,<br />Father.' 'But supposing it didn't?' He thought a moment and said, 'I suppose<br />it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.'<br /><br />"Lady Marchmain, he doesn't correspond to any degree of paganism known<br />to the missionaries."<br /><br />"Julia," said Lady Marchmain, when the priest had gone, "are you sure<br />that Rex isn't doing this thing purely with the idea of pleasing us?"<br /><br />"I don't think it enters his head," said Julia.<br /><br />"He's really sincere in his conversion?"<br /><br />"He's absolutely determined to become a Catholic, Mummy," and to<br />herself she said: In her long history the Church must have had some pretty<br />queer converts. I don't suppose all Clevis's army were exactly<br />Catholic-minded. One more won't hurt.<br /><br />Next week the Jesuit came to tea again. It was the Easter holidays and<br />Cordelia was there, too.<br /><br />"Lady Marchmain," he said. "You should have chosen one of the younger<br />fathers for this task. I shall be dead long before Rex is a Catholic."<br /><br />"Oh dear, I thought it was going so well."<br /><br />"It was, in a sense. He was exceptionally docile, said he accepted<br />everything I told him, remembered bits of it, asked no questions. I wasn't<br />happy about him. He seemed to have no sense of reality, but I knew he was<br />coming under a steady Catholic influence, so I was willing to receive him.<br />One has to take a chance sometimes -- with semi-imbeciles, for instance. You<br />never know quite how much they have understood. As long as you know there's<br />someone to keep an eye on them, you do take the chance."<br /><br />"How I wish Rex could hear this!" said Cordelia. "But yesterday I got a<br />regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how<br />ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident<br />what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have<br />such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly<br />breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn't know existed.<br />Take yesterday. He seemed to be doing very well. He'd learned large bits of<br />the catechism by heart, and the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary. Then I<br />asked him as usual if there was anything troubling him, and he looked 'at me<br />in a crafty way and said, 'Look, Father, I don't think you're being straight<br />with me. I want to join your Church and I'm going to join your Church, but<br />you're holding too much back.' I asked what he meant, and he said: 'I've had<br />a long talk with a Catholic -- a very pious, well-educated one, and I've<br />learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet<br />pointing East because that's the direction of heaven, and if you die in the<br />night you can walk there. Now I'll sleep with my feet pointing any way that<br />suits Julia, but d'you expect a grown man to believe about walking to<br />heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a cardinal? And<br />what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound<br />note with someone's name on it, they get sent to hell. I don't say there<br />mayn't be a good reason for all this,' he said, 'but you ought to tell me<br />about it and not let me find out for myself.'"<br /><br />"What can the poor man have meant?" said Lady Marchmain.<br /><br />"You see he's a long way from the Church yet," said Father Mowbray.<br /><br />"But who can he have been talking to? Did he dream it all? Cordelia,<br />what's the matter?"<br /><br />"What a chump! Oh, Mummy, what a glorious chump!"<br /><br />"Cordelia, it was you."<br /><br />"Oh, Mummy, who could have dreamed he'd swallow it? I told him such a<br />lot besides. About the sacred monkeys in the Vatican -- all kinds of<br />things."<br /><br />"Well, you've very considerably increased my work," said Father<br />Mowbray.<br /><br />"Poor Rex," said Lady Marchmain. "You know, I think it makes him rather<br />lovable. You must treat him like an idiot child, Father Mowbray."<br /><br />So the instruction was continued, and Father Mowbray at length<br />consented to receive Rex a week before his wedding.<br /><br />"You'd think they'd be all over themselves to have me in," Rex<br />complained. "I can be a lot of help to them one way and another; instead<br />they're like the chaps who issue cards for a casino. What's more," he added,<br />"Cordelia's got me so muddled I don't know what's in the catechism and what<br />she's invented."<br /><br />Thus things stood three weeks before the wedding; the cards had gone<br />out, presents were coming in fast, the bridesmaids were delighted with their<br />dresses. Then came what Julia called "Bridey's bombshell."<br /><br />With characteristic ruthlessness he tossed his load of explosive<br />without warning into what, till then, had been a happy family party. The<br />library at Marchmain House was being devoted to wedding presents; Lady<br />Marchmain, Julia, Cordelia and Rex were busy unpacking and listing them.<br />Brideshead came in and watched them for a moment.<br /><br />"Chinky vases from Aunt Betty," said Cordelia. "Old stuff. I remember<br />them on the stairs at Buckborne."<br /><br />"What's all this?" asked Brideshead.<br /><br />"Mr., Mrs., and Miss Pendle-Garthwaite, one early-morning tea set.<br />Goode's, thirty shillings, jolly mean."<br /><br />"You'd better pack all that stuff up again."<br /><br />"Bridey, what do you mean?"<br /><br />"Only that the wedding's off."<br /><br />"Bridey."<br /><br />"I thought I'd better make some enquiries about my prospective<br />brother-in-law, as no one else seemed interested," said Brideshead. "I got<br />the final answer to-night. He was married in Montreal hi 1915 to a Miss<br />Sarah Evangeline Cutler, who is still living there."<br /><br />"Rex, is this true?"<br /><br />Rex stood with a jade dragon in his hand looking at it critically; then<br />he set it carefully on its ebony stand and smiled openly and innocently at<br />them all.<br /><br />"Sure it's true," he said. "What about it? What are you all looking so<br />hit-up about? She isn't a thing to me. She never meant any good. I was only<br />a kid, anyhow. The sort of mistake anyone might make. I got my divorce back<br />in 1919. I didn't even know where she was living till Bridey here told me.<br />What's all the rumpus?"<br /><br />"You might have told me," said Julia.<br /><br />"You never asked. Honest, I've not given her a thought in years."<br /><br />His sincerity was so plain that they had to sit down and talk about it<br />calmly.<br /><br />"Don't you realize, you poor sweet oaf," said Julia, "that you can't<br />get married as a Catholic when you've another wife alive?"<br /><br />"But I haven't. Didn't I just tell you we were divorced six years ago?"<br /><br />"But you can't be divorced as a Catholic."<br /><br />"I wasn't a Catholic and I was divorced. I've got the papers<br />somewhere."<br /><br />"But didn't Father Mowbray explain to you about marriage?"<br /><br />"He said I wasn't to be divorced from you. Well, I don't want to be. I<br />can't remember all he told me -- sacred monkeys, plenary indulgences, four<br />last things -- if I remembered all he told" me I shouldn't have time for<br />anything else. Anyhow, what about your Italian cousin, Francesca? She<br />married twice."<br /><br />"She had an annulment."<br /><br />"All right then, I'll get an annulment. What does it cost? Who do I get<br />it from? Has Father Mowbray got one? I only want to do what's right. Nobody<br />told me."<br /><br />It was a long time before Rex could be convinced of the existence of a<br />serious impediment to his marriage. The discussion took them to dinner, lay<br />dormant in the presence of the servants, started again as soon as they were<br />alone, and lasted long after midnight. Up, down and round the argument<br />circled and swooped like a gull, now out to sea, out of sight, cloud-bound,<br />among irrelevances and repetitions, now right on the patch where the offal<br />floated.'<br /><br />"What d'you want me to do? Who should I see?" Rex kept asking. "Don't<br />tell me there isn't someone who can fix this."<br /><br />"There's nothing to do, Rex," said Brideshead. "It simply means your<br />marriage can't take place. I'm sorry from everyone's point of view that it's<br />come so suddenly. You ought to have told us yourself."<br /><br />"Look," said Rex. "Maybe what you say is right; maybe strictly by law I<br />shouldn't get married in your cathedral. But the cathedral is booked; no one<br />there is asking any questions; the Cardinal knows nothing about it; Father<br />Mowbray knows nothing about it. Nobody except us knows a thing. So why make<br />a lot of trouble? Just stay mum and let the thing go through, as if nothing<br />had happened. Who loses anything by that? Maybe I risk going to hell. Well,<br />I'll risk it. What's it got to do with anyone else?"<br /><br />"Why not?" said Julia. "I don't believe these priests know everything.<br />I don't believe in hell for things like that. I don't know that I believe in<br />it for anything. Anyway, that's our lookout. We're not asking you to risk<br />your souls. Just keep away."<br /><br />"Julia, I hate you," said Cordelia, and left the room.<br /><br />"We're all tired," said Lady Marchmain. "If there is anything to say,<br />I'd suggest our discussing it in the morning."<br /><br />"But there's nothing to discuss," said Brideshead, "except what is the<br />least offensive way we can close the whole incident. Mother and I will<br />decide that. We must put a notice in The Times and the Morning Post; the<br />presents will have to go back. I don't know what is usual about the<br />bridesmaids' dresses."<br /><br />"Just a moment," said Rex. "Just a moment. Maybe you can stop us<br />marrying in your cathedral. All right, to hell, we'll be married in a<br />Protestant church."<br /><br />"I can stop that, too," said Lady Marchmain.<br /><br />"But I don't think you will, Mummy," said Julia. "You see, I've been<br />Rex's mistress for some time now, and I shall go on being, married or not."<br /><br />"Rex, is this true?"<br /><br />"No, damn it, it's not," said Rex. "I wish it were."<br /><br />"I see we shall have to discuss it all again in the morning," said Lady<br />Marchmain faintly. "I can't go on any more now."<br /><br />And she needed her son's help up the stairs.<br /><br /><br />"What on earth made you tell your mother that?" I asked, when, years<br />later, Julia described the scene to me.<br /><br />"That's exactly what Rex wanted to know. I suppose because I thought it<br />was true. Not literally -- though you must remember I was only twenty, and<br />no one really knows the 'facts of life' by being told them -- but, of<br />course, I didn't mean it was true literally. I didn't know how else to<br />express it. I meant I was much too deep with Rex just to be able to say 'the<br />marriage arranged will not now take place,' and leave it at that. I wanted<br />to be made an honest woman. I've been wanting it ever since -- come to think<br />of it."<br /><br />"And then?"<br /><br />"And then the talks went on and on. Poor Mummy. And priests came into<br />it and aunts came into it. There were all kinds of suggestions -- that Rex<br />should go to Canada, that Father Mowbray should go to Rome and see if there<br />were any possible grounds for an annulment; that I should go abroad for a<br />year. In the middle of it Rex just telegraphed to Papa: 'Julia and I prefer<br />wedding ceremony take place by Protestant rites. Have you any objection?' He<br />answered, 'Delighted,' and that settled the matter as far as Mummy stopping<br />us legally went. There was a lot of personal appeal after that. I was sent<br />to talk to priests and nuns and aunts. Rex just went on quietly -- or fairly<br />quietly -- with the plans.<br /><br />"Oh, Charles, what a squalid wedding! The Savoy Chapel was the place<br />where divorced couples got married in those days--a poky little place not at<br />all what Rex had intended. I wanted just to slip into a registry office one<br />morning and get the thing over with a couple of charwomen as witnesses, but<br />nothing else would do but Rex had to have bridesmaids and orange blossoms<br />and the wedding march. It was gruesome.<br /><br />"Poor Mummy behaved like a martyr and insisted on my having her lace in<br />spite of everything. Well, she more or less had to--the dress had been<br />planned round it. My own friends came, of course, and the curious<br />accomplices Rex called his friends; the rest bf the party were very oddly<br />assorted. None of Mummy's family came, of course; one or two of Papa's. All<br />the stuffy people stayed away--you know, the Anchorages and Chasms and<br />Vanbrughs -- and I thought, Thank God for that, they always look down their<br />noses at me, anyhow; but Rex was furious, Because it was just them he wanted<br />apparently.<br /><br />"I hoped at one moment there'd be no party at all. Mummy said we<br />couldn't use Marchers, and Rex wanted to telegraph Papa and invade the place<br />with an army of caterers headed by the family solicitor. In the end it was<br />decided to have a party the evening before at home to see the presents --<br />apparently that was all right according to Father Mowbray. Well, no one can<br />ever resist going to see her own present, so that was quite a success, but<br />the reception Rex gave next day at the Savoy for the wedding guests was very<br />squalid.<br /><br />"There was great awkwardness about the tenants. In the end Bridey went<br />down and gave them a dinner and bonfire there, which wasn't at all what they<br />expected in return for their silver<br />soup-tureen.<br /><br />"Poor Cordelia took it hardest. She had looked forward so much to being<br />my bridesmaid -- it was a thing we used to talk about long before I came<br />out--and of course she was a very pious child, too. At first she wouldn't<br />speak to me. Then on the morning of the wedding --I'd moved to Aunt Fanny<br />Ross-common's the evening before; it was thought more suitable--she came<br />bursting in before I was up, straight from Farm Street, in floods of tears,<br />begged me not to marry, then hugged me, gave me a dear little brooch she'd<br />bought, and said she prayed I'd always be happy. Always happy, Charles!<br /><br />"It was an awfully unpopular wedding, you know. Everyone took Mummy's<br />side, as everyone always did -- not that she got any benefit from it. All<br />through her life Mummy had all the sympathy of everyone except those she<br />loved. They all said I'd behaved abominably to her. In fact, poor Rex found<br />he'd married an outcast, which was exactly the opposite of all he'd wanted.<br />"So you see things never looked like going right. There was a hoodoo on<br />us from the start. But I was still nuts about Rex.<br /><br />"Funny to think of, isn't it?<br /><br />"You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it<br />took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn't all there. He wasn't a<br />complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally<br />developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I<br />thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely<br />modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny ,bit<br />of a man pretending he was the whole.<br />"Well, it's all over now."<br /><br />It was ten years later that she said this to me in a storm in the<br />Atlantic.<br /><br /><br />Chapter Eight<br /><br />I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike.<br /><br />It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the<br />discomfiture of their former friends, 'and transposing into their own<br />precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold<br />revolution and civil war. Every evening the kiosks displayed texts of doom,<br />and in the cafes acquaintances greeted one half-derisively with: "Ha, my<br />friend, you are better off here than at home, are you not?" until I, and<br />several friends in circumstances like my own, came seriously to believe that<br />our country was in danger and that our duty lay there. We were joined by a<br />Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de<br />Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere<br />against the lower classes.<br />We crossed together, in a high-spirited, male party, expecting to find<br />unfolding before us at Dover the history so often repeated of late, with so<br />few variations, from all parts of Europe, that I, at any rate, had formed in<br />my mind a clear, composite picture of Revolution -- the red flag on the post<br />office, the overturned tram, the drunken N.C.O-'s, the gaol open and gangs<br />of released criminals prowling the streets, the train from the capital that<br />did not arrive. One had read it in the papers, seen it in the films, heard<br />it at cafe tables again and again for six or seven years now, till it had<br />become part of one's experience, at second hand, like the mud of Flanders<br />and the flies of Mesopotamia.<br /><br />Then we landed and met the old routine of the customs sheds, the<br />punctual boat-train, the porters lining the platform at Victoria and<br />converging on the first-class carriages; the long line of waiting taxis.<br /><br />"We'll separate," we said, "and see what's happening. We'll meet and<br />compare notes at dinner," but we knew already in our hearts that nothing was<br />happening; nothing, at any rate, which needed our presence.<br /><br />"Oh dear," said my father, meeting me by chance on the stairs, "how<br />delightful to see you again so soon." (I had been abroad fifteen months.)<br />"You've come at a very awkward time, you know. They're having another of<br />those strikes in two days -- such a lot of nonsense--and I don't know when<br />you'll be able to get away."<br /><br />I thought of the evening I was forgoing, with the lights coming out<br />along the banks of the Seine, and the company I should have had there -- for<br />I was at the time concerned with two emancipated American girls who shared a<br />garconniere in Auteuil -- and wished I had not come.<br /><br />We dined that night at the Cafe" Royal. There things were a little more<br />warlike, for the cafe" was full of undergraduates who had come down for<br />"National Service." One group, from Cambridge, had that afternoon signed on<br />to run messages for Transport House, and their table backed on another<br />group's, who were enrolled as special constables. Now and then one or other<br />party would shout provocatively over the shoulder, but it is hard to come<br />into serious conflict back to back, and the affair ended-with their giving<br />each other tall glasses of lager beer.<br /><br />"You should have been in Budapest when Horthy marched in," said Jean.<br />"That was politics."<br /><br />A party was being given that night in Regent's Park for the "Black<br />Birds," who had newly arrived in England. One of us had been asked and<br />thither we all went.<br /><br />To us, who frequented Bricktop's and the Bal Negre in the Rue Blomet,<br />there was nothing particularly remarkable in the spectacle; I was scarcely<br />inside the door when I heard an unmistakable voice, an echo from what now<br />seemed a distant past.<br /><br />"No" it said, "they are not animals in a zoo, Mulcaster, to be goggled<br />at. They are artists, my dear, very great artists, to be revered."<br /><br />Anthony Blanche and Boy Mulcaster were at the table where the wine<br />stood.<br /><br />"Thank God here's someone I know," said Mulcaster, as I joined them.<br />"Girl brought me. Can't see her anywhere."<br /><br />"She's given you the slip, my dear, and do you know why? Because you<br />look ridiculously out of place, Mulcaster. It isn't your kind of party at<br />all; you ought not to be here; you ought to go away, you know, to the Old<br />Hundredth or some lugubrious dance in Belgrave Square."<br /><br />"Just come from one," said Mulcaster. "Too early for the Old Hundredth.<br />I'll stay on a bit. Things may cheer up."<br /><br />"I spit on you," said Anthony. "Let me talk to you, Charles."<br /><br />We took a bottle and our glasses and found a corner in another room. At<br />our feet, five members of the "Black Birds" orchestra squatted on their<br />heels and threw dice.<br /><br />"That one," said Anthony, "the rather pale one, my dear, konked Mrs.<br />Arnold Frickheimer the other morning on the nut, my dear, with a bottle of<br />milk."<br /><br />Almost immediately, inevitably, we began to talk of Sebastian.<br /><br />"My dear, he's such a sot. He came to live with me in Marseilles last<br />year when you threw him over, and really it was as much as I could stand.<br />Sip, sip, sip like a dowager all day long. And so sly. I was always missing<br />little things, my dear, things I rather liked; once I lost two suits that<br />had arrived from Lesley and Roberts that morning. Of course, I didn't know<br />it was Sebastian--there were some rather queer fish, my dear, in and out of<br />my little apartment. Who knows better than you my taste for queer fish?<br />Well, eventually, my dear, we found the pawnshop where Sebastian was<br />p-p-popping them and then he hadn't got the tickets; there was a market for<br />them, too, at the Bistro.<br /><br />"I can see that puritanical, disapproving look in your eye, dear<br />Charles, as though you thought I had led the boy on. It's one of Sebastian's<br />less lovable qualities that he always gives the impression of being l-l-led<br />on -- like a little horse at a circus. But I assure you I did everything. I<br />said to him again and again, 'Why drink? If you want to be intoxicated there<br />are so many much<br />more delicious things.' I took him to quite the best man; well, you<br />know him as well as I do, Nada Alopov; and Jean Luxmore and everyone we know<br />has been to him for years -- he's always<br />in the Regina Bar -- and then we had trouble over that because<br />Sebastian gave him a bad cheque--a s-s-stumer, my dear-- and a whole lot of<br />very menacing men came round to the flat --thugs, my dear -- and Sebastian<br />was making no sense at the time and it was all most unpleasant."<br /><br />Boy Mulcaster wandered towards us and sat down, without encouragement,<br />by my side.<br /><br />"Drink running short in there," he said, helping himself from our<br />bottle and emptying it. "Not a soul in the place I ever set eyes on before<br />-- all black fellows."<br /><br />Anthony ignored him and continued: "So then we left Marseilles and went<br />to Tangier, and there, my dear, Sebastian took up with his new friend. How<br />can I describe him? He is like the footman in 'Warning Shadows' -- a great<br />clod of a German who'd been in the Foreign Legion. He got put by shooting<br />off his great toe. It hadn't healed yet. Sebastian found him, starving as<br />tout to one of the houses in the Kasbah, and brought him to stay with us. It<br />was too macabre. So back I came, my dear, to good old England -- good old<br />England" he repeated, indicating in an ample gesture the Negroes gambling at<br />our feet, Mulcaster, staring blankly before him, and our hostess who, in<br />pyjamas, now introduced herself to us.<br /><br />"Never seen you before," she said. "Never asked you. Who are all this<br />white trash, anyway? Seems to me I must be in the wrong house."<br /><br />"A time of national emergency," said Mulcaster. "Anything may happen."<br /><br />"Is the party going well?" she asked anxiously. "D'you think Florence<br />Mills would sing? We've met before," she added to Anthony.<br /><br />"Often, my dear, but you never asked me to-night."<br /><br />"Oh dear, perhaps I don't like you. I thought I liked everyone."<br /><br />"Do you think," asked Mulcaster, when our hostess had left us, "that it<br />might be witty to give the fire alarm?"<br /><br />"Yes, Boy, run away and ring it."<br /><br />"Might cheer things up, I mean."<br /><br />"Exactly."<br /><br />So Mulcaster left us in search of the telephone.<br /><br />"I think Sebastian and his lame chum went to French Morocco," continued<br />Anthony. "They were in trouble with the Tangier police when I left them. The<br />Marchioness has been a positive pest ever since I came to London, trying to<br />make me get into touch with them. What a time that poor woman's having! It<br />only shows there's some justice in life."<br /><br />Presently Miss Mills began to sing and everyone, except the crap<br />players, crowded to the next room.<br /><br />"That's my girl," said Mulcaster. "Over there with that black fellow.<br />That's the girl who brought me."<br /><br />"She seems to have forgotten you now."<br /><br />"Yes. I wish I hadn't come. Let's go on somewhere."<br /><br />Two fire engines drove up as we left and a host of helmeted figures<br />joined the throng upstairs.<br /><br />"That chap, Blanche," said Mulcaster, "not a good fellow. I put him in<br />Mercury once."<br /><br />We went to a number of night clubs. In two years Mulcaster seemed to<br />have attained his simple ambition of being known and liked in such places.<br />At the last of them he and I were kindled by a great flame of patriotism.<br /><br />"You and I," he said, "were too young to fight in the war. Other chaps<br />fought, millions of them dead. Not us. We'll show them. We'll show the dead<br />chaps we can fight, too."<br /><br />"That's why I'm here," I said. "Come from overseas, rallying to old<br />country in hour of need."<br /><br />"Like Australians."<br /><br />"Like the poor dead Australians."<br /><br />"What you in?"<br /><br />"Nothing yet. War not ready."<br /><br />"Only one thing to join -- Bill Meadows's show--Defence Corps. All good<br />chaps. Being fixed in Bratt's."<br /><br />"Ill join."<br /><br />"You member Bratt's?"<br /><br />"No. I'll join that, too."<br /><br />"That's right. All good chaps like the dead chaps."<br /><br />So I joined Bill Meadows's show, which was a flying squad, protecting<br />food deliveries in the poorer parts of London. First I was enrolled in the<br />Defence Corps, took an oath of loyalty, and was given a helmet and<br />truncheon; then I was put up for Bratt's Club and, with a number of other<br />recruits, elected at a committee meeting specially called for the occasion.<br />For a week we sat under orders in Bratt's, and thrice a day we drove out in<br />a lorry at the head of a convoy of milk vans. We were jeered at and<br />sometimes pelted with muck, but only once did we go into action.<br />We were sitting round after luncheon that day when Bill Meadows came<br />back from the telephone in high spirits.<br /><br />"Come on," he said. "There's a perfectly good battle in the Commercial<br />Road."<br /><br />We drove at great speed and arrived to find a steel hawser stretched<br />between lamp-posts, an overturned truck and a policeman, alone on the<br />pavement, being kicked by half a dozen youths. On either side of this centre<br />of disturbance, and at a little distance from it, two opposing parties had<br />formed. Near us, as we disembarked, a second policeman was sitting on the<br />pavement, dazed, with his head in his hands and blood running through his<br />fingers; two or three sympathizers were standing over him; on the other side<br />of the hawser was a hostile knot of. young dockers. We charged in<br />cheerfully, relieved the policeman, and were just falling upon the main body<br />of the enemy when we came into collision with a party of local clergy and<br />town councillors who arrived simultaneously by another route, to try<br />persuasion. They were our only victims, for just as they went down there was<br />a cry of "Look out. The coppers," and a lorry load of police drew up in our<br />rear.<br /><br />The crowd broke and disappeared. We picked up the peacemakers (only one<br />of whom was seriously hurt), patrolled some of the side streets looking for<br />trouble and finding none, and at length returned to Bratt's. Next day the<br />General Strike was called off and the country everywhere, except in the<br />coal-fields, returned to normal. It was as though a beast long fabled for<br />its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger, and slunk back to its<br />lair. It had not been worth leaving Paris.<br /><br />Jean, who joined another company, had a pot of ferns dropped on his<br />head by an elderly widow in Camden Town and was in hospital for a week.<br /><br />It was through my membership of Bill Meadows's squad that Julia learned<br />I was in England. She telephoned to say her mother was anxious to see me.<br /><br />"You'll find her terribly ill," she said.<br /><br />I went to Marchmain House on the first morning of peace. Sir Adrian<br />Porson passed me in the hall, leaving, as I arrived; he held a bandanna<br />handkerchief to his face and felt blindly for his hat and stick; he was in<br />tears.<br /><br />I was shown into the library and in less than a minute Julia joined me.<br />She shook hands with a gentleness and gravity that were unfamiliar; in the<br />gloom of that room she seemed a ghost.<br /><br />"It's sweet of you to come. Mummy has kept asking for you, but I don't<br />know if she'll be able to see you now, after all. She's just said 'good-bye'<br />to Adrian Porson and it's tired her."<br /><br />"Good-bye?"<br /><br />"Yes. She's dying. She may live a week or two or she may go at any<br />minute. She's so weak. I'll go and ask nurse."<br /><br />The stillness of death seemed in the house already. No one ever sat in<br />the library at Marchmain House. It was the one ungracious room in either of<br />their houses. The bookcases of Victorian oak held volumes of Hansard and<br />obsolete encyclopedias that were never opened; the bare mahogany table<br />seemed set for the meeting of a committee; the place had the air of being<br />both public and unfrequented; outside lay the forecourt, the railings, the<br />quiet cul-de-sac.<br /><br />Presently Julia returned.<br /><br />"No, I'm afraid you can't see her. She's asleep. She may lie like that<br />for hours; I can tell you what she wanted. Let's go somewhere else. I hate<br />this room."<br /><br />We went across the hall to the small drawing-room where luncheon<br />parties used to assemble, and sat on either side of the fireplace. Julia<br />seemed to reflect the crimson and gold of the walls and lose some of her<br />wanness.<br /><br />"First, I know, Mummy wanted to say how sorry she is she was so beastly<br />to you last time you met. She's spoken of it often. She knows now she was<br />wrong about you. I'm quite sure you understood and put it out of your mind<br />immediately, but it's the kind of thing Mummy can never forgive herself --<br />it's the kind of thing she so seldom did."<br /><br />"Do tell her I understood completely."<br /><br />"The other thing, of course, you have guessed -- Sebastian. She wants<br />him. I don't know if that's possible. Is it?"<br /><br />"I hear he's in a very bad way."<br /><br />"We heard that, too. We cabled to the last address we had, but there<br />was no answer. There still may be time for him to see her. I thought of you<br />as the only hope, as soon as I heard you were in England. Will you try and<br />get him? It's an awful lot to ask, but I think Sebastian would want it, too,<br />if he realized."<br /><br />"I'll try."<br /><br />"There's no one else we can ask. Rex is so busy."<br /><br />"Yes. I heard reports of all he'd been doing organizing the gas works."<br /><br /><br />"Oh yes," Julia said with a touch of her old dryness. "He's made a lot<br />of kudos out of the strike."<br /><br />Then we talked for a few minutes about the Bratt's squad. She told me<br />Brideshead had refused to take any public service because he was not<br />satisfied with the justice of the cause; Cordelia was in London, in bed now,<br />as she had been watching by her mother all night. I told her I had taken up<br />architectural painting and that I enjoyed it. All this talk was nothing; we<br />had said all we had to say in the first two minutes; I stayed for ten and<br />then left her.<br /><br />Air France ran a service of a kind to Casablanca; there I took the bus<br />to Fez, starting at dawn and arriving in the new town at evening. I<br />telephoned from the hotel to the British Consul and dined with him that<br />evening, in his charming house by the walls of the old town. He was a kind,<br />serious man.<br /><br />"I'm delighted someone has come to look after young Flyte at last," he<br />said. "He's been something of a thorn in our sides here. This is no place<br />for a remittance man. The French don't understand him at all. They think<br />everyone who's not engaged in trade is a spy. It's not as though he lived<br />like a milord. Things aren't easy here. There's war going on not thirty<br />miles from this house, though you might not think it. We had some young<br />fools on bicycles only last week who'd come to volunteer for Abdul Krim's<br />army.<br /><br />"Then the Moors are a tricky lot; they don't hold with drink and our<br />young friend, as you may know, spends most of his day drinking. What does he<br />want to come here for? There's plenty of room for him at Rabat or Tangier,<br />where they cater for tourists. He's taken a house in the native town, you<br />know. I tried to stop him, but he got it from a Frenchman in the Department<br />of Arts. I don't say there's any harm in him but he's an anxiety. There's an<br />awful fellow sponging on him -- a German out of the Foreign Legion. A<br />thoroughly bad lot by all accounts. There's bound to be trouble.<br /><br />"Mind you, I like Flyte. I don't see much of him. He used to come here<br />for baths until he got fixed up at his house. He was always perfectly<br />charming, and my wife took a great fancy to him. What he needs is<br />occupation."<br /><br />I explained my errand.<br /><br />"You'll probably find him at home now. Goodness knows there's nowhere<br />to go in the evenings in the old town. If you like I'll send the porter to<br />show you the way."<br /><br />So I set out after dinner, with the consular porter going ahead,<br />lantern in hand. Morocco was a new and strange country to me. Driving that<br />day, mile after mile, up the smooth, strategic road, past the vineyards and<br />military posts and the new, white settlements and the early crops already<br />standing high in the vast, open fields, and the hoardings advertising the<br />staples of France -- Dubonnet, Michelin, Magasin du Louvre --I had thought<br />it all very suburban and up-to-date; now, under the stars, in the walled<br />city, whose streets were gentle, dusty stairways, and whose walls rose<br />windowless on either side, closed overhead, then opened again to the stars;<br />where the dust lay thick among the smooth paving stones and figures passed<br />silently, robed in white, on soft slippers or hard, bare soles; where the<br />air was scented with cloves and incense and wood smoke -- now I knew what<br />had drawn Sebastian here and held him so long.<br /><br />The consular porter strode arrogantly ahead with his light swinging and<br />his tall cane banging; sometimes an open doorway revealed a silent group<br />seated in golden lamplight round a brazier.<br />"Very dirty peoples," the porter said scornfully, over his shoulder.<br />"No education. French leave them dirty. Not like' British peoples. My<br />peoples," he said, "always very British peoples."<br />For he was from the Sudan Police, and regarded this ancient centre of<br />his culture as a New Zealander might regard Rome.<br /><br />At length we came to the last of many studded doors, and the porter<br />beat on it with his stick.<br /><br />"British Lord's house," he said.<br /><br />Lamplight and a dark face appeared at the grating. The consular porter<br />spoke peremptorily; bolts were withdrawn and we entered a small courtyard<br />with a well in its centre and a vine trained overhead.<br /><br />"I wait here," said the porter. "You go with this native fellow."<br /><br />I entered the house, down a step, and into the living-room. I found a<br />gramophone, an oil-stove and, between them, a young man. Later, when I<br />looked about me, I noticed other, more agreeable things -- the rugs on the<br />floor, the embroidered silk on the walls, the carved and painted beams of<br />the ceiling, the heavy, pierced lamp that hung from a chain and cast the<br />soft shadows of its own tracery about the room. But on first entering, these<br />three things -- the gramophone for its noise -- it was playing a French<br />record of a jazz band; the stove for its smell; and the young man for his<br />wolfish look -- struck my senses. He was lolling in a basket chair, with a<br />bandaged foot stuck forward on a box; he was dressed in a kind of thin,<br />mid-European imitation tweed with a tennis shirt open at the neck; the<br />unwounded foot wore a brown canvas shoe. There was a brass tray by his side<br />on wooden legs, and on it were two beer bottles, a dirty plate, and a saucer<br />full of cigarette ends; he held a glass of beer in his hand and a cigarette<br />lay on his lower lip and stuck there when he spoke. He had long fair hair<br />combed back without a parting and a face that was unnaturally lined for a<br />man of his obvious youth; one of his front teeth was missing, so that his<br />sibilants came sometimes with a lisp, sometimes with a disconcerting<br />whistle, which he covered with a giggle; the teeth he had were stained with<br />tobacco and set far apart.<br /><br />This was plainly the "thoroughly bad lot" of the consul's description,<br />the film footman of Anthony's.<br /><br />"I'm looking for Sebastian Flyte. This is his house, is it not?" I<br />spoke loudly to make myself heard above the dance music, but he answered<br />softly in English fluent enough to suggest that it was now habitual to him.<br /><br />"Yeth. But he isn't here. There's no one but me."<br /><br />"I've come from England to see him on important business; Can you tell<br />me where I can find him?"<br /><br />The record came to its end. The German turned it over, wound up the<br />machine, and started it playing again before answering.<br /><br />"Sebastian's sick. The brothers took him away to the infirmary. Maybe<br />they'll let you thee him, maybe not. I got to go there myself one day thoon<br />to have my foot dressed. I'll ask them then. When he's better they'll let<br />you thee him, maybe."<br /><br />There was another chair and I sat down on it. Seeing that I meant to<br />stay, the German offered me some beer.<br /><br />"You're not Thebastian's brother?" he said. "Cousin maybe? Maybe you<br />married hith thister?"<br /><br />"I'm only a friend. We were at the University together."<br /><br />"I had a friend at the University. We studied History. My friend was<br />cleverer than me; a little weak fellow -- I used to pick him up and shake<br />him when I was angry -- but tho clever. Then one day we said: 'What the<br />hell? There is no work in Germany. Germany is down the drain,' so we said<br />good-bye to our professors, and they said: 'Yes, Germany is down the drain.<br />There is nothing for a student to do here now,' and we went away anckj<br />walked and walked and at last we came here. Then we said, 'There is no army<br />in Germany now, but we must be tholdiers,' so we joined the Legion. My<br />friend died of dysentery last year, campaigning in the Atlas. When he was<br />dead, I said, 'What the hell?' so I shot my foot. It is now full of pus,<br />though I have done it one year."<br /><br />"Yes," I said. "That's very interesting. But my immediate concern is<br />with Sebastian. Perhaps you would tell me about him."<br /><br />"He is a very good fellow, Sebastian. He is all right for me. Tangier<br />was a stinking place. He brought me here--nice house, nice food, nice<br />servant -- everything is all right for me here, I reckon. I like it all<br />right."<br /><br />"His mother is very ill," I said. "I have come to tell him."<br /><br />"She rich?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"Why don't she give him more money? Then we could live at Casablanca,<br />maybe, in a nice flat.<br />You know her well? You could make her give him more money?"<br /><br />"What's the matter with him?"<br /><br />"I don't know. I reckon maybe he drink too much. The brothers will look<br />after him. It's all right for him there. The brothers are good fellows. Very<br />cheap there."<br /><br />He clapped his hands and ordered more beer.<br /><br />"You thee? A nice thervant to look after me. It is all right."<br /><br />When I had got the name of the hospital I left.<br /><br />"Tell Thebastian I am still here and all right. I reckon he's worrying<br />about me, maybe."<br /><br /><br />The hospital, where I went next morning, was a collection of bungalows<br />between the old and the new towns. It was kept by Franciscans. I made my way<br />through a crowd of diseased Moors to the doctor's room. He was a layman,<br />clean-shaven, dressed in white, starched overalls. We spoke in French, and<br />he told me Sebastian was in no danger, but quite unfit to travel. He had had<br />the grippe, with one lung slightly affected; he was very weak; he lacked<br />resistance; what could one expect? He was an alcoholic. The doctor spoke<br />dispassionately, almost brutally, with the relish men of scidnce sometimes<br />have for limiting themselves to inessentials, for pruning back their work to<br />th<? point of sterility; but the bearded, barefooted brother in whose<br />charge he put me, the man of no scientific pretensions who did the dirty<br />jobs of the ward, had a different story.<br /><br />"He's so patient. Not like a young man at all. He lies there and never<br />complains -- and there is much to complain of. We have no facilities. The<br />Government give us what they can spare from the soldiers. And he is so kind.<br />There is a poor German boy with a foot that will not heal and secondary<br />syphilis, who comes here for treatment. Lord Flyte found him starving in<br />Tangier<br />and took him in and gave him a home. A real Samaritan."<br /><br />Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby. God forgive me!<br /><br />Sebastian was in the wing kept for Europeans, where the beds were<br />divided by low partitions into cubicles with some air of privacy. He was<br />lying with his hands on the quilt staring at the 1<br />wall, where the only ornament was a religious oleograph.<br /><br />"Your friend," said the brother.<br /><br />He looked round slowly.<br /><br />"Oh, I thought he meant Kurt. What are you doing here, Charles?"<br /><br />He was more than ever emaciated; drink, which made others fat and red,<br />seemed to wither Sebastian. The brother left us, and I sat by his bed and<br />talked about his illness.<br /><br />"I was out of my mind for a day or two," he said. "I kept thinking I<br />was back in Oxford. You went to my house? Did you like it? Is Kurt still<br />there? I won't ask you if you liked Kurt; no one does. It's funny -- I<br />couldn't get on without him, you know."<br /><br />Then I told him about his mother. He said nothing for some time, but<br />lay gazing at the oleograph of the Seven Dolours. Then: --<br /><br />"Poor Mummy. She really was a femme fatale, wasn't she. She killed at a<br />touch."<br /><br />I telegraphed to Julia that Sebastian was unable to travel, and stayed<br />a week at Fez, visiting the hospital daily until he was well' enough to<br />move. His first sign of returning strength, on the second day of my visit,<br />was to ask for brandy. By next day he had got some, somehow, and kept it<br />under the bedclothes.<br /><br />The doctor said: "Your friend is drinking again. It is forbidden here.<br />What can I do? This is not a reformatory school. I cannot police the wards.<br />I am here to cure people, not to protect them from vicious habits, or teach<br />them self-control. Cognac will not hurt him now. It will make him weaker for<br />the next time he is ill, and then one day some little trouble will carry him<br />off, pouff. This is not a home for inebriates. He must go at the end of the<br />week."<br /><br />The lay brother said: "Your friend is so much happier to-day, it is<br />like one transfigured."<br /><br />Poor simple monk, I thought, poor booby; but he added, "You know why?<br />He has a bottle of cognac in bed with him. It is the second I have found. No<br />sooner do I take one away than he gets another. He is so naughty. It is the<br />Arab boys who fetch it for him. But it is good to see him happy again when<br />he has been so sad."<br /><br />On my last afternoon I said, "Sebastian, now your mother's dead" -- for<br />the news had reached us that morning -- "do you think of going back to<br />England?"<br /><br />"It would be lovely, in some ways," he said, "but do you think Kurt<br />would like it?"<br /><br />"For God's sake," I said, "you don't mean to spend your life with Kurt,<br />do you?"<br /><br />"I don't know. He seems to mean to spend it with me. 'It'th all right<br />for him, I reckon, maybe,'" he said, mimicking Kurt's accent, and then he<br />added what, if I had paid more attention, should have given me the key I<br />lacked; at the time I heard and remembered it, without taking notice.<br /><br />"You know, Charles," he said, "it's rather a pleasant change when all<br />your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after<br />yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need<br />looking after by me."<br /><br />I was able to straighten his money affairs before I left. He had lived<br />till then by getting into difficulties and then telegraphing for odd sums to<br />his lawyers. I saw the branch manager of the Bank of Indo-China and arranged<br />for him, if funds were forthcoming from London, to receive Sebastian's<br />quarterly allowance and pay him a weekly sum of pocket money with a reserve<br />to be drawn in emergencies. This sum was only to be given to Sebastian<br />personally, and only when the manager was satisfied that he had a proper use<br />for it. Sebastian agreed readily to all this.<br /><br />"Otherwise," he said, "Kurt will get me to sign a cheque for the whole<br />lot when I'm tight and then he'll go off and get into all kinds of trouble."<br /><br />I saw Sebastian home from the hospital. He seemed weaker in his basket<br />chair than he had been in bed. The two sick men, he and Kurt, sat opposite<br />one another with the gramophone between them.<br /><br />"It was time you came back," said Kurt. "I need you."<br /><br />"Do you, Kurt?"<br /><br />"I reckon so. It's not so good being alone when you're sick. That boy's<br />a lazy fellow -- always slipping off when I want him. Once he stayed out all<br />night and there was no one to make my coffee when I woke up. It's no good<br />having a foot full of pus. Times I can't sleep good. Maybe another time I<br />shall slip off, too, and go where I can be looked after." He clapped his<br />hands but no servant came. "You see?" he said.<br /><br />"What d'you want?"<br /><br />"Cigarettes. I got some in the bag under my bed."<br /><br />Sebastian began painfully to rise from his chair.<br /><br />"I'll get them," I said. "Where's his bed?"<br /><br />"No, that's my job," said Sebastian.<br /><br />"Yeth," said Kurt, "I reckon that's Sebastian's job."<br /><br />So I left him with his friend in the little enclosed house at the end<br />of the alley. There was nothing more I could do for Sebastian.<br /><br />I had meant to return direct to Paris, but this business of Sebastian's<br />allowance meant that I must go to London and see Brideshead. I travelled by<br />sea, taking the P. & O. from Tangier, and was home in early June.<br /><br />"Do you consider," asked Brideshead, ''that there is anything vicious<br />in my brother's connection with this German?"<br /><br />"No. I'm sure not. It's simply a case of two waifs coming together."<br /><br />"You say he'is a criminal?"<br /><br />"I said 'a criminal type.' He's been in the military prison and was<br />dishonourably discharged."<br /><br />"And the doctor says Sebastian is killing himself with drink?"<br /><br />"Weakening himself. He hasn't D.T.'s or cirrhosis."<br /><br />"He's not insane?"<br /><br />"Certainly hot. He's found a companion he happens to like and a place<br />where he happens to like living."<br /><br />"Then he must have his allowance as you suggest. The thing is quite<br />clear."<br /><br />In some ways Brideshead was an easy man to deal with. He had a kind of<br />mad certainty about everything which made his decisions swift and easy.<br /><br />"Would you like to paint this house?" he asked suddenly. "A picture of<br />the front, another of the back on the park, another of the staircase,<br />another of the big drawing-room? Four small oils; that is what my father<br />wants done for a record, to keep at Brideshead. I don't know any painters.<br />Julia said you specialized in architecture."<br /><br />"Yes," I said. "I should like to very much."<br /><br />"You know it's being pulled down? My father's selling it. They are<br />going to put up a block of flats here. They're keeping the name -- we can't<br />stop them apparently."<br /><br />"What a very sad thing."<br /><br />"Well, I'm sorry of course. But you think it good architecturally?"<br /><br />"One of the most beautiful houses I know."<br /><br />"Can't see it. I've always thought it rather ugly. Perhaps your<br />pictures will make me see it differently."<br /><br />This was my first commission; I had to work against time, for the<br />contractors were only waiting for the final signature to start their work of<br />destruction. In spite, or perhaps because, of that -- for it is my vice to<br />spend too long on a canvas, never content to leave well alone -- those four<br />paintings are particular favourites of mine, and it was their success, both<br />with myself and others, that confirmed me in what has since been my career.<br /><br />I began in the long drawing-room, for they were anxious to shift the<br />furniture, which had stood there since it was built. It was a long,<br />elaborate, symmetrical Adam room, with two bays, of windows opening into<br />Green Park. The light, streaming in from the west on the afternoon when I<br />began to paint there, was fresh green from the young trees outside.<br /><br />I had the perspective set out in pencil and the detail carefully<br />placed. I held back from painting, like a diver on the water's edge; once in<br />I found myself buoyed and exhilarated. I was normally a slow and deliberate<br />painter; that afternoon and all next day, and the day after, I worked fast.<br />I could do nothing wrong. At the end of each passage I paused, tense, afraid<br />to start , the next, fearing, like a gambler, that luck must turn and the<br />pile be lost. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There<br />were no difficulties; the intricate multiplicity of light and colour became<br />a whole; the right colour was where I wanted it on the palette; each brush<br />stroke, as soon as it was complete, seemed to have been there always.<br /><br />Presently on the last afternoon I heard a voice behind me say; "May I<br />stay here and watch?"<br />I turned and found Cordelia.<br /><br />"Yes," I said, "if you don't talk," and I worked on, oblivious of her,<br />until the failing sun made me. put up my brushes.<br /><br />"It must be lovely to be able to do that."<br /><br />I had forgotten she was there.<br /><br />"It is."<br /><br />I could not even now leave my picture, although the sun was down and<br />the room fading to monochrome. I took it from the easel and held it up to<br />the windows, put it back and lightened a shadow. Then, suddenly weary in<br />head and eyes and back and arm, I gave it up for the evening and turned to<br />Cordelia.<br /><br />She was now fifteen and had grown tall, nearly to her full height, in<br />the last eighteen months. She had not the promise of Julia's full<br />Quattrocento loveliness; there was a touch of Brideshead already in her<br />length of nose and high cheekbone; she was in black, mourning for her<br />mother.<br /><br />"I'm tired," I said.<br /><br />"I bet you are. Is it finished?"<br /><br />"Practically. I must go over it again to-morrow."<br /><br />"D'you know it's long past dinner-time? There's no one here to cook<br />anything now. I only came up to-day, and didn't realize how far the decay<br />had gone. You wouldn't like to take me out to dinner, would you?"<br /><br />We left by the garden door, into the park, and walked in the twilight<br />to the Ritz Grill.<br /><br />"You've seen Sebastian? He won't come home, even now?"<br /><br />I did not realize till then that she had understood so much. I said so.<br /><br />"Well, I love him more than anyone," she said. "It's sad about<br />Marchers, isn't it? Do you know they're going tp build a block of flats, and<br />that Rex wanted to take what he called a 'penthouse' at the top. Isn't it<br />like him? Poor Julia. That was too much for her. He couldn't understand at<br />all; he thought she would like to keep up with her old home. Things have all<br />come to an end very quickly, haven't they? Apparently Papa has been terribly<br />in debt for a long time. Selling Marchers has put him straight again and<br />saved I don't know how much a year in rates. But it seems a shame to pull it<br />down. Julia says she'd sooner that than to have someone else live there."<br /><br />"What's going to happen to you?"<br /><br />"What, indeed? There are all kinds of suggestions. Aunt Fanny<br />Rosscommon wants me to live with her. Then Rex and Julia talk o taking over<br />half Brideshe'ad and living there. Papa won't come back. We thought he<br />might, but no.<br /><br />"They've closed the chapel at Brideshead, Bridey and the Bishop;<br />Mummy's requiem was the last mass said there. After she was buried the<br />priest came in -- I was there alone. I don't think he saw me--and took out<br />the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with<br />the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water<br />stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open<br />and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose<br />none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there<br />till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't any chapel there any<br />more, just an oddly decorated room. I can't tell you what it felt like.<br />You've never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?"<br /><br />"Never."<br /><br />"Well, if you had you'd know what the Jews felt about their temple.<br />Quomodo sedet sola civitas . . . it's a beautiful chant. You ought to go<br />once, just to hear it."<br /><br />"Still trying to convert me, Cordelia?"<br /><br />"Oh, no. That's all over, too. D'you know what Papa said when he became<br />a Catholic? Mummy told me once. He said to her: 'You have brought back my<br />family to the faith of their ancestors.' Pompous, you know. It takes people<br />different ways. Anyhow, the family haven't been very constant, have they?<br />There's him gone and Sebastian gone and Julia gone. But God won't let them<br />go for long, you know. I wondtx if you remember the story Mummy read us the<br />evening Sebastian first got drunk -- I mean the bad evening. Father Brown<br />said something like 'I caught him' (the thief) 'with an unseen hook and an<br />invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the<br />world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.'"<br />We scarcely mentioned her mother. All the time we talked, she ate<br />voraciously. Once she said: --<br /><br />"Did you see Sir Adrian Person's poem in The Times? It's funny, he knew<br />her best of anyone--he loved her all his life, you know -- and yet it<br />doesn't seem to have anything to do with her at all.<br /><br />"I got on best with her of any of us, but I don't believe I ever really<br />loved her. Not as she wanted or deserved. It's odd I didn't, because I'm<br />full of natural affections."<br /><br />"I never really knew your mother," I said.<br /><br />"You didn't like her. I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God<br />they hated Mummy."<br /><br />"What do you mean by that, Cordelia?"<br /><br />"Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn't a saint. No one could<br />really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When<br />they want to hate Him and His saints they have to find something like<br />themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. I suppose you think that's<br />all bosh."<br /><br />"I heard almost the same thing once before--from someone very<br />different."<br /><br />"Oh, I'm quite serious. I've thought about it a lot. It seems to<br />explain poor Mummy."<br /><br />Then this odd child tucked into her dinner with renewed relish.<br /><br />"First time I've ever been taken our. to dinner alone at a restaurant,"<br />she said.<br /><br />Later: "When Julia heard they were selling Marchers she said: 'Poor<br />Cordelia. She won't have her coming-out ball there after all.' It's a thing<br />we used to talk about--like my being her bridesmaid. That didn't come off<br />either. When Julia had her ball I was allowed down for an hour, to sit in<br />the corner with Aunt Fanny, and she said, 'In six years' time you'll have<br />all this.' ... I hope I've got a vocation."<br /><br />"I don't know what that means."<br /><br />"It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good<br />however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away<br />from it, however much you hate it. Bridey thinks he has a vocation and<br />hasn't. I used to think Sebastian had and hated it--but I don't know now.<br />Everything has changed so much suddenly."<br /><br />But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush<br />take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great,<br />succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening--of<br />Browning's Renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa<br />velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars<br />with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed<br />hair-splitting speech.<br /><br />"You'll fall in love," I said.<br /><br />"Oh, I pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those<br />scrumptious meringues?"Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-13140780269251514012008-08-06T13:00:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:14:37.988+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book I. Et in Arcadia Ego. Chapter SixChapter Six<br /><br />"And when we reached the top of the pass," said Mr. Samgrass, "we heard<br />the galloping horses behind, and two soldiers rode up to the head of the<br />caravan and turned us back. The General had sent them, and they reached us<br />only just in time. There was a band, not a mile ahead."<br /><br />He paused, and his small audience sat silent, conscious that he had<br />sought to impress them but in doubt as to how they could politely show their<br />interest.<br /><br />"A band?" said Julia. "Goodness!"<br /><br />Still he seemed to expect more. At last Lady Marchmain said, "I suppose<br />the sort of folk-music you get in those parts is very monotonous."<br /><br />"Dear Lady Marchmain, a band of brigands." Cordelia, beside me on the<br />sofa, began to giggle noiselessly. "The mountains are full of them.<br />Stragglers from Kemal's army; Greeks who got cut off in the retreat. Very<br />desperate fellows, I assure you."<br /><br />"Do pinch me," whispered Cordelia.<br /><br />I pinched her and the agitation of the sofa-springs cedsed.<br /><br />"Thanks," she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.<br /><br />"So you never got to wherever-it-was," said Julia. "Weren't you<br />terribly disappointed, Sebastian?"<br /><br />"Me?" said Sebastian from the shadows beyond the lamplight, beyond the<br />warmth of the burning logs, beyond the family circle and the photographs<br />spread out on the card-table. "Me? Oh, I don't think I was there that day,<br />was I, Sammy?"<br /><br />"That was the day you were ill."<br /><br />"I was ill," he repeated like an echo, "so I never should have got to<br />wherever-it-was, should I, Sammy?"<br /><br />"Now this, Lady Marchmain, is the caravan at Aleppo in the-courtyard of<br />the inn. That's our Armenian cook, Begedbian; that's me on the pony; that's<br />the tent folded up; that's a rather tiresome Kurd who would follow us about<br />at the time. . . . Here I am in Pontus, Ephesus, Trebizond,<br />Krak-des-chevaliers, Samothrace, Batum -- of course, I haven't got them in<br />chronological order yet."<br /><br />"All guides and ruins and mules," said Cordelia. "Where's Sebastian?"<br /><br />"He," said Mr. Samgrass, with a hint of triumph in his voice, as though<br />he had expected the question and prepared the answer, "he held the camera.<br />He became quite an expert as soon as he learned not to put his hand over the<br />lens, didn't you, Sebastian?"<br /><br />There was no answer from the shadows. Mr. Samgrass delved again into<br />his pig-skin satchel.<br /><br />"Here," he said, "is a group taken by a street photographer on the<br />terrace of the St. George Hotel at Beirut. There's Sebastian."<br /><br />"Why," I said, "there's Anthony Blanche, surely?"<br /><br />"Yes, we saw quite a lot of him; met him by chance at Constantinople. A<br />delightful companion. I can't think how I missed knowing him. He came with<br />us all the way to Beirut."<br /><br />Tea had been cleared away and the curtains drawn. It was two days after<br />Christmas, the first evening of my visit; the first, too, of Sebastian's and<br />Mr. Samgrass's, whom to my surprise I had found on the platform when I<br />arrived.<br /><br />Lady Marchmain had written three weeks before: I have just heard from<br />Mr. Samgrass that he and Sebastian will be home for Christmas as we hoped. I<br />had not heard from them for so long that I was afraid they were lost and did<br />not want to make any arrangements until I knew. Sebastian will be longing to<br />see you. Do come to us for Christmas if you can manage it, or as soon after<br />as you can.<br /><br />Christmas with my uncle was an engagement I could not break, so I<br />travelled across country and joined the local train midway, expecting to<br />find Sebastian already established; there he was, however, in the next<br />carriage to mine, and when I asked him what he was doing Mr. Samgrass<br />replied with such glibness and at such length, telling rne of mislaid<br />luggage and of Cook's being shut over the holidays, that I was at once aware<br />of some other explanation which was being withheld.<br /><br />Mr. Samgrass was not at ease; he maintained all the physical habits of<br />self-confidence, but guilt hung about him like stale cigar smoke, and in<br />Lady Marchmain's greeting of him I caught a note of anticipation. He kept up<br />a lively account of his tour during tea, and then Lady Marchmain drew him<br />away with her, upstairs, for a "little talk." I watched him go with<br />something near compassion; it was plain to anyone with a poker sense that<br />Mr. Samgrass held a very imperfect hand and, as I watched him at tea, I<br />began to suspect that he was not only bluffing but cheating. There was<br />something he must say, did not want to say, and did not quite know how to<br />say to Lady Marchmain about his doings over Christmas, but, more than that,<br />I guessed, there was a great deal he ought to say and had no intention at<br />all of saying about the whole Levantine tour.<br /><br />"Come and see Nanny," said Sebastian.<br /><br />"Please, can I come, too?" said Cordelia.<br /><br />"Come on."<br /><br />We climbed to the nursery in the dome. On the way Cordelia said:<br />"Aren't you at all pleased to be home?"<br /><br />"Of course I'm pleased," said Sebastian.<br /><br />"Well, you might show it a bit. I've been looking forward to it so<br />much."<br /><br />Nanny did not particularly wish to be talked to; she liked visitors<br />best when they paid no attention to her and let her knit away, and watch<br />their faces and think of them as she had known them as small children; their<br />present goings-on did not signify much beside those early illnesses and<br />crimes.<br /><br />"Well," she said, "you are looking peaky. I expect it's all that<br />foreign food doesn't agree with you. You must fatten up now you're back.<br />Looks as though you'd been having some late nights, too, by the look of your<br />eyes -- dancing, I suppose." (It was ever Nanny Hawkins's belief that the<br />upper classes spent most of their leisure evenings in the ballroom.) "And<br />that shirt wants darning. Bring it to me before it goes to the wash."<br /><br />Sebastian certainly did look ill; five months had wrought the change of<br />years in him. He was paler, thinner, pouchy under the eyes, drooping in the<br />corners of his mouth, and he showed<br />the scars of a boil on the side of his chin; his voice seemed flatter<br />and his movements alternately listless and jumpy; he looked down-at-heel,<br />too, with clothes and hair, which formerly had been happily negligent, now<br />unkempt; worst of all, there was a wariness in his eye which I had surprised<br />there at Easter, and which now seemed habitual to him.<br /><br />Restrained by this wariness I asked him nothing of himself, but told<br />him instead about my autumn and winter. I told him about my rooms in the Ile<br />St.-Louis and the art school, and how good the old teachers were and how bad<br />the students.<br /><br />"They never go near the Louvre," I said, "or, if they do, it's only<br />because one of their absurd reviews has suddenly 'discovered' a master who<br />fits in with that month's aesthetic theory. Half of them are out to make a<br />popular splash like Picabia; the other half quite simply want to earn their<br />living doing advertisements for Vogue and decorating night clubs. And the<br />teachers still go on trying to make them paint like Delacroix."<br /><br />"Charles," said Cordelia, "Modern Art is all bosh, isn't it?"<br /><br />"Great bosh."<br /><br />"Oh, I'm so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said<br />we shouldn't try and criticize what we didn't understand. Now I shall tell<br />her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her."<br /><br />Presently it was time for Cordelia to go to her supper, and for<br />Sebastian and me to go down to the drawing-room for our cocktails.<br />Brideshead was there alone, but Wilcox followed on our heels to say to him:<br />"Her Ladyship would like to speak to you upstairs, my lord."<br /><br />"That's unlike Mummy, sending for anyone. She usually lures them up<br />herself."<br /><br />There was no sign of the cocktail tray. After a few minutes Sebastian<br />rang the bell. A footman answered. "Mr. Wilcox is upstairs with her<br />Ladyship."<br /><br />"Well, never mind, bring in the cocktail things."<br /><br />''Mr. Wilcox has the keys, my lord."<br /><br />"Oh . . . well, send him in with them when he comes down."<br /><br />We talked a little about Anthony Blanche -- "He had a beard in<br />Istanbul, but I made him take it off" -- and after ten minutes Sebastian<br />said: "Well, I don't want a cocktail, anyway; I'm off to my bath," and left<br />the room.<br /><br />It was half-past seven; I supposed the others had gone to dress, but,<br />as I was going to follow them, I met Brideshead coming down.<br /><br />"Just a moment, Charles, there's something I've got to explain. My<br />mother has given orders that no drinks are to be left in any of the rooms.<br />You'll understand why. If you want anything, ring and ask Wilcox -- only<br />better wait until you're alone. I'm sorry, but there it is."<br /><br />"Is that necessary?"<br /><br />"I gather very necessary. You may or may not have heard, Sebastian had<br />another outbreak as soon as he got back to England. He was lost over<br />Christmas. Mr. Samgrass only found him yesterday evening."<br /><br />"I guessed something of the kind had happened. Are you sure this is the<br />best way of dealing with it?"<br /><br />"It's my mother's way. Will you have a cocktail, now that he's gone<br />upstairs?"<br /><br />"It would choke me."<br /><br />I was always given the room I had on my first visit; it was next to<br />Sebastian's, and we shared what had once been a dressing-room and had been<br />changed to a bathroom twenty years back by the substitution for the bed of a<br />deep, copper, mahogany-framed bath, that was filled by pulling a brass lever<br />heavy as a piece of marine engineering; the rest of the room remained<br />unchanged; a coal fire always burned there in winter. I often think of that<br />bathroom -- the water colours dimmed by steam and the huge towel warming on<br />the back of the chintz armchair -- and contrast it with the uniform,<br />clinical little chambers, glittering with chromium plate and looking-glass,<br />which pass for luxury itf f the modern world.<br /><br />I lay in the bath and then dried slowly by the fire, thinking all'' the<br />time of my friend's black home-coming. Then I put on my dressing-gown and<br />went to Sebastian's room, entering, as I always did, without knocking. He<br />was sitting by his fire half-dressed, and he started angrily when he heard<br />me and put down a tooth-glass.<br /><br />"Oh, it's you. You gave me a fright."<br /><br />"So you got a drink," I said.<br /><br />"I don't know what you mean."<br /><br />"For Christ's sake," I said, "you don't have to pretend with me! You<br />might offer me some."<br /><br />"It's just something I had in my flask. I've finished it now."<br /><br />"What's going on?"<br /><br />"Nothing. A lot. I'll tell you sometime."<br /><br />I dressed and called in for Sebastian, but found him still sitting 1 as<br />I had left him, half-dressed over his fire.<br /><br />Julia was alone in the drawing-room.<br /><br />"Well," I asked, "what's going on?"<br /><br />"Oh, just another boring family potin. Sebastian got tight again, so<br />we've all got to keep an eye on him. It's too tedious."<br /><br />"It's pretty boring for him, too."<br /><br />"Well, it's his fault. Why can't he behave like anyone else? Talking of<br />keeping an eye on people, what about Mr. Samgrass? Charles, do you notice<br />anything at all fishy about that man?"<br /><br />"Very fishy. Do you think your mother saw it?"<br /><br />"Mummy only sees what suits her. She can't have the whole I household<br />under surveillance. I'm causing anxiety, too, you know."<br /><br />"I didn't know," I said, adding humbly, "I've only just come from<br />Paris," so as to avoid giving the impression that any trouble she might be<br />in was not widely notorious.<br /><br />It was an evening of peculiar gloom. We dined in the Painted Parlour.<br />Sebastian was late, and so painfully excited were we, that I think it was in<br />all our minds that he would make some sort of low-comedy entrance, reeling<br />and hiccuping. When he came it was, of course, with perfect propriety; he<br />apologized, sat in the empty place and allowed Mr. Samgrass to resume his<br />monologue, uninterrupted and, it seemed, unheard. Druses, patriarchs, icons,<br />bed-bugs, romanesque remains, curious dishes of goat and sheep s' eyes,<br />French and Turkish officials--all the catalogue of Near Eastern travel was<br />provided for our amusement.<br /><br />I watched the champagne go round the table. When it came to Sebastian<br />he said: "I'll have whiskey, please," and I saw Wilcox glance over his head<br />to Lady Marchmain and saw her give a tiny, hardly perceptible nod. At<br />Brideshead they used small individual spirit decanters which held about a<br />quarter 6 a bottle, and were always placed, full, before anyone who asked<br />for it; the decanter which Wilcox put before Sebastian was half empty.<br />Sebastian raised it very deliberately, tilted it, looked at it, and then in<br />silence poured the liquor into his glass, where it covered two fingers. We<br />all began talking at once, all except Sebastian, so that for a moment Mr.<br />Samgrass found himself talking to no one, telling the candlesticks about the<br />Maronites; but soon we fell silent again, and he had the table until Lady<br />Marchmain and Julia left the room.<br /><br />"Don't be long, Bridey," she said, at the door, as she always said, and<br />that evening we had no inclination to delay. Our glasses were filled with<br />port and the decanter at once taken from the room. We drank quickly and went<br />to the drawing-room, where Brideshead asked his mother to read, and she read<br />The Diary of a Nobody with great spirit until ten o'clock, when she closed<br />the book and said she was unaccountably tired, so tired that she would not<br />visit the chapel that night.<br /><br />"Who's hunting to-morrow?" she asked.<br /><br />"Cordelia," said Brideshead. "I'm taking that young horse of Julia's,<br />just to show him the hounds; I shan't keep him out more than a couple of<br />hours."<br /><br />"Rex is arriving sometime," said Julia. "I'd better stay in to greet<br />him."<br /><br />"Where's the meet?" said Sebastian suddenly.<br /><br />"Just here at Flyte St. Mary."<br /><br />"Then I'd like to hunt, please, if there's anything for me."<br /><br />"Of course. That's delightful. I'd have asked you, only you used always<br />to complain so of being made to go out. You can have Tinkerbell. She's been<br />going very nicely this season."<br /><br />Everyone was suddenly pleased that Sebastian wanted to hunt; it seemed<br />to undo some of the mischief of the evening. Brides-head rang the bell for<br />whiskey.<br /><br />"Anyone else want any?"<br /><br />"Bring me some, too," said Sebastian, and, though it was a footman this<br />time and not Wilcox, I saw the same exchange of glance and nod between the<br />servant and Lady Marchmain. Everyone had been warned. The two drinks were<br />brought in, poured out already in the glasses, like "doubles" at a bar, and<br />all our eyes followed the tray, as though we were dogs in a dining-room<br />smelling game.<br /><br />The good humour engendered by Sebastian's wish to hunt persisted,<br />however; Brideshead wrote out a note for the stables, and we all went up to<br />bed quite cheerfully.<br /><br />Sebastian got straight to bed; I sat by his fire and smoked a pipe. I<br />said: "I rather wish I was coming out with you tomorrow."<br /><br />"Well," he said, "you wouldn't see much sport. I can tell you exactly<br />what I'm going to do. I shall leave Bridey at the first covert, hack over to<br />the nearest good pub and spend the entire day quietly soaking in the bar<br />parlour. If they treat me like a dipsomaniac, they can bloody well have a<br />dipsomaniac. I hate hunting, anyway."<br /><br />"Well, I can't stop you."<br /><br />"You can, as a matter of fact--by not giving me any money. They stopped<br />my banking account, you know, in the summer. It's been one of my chief<br />difficulties. I pawned my watch and cigarette case to ensure a happy<br />Christmas, so I shall have to come to you to-morrow for my day's expenses."<br /><br />"I won't. You know perfectly well I can't."<br /><br />"Won't you, Charles? Well, I daresay I shall manage on my own somehow.<br />I've got rather clever at that lately -- managing on my own. I've had to."<br /><br />"Sebastian, what have you and Mr. Samgrass been up to?"<br /><br />"He told you at dinner -- ruins and guides and mules, that's what<br />Sammy's been up to. We decided to go our own ways, that's all. Poor Sammy's<br />really behaved rather well so far. I hoped he would keep it up, but he seems<br />to have been very indiscreet about my happy Christmas. I suppose he thought<br />if he gave too good an account of me, he might lose his job as keeper.<br /><br />"He makes quite a good thing out of it, you know. I don't mean that he<br />steals. I should think he's fairly honest about money. He certainly keeps an<br />embarrassing little note-book in which he puts down all the travellers'<br />cheques he cashes and what he spends it on, for Mummy and the lawyer to see.<br />But he wanted to go to all these places, and it's very convenient for him to<br />have me to take him in comfort, instead of going as dons usually do. The<br />only disadvantage was having to put up with my company, and we soon solved<br />that for him.<br /><br />"We began very much on a Grand Tour, you know, with letters to all the<br />chief people everywhere, and stayed with the Military Governor at Rhodes and<br />the Ambassador at Constantinople. That was what Sammy had signed on for in<br />the first place. Of course, he had his work cut out keeping his eye on me,<br />but he warned all our hosts beforehand that I was not responsible."<br /><br />"Sebastian."<br /><br />"Not quite responsible--and as I had no money to spend I couldn't get<br />away very much. He even did the tipping for me, put the note into the man's<br />hand and jotted the amount down then and there in his note-book. My lucky<br />time was at Constantinople. I managed to make some money at cards one<br />evening when Sammy wasn't looking. Next day I gave him the slip and was<br />having a very happy hour in the bar at the Tokatlian when who should come in<br />but Anthony Blanche with a beard and a Jew boy. Anthony lent me a tenner<br />just before Sammy came panting in and recaptured me. After that I didn't get<br />a minute out of sight; the Embassy staff put us in the boat to Piraeus and<br />watched us sail away. But in Athens it was easy. I simply walked out of the<br />Legation one day after lunch, changed my money at Cook's, and asked about<br />sailings to Alexandria just to fox Sammy, then went down to the port in a<br />bus, found a sailor who spoke American, lay up with him till his ship<br />sailed, and popped back to Constantinople, and that was that.<br /><br />"Anthony and the Jew boy shared a very nice, tumble-down house near the<br />bazaars. I stayed there till it got too cold, then Anthony and I drifted<br />South till we met Sammy by appointment in Syria three weeks ago."<br /><br />"Didn't Sammy mind?"<br /><br />"Oh, I think he quite enjoyed himself in his own ghastly way -- only of<br />course there was no more high life for him. I think he was a bit anxious at<br />first. I didn't want him to get the whole Mediterranean Fleet out, so I<br />cabled him from Constantinople that I was quite well and would he send money<br />to the Ottoman Bank. He came hopping over as soon as he got my cable. Of<br />course he was in a difficult position, because I'm o age and not certified<br />yet, so he couldn't have me arrested. He couldn't leave me to starve while<br />he was living on my money, and he couldn't tell Mummy without looking pretty<br />silly. I had him all ways, poor Sammy. My original idea had been to leave<br />him flat, but Anthony was very helpful about that, and said it was far<br />better to arrange things amicably; and he did arrange things very amicably.<br />So here I am."<br /><br />"After Christmas."<br /><br />"Yes, I was determined to have a happy Christmas."<br /><br />"Did you?"<br /><br />"I think so. I don't remember it much, and that's always a good sign,<br />isn't it?"<br /><br />Next morning at breakfast Brideshead wore scarlet; Cordelia, very smart<br />herself, with her chin held high over her white stock, wailed when Sebastian<br />appeared in a tweed coat: "Oh, Sebastian, you can't come out like that. Do<br />go and change. You look so lovely in hunting clothes."<br /><br />"Locked away somewhere. Gibbs couldn't find them."<br /><br />"That's a fib. I helped get them out myself before you were called."<br /><br />"Half the things are missing."<br /><br />"It's so bad for local prestige. If you only knew how unsmart the<br />Strickland-Venableses are this year. They've even taken their grooms out of<br />top-hats."<br /><br />It was quarter to eleven before the horses were brought round, but no<br />one else appeared downstairs; it was as though they were in hiding,<br />listening for Sebastian's retreating hooves before showing themselves.<br /><br />Just as he was about to start, when the others were already mounted,<br />Sebastian beckoned me into the hall. On the table beside his hat, gloves,<br />whip and sandwiches, lay the flask he had put out to be filled. He picked it<br />up and shook it; it was empty.<br /><br />"You see," he said, "I can't even be trusted that far. It's they who<br />are mad, not me. Now you can't refuse me money."<br /><br />I gave him a pound.<br /><br />"More," he said.<br /><br />I gave him another and watched him mount and trot after his brother and<br />sister.<br /><br />Then, as though it were his cue on the stage, Mr. Samgrass came to my<br />elbow, put an arm in mine, and led me back to the fire. He warmed his neat<br />little hands and then turned to warm his seat.<br /><br />"So Sebastian is in pursuit of the fox," he said, "and our little<br />problem is shelved for an hour or two?"<br /><br />I was not going to stand this from Mr. Samgrass.<br /><br />"I heard all about your Grand Tour, last night," I said.<br /><br />"Ah, I rather supposed you might have." Mr. Samgrass was undismayed,<br />relieved, it seemed, to have someone else in the know. "I did not harrow our<br />hostess with all that. After all, it turned out far better than one had any<br />right to expect. I did feel, however, that some explanation was due to her<br />of Sebastian's Christmas festivities. You may have observed last night that<br />there were certain precautions."<br /><br />"I did."<br /><br />"You thought them excessive? I am with you, particularly , as they tend<br />to compromise the comfort of our own little visit. I have seen Lady<br />Marchmain this morning. You must not suppose I am just out of bed. I have<br />had a little talk upstairs with our hostess. I think we may hope for some<br />relaxation to-night. Yesterday was not an evening that'any of us would wish<br />to have repeated. I earned less gratitude than I deserved, I think, for my<br />efforts to distract you."<br /><br />It was repugnant to me to talk about Sebastian to Mr. Sam-grass, but I<br />was compelled to say: "I'm not sure that to-night would be the best time to<br />start the relaxation."<br /><br />"But surely ? Why not to-night, after a day in the field under<br />Brideshead's inquisitorial eye? Could one choose better?"<br /><br />"Oh, I suppose it's none of my business really."<br /><br />"Nor mine strictly, now that he is safely home. Lady March-main did me<br />the honour of consulting me. But it is less Sebastian's welfare than our own<br />I have at heart at the moment. I need my third glass of port; I need that<br />hospitable tray in the library. And yet you specifically advise against it<br />to-night. I wonder why. Sebastian can come to no mischief to-day. For one<br />thing, he has no money. I happen to know. I saw to it. I even have his watch<br />and cigarette case upstairs. He will be quite harmless . . . as long as no<br />one is so wicked as to give him any . . . Ah, Lady Julia, good morning to<br />you, good morning. And how is the Peke this hunting morning?"<br /><br />"Oh, the Peke's all right. Listen. I've got Rex Mottram coming here<br />to-day. We simply can't have another evening like last night. Someone must<br />speak to Mummy."<br /><br />"Someone has. I spoke. I think it will be all right."<br /><br />"Thank God for that. Are you painting to-day, Charles?"<br /><br />It had been the custom that on every visit to Brideshead I painted a<br />medallion on the walls of the garden-room. The custom suited me well, for it<br />gave me a good reason to detach myself from the rest of the party; when the<br />house was full the garden-room became a rival to the nursery, where from<br />time to time people took refuge to complain about the others; thus without<br />effort I kept in touch with the gossip of the place. There were three<br />finished medallions now, each rather pretty in its way, but unhappily each<br />in a different way, for my tastes had changed and I had become more<br />dexterous in the eighteen months since the series was begun. As a decorative<br />scheme, they were a failure. That morning was typical of the many mornings<br />when I had found the garden-room a sanctuary. There I went and was soon at<br />work. Julia came with me to see me started and we talked, inevitably, of<br />Sebastian.<br /><br />"Don't you get bored with the subject?" she asked. "Why must everyone<br />make such a Thing about it?"<br /><br />"Just because we're fond of him."<br /><br />"Well, I'm fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he'd<br />behave like anybody else. I've grown up with one family skeleton, you know<br />-- Papa. Not to be talked of before the servants, not to be talked of before<br />us when we were children. If Mummy is going to start making a skeleton out<br />of Sebastian, it's too much. If he wants to be always tight, why doesn't he<br />go to Kenya or somewhere where it doesn't matter?"<br /><br />"Why does it matter less being unhappy in Kenya than anywhere else?"<br /><br />"Don't pretend to be stupid, Charles. You understand perfectly."<br /><br />"You mean there won't be so many embarrassing situations for you? Well,<br />all I was trying to say was that I'm afraid there may be an embarrassing<br />situation to-night if Sebastian gets the chance. He's in a bad mood."<br /><br />"Oh, a day's hunting will put that all right."<br /><br />It was touching to see the faith which everybody put in the value of a<br />day's hunting. Lady Marchmain, who looked in on me during the morning,<br />mocked herself for it with that delicate irony for which she was famous.<br /><br />"I've always detested hunting," she said, "because it seems to produce<br />a particularly gross kind of caddishness in the nicest people. I don't know<br />what it is, but the moment they dress np and get on a horse they become like<br />a lot of Prussians. And so boastful after it. The evenings I've sat at<br />dinner appalled at seeing the men and women I know, transformed into<br />half-awake, self-opinionated, monomaniac louts! . . . And yet, you know --<br />it must be something derived from centuries ago -- my heart is quite light<br />to-day to think of Sebastian out with them. 'There's nothing wrong with him<br />really,' I say, "he's gone hunting' -- as though it were an answer to<br />prayer."<br /><br />She asked me about my life in Paris. I told her of my rooms with their<br />view of the river and the towers of Notre Dame. "I'm hoping Sebastian will<br />come and stay with me when I go back."<br /><br />"It would have been lovely," said Lady Marchmain, sighing as though for<br />the unattainable.<br /><br />"I hope he's coming to stay with me in London."<br /><br />"Charles, you know it isn't possible. London's the worst place.<br /><br />Even Mr. Samgrass couldn't hold him there. We have no secrets in this<br />house. He was lost, you know, all through Christmas. Mr. Samgrass only found<br />him because he couldn't pay his bill in the place where he was, so they<br />telephoned our house. It's too horrible. No, London is impossible; if he<br />can't behave himself here, with us ... We must keep him happy and healthy<br />here for a bit, hunting, and then send him abroad again with Mr. Samgrass. .<br />. . You see, I've been through all this before."<br /><br />The retort was there, unspoken, well-understood by both of us--You<br />couldn't keep him; he ran away. So will Sebastian. Because they both hate<br />you.<br /><br />A horn and the huntsman's cry sounded in the valley below us.<br /><br />"There they go now, drawing the home woods. I hope he's having a good<br />day."<br /><br />Thus with Julia and Lady Marchmain I reached deadlock, not because we<br />failed to understand one another, but because we understood too well. With<br />Brideshead, who came home to luncheon and talked to me on the subject--for<br />the subject was everywhere in the house like a fire deep in the hold of a<br />ship, below the water-line, black and red in the darkness, coming to light<br />Hi acrid wisps of smoke that curled up the ladders, crept between decks,<br />oozed under hatches, hung in wreaths on the flats, billowed suddenly from<br />the scuttles and air pipes--with Brideshead, I was in a strange world, a<br />dead world to me, in a moon-landscape of barren lava, on a plateau where the<br />air struck chill, a high place of unnaturally clear eyes and of toiling<br />lungs.<br /><br />He said: "I hope it is dipsomania. That is simply a great misfortune<br />that we must all help him bear. What I used to fear was that he just got<br />drunk deliberately when he liked and because he liked."<br /><br />"That's exactly what he did--what we both did. It's what he does with<br />me now. I can keep him to that, if only your mother would trust me. If you<br />wqrry him with keepers and cures he'll be a physical wreck in a few years."<br /><br />"There's nothing wrong in being a physical wreck, you know. There's no<br />moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live<br />to walk ten miles at eighty."<br /><br />"Wrong" I said. "Moral obligation -- now you're back on religion<br />again."<br /><br />"I never left it," said Brideshead.<br /><br />"D'you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a<br />Catholic, 1 should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured.<br />You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark<br />nonsense."<br /><br />"It's odd you should say that. I've heard it before from other people.<br />It's one of the many reasons why I don't think I should make a good priest.<br />It's something in the way my mind works I suppose. I have to turn a thing<br />round and round, like a piece of ivory in a Chinese puzzle, until -- click!<br />--it fits into place -- but by that time it's upside down to everyone else.<br />But it's the same bit of ivory, you know."<br /><br />At luncheon Julia had no thoughts except for her guest who was coming<br />that day. She drove to the station to meet him and brought him home to tea.<br /><br />"Mummy, do look at Rex's Christmas present."<br /><br />It was a small tortoise with Julia's initials set in diamonds in the<br />living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on<br />the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over<br />a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its<br />withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of<br />those needle-hooks of experience which catch the attention when larger<br />matters are at stake, and remain in the mind when they are forgotten, so<br />that years later it is a bit of gilding, or a certain smell, or the tone of<br />a clock's striking which recalls one to a tragedy.<br /><br />"Dear me," said Lady Marchmain. "I wonder if it eats the same sort of<br />things as an ordinary tortoise."<br /><br />"What will you do when it's dead?" asked Mr. Samgrass. "Can you have<br />another tortoise fitted into the shell?"<br /><br />Rex had been told about the problem of Sebastian--he could scarcely<br />have endured in that atmosphere without -- and had a solution pat. He<br />propounded it cheerfully and openly at tea, and after a day of whispering it<br />was a relief to hear the thing discussed. "Send him to Borethus at Zurich.<br />Borethus is the man. He works miracles every day at that sanatorium of his.<br />You know how Charlie Kilcartney used to drink."<br /><br />"No," said Lady Marchmain, with that sweet irony of hers. "No, I'm<br />afraid I don't know how Charlie Kilcartney drank."<br /><br />Julia, hearing her lover mocked, frowned at the tortoise, but Rex<br />Mottram was impervious to such delicate mischief.<br /><br />"Two wives despaired of him," he said. "When he got engaged to Sylvia,<br />she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it<br />worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn't touched<br />a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him."<br /><br />"Why did she do that?"<br /><br />"Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But<br />that's not really the point of the story."<br /><br />"No, I suppose not. In fact, I suppose, really, it's meant to be an<br />encouraging story."<br /><br />Julia scowled at her jewelled tortoise.<br /><br />"He takes sex cases, too, you know."<br /><br />"Oh dear, what very peculiar friends poor Sebastian will make in<br />Zurich."<br /><br />"He's booked up for months ahead, but I think he'd find room if I asked<br />him. I could telephone him from here to-night."<br /><br />(In his kindest moments Rex displayed a kind of hectoring zeal as if he<br />were thrusting a vacuum cleaner on an unwilling housewife.).<br /><br />"We'll think about it."<br /><br />And we were thinking about it when Cordelia returned from hunting.<br /><br />"Oh, Julia, what's that? How beastly"<br /><br />"It's Rex's Christmas present."<br /><br />"Oh, sorry. I'm always putting my foot in it. But how cruel! It must<br />have hurt frightfully."<br /><br />"They can't feel."<br /><br />"How d'you know? Bet they can."<br /><br />She kissed her mother, whom she had not seen that day, shook hands with<br />Rex, and rang for eggs.<br /><br />"I had one tea at Mrs. Barney's, where I telephoned for the car, but<br />I'm still hungry. It was a spiffing day. Jean Strickland-Venables fell in<br />the mud. We ran from Bengers to Upper Eastrey without a check. I reckon<br />that's five miles, don't you, Bridey?"<br /><br />"Three."<br /><br />"Not as he ran. . . ." Between mouthfuls of scrambled egg she told us<br />about the hunt. . . . "You should have seen Jean when she came out of the<br />mud."<br /><br />"Where's Sebastian?"<br /><br />"He's in disgrace." The words, in that clear, child's voice, had the<br />ring of a bell tolling, but she went on: "Coming out in that beastly<br />rat-catcher coat and mean little tie like something from Captain Morvin's<br />Riding Academy. I just didn't recognize him at the meet, and I hope nobody<br />else did. Isn't he back? I expect he got lost."<br /><br />When Wilcox came to clear the tea, Lady Marchmain asked: "No sign of<br />Lord Sebastian?"<br /><br />"No, my lady."<br /><br />"He must have stopped for tea with someone. How very unlike him."<br /><br />Half an hour later, when Wilcox brought in the cocktail tray, he said:<br />"Lord Sebastian has just rung up to be fetched from South Twining."<br /><br />"South Twining? Who lives there?"<br /><br />"He was speaking from the hotel, my lady."<br /><br />"South Twining?" said Cordelia. "Goodness, he did get lost!"<br /><br />When he arrived he was flushed and his eyes were feverishly bright; I<br />saw that he was two-thirds drunk.<br /><br />"Dear boy," said Lady Marchmain. "How nice to see you looking so well<br />again. Your day in the open has done you good. The drinks are on the table;<br />do help yourself."<br /><br />There was nothing unusual in her speech but the fact of her saying it.<br />Six months ago it would not have been said.<br /><br />"Thanks," said Sebastian. "I will."<br /><br /><br />A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock<br />of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another<br />like it could be borne -- that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian<br />at dinner that night, seeing his clouded eye and groping movements, hearing<br />his thickened voice breaking in, ineptly, after long brutish silences. When<br />at length Lady Marchmain and Julia and the servants left us, Brideshead<br />said: "You'd best go to bed, Sebastian."<br /><br />"Have some port first."<br /><br />"Yes, have some port if you want it. But don't come into the<br />drawing-room."<br /><br />"Too bloody drunk," said Sebastian nodding heavily. "Like olden times.<br />Gentlemen always too drunk join ladies in olden times."<br /><br />("And yet, you know, it wasn't" said Mr. Samgrass, trying to be chatty<br />with me about it afterwards, "it wasn't at all like olden times. I wonder<br />where the difference lies. The lack of good humour? The lack of<br />companionship? You know I think he must have been drinking by himself<br />to-day. Where did he get the money?")<br /><br />"Sebastian's gone up," said Brideshead when we reached the<br />drawing-room.<br /><br />"Yes? Shall I read?"<br /><br />Julia and Rex played bezique; the tortoise, teased by the Pekinese,<br />withdrew into his shell; Lady Marchmain read The Diary of a Nobody aloud<br />until, quite early, she said it was time for bed.<br /><br />"Can't I stay up and play a little longer, Mummy? Just three games?"<br /><br />"Very well, darling. Come in and see me before you go to bed. I shan't<br />be asleep."<br /><br />It was plain to Mr. Samgrass and me that Julia and Rex wanted to be<br />left alone, so we went, too; it was not plain to Brideshead, who settled<br />down to read The Times, which he had not yet seen that day. Then, going to<br />our side of the house, Mr. Samgrass said: "It wasn't at all like olden<br />times."<br /><br />Next morning I said to Sebastian: "Tell me honestly, do you want me to<br />stay on here?"<br /><br />"No, Charles, I don't believe I do."<br /><br />"I'm no help?"<br /><br />"No help."<br /><br />So I went to make my excuses to his mother.<br /><br />"There's something I must ask you, Charles. Did you give Sebastian<br />money yesterday?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"Knowing how he was likely to spend it?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"I don't understand it," she said. "I simply don't understand how<br />anyone can be so callously wicked."<br /><br />She paused, but I do not think she expected any answer; there was<br />nothing I could say unless I were to start all over again on that familiar,<br />endless argument.<br /><br />"I'm not going to reproach you," she said. "God knows it's not for me<br />to reproach anyone. Any failure in my children is my failure. But I don't<br />understand it. I don't understand how you can have been so nice in so many<br />ways, and then do something so wantonly cruel. I don't understand how we all<br />liked you somuch. Did you hate us all the time? I don't understand how we<br />deserved it."<br /><br />I was unmoved; there was no part of me remotely touched by her<br />distress. It was as I had often imagined being expelled from school. I<br />almost expected to hear her say: "I have already written to inform your<br />unhappy father." But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what<br />promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of<br />myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of<br />it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the<br />spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay<br />their way to the nether world.<br /><br />"I shall never go back," I said to myself.<br /><br />A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in<br />Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.<br /><br />I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh<br />sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving<br />forests of the ocean bed.<br /><br />I had left behind me -- what ? Youth ? Adolescence ? Romance ? The<br />conjuring stuff of these things, "the Young Magician's Compendium," that<br />neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard<br />balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be<br />drawn into a hollow candle.<br />,<br />"I have left behind illusion," I said to myself. "Henceforth I live in<br />a world of three dimensions -- with the aid of my five senses."<br /><br />I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car<br />turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all<br />about me at the end of the avenue.<br /><br /><br />Thus I returned to Paris, and to the friends I had found there and the<br />habits I had formed. I thought I should hear no mote of Brideshead, but life<br />has few separations as sharp as that. It was not three weeks before I<br />received a letter in Cordelia's Frenchified convent hand: --<br /><br />Darling Charles [she'said],<br /><br />I was so very miserable when you went. You might have come and said<br />good-bye I<br />I heard all about your disgrace, and I am writing to say that I am in<br />disgrace, too. I sneaked Wilcox's keys and got whiskey for Sebastian and got<br />caught. He did seem to want it so. And there was (and is) an awful row.<br /><br />Mr. Samgrass has gone (good!), and I think he is a bit in disgrace,<br />too, but I don't know why.<br /><br />Mr. Mottram is very popular with Julia (bad!) and is taking Sebastian<br />away (bad! bad!) to a German doctor.<br /><br />Julia's tortoise disappeared. We think it buried itself, as they do, so<br />there goes a packet (expression of Mr. Mottram's).<br /><br />I am very well.<br /><br />With love from,<br /><br />cordelia<br /><br /><br />It must have been about a week after receiving this letter that I<br />returned to my rooms one afternoon to find Rex waiting for me.<br /><br />It was about four, for the light began to fail early in the studio at<br />that time of year. I could see by the expression on the concierge's face,<br />when she told me I had a visitor waiting that there was something impressive<br />upstairs; she had a vivid gift of expressing differences of age or<br />attraction; this was the expression which meant someone of the first<br />consequence, and Rex indeed seemed to justify it, as I found him in his big<br />travelling coat, filling the window that looked over the river.<br /><br />"Well," I said. "Well."<br /><br />"I came this morning. They told me where you usually lunched but I<br />couldn't see you there. Have you got him?"<br /><br />I did not need to ask whom. "So he's given you the slip, too?"<br /><br />"We got here last night and were going on to Zurich to-day. I left him<br />at the Lotti after dinner, as he said he was tired, and went round to the<br />Travellers' for a game."<br /><br />I noticed how, even with me, he was making excuses, as though<br />rehearsing his story for re-telling elsewhere. "As he said he was tired" was<br />good. I could not well imagine Rex letting a half-tipsy boy interfere with<br />his cards. "So you came back and found him gone ?" "Not at all. I wish I<br />had. I found him sitting up for me. I had a run of luck at the Travellers'<br />and cleaned up a packet. Sebastian pinched the lot while I was asleep. All<br />he left me was two first-class tickets to Zurich stuck in the edge of the<br />looking-glass. I had. nearly three hundred quid, blast him!"<br /><br />"And now he may be almost anywhere."<br /><br />"Anywhere. You're not hiding him by any chance?"<br /><br />"No. My dealings with that family are over."<br /><br />"I think mine are just beginning," said Rex. "I say, I've got a lot to<br />talk about, and I promised a chap at the Travellers' I'd give him his<br />revenge this afternoon. Won't you dine with me?"<br /><br />"Yes. Where?"<br /><br />"I usually go to Ciro's."<br /><br />"Why not Paillard's?"<br /><br />"Never heard of it. I'm paying you know."<br /><br />"I know you are. Let me order dinner."<br /><br />"Well, all right. What's the place again?" I wrote it down for him. "Is<br />it the sort of place you see native life?"<br /><br />"Yes, you might call it that."<br /><br />"Well, it'll be an experience. Order something good."<br /><br />"That's my intention."<br /><br />I was there twenty minutes before Rex. If I had to spend an evening<br />with him, it should, at any rate, be in my own way. I remember the dinner<br />well -- soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a<br />caneton la presse, a lemon souffle. At the last minute, fearing that the<br />whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviare aux blinis. And for wine<br />I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with<br />the duck, a Clos de Bre of 1904.<br /><br />Living was easy in France then; with the exchange as it was, my<br />allowance went a long way and I did not live frugally. It was very seldom,<br />however, that I had a dinner like this, and I felt well disposed to Rex,<br />when at last he arrived and gave up his hat and coat with the air of not<br />expecting to see them again. He looked round the sombre little place with<br />suspicion, as though hoping to see apaches or a drinking party of students.<br />All he saw was four senators with napkins tucked under their beards eating<br />in absolute silence. I could imagine him telling his commercial friends<br />later: "... interesting fellow I know; an art student living in Paris. Took<br />me to a funny little restaurant -- sort of place you'd pass without looking<br />at -- where there was some of the best food I ever ate. There were half a<br />dozen senators there, too, which shows you it was the right place. Wasn't at<br />all cheap either."<br /><br />"Any sign of Sebastian?" he asked.<br /><br />"There won't be," I said, "until he needs money."<br /><br />"It's a bit thick, going off like that. I was rather hoping that if I<br />made a good job of him, it might do me a bit of good in another direction."<br /><br />He plainly wished to talk of his own affairs; they could wait, I<br />thought, for the hour of tolerance and repletion, for the cognac; they could<br />wait until the attention was blunted and one could listen with half the mind<br />only; now in the keen moment when the maitre d'hotel was turning the blinis<br />over in the pan, and, in the background, two humbler men were preparing the<br />press, we would talk of myself.<br /><br />"Did you stay long at Brideshead? Was my name mentioned after I left?"<br /><br />"Was it mentioned? I got sick of the sound of it, old boy. The<br />Marchioness got what she called a 'bad conscience' about you. She piled it<br />on pretty thick, I gather, at your last meeting."<br /><br />" 'Callously wicked', 'wantonly cruel.'"<br /><br />"Hard words."<br /><br />" 'It doesn't matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon<br />pie and eat you up.'"<br /><br />"Eh?"<br /><br />"A saying."<br /><br />"Ah." The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed separating each<br />glaucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.<br /><br />"I like a bit of chopped onion with mine," said Rex. "Chap-who-knew<br />told me it brought out the flavour."<br /><br />"Try it without first," I said. "And tell me more news of myself."<br /><br />"Well, of course, Greenacre, or whatever he was called -- the snooty<br />don -- he came a cropper. That was well received by all.; He was the<br />blue-eyed boy for a day or two after you left. Shouldn't wonder if he hadn't<br />put the old girl up to pitching you out. He was always being pushed down our<br />throats, so in the end Julia couldn't bear it any more and gave him<br />away."<br /><br />"Julia did?"<br /><br />"Well, he'd begun to stick his nose into our affairs you see. Julia<br />spotted he was a fake, and one afternoon when Sebastian was tight--he was<br />tight most of the time -- she got the whole story of the Grand Tour out of<br />him. And that was the end of Mr. Samgrass. After that the Marchioness began<br />to think she might have been a bit rough with you."<br /><br />"And what about the row with Cordelia?"<br /><br />"That eclipsed everything. That kid's a walking marvel -- she'd been<br />feeding Sebastian whiskey right under our noses for a week. We couldn't<br />think where he was getting it. That's when the<br />Marchioness finally crumbled."<br /><br />The soup was delicious after the rich blinis--hot, thin, bitter,<br />frothy.<br /><br />"I'll tell you a thing, Charles, that Ma Marchmain hasn't let on to<br />anyone. She's a very sick woman. Might peg out any minute. George Anstruther<br />saw her in the autumn and put it at two years."<br /><br />"How on earth do you know?"<br /><br />"It's the kind of thing I hear. With the way her family are going on at<br />the moment, I wouldn't give her a year. I know just the man for her in<br />Vienna. He put Sonia Bamfshire on her feet when everyone including<br />Anstruther had despaired of her. But Ma Marchmain won't do anything about<br />it. I suppose it's something to do with her crack-brain religion, not to<br />take care of the body."<br /><br />The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. We<br />ate to the music of the press--the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood<br />and marrow, the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast. There<br />was a pause here of a quarter of an hour, while I drank the first glass of<br />the Clos de Bere and Rex smoked his first cigarette. He leaned back, blew a<br />cloud of smoke across the table and remarked, "You know, the food here isn't<br />half bad; someone ought to take this place up and make something of it."<br /><br />Presently he began again on the Marchmains: --<br /><br />"I'll tell you another thing, too -- they'll get a jolt financially<br />soon if they don't look out."<br /><br />"I thought they were enormously rich."<br /><br />"Well, they are rich in the way people are who just let their money sit<br />quiet. Everyone of that sort is poorer than they were in 1914, and the<br />Flytes don't seem to realize it. I reckon those lawyers who manage their<br />affairs find it convenient to give them all the cash they want and no<br />questions asked. Look at the way they live--Brideshead and Marchmain House<br />both going full blast, pack of foxhounds, no rents raised, nobody sacked,<br />dozens of old servants doing damn all, being waited on by other servants,<br />and then besides all that there's the old boy setting up a separate<br />establishment -- and setting it up on no humble scale either. D'you<br />know how much they're overdrawn?"<br /><br />"Of course I don't."<br /><br />"Jolly near a hundred thousand in London. I don't know what they owe<br />elsewhere. Well, that'siquite a packet, you know, for people who aren't<br />using their money. Ninety-eight thousand last November. It's the kind of<br />thing I hear."<br /><br />Those were the kind of things he heard, mortal illness and debt, I<br />thought.<br /><br />I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy<br />resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been<br />strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the<br />stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and<br />triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex<br />knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his.<br />By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St.<br />James's Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in<br />the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of<br />its prime and, that day, as at Paillard's with Rex Mottram years before, it<br />whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.<br /><br />"I don't mean that they'll be paupers; the old boy will always be good<br />for an odd thirty thousand a year, but there'll be a shake-up coming soon,<br />and when the upper classes get the wind up, their first idea is usually to<br />cut down on the girls. I'd like to get the little matter of a marriage<br />settlement through, before it comes."<br /><br />We had by no means reached the cognac, but here we were on the subject<br />of himself. In twenty minutes I should have been ready for all he had to<br />tell. I closed my mind to him as best I could and gave myself to the food<br />before me, but sentences came breaking in on my happiness, recalling me to<br />the harsh, acquisitive world which Rex inhabited. He wanted a woman; he<br />"wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her cheap; that was what it<br />amounted to.<br /><br />"... Ma Marchmain doesn't like me. Well, I'm not asking her to. It's<br />not her I want to marry. She hasn't the guts to say openly: 'You're not a<br />gentleman. You're an adventurer from the Colonies.' She says we live in<br />different atmospheres. That's all right, but Julia happens to fancy my<br />atmosphere. . . . Then she brings up religion. I've nothing against her<br />Church; we don't take much account of Catholics in Canada, but that's<br />different; in Europe you've got some very posh Catholics. All right, Julia<br />can go to church whenever she wants to. I shan't try and stop her. It<br />doesn't mean two pins to her, as a matter of fact, but I like a girl to have<br />religion. What's more, she can bring the children up Catholic. I'll make all<br />the 'promises' they want. . . . Then there's my past. 'We know so little<br />about you.' She knows a sight too much. You may know I've been tied up with<br />someone else for a year or two."<br /><br />I knew; everyone who had ever met Rex knew of his affair with Brenda<br />Champion; knew also that it was from this affair that he derived everything<br />which distinguished him from every other stock-jobber: his golf with the<br />Prince of Wales, his membership of Bratt's, even his smoking-room<br />comradeship at the House of Commons; for, when he first appeared there, his<br />party chiefs did not say of him, "Look, there is the promising young member<br />for North Gridley who spoke so well on Rent Restrictions." They said:<br />"There's Brenda Champion's latest"; it had done him a great deal of good<br />with men; women he could usually charm.<br /><br />"Well, that's all washed up. Ma Marchmain was too delicate to mention<br />the subject; all she said was that I had 'notoriety.' Well, what does she<br />expect as a son-in-law--a sort of half-baked monk like Brideshead? Julia<br />knows all about the other thing; if she doesn't care, I don't see it's<br />anyone else's business."<br /><br />After the duck came a salad of watercress and chicory in a faint mist<br />of chives. I tried to think only of the salad. I succeeded for a time in<br />thinking only of the souffle. Then came the cognac and the proper hour for<br />these confidences.<br /><br />"... Julia's just rising twenty. I don't want to wait till she's of<br />age. Anyway, I don't want to marry without doing the thing properly . . .<br />nothing hole-in-corner. ... I have to see she isn't jockeyed out of her<br />proper settlement. I've got to the time now when 'notoriety,' as Ma<br />Marchmain calls it, has done its bit. I need setting up solidly. You know --<br />St. Margaret's, Westminster, or Whatever Catholics have, royalty and the<br />Prime Minister photographed going in ... and, afterwards 'the beautiful Lady<br />Julia Mottram, leading young political hostess' . . . nothing<br />hole-in-corner. So as the Marchioness won't play ball I'm off to see the old<br />man and square him. I gather he's likely to agree to anything he knows will<br />upset her. He's at Monte Carlo at the moment. I'd planned to go on there<br />after dropping Sebastian off at Zurich. That's why it's such a bloody bore<br />having lost him."<br /><br />The cognac was not to Rex's taste. It was clear and pale and it came to<br />us in a bottle free from grime and Napoleonic cyphers. It was only a year or<br />two older than Rex and lately bottled. They gave it to us in very thin<br />tulip-shaped glasses of modest size.<br /><br />"Brandy's one of the things I do know a bit about," said Rex. "This is<br />a bad colour. What's more, I can't taste it in this thimble."<br /><br />They brought him a balloon the size of his head. He made them warm it<br />over the spirit lamp.<br /><br />Then he rolled the splendid spirit round, buried his face in the fumes,<br />and pronounced it the sort of stuff he put soda in at home.<br /><br />So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and<br />mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex's sort.<br /><br />"That's the stuff," he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it<br />left dark rings round the sides of his glass. "They've always got some<br />tucked away, but they won't bring it out unless you<br />make a fuss. Have some."<br /><br />"I'm quite happy with this."<br /><br />"Well, it's a crime to drink it, if you don't really appreciate it." He<br />lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in<br />another world than his. We both were happy.<br /><br />He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great<br />distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night.<br /><br /><br />At the beginning of May the engagement was announced. I saw the notice<br />in the Continental Daily Mail and assumed that Rex had "squared the old<br />man." But things did not go as expected. The next news I had of them was in<br />the middle of June, when I read that they had been married very quietly at<br />the Savoy Chapel. No royalty was present; nor was the Prime Minister; nor<br />were any of Julia's family. It sounded like a "hole-in-the-corner" affair,<br />but it was not for several years that I heard the full story.Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-27421644306558505472008-08-06T12:55:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:14:26.254+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book I. Et in Arcadia Ego. Chapter FiveChapter Five<br /><br />"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."<br />Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in<br />the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist,<br />drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by<br />one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights<br />were diffuse and remote, like those of a foreign village seen from the<br />slopes outside; new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under<br />the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year's<br />memories.<br /><br />The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of<br />June had died with the gillyflowers, whose scent at my windows now yielded<br />to the damp leaves, smouldering in a corner of the quad.<br /><br />It was the first Sunday evening of term. "I feel precisely one hundred<br />years old," said Sebastian. He had come up the night before, a day earlier<br />than I, and this was our first meeting since we parted in the taxi.<br /><br />"I've had a talking-to from Monsignor Bell this afternoon. That makes<br />the fourth since I came up -- my tutor, the junior dean, Mr. Samgrass of All<br />Souls, and now Monsignor Bell." "Who is Mr. Samgrass of All Souls?"<br /><br />"Just someone of Mummy's. They all say that I made a very bad start<br />last year, that I have been noticed, and that if I don't mend my ways I<br />shall get sent down. How does one mend one's ways? I suppose one joins the<br />League of Nations Union, and reads the Isif every week, and drinks coffee in<br />the morning at the Cadena caf 4 and smokes a great pipe and plays hockey and<br />goes out to tea on Boar's Hill and to lectures at Keble, and rides a bicycle<br />with a little tray full of note-books and drinks cocoa in the evening and<br />discusses sex seriously. Oh, Charles, what has happened since last term? I<br />feel so old."<br /><br />"I feel middle-aged. That is infinitely worse, I believe we have had<br />all the fun we can expect here." We sat silent in the firelight as darkness<br />fell. "Anthony Blanche has gone down."<br /><br />"Why?"<br /><br />"He wrote to me. Apparently he's taken a flat in Munich--he has formed<br />an attachment to a policeman there."<br /><br />"I shall miss him."<br /><br />"I suppose I shall, too, in a way."<br /><br />We fell silent again and sat so still in the firelight that a man who<br />came in to see me stood for a moment in the door and then went away thinking<br />the room empty.<br /><br />"This is no way to start a new year," said Sebastian; but this sombre<br />October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding<br />weeks. All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more<br />in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at<br />length forgotten, j the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the<br />chest-of-drawers in Sebastian's bedroom.<br /><br />There was a change in both of us. We had lost the sense of discovery,<br />which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down.<br /><br />Unexpectedly, I missed my cousin Jasper, who had got his first in<br />Greats and was now cumbrously setting about a life of public mischief in<br />London; I needed him to shock; without that massive presence the college<br />seemed to lack solidity; it no longer provoked and gave point to outrage as<br />it had done in the summer. Moreover, I had come back glutted and a little<br />chastened, with the resolve to go slow. Never again would I expose myself to<br />my father's humour; his whimsical persecution had convinced me, as no rebuke<br />could have done, of the folly of living beyond my means. I had had no<br />talking-to this term; my success in History Previous and a beta minus- in<br />one of my Collections papers had put me on easy terms with my tutor -- which<br />I managed to maintain without undue effort.<br /><br />I kept a tenuous connection with the History School, wrote my two<br />essays a week and attended an occasional lecture. Besides this I started my<br />second year by joining the Ruskin School of Art; two or three mornings a<br />week we met, about a dozen of us--half, at least, the daughters of North<br />Oxford -- among the casts from the antique at the Ashmolean Museum; twice a<br />week we drew from the nude in a small room over a teashop; some pains were<br />taken by the authorities to exclude any hint of lubricity on these evenings,<br />and the young woman who sat to us was brought from London for the day and<br />not allowed to reside in the University city; one flank, that nearer the oil<br />stove, I remember, was always rosy and the other mottled and puckered as<br />though it had been plucked. There, in the smell of the oil lamp, we sat<br />astride the donkey stools and evoked a barely visible wraith of Trilby. My<br />drawings were worthless; in my own rooms I designed elaborate little<br />pastiches, some of which, preserved by friends of the period, come to light<br />occasionally to embarrass me.<br /><br />We were instructed by a man of about my age, who treated us with<br />defensive hostility; he wore very dark blue shirts, a lemon-yellow tie and<br />horn-rimmed glasses, and it was largely by reason of this warning that I<br />modified my own style of dress until it approximated to what my cousin<br />Jasper would have thought suitable for country-house visiting. Thus soberly<br />dressed and happily employed I became a fairly respectable member of my<br />college.<br /><br />With Sebastian it was different. His year of anarchy had filled a deep,<br />interior need of his, the escape from reality, and as he found himself<br />increasingly hemmed in, where he once felt himself free, he became at times<br />listless and morose, even with me. We kept very much to our own company that<br />term, each so much bound up in the other that we did not look elsewhere for<br />friends. My cousin Jasper had told me that it was normal to spend one's<br />second year shaking off the friends of one's first, and it happened as he<br />said. Most of my friends were those I had made through Sebastian; together<br />we shed them and made no others. There was no renunciation. At first we<br />seemed to see them as often as ever; we went to parties but gave few of our<br />own. I was not concerned to impress the new freshmen who, like their London<br />sisters, were here-being launched in society; there were strange faces now<br />at every party and I, who a few months back had been voracious of new<br />acquaintances^ now felt surfeited; even our small circle of intimates, so<br />lively in the summer sunshine, seemed dimmed and muted now in the pervading<br />fog, the river-borne twilight that softened and obscured all that year for<br />me. Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had<br />locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom<br />he had always been a stranger, needed him now.<br /><br />The Charity matinee was over, I felt; the impresario had | buttoned his<br />astrakhan coat and taken his fee and the disconsolate ladies of the company<br />were without a leader. Without him they forgot their cues and garbled their<br />lines; they needed him to ring the curtain up at the right moment; they<br />needed him to direct the limelights; they needed his whisper in the wings,<br />and his imperious eye on the leader of the band; without him there were no<br />photographers from the weekly press, no prearranged goodwill and expectation<br />of pleasure. No stronger bond held them together than common service; now<br />the gold lace and velvet were packed away and returned to the costumier and<br />the drab uniform of the day put on in its stead. For a few happy hours of<br />rehearsal, for a few ecstatic minutes of performance, they had played<br />splendid parts, their own great ancestors, the famous paintings they were<br />thought to resemble; now it was over and in the bleak light of day they must<br />go back to their homes; to the husband who came to London too often, to the<br />lover who lost at cards, and to the child who grew too fast.<br /><br />Anthony Blanche's set broke up and became a bare dozen lethargic,<br />adolescent Englishmen. Sometimes in later life they would say: "Do you<br />remember that extraordinary fellow we used all to know at Oxford -- Anthony<br />Blanche? I wonder what became of him." They lumbered back into the herd from<br />which they had been so capriciously chosen and grew less and less<br />individually recognizable. The change was not so apparent to them as to us,<br />and they still congregated on occasions in our rooms; but we gave up seeking<br />them. Instead we formed the taste for lower company and spent our evenings,<br />as often as not, in Hogarthian little inns in St. Ebb's and St. Clement's<br />and the streets between the old market and the canal, where we managed to be<br />gay and were, I believe, well liked by the company. The Gardener's Arms and<br />the Nag's Head, the Druid's Head near the theatre, and the Turf in Hell<br />Passage knew us well; but in the last of these we were liable to meet other<br />undergraduates-- pub-crawling hearties from BNC--and Sebastian became<br />possessed by a kind of phobia, like that which sometimes comes over men in<br />uniform against their own service, so that many an evening was spoilt by<br />their intrusion, and he would leave his glass half empty and turn sulkily<br />back to college.<br /><br />It was thus that Lady Marchmain found us when, early in that Michaelmas<br />term, she came for a week to Oxford. She found Sebastian subdued, with all<br />his host of friends reduced to one, myself. She accepted me as Sebastian's<br />friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck<br />at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set<br />against her abundant kindness to me.<br /><br />Her business in Oxford was with Mr. Samgrass of All Souls, who now<br />began to play an increasingly large part in our lives. Lady Marchmain was<br />engaged in making a memorial book for circulation among her friends, about<br />her brother, Ned, the eldest of three legendary heroes all killed between<br />Mons and Paschen-daele; he had left a quantity of papers -- poems, letters,<br />speeches, articles; to edit them even for a restricted circle needed tact<br />and countless decisions in which the judgment of an adoring sister was<br />liable to err. Acknowledging this, she had sought outside advice, and Mr.<br />Samgrass had been found to help her.<br /><br />He was a youflg history don, a short, plump man, dapper in dress, with<br />sparse hair brushed flat on an over-large head, neat hands, small feet and<br />the general appearance of being too often bathed. His manner was genial and<br />his speech idiosyncratic. We came to know him well.<br />It was Mr. Samgrass's particular aptitude to help others with their<br />work, but he was himself the author of several stylish little books. He was<br />a great delver in muniment-rooms and had a sharp nose for the picturesque.<br />Sebastian spoke less than the truth when he described him as "someone of<br />Mummy's"; he was someone of almost everyone's who possessed anything to<br />attract him.<br /><br />Mr. Samgrass was a genealogist and a legitimist; he loved 1<br />dispossessed royalty and knew the exact validity of the rival claims of the<br />pretenders to many thrones; he was not a man of religious habit, but he knew<br />more than most Catholics about their Church; he had friends in the Vatican<br />and, could talk at length of policy and appointments, saying which<br />contemporary ecclesiastics were in good favour, which in bad, what recent<br />theological hypothesis was suspect, and how this or that Jesuit or Dominican<br />had skated on thin ice or sailed near the wind in his Lenten discourses; he<br />had everything except the Faith, and later liked to attend benediction in<br />the chapel at Brideshead and see the ladies of the family with their necks<br />arched in devotion under their black lace mantillas; he loved forgotten<br />scandals in high life and was an expert on putative parentage; he claimed to<br />love the past, but I always felt that he thought all the splendid company,<br />living or dead, with whom he associated, slightly absurd; it was Mr.<br />Samgrass who was real, the rest were an insubstantial pageant. He was the<br />Victorian tourist, solid and patronizing, for whose amusement these foreign<br />things were paraded. And there was something a little too brisk about his.<br />literary manners; I suspected the existence of a concealed typewriter<br />somewhere in his panelled rooms.<br /><br />He was with Lady Marchmain when I first met them, and I thought then<br />that she could not have found a greater contrast to herself than this<br />intellectual-on-the-make, nor a better foil to her own charm. It was not her<br />way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone's life, but towards the end of<br />that week Sebastian said rather sourly: "You and Mummy seem very thick" --<br />and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift,<br />imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that<br />fell short of it. By the time that she left I had promised to spend all next<br />vacation, except Christmas itself, at Brideshead.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />One Monday morning a week or two later I was in Sebastian's room<br />waiting for him to return from a tutorial, when Julia walked in, followed by<br />a large man whom she introduced as "Mr. Mottram" and addressed as "Rex."<br />They were motoring up from a house where they had spent the week-end, they<br />explained, and had stopped in Oxford for luncheon. Rex Mottram was warm and<br />confident in a checked ulster; Julia cold and rather shy in furs; she made<br />straight for the fire and crouched over it shivering.<br /><br />"We hoped Sebastian might give us luncheon," she said. "Failing him we<br />can always try Boy Mulcaster, but I somehow thought we should eat better<br />with Sebastian, and we're very hungry. We've been literally starved all the<br />week-end at the Chasms'."<br /><br />"He and Sebastian are both lunching with me. Come too."<br /><br />So, without demur, they joined the party in my rooms, one of the last<br />of the old kind that I gave. Rex Mottram exerted himself to make an<br />impression. He was a handsome fellow with dark hair growing low on his<br />forehead and heavy black eyebrows. He spoke with an engaging Canadian<br />accent. One quickly learned all that he wished one to know about him, that<br />he was a lucky man with money, a member of Parliament, a gambler, a good<br />fellow; that he played golf regularly with the Prince of Wales and was on<br />easy terms with "Max" and "F.E." and "Gertie" Lawrence and Augustus John and<br />Carpentier -- with anyone, it seemed, who happened to be mentioned. Of the<br />University he said: "No, I was never here. It just means you start life<br />three years behind the other fellow."<br /><br />His life, so far as he made it known, began in the war, where he had<br />got a good M.C. serving with the Canadians and had ended as A.D.C. to a<br />popular general.<br /><br />He cannot have been more than thirty at the time we met him, but he<br />seemed very old to us in Oxford. Julia treated him, as she seemed to treat<br />all the world, with mild disdain, but with an air of possession. During<br />luncheon she sent him to the car for her cigarettes, and once or twice when<br />he was talking very big, she apologized for him, saying: "Remember he's a<br />colonial," to which he replied with boisterous laughter.<br /><br />When he had gone I asked who he was.<br /><br />"Oh, just someone of Julia's," said Sebastian.<br />,<br />We were slightly surprised a week later to get a telegram from him<br />asking us and Boy Mulcaster to dinner in London on the following night for<br />"a party of Julia's."<br /><br />"I don't think he knows anyone young," said Sebastian; "all his friends<br />are leathery old sharks in the City and the House of Commons. Shall we go?"<br /><br />We discussed it, and because our life at Oxford was now so much in the<br />shadows, we decided that we would.<br /><br />"Why does he want Boy?"<br /><br />"Julia and I have known him all our lives. I suppose, finding him at<br />lunch with you, he thought he was a chum."<br /><br />We had no great liking for Mulcaster, but the three of us were in high<br />spirits when, having got leave for the night from our colleges, we drove off<br />on the London road in Hardcastle's car.<br />We were to spend the night at Marchmain House. We went there to dress<br />and, while we dressed, drank a bottle of champagne. As we came downstairs<br />Julia passed us going up to her room still in her day clothes.<br /><br />"I'm going to be late," she said; "you boys had better go on to Rex's.<br />It's heavenly of you to come."<br /><br />"What is this party?"<br /><br />"A ghastly charity ball I'm involved with. Rex insisted on giving a<br />dinner party for it. See you there."<br /><br />Rex Mottram lived within walking distance of Marchmain House.<br /><br />"Julia's going to be late," we said, "she's only just gone up to<br />dress."<br /><br />"That means an hour. We'd better have some wine."<br /><br />A woman who was introduced as "Mrs. Champion" said: "I'm sure she'd<br />sooner we started, Rex."<br />"Well, let's have some wine first anyway."<br /><br />"Why a Jeroboam, Rex?" she said peevishly. "You always want to have<br />everything too big."<br /><br />"Won't be too big for us," he said, taking the bottle in his own hands<br />and easing the cork.<br /><br />There were two girls there, contemporaries of Julia's; they all seemed<br />involved in the management of the ball. Mulcaster knew them of old and they,<br />without much relish I thought, knew him. Mrs. Champion talked to Rex.<br />Sebastian and I found ourselves drinking alone together as we always did.<br /><br />At length Julia arrived, unhurried, exquisite, unrepentant. "You<br />shouldn't have let him wait," she said. "It's his Canadian courtesy."<br /><br />Rex Mottram was a liberal host, and by the end of dinner the three of<br />us who had come from Oxford Were rather drunk. While we were standing in the<br />hall waiting for the girls to come down and Rex and Mrs. Champion had drawn<br />away from us, talking acrimoniously, in low voices, Mulcaster said, "I say,<br />let's slip away from this ghastly dance and go to Ma Mayfield's."<br /><br />"Whois Ma Mayfield?"<br /><br />"You know Ma Mayfield. Everyone knows Ma Mayfield of the Old Hundredth.<br />I've got a regular there --a sweet little thing called Effie. There'd be the<br />devil to pay if Effie heard I'd been to London and hadn't been in to see<br />her. Come and meet Effie at Ma Mayfield's."<br /><br />"All right," said Sebastian, "let's meet Effie at Ma Mayfield's."<br /><br />"We'll take another bottle of pop off the good Mottram and then leave<br />the bloody dance and go to the Old Hundredth. How about that?"<br /><br />It was not a difficult matter to leave the ball; the girls whom Rex<br />Mottram had collected had many friends there and, after we had danced<br />together once or twice, our table began to fill up; Rex Mottram ordered more<br />and more wine; presently the three of us were together on the pavement.<br /><br />"D'you know where this place is?"<br /><br />"Of course I do. A hundred Sink Street."<br /><br />"Where's that?"<br /><br />"Just off Leicester Square. Better take the car."<br /><br />"Why?"<br /><br />"Always better to have one's own car on an occasion like this."<br /><br />We did not question this reasoning, and there lay our mistake. The car<br />was in the forecourt of Marchmain House within a hundred yards of the hotel<br />where we had been dancing. Mul-caster drove and, after some wandering,<br />brought us safely to Sink Street. A commissionaire at one side of a dark<br />doorway and a middle-aged man in evening dress on the other side of it,<br />standing with his face to the wall cooling his forehead on the bricks,<br />indicated our destination.<br /><br />"Keep out, you'll be poisoned," said the middle-aged man.<br /><br />"Members?" said the commissionaire.<br /><br />"The name is Mulcaster," said Mulcaster. "Viscount Mulcaster."<br /><br />"Well, try inside," said the commissionaire.<br /><br />"You'll be robbed and given a dose," said the middle-aged man.<br /><br />Inside the dark doorway was a bright hatch.<br /><br />"Members?" asked a stout woman, in evening dress.<br /><br />"I like that," said Mulcaster. "You ought to know me by now."<br /><br />"Yes, dearie," said the woman without interest. "Ten bob each."<br /><br />"Oh, look here, I've never paid before."<br /><br />"Daresay not, dearie. We're full up to-night so it's ten bob. Anyone<br />who comes after you will have to pay a quid. You're lucky."<br /><br />"Let me speak to Mrs. Mayfield."<br /><br />"I'm Mrs. Mayfield. Ten bob each."<br /><br />"Why, Ma, I didn't recognize you in your finery. You know me, don't<br />you? Boy Mulcaster."<br /><br />"Yes, duckie. Ten bob each."<br /><br />We paid, and the man who had been standing between us and the inner<br />door now made way for us. Inside it was hot and crowded, for the Old<br />Hundredth was then at the height of its success. We found a table and<br />ordered a bottle; the waiter took payment before he opened it.<br /><br />"Where's Effie to-night?" asked Mulcaster.<br /><br />"Effie 'oo?"<br /><br />"Effie, one of the girls who's always here. The pretty dark one."<br /><br />"There's lots of girls works here. Some of them's dark and some of<br />them's fair. You might call some of them pretty. I haven't the time to know<br />them by name."<br /><br />"I'll go and look for her," said Mulcaster.<br /><br />While he was away two girls stopped near our table and looked at us<br />curiously. "Come on," said one to the other, "we're wasting our time.<br />They're only fairies."<br /><br />Presently Mulcaster returned in triumph with Effie to whom, without its<br />being ordered, the waiter immediately brought a plate of eggs and bacon.<br /><br />"First bite I've had all the evening," she said. "Only thing that's any<br />good here is the breakfast; makes you fair peckish hanging about."<br /><br />"That's another six bob," said the waiter.<br /><br />When her hunger was appeased, Effie dabbed her mouth and looked at us.<br /><br />"I've seen you here before, often, haven't I?" she said to me.<br /><br />"I'm afraid not."<br /><br />"But I've seen you?" to Mulcaster.<br /><br />"Well, I should rather hope so. You haven't forgotten our little<br />evening in September?"<br /><br />"No, darling, of course not. You were the boy in the Guards who cut<br />your toe, weren't you?"<br /><br />"Now, Effie, don't be a tease."<br /><br />"No, that was another night, wasn't it? I know--you were with Bunty the<br />time the police were in and we all hid in the place they keep the dustbins."<br /><br />"Effie loves pulling my leg, don't you, Effie? She's annoyed with me<br />for staying away so Jong, aren't you?"<br /><br />"Whatever you say, I know I have seen you before somewhere."<br /><br />"Stop teasing."<br /><br />"I wasn't meaning to tease. Honest. Want to dance?"<br /><br />"Not at the minute."<br /><br />"Thank the Lord. My shoes pinch something terrible to-night."<br /><br />Soon she and Mulcaster were deep in conversation. Sebastian leaned back<br />and said to me: "I'm going to ask that pair to join us."<br /><br />The two unattached women who had considered us earlier were again<br />circling towards us. Sebastian smiled and rose to greet them; soon they,<br />too, were eating heartily. One had the face of a skull, the other of a<br />sickly child. The Death's Head seemed destined for me. "How about a little<br />party," she said, "just the six of us over at my place?"<br /><br />"Certainly," said Sebastian.<br /><br />"We thought you were fairies when you came in."<br /><br />"That was our extreme youth."<br /><br />Death's Head giggled. "You're a good sport," she said.<br /><br />"You're very sweet really," said the Sickly Child. "I must just tell<br />Mrs. Mayfield we're going out."<br /><br />It was still early, not long after midnight, when we regained the<br />street. The commissionaire tried to persuade us to take a taxi. "I'll look<br />after your car, sir. I wouldn't drive yourself, sir, really I wouldn't."<br /><br />But Sebastian took the wheel and the two women sat one on the other<br />beside him, to show him the way. Effie and Mulcaster and I sat in the back.<br />I think we cheered a little as we drove off.<br />We did not drive far. We turned into Shaftesbury Avenue and were making<br />for Piccadilly when we narrowly escaped a head-on collision with a taxi-cab.<br /><br />"For Christ's sake," said Effie, "look where you're going. D'you want<br />to murder us all?"<br /><br />"Careless fellow that," said Sebastian.<br /><br />"It isn't safe the way you're driving," said Death's Head. "Besides, we<br />ought to be on the other side of the road."<br /><br />"So we should," said Sebastian, swinging abruptly across.<br /><br />"Here, stop. I'd sooner walk."<br /><br />"Stop? Certainly."<br /><br />He put on the brakes and we came abruptly to a halt broadside across<br />the road. Two policemen quickened their stride and approached us.<br /><br />"Let me out of this," said Effie, and made her escape with a leap and a<br />scamper.<br /><br />The rest of us were caught.<br /><br />"I am sorry if I am impeding the traffic, officer," said Sebastian with<br />care, "but the lady insisted on my stopping for her to get out. She would<br />take no denial. As you will have observed, she was pressed for time. A<br />matter of nerves you know."<br /><br />"Let me talk to him," said Death's Head. "Be a sport, handsome; no<br />one's seen anything but you. The boys don't mean any harm. I'll get them<br />into a taxi and see them home quiet."<br /><br />The policemen looked us over, deliberately, forming their own judgment.<br />Even then everything might have been well had not Mulcaster joined in. "Look<br />here, my good man," he said. "There's no need for you to notice anything.<br />We've just come from Ma Mayfield's. I reckon she pays you a nice retainer to<br />keep your eyes shut. Well, you can keep 'em shut on us too and you won't be<br />the losers by it."<br /><br />That resolved any doubts which the policemen may have felt. In a short<br />time we were in the cells.<br /><br />I remember little of the journey there or the process of admission.<br />Mukaster, I think, protested vigorously and, when we were made to empty our<br />pockets, accused his gaolers of theft. Then we were locked in,<br />and my first clear memory is of tiled walls with a lamp set high up under<br />thick glass, a bunk, and a door, which had no handle on my side. Somewhere<br />to the left of me Sebastian and Mulcaster were raising Cain. Sebastian had<br />been steady on his legs and fairly composed on the way to the station; now,<br />shut in, he seemed in a frenzy and was pounding the door, and shouting:<br />"Damn you, I'm not drunk. Open this door. I insist on seeing the doctor. I<br />tell you I'm not drunk," while Mulcaster, beyond, cried: "My God, you'll pay<br />for this! You're making a great mistake, I can tell you. Telephone the Home<br />Secretary. Send for my solicitors. I will have habeas corpus."<br /><br />Groans of protest rose from the other cells where various tramps and<br />pickpockets were trying to get some sleep: "Aw, pipe down!" "Give a man some<br />peace, can't yer?" . . . "Is this a blinking lock-up or a looney-house?" And<br />the sergeant, going his1 rounds, admonished them through the<br />grille: "You'll be here all night if you don't sober up." .<br /><br />I sat on the'bunk in low spirits and dozed a little. Presently the<br />racket subsided and Sebastian called: "I say, Charles, are you there?"<br /><br />"Here I am."<br /><br />"This is the hell of a business."<br /><br />"Can't we get bail or something?"<br /><br />Mulcaster seemed to have fallen asleep.<br /><br />"I tell you the man -- Rex Mottram. He'd be in his element here."<br /><br />We had some difficulty in getting into touch with him; it was half an<br />hour before the policeman in charge answered my bell. At last he consented,<br />rather sceptically, to send a telephone message to the hotel where the ball<br />was being held. There was another long delay and then our prison doors were<br />open.<br /><br />Seeping through the squalid air of the police station, the sour smell<br />of dirt and disinfectant, came the sweet, rich smoke of a Havana cigar -- of<br />two Havana cigars, for the sergeant in charge was smoking also.<br /><br />Rex stood in the charge room looking the embodiment -- indeed, the<br />burlesque--:of power and prosperity; he wore a fur-lined overcoat<br />with broad astrakhan lapels and a silk hat. The police were deferential and<br />eager to help.<br /><br />"We had to do our duty," they said. "Took the young gentlemen into<br />custody for their own protection."<br /><br />Mulcaster looked crapulous and began a confused complaint that he had<br />been denied legal representation and civil rights. Rex said: "Better leave<br />all the talking to me."<br /><br />I was clear-headed now and watched and listened with fascination while<br />Rex settled our business. He examined the charge sheets, spoke affably to<br />the men who had made the arrest; with the slightest perceptible nuance he<br />opened the way for bribery and quickly covered it when he saw that things<br />had now lasted too long and the knowledge had been too widely shared; he<br />undertook to deliver us at the magistrate's court at ten next morning, and<br />then led us away. His car was outside.<br /><br />"It's no use discussing things to-night. Where are you sleeping?"<br /><br />"Marchers," said Sebastian.<br /><br />"You'd better come to me. I can fix you up for to-night. Leave<br />everything to me."<br /><br />It was plain that he rejoiced in his efficiency.<br /><br />Next morning the display was even more impressive." I awoke with the<br />startled and puzzled sense of being in a strange room,, and in the first<br />seconds of consciousness the memory of the evening before returned, first as<br />though of a nightmare, then of reality. Rex's valet was unpacking a<br />suitcase. On seeing me move he went to the wash-hand stand and poured<br />something from a bottle. "I think I have everything from Marchmain House,"<br />he said. "Mr. Mottram sent round to Heppel's for this."<br /><br />I took the draught and felt better.<br /><br />A man was there from Trumper's to shave us.<br /><br />Rex joined us at breakfast. "It's important to make a good appearance<br />at the court," he said. "Luckily none of you look much the worse for wear."<br /><br />After breakfast the barrister arrived and Rex delivered a summary of<br />the case.<br /><br />"Sebastian's in a jam," he said. "He's liable to anything up to six<br />months' imprisonment for being drunk in charge of a car. You'll come up<br />before Grigg unfortunately. He takes rather a grim view of cases of this<br />sort. All that will happen this morning is that we shall ask to have<br />Sebastian held over for a week to prepare the defence. You two will plead<br />guilty, say you're sorry, and pay your five-bob fine. I'll see what can be<br />done about squaring the evening papers. The Star may be difficult.<br /><br />"Remember, the important thing is to keep out all mention of the Old<br />Hundredth. Luckily the tarts were sober and aren't being charged, but their<br />names have been taken as witnesses. If we try and break down the police<br />evidence, they'll be called. We've got to avoid that at all costs, so we<br />shall have to swallow the police story whole and appeal to the magistrate's<br />good nature not to wreck a young man's career for a single boyish<br />indiscretion. It'll work all right. We shall need a don to give evidence of<br />good character. Julia tells me you have a tame one called Samgrass. He'll<br />do. Meanwhile your story is simply that you came up from Oxford for a<br />perfectly respectable dance, weren't used to wine, had too much, and lost<br />the way driving home.<br /><br />"After that we shall have to see about fixing things with your<br />authorities at Oxford."<br /><br />"I told them to call my solicitors," said Mulcaster, "and they refused.<br />They've put themselves hopelessly in the wrong, and I don't see why they<br />should get away with it."<br /><br />"For heaven's sake don't start any kind of argument. Just plead guilty<br />and pay up. Understand?"<br /><br />Mulcaster grumbled but submitted.<br /><br />Everything happened at court as Rex had predicted. At half past ten we<br />stood in Bow Street, Mulcaster and I free men, Sebastian bound over to<br />appear in a week's time. Mulcaster had kept silent about his grievance; he<br />and I were admonished and fined five shillings each and fifteen shillings<br />costs. Mulcaster was becoming rather irksome to us, and it was with relief<br />that we heard his plea of other business in London. The barrister bustled<br />off and Sebastian and I were left alone and disconsolate.<br /><br />"I suppose Mummy's got to hear about it," he said. "Damn, damn, damn!<br />It's cold. I won't go home. I've nowhere to go. Let's just slip back to<br />Oxford and wait for them to bother us"<br /><br />The raffish habitues of the police court came and went up and down the<br />steps; still we stood on the windy corner, undecided.<br /><br />"Why not get hold of Julia?"<br /><br />"I might go abroad."<br /><br />"My dear Sebastian, you'll only be given a talking-to and fined a few<br />pounds."<br /><br />"Yes, but it's all the bother--Mummy and Bridey and all the family and<br />the dons. I'd sooner go to prison. If I just slip away abroad they can't get<br />me back, can they? That's what people do when the police are after them. I<br />know Mummy will make it seem she has to bear the whole brunt of the<br />business."<br /><br />"Let's telephone Julia and get her to meet us somewhere and talk it<br />over."<br /><br />We met at Gunter's in Berkeley Square. Julia, like most women then,<br />wore a green hat pulled down to her eyes with a diamond arrow in it; she had<br />a small dog under her arm, three-quarters buried in the fur of her, coat.<br />She greeted us with an unusual show of interest.<br /><br />"Well, you are a pair of pickles; I must say you look remarkably well<br />on it. The only time I got tight I was paralysed all the next day. I do<br />think you might have taken me with you. The ball was positively lethal, and<br />I've always longed to go to the Old Hundredth. No one will ever take me. Is<br />it heaven?"<br /><br />"So you know all about that, too?"<br /><br />"Rex telephoned me this morning and told me everything.! What were your<br />girl friends like?"<br /><br />"Don't be prurient," said Sebastian.<br /><br />"Mine was like a skull."<br /><br />"Mine was like a consumptive."<br /><br />"Goodness" It had clearly raised us in Julia's estimation that we had<br />been out with women; to. her they were the point of interest.<br /><br />"Does Mummy know?"<br /><br />"Not about your skulls and consumptives. She knows you were<br />in the clink. I told her. She was divine about it, o course. You know<br />anything Uncle Ned did was always perfect, and hr,| got locked up once for<br />taking a bear into one of Lloyd George's meetings, so she really feels quite<br />human about the whole thing. I She wants you both to lunch with her."<br /><br />"Oh God!"<br /><br />"The only trouble is the papers and the family. Have you, I got an<br />awful family, Charles?"<br /><br />"Only a father. He'll never hear about it."<br /><br />"Ours are awful. Poor Mummy is in for a ghastly time withvI them.<br />They'll be writing letters and paying visits of sympathy, i and all the time<br />at the back of their minds one half will be saying, 'That's what comes of<br />bringing the boy up a Catholic,' and the' other half will say, 'That's what<br />comes of sending him to Eton instead of Stonyhurst.' Poor Mummy can't get it<br />right."<br /><br />We lunched with Lady Marchmain. She accepted the whole thing with<br />humorous resignation. Her only reproach was: "I can't think why you went off<br />and stayed with Mr. Mottram* f You might have come and told me about it<br />first. . . .<br /><br />"How am I going to explain it to all the family?" she asked. "They will<br />be so shocked to find that they're more upset about j it than I am. Do you<br />know my sister-in-law, Fanny Rosscommon? She has always thought I brought<br />the children up badly. Now I am beginning to think she must be right."<br /><br />When we left I said: "She couldn't have been more charming. What were<br />you so worried about?"<br /><br />"I can't explain," said Sebastian miserably.<br /><br />A week later when Sebastian came up for trial he was fined ten pounds.<br />The newspapers reported it with painful prominence, one of them under the<br />ironic headline: "Marquis's Son Unused to Wine." The magistrate said that it<br />was only through the prompt action of the police that he was not up on a<br />grave charge . . . "It is purely by good fortune that you do not bear the<br />responsibility of a serious accident. . . ." Mr. Samgrass gave evidence that<br />Sebastian bore an irreproachable character and that a brilliant future at<br />the University was in jeopardy. The papers took hold of this too --"Model<br />Student's Career at Stake." But for Mr. Samgrass's evidence, said the<br />magistrate, he would have been disposed to give an exemplary sentence; the<br />law was the same for an Oxford undergraduate as for any young hooligan,<br />indeed the better the home the more shameful the offence. . . .<br /><br />It was not only at Bow Street that Mr. Samgrass was of value. At Oxford<br />he showed all the zeal and acumen which were Rex Mottram's in London. He<br />interviewed the college authorities, the proctors, the Vice-Chancellor; he<br />induced Monsignor Bell to call on the Dean of Christ Church; he arranged for<br />Lady March-main to talk to the Chancellor himself; and, as a result of all<br />this, the three of us were gated for the rest of the term, Hardcastle, for<br />no very clear reason, was again deprived of the use of his car, and the<br />affair blew over. The most lasting penalty we suffered was our intimacy with<br />Rex Mottram and Mr. Samgrass, but since Rex's life was in London in a world<br />of politics and high finance and Mr. Samgrass's nearer to our own at Oxford,<br />it was from him we suffered the more.<br /><br />For the rest of that term he haunted us. Now that we were gated we<br />could not spend our evenings together, and from nine o'clock onwards were<br />alone and at Mr. Samgrass's mercy. Hardly an evening seemed to pass but he<br />called on one or the other of us. He spoke of "our little escapade" as<br />though he, too, had been iri the cells, and had that bond with us. ... Once<br />I climbed out of college and Mr. Samgrass found me in Sebastian's rooms<br />after the gate was shut and that, too, he made into a bond. It did not<br />surprise me, therefore, when I arrived at Brideshead, to find Mr. Samgrass,<br />as though in wait for me, sitting alone before the fire in the room they<br />called the "Tapestry Hall."<br /><br />"You find me in solitary possession," he said, and indeed he seemed to<br />possess the hall and the sombre scenes of venery that hung round it, to<br />possess the caryatids on either side of the fireplace, to possess me, as he<br />rose to take my hand and greet me like a host: "This morning," he continued,<br />"we had a lawn meet of the Marchmain Hounds -- a deliciously archaic<br />spectacle -- and all our young friends are fox hunting, even Sebastian who,<br />you will not be surprised to hear, looked remarkably elegant in his pink<br />coat. Brideshead was impressive rather than elegant; he is Joint-master with<br />a local figure of fun named Sir Walter Strickland-Venables. I wish the two<br />of them could be included in these rather humdrum tapestries--they would<br />give a note of fantasy.<br />"Our hostess remained at home; also a convalescent Dominican who has<br />read too much Maritain and too little Hegel; Sir Adrian Person, of course,<br />and two rather forbidding Magyar cousins -- I have tried them in German and<br />in French, but in neither tongue are they diverting. All these have now<br />driven off to visit a neighbour. I have been spending a cosy afternoon<br />before the fire with the incomparable Charlus. Your arrival emboldens me to<br />ring for some tea. How can I prepare you for the party? Alas, it breaks up<br />to-morrow. Lady Julia departs to celebrate the New Year elsewhere, and takes<br />the beau-monde with her. I shall miss the pretty creatures about the house<br />-- particularly one Celia; she is the sister of our old companion in<br />adversity, Boy Mulcaster, and wonderfully unlike him. She has a bird-like<br />style of conversation, pecking away at the subject in a way I find most<br />engaging, and a school-monitor style of dress which I can only call 'saucy.'<br />I shall miss her, for I do not go to-morrow. To-morrow I start work in<br />earnest on our hostess's book -- which, believe me, is a treasure house of<br />period gems; pure authentic 1914."<br /><br />Tea was brought and, soon after it, Sebastian returned; he had lost the<br />hunt early, he said, and hacked home; the others were not long after him,<br />having been .fetched by car at the end of the day; Brideshead was absent; he<br />had business at the kennels and Cordelia had gone with him. The rest filled<br />the hall and were soon eating scrambled eggs and crumpets; and Mr. Samgrass,<br />who had lunched at home and dozed all the afternoon before the fire, ate<br />eggs and crumpets with them. Presently Lady Marchmain's party returned; and<br />when, before we went upstairs to dress for dinner, she said, "Who's coming<br />to chapel for the rosary?" and Sebastian and Julia said they must have their<br />baths at once, Mr. Samgrass went with her and the friar.<br /><br />"I wish Mr. Samgrass would go," said Sebastian, in his bath; "I'm sick<br />of being grateful to him."<br /><br />In the course of the next fortnight distaste for Mr. Samgrass came to<br />be a little unspoken secret throughout the house; in his presence Sir Adrian<br />Porson's fine old eyes seemed to search a distant horizon and his lips set<br />in classic pessimism. Only the Hungarian cousins who, mistaking the status<br />of tutor, took him for an unusually privileged upper servant, were<br />unaffected by his presence.<br /><br />Mr. Samgrass, Sir Adrian Porson, the Hungarians, the friar, Brideshead,<br />Sebastian, Cordelia, were all who remained of the Christmas party.<br /><br />Religion predominated in the house; not only in its practices-- the<br />daily mass and rosary, morning and evening in the chapel -- but in all its<br />intercourse. "We must make a Catholic of Charles," ' Lady Marchmain said,<br />and we had many little talks together during my visits when she delicately<br />steered the subject into a holy quarter. After the first of these Sebastian<br />said: "Has Mummy been having one of her 'little talks' with you? She's<br />always doing it. I wish to hell she wouldn't."<br /><br />One was never summoned for a little talk, or consciously led to it; it<br />merely happened, when she wished to speak intimately, that one found oneself<br />alone with her, if it was summer in a secluded walk by the lakes or in a<br />corner of the walled rose gardens; if it was winter in her sitting-room on<br />the first floor.<br /><br />This room was all her own; she had taken it for herself and changed it<br />so that, entering, one seemed to be in another house. She had lowered the<br />ceiling, and the elaborate cornice which, in one form or another, graced<br />every room, was lost to view; the walls, once panelled in brocade, were<br />stripped and washed blue and spotted with innumerable little water-colours<br />of fond association; the air was sweet with the fresh scent of flowers and<br />musty pot-pourri; her library in soft leather covers, well-read works of<br />poetry and piety, filled a small rosewood bookcase; the chimney-piece was<br />covered with small personal treasures -- an ivory Madonna, a plaster St.<br />Joseph, posthumous miniatures of her three soldier brothers. When Sebastian<br />and I lived alone at Brideshead during that brilliant August we had kept out<br />of his mother's room.<br /><br />Scraps of conversation come back to me with the memory of her room. I<br />remember her saying: "When I was a girl we were comparatively poor, but<br />still much richer than most of the world, and when I married I became very<br />rich. It used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful<br />things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the<br />rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always<br />been the favourites of God and His saints, but I believe that it is one of<br />the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches<br />included. Wealth in pagan Rome was necessarily something cruel; it's not any<br />more."<br />I said something about a camel and the eye of a needle and she rose<br />happily to the point.<br />"But of course" she said, "it's very unexpected for a camel to go<br />through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of<br />unexpected things. It's not to be expected that an ox and an ass should<br />worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives<br />of the saints. It's all part of the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side, of<br />religion."<br /><br />But I was as untouched by her faith as I was by her charm; or, rather,<br />I was touched by both alike. I had no mind then for anything except<br />Sebastian, and I saw him already as being threatened, though I did not yet<br />know how black was the threat. His constant, despairing prayer was to be let<br />alone. By the blue waters and rustling palm of his own mind he was happy and<br />harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the<br />coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the golden slope<br />that had never known the print of a boot there trod the grim invasion of<br />trader, adminis-. trator, missionary and tourist--only then was it time to<br />disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills;<br />or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness,<br />where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his<br />heart out among the rum bottles.<br /><br />And since Sebastian counted among the intruders his own conscience and<br />all claims of human affection, his days in Arcadia were numbered. For in<br />this, to me, tranquil time Sebastian took fright. I knew him well in that<br />mood of alertness and suspicion, like a deer suddenly lifting his head at<br />the far notes of the hunt; I had seen him grow wary at the thought of his<br />family or his religion; now I found I, too, was suspect. He did not fail in<br />love, but he lost his jay of it, for I was no longer part of his solitude.<br />As my intimacy with his family grew I became part of the world which he<br />sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him. That was the<br />part for which his mother, in all our little talks, was seeking to fit me.<br />Everything was left unsaid. It was only dimly and at rare moments that I<br />suspected what was afoot.<br /><br />Outwardly Mr. Samgrass was the only enemy. For a fortnight Sebastian<br />and I remained at Brideshead, leading our own life. His brother was engaged<br />in sport and estate management; Mr. Samgrass was at work in the library on<br />Lady Marchmain's book; Sir Adrian Porson demanded most of Lady Marchmain's<br />time./ We saw little of them except in the evenings; there was room under<br />that domed roof for a wide variety of independent lives.<br /><br />After a fortnight Sebastian said: "I can't stand Mr. Samgrass any more.<br />Let's go to London," so he came to stay with me and now began to use my home<br />in preference to Marchers. My father liked him. "I think your friend very<br />amusing," he said. "Ask him often."<br /><br />Then, back at Oxford, we took up again the life that seemed to be<br />shrinking in the cold air. The sadness that had been strong in Sebastian the<br />term before gave place to a kind of sullenness even towards me. He was sick<br />at heart somewhere, I did not know how, and I grieved for him, unable to<br />help.<br /><br />When he was gay now it was usually because he was drunk, and when drunk<br />he developed an obsession of "mocking Mr. Samgrass." He composed a ditty of<br />which the refrain was, "Green arse, Samgrass -- Samgrass green arse," sung<br />to the tune of St. Mary's chime, and he would thus serenade him, perhaps<br />once a week, under his windows. Mr. Samgrass was distinguished as being the<br />first don to have a private telephone installed in his rooms. Sebastian in<br />his cups used to ring him up and sing him this simple song. And all this Mr.<br />Samgrass took in good part, as it is called,, smiling obsequiously when we<br />met, but with growing confidence, as though each outrage in some way<br />strengthened his hold on Sebastian.<br /><br />It was during this term that I began to realize that Sebastian was a<br />drunkard in quite a different sense from myself. I got drunk often, but<br />through an excess of high spirits, in the love of the moment, and the wish<br />to prolong and enhance it; Sebastian drank to escape. As we together grew<br />older and more serious I drank less, he more. I found that sometimes after I<br />had gone back to my college, he sat up late and alone, soaking. A succession<br />of disasters came on him so swiftly and with such unexpected violence that<br />it is hard to say when exactly I recognized that my friend was in deep<br />trouble. I knew it well enough in the Easter vacation. Julia used to say,<br />"Poor Sebastian. It's something chemical in him."<br /><br />That was the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what<br />misconception of popular science. "There's something chemical between them"<br />was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was<br />the old concept of determinism in a new form. I do not believe there was<br />anything chemical in my friend.<br /><br />The Easter party at Brideshead was a bitter time, culminating in a<br />small but unforgettably painful incident. Sebastian got very drunk before<br />dinner in his mother's house, and thus marked the beginning of a new epoch<br />in his melancholy record of deterioration, the first step in the flight from<br />his family which brought him to ruin.<br /><br />It was at the end of the day when the large Easter party left<br />Brideshead. It was called "the Easter party," though in fact it began on the<br />Tuesday of Easter Week, for the Flytes all went into retreat at the guest<br />house of a monastery from Maundy Thursday until Easter. This year Sebastian<br />had said he would not go, but at the last moment had yielded, and came home<br />in a state of acute depression from which I totally failed to raise him.<br /><br />He had been drinking very hard for a week -- only I knew how hard --<br />and drinking in a nervous, surreptitious way, totally unlike his old habit.<br />During the party there was always a grog tray in the library, and Sebastian<br />took to slipping in there at odd moments during the day without saying<br />anything even to me. The house was largely deserted during the day. I was at<br />work painting another panel in the little garden-room in the colonnade.<br />Sebastian complained of a cold, stayed in, and during all that time was<br />never quite sober; he escaped attention by being silent. Now and then I<br />noticed him attract curious glances, but most of the party knew him too<br />slightly to see the change in him while his own family were occupied, each<br />with his particular guests.<br /><br />When I remonstrated he said, "I can't stand all these people about,"<br />but it was when they finally left and he had to face his family at close<br />quarters that he broke down.<br /><br />The normal practice was for a cocktail tray to be brought into the<br />drawing-room at six; we mixed our own drinks and the bottles were removed<br />when we went to dress; later just before dinner cocktails appeared again,<br />this time handed round by the footmen.<br /><br />Sebastian disappeared after tea; the light had gone and I spent the<br />next hour playing Mah Jong with Cordelia. At six I was alone in the<br />drawing-room, when he returned; he was frowning in a way I knew all too<br />well, and when he spoke I recognized the drunken thickening in his voice.<br /><br />"Haven't they brought the cocktails yet?" He pulled clumsily on the<br />bell-rope.<br /><br />I said, "Where have you been?"<br /><br />"Up with Nanny."<br /><br />"I don't believe it. You've been drinking somewhere."<br /><br />"I've been reading in my room. My cold's worse to-day."<br /><br />When the tray arrived he slopped gin and vermouth into a tumbler and<br />carried it out of the room with him. I followed him upstairs, where he shut<br />his bedroom door in my face and turned the key.<br /><br />I returned to the drawing-room full of dismay and foreboding.<br /><br />The family assembled. Lady Marchmain said: "What's become of<br />Sebastian?"<br /><br />"He's gone to lie down. His cold is worse."<br /><br />"Oh dear, I hope he isn't getting flu. I thought he had a feverish look<br />once or twice lately. Is there anything he wants?"<br /><br />"No, he particularly asked not to be disturbed."<br /><br />I wondered whether I ought to speak to Brideshead, but that grim,<br />rock-crystal mask forbade all confidence. Instead, on the way upstairs to<br />dress, I told Julia.<br /><br />"Sebastian's drunk."<br /><br />"He can't be. He didn't even come for a cocktail."<br /><br />"He's been drinking in his room all the afternoon."<br /><br />"How very peculiar! What a bore he isl Will he be all right for<br />dinner?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"Well, you must deal with him. It's no business of mine. Does he often<br />do this?"<br /><br />"He has lately."<br /><br />"How very boring."<br /><br />I tried Sebastian's door, found it locked and hope,d he was sleeping,<br />but when I came back from my bath, I found him sitting in the armchair<br />before my fire; he was dressed for dinner, all but his shoes, but his tie<br />was awry and his hair on end; he was very red in the face and squinting<br />slightly. He spoke indistinctly.<br /><br />"Charles, what you said was quite true. Not with Nanny. Been drinking<br />whiskey up here. None in the library now party's gone. Now party's gone and<br />only Mummy. Feeling rather drunk. Think I'd better have something-on-a-tray<br />up here. Not dinner with Mummy."<br /><br />"Go to bed," I told him. "I'll say your cold's worse."<br /><br />"Much worse."<br /><br />I took him to his room, which was next to mine, and tried to get him to<br />bed, but he sat in front of his dressing-table squinnying at himself in the<br />glass, trying to remake his bow tie. On the writing-table by the fire was a<br />half-empty decanter of whiskey. I took it up, thinking he would not see, but<br />he spun round from the mirror and said: "You put that down."<br /><br />"Don't be an ass, Sebastian. You've had enough."<br /><br />"What the devil's it got to do with you? You're only a guest here -- my<br />guest. I drink what I want to in my own house."<br /><br />He would have fought me for it at that moment.<br /><br />"Very well," I said, putting the decanter back, "only for God's sake<br />keep out of sight."<br /><br />"Oh, mind your own business. You came here as my friend; now you're<br />spying on me for my mother, I know. Well, you can get out, and tell her from<br />me that I'll choose my friends and she her spies in future."<br /><br />So I left him and went down to dinner.<br /><br />"I've been in to Sebastian," I said. "His cold has come on rather<br />badly. He's gone to bed and says he doesn't want anything."<br /><br />"Poor Sebastian," said Lady Marchmain. "He'd better have a glass of hot<br />whiskey. I'll go and have a look at him."<br /><br />"Don't Mummy, I'll go," said Julia rising.<br /><br />"I'll go," said Cordelia, who was dining down that night, for a treat<br />to celebrate the departure of the guests. She was at the door and through<br />it, before anyone could stop her. Julia caught my eye and gave a tiny, sad<br />shrug. In a few minutes Cordelia was back, looking grave. "No, he doesn't<br />seem to want anything," she said. "How was he?" "Well, I don't know, but I<br />think he's very drunk," she said.<br /><br />"Cordelia."<br /><br />Suddenly the child began to giggle. " 'Marquis's Son Unused to Wine,'"<br />she quoted. " 'Model Student's Career Threatened.'"<br /><br />"Charles, is this true?" asked Lady Marchmain.<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />Then dinner was announced, and we went to the dining-room, where the<br />subject was not mentioned.<br /><br />When Brideshead and I were left alone he said: "Did you say Sebastian<br />was drunk?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"Extraordinary time to choose. Couldn't you stop him?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"No," said Brideshead, "I don't suppose you could. I once saw my father<br />drunk, in this room. I wasn't more than about ten at the time. You can't<br />stop people if they want to get drunk. My mother couldn't stop my father,<br />you know."<br /><br />He spoke in his odd, impersonal way. The more I saw of this family, I<br />reflected, the more singular I found them. "I shall ask my mother to read to<br />us to-night."<br /><br />It was the custom, I learned later, always to ask Lady March-main to<br />read aloud on evenings of family tension. She had a beautiful voice and<br />great humour of expression. That night she read part of The Wisdom of Father<br />Brown. Julia sat with' a stool covered with manicure things and carefully<br />revarnished her nails; Cordelia nursed Julia's Pekinese; Brideshead played<br />patience; I sat unoccupied studying the pretty group they made, and mourning<br />my friend upstairs. But the horrors of that evening were not yet over. It<br />was sometimes Lady Marchmain's practice, when the family were alone, to<br />visit the chapel before going to bed. She had just closed her book and<br />proposed going there when the door opened and Sebastian appeared. He was<br />dressed as I had last seen him, but now instead of being flushed he was<br />deathly pale.<br /><br />"Come to apologize," he said.<br /><br />"Sebastian, dear, do go back to your room," said Lady Marchmain. "We<br />can talk about it in the morning."<br /><br />"Not to you. Come to apologize to Charles. I was bloody to him and he's<br />my guest. He's my guest and my only friend and I was bloody to him."<br /><br />A chill spread over us. I led him back to his room; his family went to<br />their prayers. I noticed when we got upstairs that the decanter was now<br />empty. "It's time you were in bed," I said.<br /><br />Sebastian began to weep. "Why do you take their side against me? I knew<br />you would if I let you meet them. Why do you spy on me?"<br /><br />He said more than I can bear to remember, even at twenty years'<br />distance. At last I got him to sleep and very sadly went to bed myself.<br /><br />Next morning, he came to rny room very early, while the house still<br />slept; he drew the curtains and the sound of it woke me, to find him there<br />fully dressed, smoking, with his back to me, looking out of the windows to<br />where the long dawn-shadows lay across the dew and the first birds were<br />chattering in the budding tree-tops. When I spoke he turned a face, which<br />showed no ravages of the evening before, but was fresh and sullen as a<br />disappointed child's.<br /><br />"Well," I said. "How do you feel?"<br /><br />"Rather odd. I think perhaps I'm still a little drunk. I've just been<br />down to the stables trying to get a car but everything was locked. We're<br />off."<br /><br />He drank from the water-bottle by my pillow, threw his cigarette from<br />the window, and lit another with hands which trembled like an old man's.<br /><br />"Where are you going?"<br /><br />"I don't know. London, I suppose. Can I come and stay with you?"<br /><br />"Of course."<br /><br />"Well, get dressed. They can send our luggage on by train."<br /><br />"We can't just go like this."<br /><br />"We can't stay."<br /><br />He sat on the window-seat looking away from me, out of the windoyv.<br />Presently he said: "There's smoke coming from some of the chimneys. They<br />must have opened the stables now. Come on."<br /><br />"I can't go," I said. "I must say good-bye to your mother."<br /><br />"Sweet bulldog."<br /><br />"Well, I don't happen to like running away."<br /><br />"And I couldn't care less. And I shall go on running away, as far and<br />as fast as I can. You can hatch up any plot you like with my mother; I<br />shan't come back."<br /><br />"That's how you talked last night."<br /><br />"I know. I'm sorry, Charles. I told you I was still drunk. If it's any<br />comfort to you, I absolutely detest myself."<br /><br />"It's no comfort at all."<br /><br />"It must be a little, I should have thought. Well, if you won't come,<br />give my love to Nanny."<br /><br />"You're really going?"<br /><br />"Of course."<br /><br />"Shall I see you in London?"<br /><br />"Yes, I'm coming to stay with you."<br /><br />He left me but I did not sleep again; nearly two hours later a footman<br />came with tea and bread and butter and set my clothes out for a new day.<br /><br /><br />Later that morning I sought Lady Marchmain; the wind had freshened and<br />we stayed indoors; I sat near her before the fire in her room, while she<br />bent over her needlework and the budding creeper rattled on the<br />window-panes.<br /><br />"I wish I had not seen him," she said. "That was cruel. I do not mind<br />the idea of his being drunk. It is a thing all men do when they are young. I<br />am used to the idea of it. My brothers were wild at his age. What hurt last<br />night was that there was nothing happy about him."<br /><br />"I know," I said. "I've never seen him like that before."<br /><br />"And last night of all nights . . . when everyone had gone and there<br />were only ourselves here -- you see, Charles, I look on you very much as one<br />of ourselves. Sebastian loves you -- when there was no need for him to make<br />an effort to be gay. And he wasn't gay. I slept very little last night, and<br />all the time I kept coming back to that one thing: he was so unhappy."<br /><br />It was impossible for me to explain to her what I only half understood<br />myself; even then I felt, "She will learn it soon enough. Perhaps she knows<br />it now."<br /><br />"It was horrible," I said. "But please don't think that's his usual<br />way."<br /><br />"Mr. Samgrass told me he was drinking too much all last term."<br /><br />"Yes, but not like that -- never before."<br /><br />"Then why now? Here? With us? All night I have been thinking and<br />praying and wondering what I was to say to him, and now, this morning, he<br />isn't here at all. That was cruel of him, leaving without a word. J don't<br />want him to be ashamed -- it's being ashamed that makes it all so wrong of<br />him."<br /><br />"He's ashamed of being unhappy," I said.<br /><br />"Mr. Samgrass says he is noisy and high-spirited. I believe," she said,<br />with a faint light of humour streaking the clouds, "I believe you and he<br />tease Mr. Samgrass rather. It's naughty of you. I'm very fond of Mr.<br />Samgrass, and you should be too, after all he's done for you. But I think<br />perhaps if I were your age and a man, I might be just a little inclined to<br />tease Mr. Samgrass myself. No, I don't mind that, but last night and this<br />morning are something quite different. You see, it's all happened before."<br /><br />"I can only say I've seen him drunk often and I've been drunk with him<br />often, but last night was quite new to me."<br /><br />"Oh, I don't mean with Sebastian. I mean years ago. I've been through<br />it all before with someone else whom I loved. Well, you must know what I<br />mean -- with his father. He used to be drunk in just that way. Someone told<br />me he is not like that now. I pray God it's true and thank God for it with<br />all my heart, if it is. But the running away -- he ran away, too, you know.<br />It was as you said just now, he was ashamed of being unhappy. Both of them<br />unhappy, ashamed and running away. It's too pitiful. The men I grew up with"<br />-- and her great eyes moved from the embroidery to the three miniatures in<br />the folding leather case on the chimney-piece -- "were not like that. I<br />simply don't understand it. Do you, Charles?"<br /><br />"Only very little."<br /><br />"And yet Sebastian is fonder of you than of any of us, you know. You've<br />got to help him. I can't."<br /><br />I have here compressed into a few sentences what, there, required many.<br />Lady Marchmain was not diffuse, but she took hold of her subject in a<br />feminine, flirtatious way, circling, approaching, retreating, feinting; she<br />hovered over it like a butterfly; she played "grandmother's steps" with it,<br />getting nearer the real point imperceptibly while one's back was turned,<br />standing rooted when she was observed. The unhappiness, the running away --<br />these made up her sorrow, and in her own way she exposed the whole of it,<br />before she was done. It was an hour before she had said all she meant to<br />say. Then, as I rose to leave her, she added as though in an afterthought:<br />"I wonder have you seen my brother's book? It has just come out."<br /><br />I told her I had looked through it in Sebastian's rooms.<br /><br />"I should like you to have a copy. May I give you one? They were three<br />splendid men; Ned was the best of them. He was the last to be killed, and<br />when the telegram came, as I knew it would come, I thought: 'Now it's my<br />son's turn to do what Ned can never do now.' I was alone then. He was just<br />going to Eton. If you read Ned's book you'll understand."<br /><br />She had a copy lying ready on her bureau. I thought at the time, "She<br />planned this parting before ever I came in. Had she rehearsed all the<br />interview? If things had gone differently would she have put the book back<br />in the drawer?"<br /><br />She wrote her name and mine on the fly-leaf, the date and place.<br /><br />"I prayed for you, too, in the night," she said.<br /><br />I closed the door behind me, shutting out the bondieuserie, the low<br />ceiling, the chintz, the lambskin bindings, the views of Florence, the bowls<br />of hyacinth and pot-pourri, the petit point, the intimate feminine, modern<br />world, and was back under the coved and coffered roof, the columns and<br />entablature of the central hall, in the august, masculine atmosphere of a<br />better age.<br />I was no fool; I was old enough to know that an attempt had been made<br />to suborn me and young enough to have found the experience agreeable.<br /><br />I did not see Julia that morning, but just as I was leaving Cordelia<br />ran to the door of the car and said: "Will you be seeing Sebastian? Please<br />give him my special love. Will you remember -- my special love?"<br /><br /><br />In the train to London I read the book Lady Marchmain had given me. The<br />frontispiece reproduced the photograph of a young man in Grenadier uniform,<br />and I saw plainly revealed there the origin of that grim mask which, in<br />Brideshead, overlaid the gracious features of his father's family; this was<br />a man of the woods and caves, a hunter, a judge of the tribal council, the<br />repository of the harsh traditions of a people at war with their<br />environment. There were other illustrations in the book, snapshots of the<br />three brothers on holiday, and in each I traced the same archaic lines; and<br />remembering Lady Marchmain, starry and delicate, I could find no likeness to<br />her in these sombre men.<br /><br />She appeared seldom in the book; she was older than the eldest of them<br />by nine years and had married and left home while they were schoolboys;<br />between her and them stood two other sisters; after the birth o the third<br />daughter there had been pilgrimages and pious benefactions in request for a<br />son, for theirs was a wide property and an ancient name; male heirs had come<br />late and, when they came, in a profusion which at the time seemed to promise<br />continuity to "the line which, in the tragic event, ended abruptly with<br />them.<br /><br />The family history was typical of the Catholic squires of England; from<br />Elizabeth's reign till Victoria's they lived sequestered lives among their<br />tenantry and kinsmen, sending their sons to school abroad; often marrying<br />there--inter-marrying, if not, with a score of families like themselves,<br />debarred from all preferment; and learning, in those lost generations,<br />lessons which, could still be read in the lives o the last three men of the<br />house. Mr. Samgrass's deft editorship had assembled and arranged a curiously<br />homogeneous little body of writing--poetry, letters, scraps of a journal, an<br />unpublished essay or two -- which all exhaled the same high-spirited,<br />serious, chivalrous, other-worldly air; and the letters from their<br />contemporaries, written after their deaths, all in varying degrees of<br />articulateness, told the same tale of men who were, in all the full flood of<br />academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great<br />rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded<br />victims, devoted to the sacrifice. These men must die to make a world for<br />Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of lawy to be shot off at<br />leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his<br />polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures. I<br />wondered, as the train carried me farther and farther from Lady Marchmain,<br />whether perhaps there was not on her, too, the same blaze, marking her and<br />hers for destruction by other ways than war. Did she see a sign in the red<br />centre of her cosy grate and hear it in the rattle of creeper on the<br />window-pane, this whisper of doom?<br /><br />Then I reached Paddington and, returning home, found ebastian there,<br />and the sense of tragedy vanished, for he was gay and free as when I first<br />met him.<br /><br />"Cordelia sent you her special love."<br /><br />"Did you have a 'little talk' with Mummy?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"Have you gone over to her side?"<br /><br />The day before I would have said: "There aren't two sides"; that day I<br />said, "No, I'm with you, Sebastian contra mundum"<br /><br />And that was all the conversation we had on the subject, then or ever.<br /><br /><br />But the shadows were closing round Sebastian. We returned to Oxford and<br />once again the gillyflowers bloomed under my windows and the chestnut lit<br />the streets and the warm stones strewed their flakes upon the cpbble; but it<br />was not as it had been; there was midwinter in Sebastian's heart.<br /><br />The weeks went by; we looked for lodgings for the coming term and found<br />them in Merton Street, a secluded, expensive little house near the tennis<br />court.<br /><br />Meeting Mr. Samgrass, whom we had seen less often of late, I told him<br />of our choice. He was standing at the table in Black-well's where recent<br />German books were displayed, setting aside a little heap of purchases.<br /><br />"You're sharing digs with Sebastian?" he said. "So he is coming up next<br />term?"<br /><br />"I suppose so. Why shouldn't he be?"<br /><br />"I don't know why; I somehow thought perhaps he wasn't. I'm always<br />wrong about things like that. I like Merton Street."<br /><br />He showed me the books he was buying, which, since I knew no German,<br />were not of interest to me. As I left him he said: "Don't think me<br />interfering, you know, but I shouldn't make any definite arrangement in<br />Merton Street until you're sure."<br /><br />I told Sebastian of this conversation and he said: "Yes, there's a plot<br />on. Mummy wants me to go and live with Monsignor Bell."<br /><br />"Why didn't you tell me about it?"<br /><br />"Because I'm not going to live with Monsignor Bell."<br /><br />"I still think you might have told me. When did it start?"<br /><br />"Oh, it's been going on. Mummy's very clever you know. She saw she'd<br />failed with you. I expect it was the letter you wrote after reading Uncle<br />Ned's book."<br /><br />"I hardly said anything."<br /><br />"That was it. If you were going to be any help to her, you would have<br />said a lot. Uncle Ned is the test, you know."<br /><br />But it seemed she had not quite despaired, for a few days later I got a<br />note from her which said: 7 shall be passing through Oxford on Tuesday and<br />hope to see you and Sebastian. I would life to see you alone for five<br />minutes before I see him. Is that too much to ask? I will come to your rooms<br />at about twelve.<br /><br />She came; she admired my rooms. . . . "My brothers Simon and Ned were<br />here, you know. Ned had rooms on the garden front. I wanted Sebastian to<br />come here, too, but my husband was at Christ Church and, as you know, he<br />took charge of Sebastian's education"; she admired my drawings . . .<br />"'everyone loves your paintings in the garden-room. We shall never forgive<br />you if you don't finish them." Finally, she came to her point.<br /><br />"I expect you've guessed already what I have come to ask. Quite simply,<br />is Sebastian drinking too much this term?"<br /><br />I had guessed; I answered: "If he were, I shouldn't answer. As it is, I<br />can say, 'No.'"<br /><br />She said: "I believe you. Thank God!" and we went together to luncheon<br />at Christ Church.<br /><br />That night Sebastian had his third disaster and was found by the junior<br />dean at one o'clock, wandering round Tom Quad hopelessly drunk.<br /><br />I had left him morose but completely sober at a few minutes before<br />twelve. In the succeeding hour he had drunk half a bottle of whiskey alone.<br />He did not remember much about 1 it when he came to tell me next morning.<br /><br />"Have you been doing that a lot," I asked--"drinking by yourself after<br />I've gone?"<br /><br />"About twice; perhaps four times. It's only when they start bothering<br />me. I'd be all right if they'd only leave me alone."<br /><br />"They won't now," I said.<br /><br />"I know."<br /><br />We both knew that this was a crisis. I had no love for Sebastian that<br />morning; he needed it, but I had none to give.<br /><br />"Really," I said, "if you are going to embark on a solitary bout of<br />drinking every time you see a member of your family, it's perfectly<br />hopeless."<br /><br />"Oh, yes," said Sebastian with great sadness. "I know. It's hopeless."<br /><br />But my pride was stung because I had been made to look a liar and I<br />could not respond to his need.<br /><br />"Well, what do you propose to do?"<br /><br />"I shan't do anything. They'll do it all."<br /><br />And I let him go without comfort.<br /><br />Then the machinery began to move again, and I saw it all repeated as it<br />had happened in December; Mr. Samgrass and Monsignor Bell saw the Dean of<br />Christ Church; Brideshead came up for a night; the heavy wheels stirred and<br />the small wheels spun. Everyone was exceedingly sorry for Lady Marchmain,<br />whose brothers' names stood in letters of gold on the war memorial, whose<br />brothers' memory was fresh in many breasts.<br /><br />She came to see me and, again, I must reduce to a few words a<br />conversation which took us from Holywell to the Parks, through Mesopotamia,<br />and over the ferry to North Oxford, where she was staying the night with a<br />houseful of nuns who were in some way under her protection.<br /><br />"You must believe," I said, "that when I told you Sebastian was not<br />drinking, I was telling you the truth, as I knew it."<br /><br />"I know you wish to be a good friend to him."<br /><br />"That is not what I mean. I believed what I told you. I still believe<br />it to some extent. I believe he has been drunk two or three times before,<br />not more."<br /><br />"It's no good, Charles," she said. "All you can mean is that you have<br />not as much influence or knowledge of him as I thought. It is no good either<br />of us trying to believe him. I've - known drunkards before. One of the most<br />terrible things about them is their deceit. Love of truth is the first thing<br />that goes.<br /><br />"After that happy luncheon together. When you left he was so sweet to<br />me, just as he used to be as a little boy, and I agreed to all he wanted.<br />You know I had been doubtful about his sharing rooms with you. I know you'll<br />understand me when I say that. You know that we are all fond of you apart<br />from your being Sebastian's friend. We should miss you so much if you ever<br />stopped coming to stay with us. But I want Sebastian to have all sorts of<br />friends, not just one. Monsignor Bell tells me he never mixes with the other<br />Catholics, never goes to the Newman, very rarely goes to mass even. Heaven<br />forbid that he should only know Catholics, but he must know some. It needs a<br />very strong faith to stand entirely alone and Sebastian isn't strong.'<br /><br />"But I was so happy at luncheon on Tuesday that I gave up all my<br />objections; I went round widi him and saw the rooms you had chosen. They are<br />charming. And we decided on some furniture you could have from London to<br />make them nicer. And then, on the very night after I had seen him! No,<br />Charles, it is not in the Logic of the Thing."<br /><br />As she said it I thought, That's a phrase she's picked up from one of<br />her intellectual hangers-on.<br /><br />"Well," I said, "have you a remedy?"<br /><br />"The College are being extraordinarily kind. They say they will not<br />send him down provided he goes to live with Monsignor Bell. It's not a thing<br />I could have suggested myself, but it was the<br />Monsignor's own idea. He specially sent a message to you to say how<br />welcome you would always be. There's not room for you actually in the old<br />Palace, but I daresay you wouldn't want that yourself."<br /><br />"Lady Marchmain, if you want to make him a drunkard that's the way to<br />do it. Don't you see that any idea of his being watched would be fatal?"<br /><br />"Oh, dear, it's no good trying to explain. Protestants always think<br />Catholic priests are spies."<br /><br />"I don't mean that." I tried to explain but made a poor business of it.<br />"He must feel free."<br /><br />"But he's been free, always, up till now, and look at the result."<br /><br />We had reached the ferry; we had reached a deadlock. With scarcely<br />another word I saw her to the convent, then took the bus back to Carfax.<br /><br />Sebastian was in my rooms waiting for me. "I'm going to cable to Papa,"<br />he said. "He won't let them force me into this priest's house."<br /><br />"But if they make it a condition, of your coming up?"<br /><br />"I shan't come up. Can you imagine me -- serving mass twice a week,<br />helping at tea parties for shy Catholic freshmen, dining with the visiting<br />lecturer at the Newman, drinking a glass of port when we have guests, with<br />Monsignor Bell's eye on me to see I don't get too much, being explained,<br />when I was out of the room, as the rather embarrassing local inebriate who's<br />being taken in because his mother is so charming?"<br /><br />"I told her it wouldn't do," I said.<br /><br />"Shall we get really drunk to-night?"<br /><br />"It's the one time it could do no conceivable harm," I said.<br /><br />"Contra mundum?"<br /><br />"Contra mundum."<br /><br />"Bless you, Charles. There aren't many evenings left to us."<br /><br />And that night, the first time for many weeks, we got deliriously drunk<br />together; I saw him to the gate as all the bells were striking midnight, and<br />reeled back to my rooms under a starry heaven which swam dizzily among the<br />towers, and fell asleep in my clothes as I had not done for a year.<br /><br /><br />Next day Lady Marchmain left Oxford, taking Sebastian with her.<br />Brideshead and I went to his rooms to sort out what he would have sent on<br />and what leave behind.<br /><br />Brideshead was as grave and impersonal as ever. "It's a pity Sebastian<br />doesn't know Monsignor Bell better," he said. "He'd find him a charming man<br />to live with. I was there my last year. My mother believes Sebastian is a<br />confirmed drunkard. Is he?"<br /><br />"He's in danger of becoming one."<br /><br />"I believe God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people."<br /><br />"For God's sake," I said, for I was near to tears that morning, "why<br />bring God into everything?"<br /><br />"I'm sorry. I forgot. But you know that's an extremely funny question."<br /><br />"Is it?"<br /><br />"To me. Not to you."<br /><br />"No, not to me. It seems to me that without your religion Sebastian<br />would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man."<br /><br />"It's arguable," said Brideshead. "Do you think he will need this<br />elephant's foot again?"<br /><br />That evening I went across the quad to visit Collins. He was alone with<br />his texts working by the failing light at his open window. "Hullo," he said.<br />"Come in. I haven't seen you all the term. I'm afraid I've nothing to offer<br />you. Why have you deserted the smart set?"<br /><br />"I'm the loneliest man in Oxford," I said. "Sebastian Flyte's been sent<br />down."<br /><br />Presently I asked him what he was doing in the Long Vacation. He told<br />me; it sounded excruciatingly dull. Then I aske him if ,he had got digs for<br />next term. Yes, he told me, rather far out but very comfortable. He was<br />sharing with Tyngate, the secretary of the College Essay Society.<br /><br />"There's one room we haven't filled yet. Barker was coming, but he<br />feels now he's standing for president of the Union he ought to be nearer<br />in."<br /><br />It was in both our minds that perhaps I might take that room.<br /><br />"Where are you going?"<br /><br />"I was going to Merton Street with Sebastian Flyte. That's no use now."<br /><br />Still neither of us made the suggestion and the moment passed. When, I<br />left he said, "I hope you find someone for Merton Street," and I said, "I<br />hope you find someone for the Iffley Road," and I never spoke to him again.<br /><br />There was only ten days of term to go; I got through them somehow and<br />returned to London as I had done in such different circumstances the year<br />before, with no plans made.<br /><br />"That very good-looking friend of yours," asked my father -- "is he not<br />with you?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"I quite thought he had taken this over as his home. I'm sorry. I liked<br />him."<br /><br />"Father, do you particularly want me to take my degree?"<br /><br />"I want you to? Good gracious, why should I want such a thing? No use<br />to me. Not much use to you either, as far as I've seen."<br /><br />"That's exactly what I've been thinking. I thought perhaps it was<br />rather a waste of time going back to Oxford."<br /><br />Until then my father had taken only a limited interest in what I was<br />saying; now he put down his book, took off his spectacles, and looked at me<br />hard. "You've been sent down," he said. "My brother warned me of this."<br /><br />"No, I've not."<br /><br />"Well, then, what's all the talk about?" he asked testily, resuming his<br />spectacles, searching for his place on the page. "Everyone stays up at least<br />three years. I knew one man who took seven to get a pass degree in<br />theology."<br /><br />"I only thought that if I was not going to take up one o the<br />professions where a degree is necessary, it might be best to start now on<br />what I intend doing. I intend to be a painter."<br /><br />But to this my father made no answer at the time.<br /><br />The idea, however, seemed to take root in his mind; by the time we<br />spoke of the matter again it was firmly established.<br /><br />"When you're a painter," he said suddenly at Sunday luncheon, "you'll<br />need a studio."<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"Well, there isn't a studio here. There isn't even a room you could<br />decently use as a studio. I'm not going to have you painting in the<br />gallery."<br /><br />"No. I never meant to."<br /><br />"Nor will I have undraped models all over the house, not critics with<br />their horrible jargon. And I don't like the smell of turpentine. I presume<br />you intend to do the thing thoroughly and use oil paint?" My father belonged<br />to a generation which divided painters into the serious and the amateur,<br />according as they used oil or water.<br /><br />"I don't suppose I should do much painting the first year. Anyway, I<br />should be working at a school."<br /><br />"Abroad?" asked my father hopefully. "There are some excellent schools<br />abroad I believe."<br /><br />It was all happening rather faster than I had intended.<br /><br />"Abroad or here. I should have to look round first."<br /><br />"Look round abroad," he said.<br /><br />"Then you agree to my leaving Oxford?"<br /><br />"Agree? Agree? My dear boy, you're twenty-two."<br /><br />"Twenty," I said, "twenty-one in October."<br /><br />"Is that all? It seems much longer."<br /><br /><br />A letter from Lady Marchmain completes this episode.<br /><br /><br />My dear Charles [she wrote],<br /><br />Sebastian left me this morning to join his father abroad. Before he<br />went I asked him if he had written to you. He said no, so I must write, tho'<br />I can hardly hope to say in a letter what I could not say on our last walk.<br />But you must not be left in silence.<br /><br />The College has sent Sebastian down for a term only, and will take him<br />back after Christmas on condition he goes to live with Mgr. Bell. It is for<br />him to decide. Meanwhile Mr. Samgrass has very kindly consented to take<br />charge of him. As soon as his visit to his father is over Mr. Samgrass will<br />pick him up and they will go together to the Levant, where Mr. Samgrass has<br />long been anxious to investigate a number of orthodox monasteries. He hopes<br />this may be a new interest for Sebastian.<br /><br />Sebastian's stay here has not been happy.<br /><br />When they come home at Christmas I know Sebastian will want to see you,<br />and so shall we all. I hope your arrangements for next term have not been<br />too much upset and that everything will go well with you.<br /><br />Yours sincerely,<br />teresa marchmain<br /><br />I went to the garden-room this morning ahd was so very sorry.Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-33824698381690119832008-08-06T12:52:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:14:14.236+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book I. Et in Arcadia Ego. Chapter FourChapter Four<br /><br />the languor of Youth -- how unique and quintessential it is! How<br />quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the<br />illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth -- all save<br />this -- come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we<br />experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left<br />behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its<br />concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us<br />in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged. These things<br />are a part of life itself; but languor -- the relaxation of yet unwearie^l<br />sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in<br />the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse -- that belongs to<br />Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes<br />enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps<br />the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly<br />experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those<br />languid days at Brideshead.<br /><br />"Why is this house called a 'Castle'?"<br /><br />"It used to be one until they moved it."<br /><br />"What can you mean?"<br /><br />"Just that. We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then in<br />Inigo Jones's time we took a fancy to the valley and pulled the castle down,<br />carted the stones up here and built a new house. I'm glad they did, aren't<br />you?"<br /><br />"If it was mine I'd never live anywhere else."<br /><br />"But you see, Charles, it isn't mine. Just at the moment it is, but<br />usually it's full of ravening beasts. If it could only be like this always<br />-- always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good<br />temper. . . ."<br /><br />It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we<br />wandered alone together through that enchanted j palace; Sebastian in his<br />wheel-chair spinning down die box-edged walks of the kitchen gardens in<br />search of alpine strawberries and warm figs, propelling himself through the<br />succession; of hothouses, from scent to scent and climate to climate, to cut<br />the muscat grapes and choose orchids for our buttonholes; Sebas- | tian<br />hobbling, with a pantomime of difficulty, to the old nurseries, sitting<br />beside me on the thread-bare, flowered carpet with the toy-cupboard empty<br />about us and Nanny Hawkins stitching com- I placehtly in the corner, saying,<br />"You're one as bad as the other; a pair of children the two of you. Is that<br />what they teach you at college?" Sebastian prone on the sunny seat in the<br />colonnade, 1 as he was now, and I in a hard chair beside him, trying to draw<br />the fountain.<br /><br />"Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later."<br /><br />"Oh, Charles, don't be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was<br />built, if it's pretty?"<br /><br />"It's the sort of thing I like to know."<br />"Oh dear, I thought I'd cured you of all that--the terrible Mr.<br />Collins."<br /><br />It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander<br />from room to room, from the Soanesque library to the Chinese drawing-room,<br />adazzle with gilt pagodas and nodding mandarins, painted paper and<br />Chippendale fret-work, from the Pompeian parlour to the great tapestry-hung<br />hall which stood unchanged, as it had been designed two hundred and fifty<br />years before; to sit, hour after hour, in the pillared shade looking out on<br />the terrace.<br /><br />This terrace was the final consummation of the house's plan; it stood<br />on massive stone ramparts above the lakes, so that from the hall steps it<br />seemed to overhang them, as though, standing by the balustrade, one could<br />have dropped a pebble into the first of them immediately below one's feet.<br />It was embraced by the two arms of the colonnade; beyond the pavilions<br />groves of lime led to the wooded hillsides. Part of the terrace was paved,<br />part planted with flower-beds and arabesques of dwarf box; taller box grew<br />in a dense hedge, making a wide oval, cut into niches and interspersed with<br />statuary, and, in the centre, dominating the whole spendid space, rose the<br />fountain; such a fountain as one might expect to find in a piazza of<br />Southern Italy, such a fountain as was, indeed, found there a century ago by<br />one of Sebastian's ancestors; found, purchased, imported and re-erected in<br />an alien but welcoming climate.<br /><br />Sebastian set me to draw it. It was an ambitious subject for an amateur<br />-- an oval basin with an island of formal rocks at its centre; on the rocks<br />grew, in stone, formal tropical vegetation and wild English fern in its<br />natural fronds; through them ran a dozen streams that counterfeited springs,<br />and round them sported fantastic tropical animals, camels and camelopards<br />and an ebullient lion all vomiting water; on the rocks, to the height of the<br />pediment, stood an Egyptian obelisk of red sandstone -- but, by some odd<br />chance, for the thing was far beyond me, I brought it off and by judicious<br />omissions and some stylish tricks, produced a very passable echo of<br />Piranesi. "Shall I give it to your mother?" I asked.<br /><br />"Why ? You don't know her."<br /><br />"It seems polite. I'm staying in her house."<br /><br />"Give it to Nanny," said Sebastian.<br /><br />I did so, and she put it among the collection on the top of her chest<br />of drawers, remarking that it had quite a look of the thing, which she had<br />often heard admired but could never see<br />the beauty of, herself.<br /><br />I was myself in almost the same position as Nanny Hawkins.<br /><br />Since the days when, as a school-boy, I used to bicycle round the<br />neighbouring parishes, rubbing brasses and photographing fonts, I have<br />nursed a love of architecture, but though in opinion I had made that easy<br />leap, characteristic of my generation; from the puritanism of Ruskin to the<br />puritanism of Roger Fry, my sentiments at heart were insular and mediaeval.<br /><br />This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and<br />insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed j through<br />those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour<br />by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering<br />echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt<br />a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that<br />spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.<br /><br /><br />One day in a cupboard we found a large japanned-tin box of oil paints<br />still in workable condition.<br /><br />"Mummy bought them a year or two ago. Someone told her that you could<br />only appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it. We laughed at<br />her a great deal about it. She couldn't draw at all, and however .bright the<br />colours were in the tubes, by the time Mummy had mixed them up, they came<br />out a kind of khaki." Various dry, muddy smears on the palette confirmed<br />this statement. "Cordelia was always made to wash the brushes. In the end we<br />all protested and made Mummy stop."<br /><br />The paints gave us the idea of decorating the office; this was a small<br />room opening on the colonnade; it had once been used for estate business,<br />but was now derelict, holding only some garden games and a tub of dead<br />aloes; it had plainly been designed for a softer use; perhaps as a tea-room<br />or study, for the plaster walls were decorated with delicate rococo panels<br />and the roof was prettily groined. Here, in one of the smaller oval frames,<br />I sketched a romantic landscape, and in the days that followed filled it out<br />in colour, and by luck and the happy mood of the moment, made a success of<br />it. The brush seemed somehow to do what was wanted of it. It .was a<br />landscape without figures, a summer scene of white cloud and blue distances,<br />with an ivy-clad ruin in the foreground, rocks and a waterfall affording a<br />rugged introduction to the receding parkland behind. I knew little of oil<br />painting and learned its ways as I worked. When, in a week, it was finished,<br />Sebastian was eager for me to start on one of the larger panels. I made some<br />sketches. He called for a fte champtre with a ribboned swing and a Negro<br />page and a shepherd playing the pipes, but the thing languished. I knew it<br />was good chance that had made my landscape, and that this elaborate pastiche<br />was too much for me.<br /><br />One day we went down to the cellars with Wilcox and saw the empty bays<br />which had once held a vast store of wine; one transept only was used now;<br />there the bins were well stocked, some of them with vintages fifty years<br />old.<br /><br />"There's been nothing added since his Lordship went abroad," said<br />Wilcox. "A lot of the old wine wants drinking up. We ought to have laid down<br />the eightcens and twenties. I've had several letters about it from the wine<br />merchants, but her Ladyship says to ask Lord Brideshead, and he says to ask<br />his Lordship, and his Lordship says to ask the lawyers. That's how we get<br />low. There's enough here for ten years at the rate it's going, but how shall<br />we be then?"<br /><br />Wilcox welcomed our interest; we had bottles brought up from every bin,<br />and it was during those tranquil evenings with Sebastian that I first made a<br />serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of that rich harvest which<br />was to be my stay in many barren years. We would sit, he and I, in the<br />Painted Parlour with three bottles open on the table and three glasses<br />before each of us; Sebastian had found a book on wine-tasting, and we<br />followed its instructions in detail. We warmed the glass slightly at a<br />candle, filled a third of it, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our<br />hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with<br />it and rolled it over the tongue, ringing it on the palate like a coin on a<br />counter, tilted our heads back and let it trickle down the throat. Then we<br />talked of it and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another<br />wine; then back to the first, then on to another, until all three were in<br />circulation and the order of glasses got confused, and we fell out over<br />which was which, and we passed the glasses to and fro between us until there<br />were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled<br />from the wrong bottle, till we were obliged to start again with three clean<br />glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and<br />more exotic.<br /><br />"... It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle."<br /><br />"Like a leprechaun."<br /><br />"Dappled, in a tapestry meadow."<br /><br />"Like a flute by still water."<br /><br />"... And this is a wise old wine."<br /><br />"A prophet in a cave."<br /><br />"... And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck."<br /><br />"Like a swan."<br /><br />"Like the last unicorn."<br /><br />And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the<br />starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in<br />the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks.<br /><br />"Ought we to be drunk every night?" Sebastian asked one morning.<br /><br />"Yes, I think so."<br /><br />"I think so too."<br /><br />We saw few strangers. There was the agent, a lean and pouchy colonel,<br />who crossed our path occasionally and once came to tea. Usually we managed<br />to hide from him. On Sundays a monk was fetched from a neighbouring<br />monastery to say mass and breakfast with us. He was the first priest I ever<br />met; I noticed how unlike he was to a parson, but Brideshead was a place of<br />such enchantment to me that I expected everything and everyone to be unique;<br />Father Phipps was in fact a bland, bun-faced man with an interest in county<br />cricket which he obstinately believed us to share.<br /><br />"You know, Father, Charles and I simply don't tyiow about cricket."<br /><br />"I wish I'd seen Tennyson make that fifty-eight last Thursday. That<br />must have been an innings. The account in The Times was excellent. Did you<br />see him against the South Africans?"<br /><br />"I've never seen him."<br /><br />"Neither have I. I haven't seen a first-class match for years -- not<br />since Father Graves took me when we were passing through Leeds, after we'd<br />been to the induction of the Abbot at Ample-forth. Father Graves managed to<br />look up a train which gave us three hours to wait on the afternoon of the<br />match against Lancashire. That was an afternoon. I remember every ball of<br />it. Since then I've had to go by the papers. You seldom go to sec'cricket?"<br /><br />"Never," I said, and he looked at me with the expression I have seen<br />since in the religious, of innocent wonder that those who expose themselves<br />to the dangers of the world should avail themselves so little of its varied<br />solace.<br /><br />Sebastian always heard his mass, which was ill-attended. Brideshead was<br />not an old-established centre of Catholicism. Lady Marchmain had introduced<br />a few Catholic servants, but the majority of them, and all the cottagers,<br />prayed, if anywhere, among the Flyte tombs in the little grey church at the<br />gates.<br /><br />Sebastian's faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I<br />felt particularly concerned to solve. I had no religion. I was taken to<br />church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as<br />though in compensation, from the time I went to my public school I was<br />excused church in the holidays. The view implicit in my education was that<br />the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and<br />that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of<br />present value, a division in which the main weight went against it; religion<br />was a hobby which some people professed and others; did not; at the best it<br />was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of "complexes" and<br />"inhibitions" -- catchwords I of the decade -- and of the intolerance,<br />hypocrisy, and sheer j| stupidity attributed to it for centuries. No one had<br />ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent<br />philosophic system and intransigeant historical claims; nor, had they done<br />so, would I have been much interested.<br /><br />Often, almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance ' word in<br />his conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, ' but I took it as<br />a foible, like his Teddy-bear. We never discussed the matter until on the<br />second Sunday at Brideshead, when Father Phipps had left us and we sat in<br />the colonnade with the papers, he surprised me by saying: "Oh dear, it's<br />very difficult being a Catholic."<br /><br />"Does it make much difference to you?"<br /><br />"Of course. All the time."<br /><br />"Well, I can't say I've noticed it. Are you struggling against<br />temptation? You don't seem much more virtuous than me."<br /><br />"I'm very, very much wickeder," said Sebastian indignantly.<br /><br />"Well then?"<br /><br />"Who was it used to pray, 'Oh God, make me good, but not yet'?"'<br /><br />"I don't know. You, I should think."<br /><br />"Why, yes, I do, every day. But it isn't that." He turned back to the<br />pages of the News of -the World and said, "Another naughty scout-master."<br /><br />"I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?"<br /><br />"Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible<br />to me."<br /><br />"But, my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all."<br /><br />"Can't I?"<br /><br />"I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and<br />the ass."<br /><br />"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."<br /><br />"But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea."<br /><br />"But I do. That's how I believe."<br /><br />"And in prayers? You think you can kneel down in front of a statue and<br />say a few words, not even out loud, just in your mind, and change the<br />weather; or that some saints are more influential than others, and you must<br />get hold of the right one to help you on the right problem?"<br /><br />"Oh yes. Don't you remember last term when I took Aloysius and left him<br />behind I didn't know where? I prayed like mad to St. Anthony of Padua that<br />morning, and immediately after lunch there was Mr. Nichols at Canterbury<br />Gate with Aloysius in his arms, saying I'd left him in his cab."<br /><br />"Well," I said, "if you can believe all that and you don't want to be<br />good, where's the difficulty about your religion?"<br /><br />"If you can't see, you can't."<br /><br />"Well, where?"<br /><br />"Oh, don't be a bore, Charles. I want to read about a woman in Hull<br />who's been using an instrument."<br /><br />"You started the subject. I was just getting interested."<br /><br />"I'll never mention it again . . . Thirty-eight other cases were taken<br />into consideration in sentencing her to six months -- golly!"<br /><br />But he did mention it again, some ten days later, as we were lying on<br />the roof of the house, sunbathing and watching through a telescope the<br />Agricultural Show which was in progress in the park below us. It was a<br />modest two-day show serving the neighbouring parishes, and surviving more as<br />a fair and social gathering than as a centre of serious competition. A ring<br />was marked out in flags, and round it had been pitched half a dozen tents o<br />varying size; there was a judges' box, and some pens for livestock; the<br />largest marquee was for refreshments, and there the<br />farmers congregated in numbers. Preparations had been going on for a<br />week. "We shall have to hide," said Sebastian as the day approached. "My<br />brother will be here. He's in his element 4 at the Agricultural<br />Show." So we lay on the roof under the balustrade.<br /><br />Brideshead came down by train in the morning and lunched with Colonel<br />Fender, the agent. I met him for five minutes on his arrival. Anthony<br />Blanche's description was peculiarly apt; he had the Flyte face, carved by<br />an Aztec. We could see him now, through the telescope, moving affably among<br />the tenants, stopping to greet the judges in their box, leaning over a pen<br />gazing seriously at the cattle.<br /><br />"Queer fellow, my brother," said Sebastian.<br /><br />"He looks normal enough."<br /><br />"Oh, but he's not. If you only knew, he's much the craziest of us, only<br />it doesn't come out at all. He's all twisted inside. He wanted to be a<br />priest, you know."<br /><br />"I didn't."<br /><br />"I think he still does. He nearly became a Jesuit, straight from<br />Stonyhurst. It was awful for Mummy. She couldn't exactly try and stop him,<br />but of course it was the last thing she wanted. Think what people would have<br />said -- the eldest son; it's not as if it had been me. And poor Papa. The<br />Church has been enough trouble to him without that happening. There was a<br />frightful to-do -- monks and monsignori running round the house like mice,<br />and Brideshead just sitting glum and talking about the will of God. He was<br />the most upset, you see, when Papa went abroad -- much more than Mummy<br />really. Finally they persuaded him to go to Oxford and think it over for<br />three years. Now he's trying to make up his mind. He talks of going into the<br />Guards and into the House of Commons and of marrying. He doesn't know what<br />he wants. I wonder if I should have been like that, if I'd gone to<br />Stonyhurst. I should have gone, only Papa went abroad before I was old<br />enough, and the first thing he insisted on was my going to Eton."<br /><br />"Has your father given up religion?"<br /><br />"Well, he's had to in a way; he only took to it when he married Mummy.<br />When he went off, he left that behind with the rest of us. You must meet<br />him. He's a very nice man."<br /><br />'Sebastian had never spoken seriously of his father before.<br /><br />I said: "It must have upset you all when your father went away."<br /><br />"All but Cordelia. She was too young. It upset me at the time. Mummy<br />tried to explain it to the three eldest of us so that we wouldn't hate Papa.<br />I was the only one who didn't. I believe she wishes I did. I was always his<br />favourite. I should be staying with him now, if it wasn't for this foot. I'm<br />the only one who goes. Why don't you come too? You'd like him."<br /><br />A man with a megaphone was shouting the results of the last event in<br />the field below; his voice came faintly to us.<br /><br />"So you see we're a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia<br />are both fervent Catholics; he's miserable, she's bird-happy; Julia and I<br />are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn't; Mummy is popularly<br />believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated -- and I wouldn't know<br />which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn't<br />seem to have much to do with it, and that's all I want. ... I wish I liked<br />Catholics more."<br /><br />"They seem just like other people."<br /><br />"My dear Charles, that's exactly what they're not -- particularly in<br />this country, where they're so few. It's not just that they're a clique --<br />as a matter of fact, they're at least four cliques all blackguarding each<br />other half the time -- but they've got an entirely different outlook on<br />life; everything they think important is different from other people. They<br />try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time. It's<br />quite natural, really, that they should. But you see it's difficult for<br />semi-heathens like Julia and me."<br /><br />We were interrupted in this unusually grave conversation by 1 loud,<br />childish cries from beyond the chimney-stacks, "Sebastian, Sebastian."<br /><br />"Good heavens!" said Sebastian, reaching for a blanket. "That sounds<br />like my sister Cordelia. Cover yourself up."<br /><br />"Where are you?"<br /><br />There came into view a robust child of ten or eleven; she had the<br />unmistakable family characteristics, but had them ill-arranged in a frank<br />and chubby plainness, two thick old-fashioned pigtails hung down her back.<br /><br />"Go away, Cordelia. We've got no clothes on."<br /><br />"Why? You're quite decent. I guessed you were here. You didn't know I<br />was about, did you? I came down with Bridey J and stopped to see Francis<br />Xavier." To me, "He's my pig. Then we had lunch with Colonel Fender and then<br />the show. Francis Xavier got a special mention. That beast Randal got first<br />with a mangy animal. Darling Sebastian, I am pleased to see you again. How's<br />your poor foot?"<br /><br />"Say how-d'you-do to Mr. Ryder."<br /><br />"Oh, sorry. How d'you do?" All the family charm was in her smile.<br />"They're all getting pretty boozy down there, so I came away. I say, who's<br />been painting the office? I went in to look for a shooting stick and saw<br />it."<br /><br />"Be careful what you say. It's Mr. Ryder."<br /><br />"But it's lovely. I say, did you really? You are clever. Why don't you<br />both dress and come down? There's no one about."<br /><br />"Bridey's sure to bring the judges in."<br /><br />"But he won't. I heard him making plans not to. He's very sour to-day.<br />He didn't want me to have dinner with you, but I fixed that. Come on. I'll<br />be in the nursery when you're fit to be seen."<br /><br /><br />* * *<br /><br />We were a sombre little party that evening. Only Cordelia was perfectly<br />at ease, rejoicing in the food, the lateness of the hour and her brothers'<br />company. Brideshead was three years older than Sebastian and I, but he<br />seemed of another generation. He had the physical tricks of his family, and<br />his smile, when it rarely came, was as lovely as theirs; he spoke, in their<br />voice, with a gravity and restraint which in my cousin Jasper would have<br />sounded pompous and false, but in him was plainly un-assumed and<br />unconscious.<br /><br />"I am so sorry to miss so much of your visit," he said to me. "You are<br />being looked after properly? I hope Sebastian is seeing to the wine. Wilcox<br />is apt to be rather grudging when he is on his own."<br /><br />"He's treated us very liberally."<br /><br />"I am delighted to hear it. You are fond of wine?"<br /><br />"Very."<br /><br />"I wish I were. It is such a bond with other men. At Magdalen I tried<br />to get drunk more than once, but I did not enjoy it. Beer and whiskey I find<br />even less appetising. Events like this afternoon's are a torment to me in<br />consequence."<br /><br />"I like wine," said Cordelia.<br /><br />"My-sister Cordelia's last report said that she was not only the worst<br />girl in the school, but the worst there had ever been in the memory of the<br />oldest nun."<br /><br />"That's because I refused to be an Enfant de Marie. Reverend Mother<br />said that if I didn't keep my room tidier I couldn't be one, so I said,<br />Well, I won't be one, and I don't believe Our Blessed Lady cares two hoots<br />whether I put my gym shoes on the left or the right of my dancing shoes.<br />Reverend Mother was livid."<br /><br />"Our Lady cares about obedience."<br /><br />"Bridey, you mustn't be pious," said Sebastian. "We've got an atheist<br />with us."<br /><br />"Agnostic," I said.<br /><br />"Really? Is there much of that at your college? There was a certain<br />amount at Magdalen."<br /><br />"I really don't know. I was one long before I went to Oxford."<br /><br />"It's everywhere," said Brideshead.<br /><br />Religion seemed an inevitable topic that day. For some time we talked<br />about the Agricultural Show. Then Brideshead said, "I saw the Bishop in<br />London last week. You know, he wants to close our chapel."<br /><br />"Oh, he couldn't," said Cordelia.<br /><br />"I don't think Mummy will let him," said Sebastian.<br /><br />"It's too far away," said Brideshead. "There are a dozen families round<br />Melstead who can't get here. He wants to open a mass centre there."<br /><br />"But what about us?" said Sebastian. "Do we have to drive out on winter<br />mornings?"<br /><br />"We must have the Blessed Sacrament here," said Cordelia. "I like<br />popping in at odd times; so does Mummy."<br /><br />"So do I," said Brideshead, "but there are so few of us. It's not as<br />though we were old Catholics with everyone on the estate coming to mass.<br />It'll have to go sooner or later, perhaps after Mummy's time. The point is<br />whether it wouldn't be better to let it go now. You are an artist, Ryder,<br />what do you think of it aesthetically?"<br /><br />"I think it's beautiful" said Cordelia with tears in her eyes.<br /><br />"Is it Good Art?"<br /><br />"Well, I don't quite know what you mean," I said warily. "I think it's<br />a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be<br />greatly admired."<br /><br />"But surely it can't be good twenty years ago and good in eighty years,<br />and not good now?"<br /><br />"Well, it may be good now. All I mean is that I don't happen to like it<br />much."<br /><br />"But is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it<br />good?"<br /><br />"Bridey, don't be so Jesuitical," said Sebastian, but I knew that this<br />disagreement was not a matter of words only, but expressed a deep and<br />impassable division between us; neither had any understanding of the other,<br />nor ever could.<br /><br />"Isn't that just the distinction'you made about wine?" '"No. I like and<br />think good the end to which wine is sometimes the means -- the promotion of<br />sympathy between man and man. But in my own case it does not achieve that<br />end, so I neither like it nor think it good for me."<br /><br />"Bridey, do stop."<br /><br />"I'm sorry," he said, "I thought it rather an interesting point."<br /><br />"Thank God I went to Eton," said Sebastian.<br /><br />After dinner Brideshead said: "I'm afraid I must take Sebastian away<br />for half an hour. I shall be busy all day to-morrow, and I'm off immediately<br />after the show. I've a lot of papers for Father to sign. Sebastian must take<br />them out and explain them to him. It's time you were in bed, Cordelia."<br />"Must digest first," she said. "I'm not used to gorging like this at<br />night. I'll talk to Charles."<br /><br />"Charles?" said Sebastian. "Charles? Mister Ryder, to you, child."<br /><br />"Come on, Charles."<br /><br />When we were alone she said: "Are you really an agnostic?"<br /><br />"Does your family always talk about religion all the time?"<br /><br />"Not all the time. It's a subject that just comes up naturally, doesn't<br />it?"<br /><br />"Does it ? It never has with me before."<br /><br />"Then perhaps you are an agnostic. I'll pray for you."<br /><br />"That's very kind of you."<br /><br />"I can't spare you a whole rosary you know. Just a decade. I've got<br />such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about<br />once a week."<br /><br />"I'm sure it's more than I deserve."<br /><br />"Oh, I've got some harder cases than you. Lloyd George and the Kaiser<br />and Olive Banks."<br /><br />"Who is she?"<br /><br />"She was bunked from the convent last term. I don't quite know what<br />for. Reverend Mother found something she'd been writing. D'you know, if you<br />weren't an agnostic, I should ask you for five shillings to buy a black<br />god-daughter?"<br /><br />"Nothing will surprise me about your religion."<br /><br />"It's a new thing a missionary priest started last term. You send five<br />bob to some nuns in Africa and they christen a baby and name her after you.<br />I've got six black Cordelias already. Isn't it lovely?"<br /><br />When Brideshead and Sebastian returned, Cordelia was sent to bed.<br />Brideshead began again on our discussion.<br /><br />"Of course, you are right really," he said. "You take art as a means<br />not as an end. That is strict theology, but it's unusual to find an agnostic<br />believing it."<br /><br />"Cordelia has promised to pray for me," I said.<br /><br />"She made a novena for her pig," said Sebastian.<br /><br />"You know all this is very puzzling to me," I said.<br /><br />"I think we're causing scandal," said Brideshead.<br /><br />That night I began to realize how little I really knew of Sebastian,<br />and to understand why he had always sought to keep me apart from the rest of<br />his life. He was like a friend made on<br />board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port.<br /><br /><br />Brideshead and Cordelia went away; the tents were struck on the show<br />ground, the flags uprooted; the trampled grass began to regain its colour;<br />the month that had .started in leisurely fashion came swiftly to its end.<br />Sebastian walked without a stick now and had forgotten his injury.<br /><br />"I think you'd better come with me to Venice," he said.<br /><br />"No money."<br /><br />"I thought of that. We live on Papa when we get there. The lawyers pay<br />my fare -- first class and sleeper. We can both travel third for that."<br /><br />And so we went; first by the long, cheap sea-crossing to Dunkirk,<br />sitting all night on deck under a clear sky, watching the grey dawn break<br />over the sand dunes; then to Paris, on wooden seats, where we drove to the<br />Lotti, had baths and shaved, lunched at Foyot's, which was hot and<br />half-empty, loitered sleepily among the shops and sat long in a. half-empty<br />cafe waiting till the time of our train; then in the warm, dusty evening to<br />the Gare de Lyon, to the slow train South; again the wooden seats, a<br />carriage full of the poor, visiting their families -- travelling as the poor<br />do in Northern countries, with a multitude of small bundles and an air of<br />patient submission to authority -- and sailors returning from leave. We<br />slept fitfully, jolting and stopping, changed once in the night, slept again<br />and awoke in an empty carriage, with pine woods passing the windows and the<br />distant view of mountain peaks. New uniforms at the frontier, coffee and<br />bread at the station buffet, people round us of Southern grace and gaiety;<br />on again into the plains, conifers changing to vine and olive, a change of<br />trains at Milan; garlic sausage, bread and a flash of Orvieto bought from a<br />trolley (we had spent all our money save for a few francs, in Paris); the<br />sun mounted high and the country glowed with heat; the carriage filled with<br />peasants, ebbing and flowing at each station; the smell of garlic was<br />overwhelming in the hot carriage. At last in the evening we arrived at<br />Venice.<br /><br />A sombre figure was there to meet us. "Papa's valet, Plender."<br /><br />"I met the express," said Plender. "His Lordship thought you must have<br />looked up the train wrong. This seemed only to come from Milan."<br /><br />"We travelled third."<br /><br />Plender tittered politely. "I have the palace gondola here. I shall<br />follow with the luggage in the vaporetto. His Lordship has gone to the Lido.<br />He was not sure he would be home before you<br />-- that was when we expected you on the express. He should be there by<br />now."<br /><br />He led us to the waiting boat. The gondoliers wore green and white<br />livery and silver plaques on their arms; they smiled and bowed.<br /><br />"Palazzo. Pronto"<br /><br />"Si, Signor Plender."<br /><br />And we floated away.<br /><br />"You've been here before?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"I came once before -- from the sea. This is the way to arrive."<br /><br />"Ecco ci siamo, signori."<br /><br />The palace was a little less than it sounded, a narrow Palladian<br />facade, mossy steps, a dark archway of rusticated stone. One boatman leapt<br />ashore, made fast to the post, rang the bell; the other stood on the prow<br />keeping the craft in to the steps. The doors opened; a man in rather raffish<br />summer livery of striped linen led us up the stairs from shadow into light;<br />the piano nobile was in full sunshine, ablaze with frescoes of the school of<br />Tintoretto.<br /><br />"The marchese at Lido coming quick. Your sleeping this way please.<br />Making wash at once."<br /><br />Our rooms were on the floor above; reached by a precipitous marble<br />staircase, they were shuttered against the afternoon sun; the butler threw<br />them open and we looked on to the Grand Canal; the beds had mosquito nets.<br /><br />"Mostica not now."<br /><br />There was a little bulbous press in each room, a misty, gilt-framed<br />mirror, and no other furniture. The floor was of bare marble slabs.<br /><br />"Make hot wash," said the butler, leaving us. ' "A bit bleak?" asked<br />Sebastian.<br /><br />"Bleak ? Look at that." I led him again to the window and the<br />incomparable pageant below and about us.<br /><br />"No, you couldn't call it bleak."<br /><br />A tremendous explosion next door announced a setback to the hot wash.<br />We went to investigate and found a bathroom which seemed to have been built<br />in a chimney. There was no ceiling; instead the walls ran straight through<br />the floor above • to the open sky. An antiquated geyser was sending out<br />clouds of steam, a strong smell of gas and a tiny trickle of cold water.<br /><br />"No good."<br /><br />"Si, si, subito, signori"<br /><br />The butler ran to the top of the staircase and began to shout down it;<br />a female voice, more strident than his, answered. Sebastian and I returned<br />to the spectacle below our windows. Presently the argument came to an end<br />and a woman and child appeared, who smiled at us, scowled at the butler, and<br />put on Sebastian's press a silver basin and ewer of boiling water. The<br />butler meanwhile unpacked and folded our clothes and, lapsing into Italian,<br />told us of the unrecognized merits of the geyser, until suddenly cocking his<br />head sideways he became alert, said "// signor marchese" and darted<br />downstairs.<br /><br />"We'd better look respectable before meeting Papa," said Sebastian. "We<br />needn't dress. I gather he's alone at the moment"<br /><br />I was full of curiosity to meet Lord Marchmain. When I did so I was<br />first struck by his normality, which, as I saw more of him, I found to be<br />studied. It was as though he were conscious of a Byronic aura, which he<br />considered to be in bad taste and was at pains to suppress. He was standing<br />on the balcony of the saloon which was the main living-room of the palace,<br />and, as he turned to greet us, his face was in deep shadow. I was aware only<br />of a tall and upright figure.<br /><br />"Darling Papa," said Sebastian, "how young you are looking!"<br /><br />He kissed Lord Marchmain on the cheek and I, who had not kissed my<br />father since I left the nursery, stood shyly behind him.<br /><br />"This is Charles. Don't you think my father very handsome, Charles?"<br /><br />Lord Marchmain shook my hand.<br /><br />"Whoever looked up your train," he said -- and his voice also was<br />Sebastian's -- "made a btise. There's no such one."<br /><br />"We came on it."<br /><br />"You can't have. There was only a slow train from Milan at that time. I<br />was at the Lido. I have taken to playing tennis there with the professional<br />in the early evening. It is the only time of day when it is not too hot. I<br />hope you boys will be fairly comfortable upstairs. This house seems to have<br />been designed for the comfort of only one person, and I am that one. I have<br />a room the size of this and a very decent dressing-room. Cara has taken<br />possession of the odier sizeable room."<br /><br />I was fascinated to hear him speak of his mistress, so simply and<br />casually; later I suspected that it was done for effect, for me.<br /><br />"How is she?"<br /><br />"Cara? Well, I hope. She will be back with us to-morrow. She is<br />visiting some American friends at a villa on the Brenta Canal. Where shall<br />we dine? We might go to the Luna, but it is filling up with English now.<br />Would you be too dull at home? Cara is sure to want to go out to-morrow, and<br />the cook here is really quite excellent."<br /><br />He had moved away from the window and now stood in the full evening<br />sunlight, with the red damask of the walls behind him. It was a noble face,<br />a controlled one, just, it seemed, as he planned it to be; slightly weary,<br />slightly sardonic, slightly voluptuous. He seemed in the prime of life; it<br />was odd to think that he was only a few years younger than my father.<br /><br />We dined at a marble table in the windows; everything was either of<br />marble, or velvet, or dull, gilt gesso, in this house. Lord Marchmain said,<br />"And how do you plan your time here? Bathing or sight-seeing?" "Some<br />sight-seeing, anyway," I said.<br /><br />"Cara will like that -- she, as Sebastian will have told you, is your<br />hostess here. You can't do both, you know. Once you go to the Lido there is<br />no escaping -- you play backgammon, you get caught at the bar, you get<br />stupefied by the sun. Stick to the churches. You've just come from England?"<br /><br />"Yes, it was lovely there."<br /><br />"Was it? Was it? It has been my tragedy that I abominate the English<br />countryside. I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great<br />responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the<br />socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling-block to my own party.<br />Well, my elder son will change all that, I've no doubt, if they leave him<br />anything to inherit. . . . Why, I wonder, are Italian sweets always thought<br />to be so good ? There was always an Italian pastry-cook at Brides-head until<br />my father's day. He had an Austrian, so much better. And now I suppose there<br />is some British matron with beefy forearms."<br /><br />After dinner we left the palace by the street door and walked through a<br />maze of bridges and squares and alleys, to Florian's for coffee, and watched<br />the grave crowds crossing and re-crossing under the Campanile. "There is<br />nothing quite like a Venetian crowd," said Lord Marchmain. "The country is<br />crawling with Communists, but an American woman tried to sit here the other<br />night with bare shoulders and they drove her away by coming to stare at her,<br />quite silently; they were like circling gulls coming back and back to her,<br />until she left. Our countrymen are much less dignified when they attempt to<br />express moral disapproval."<br /><br />An English party had just then come from the water-front, made for a<br />table near us, and then suddenly moved to the other side, where they looked<br />askance at us and talked with their heads close together. "That is a man and<br />his wife I used to know when I was in politics. A prominent member o your<br />church, Sebastian."<br /><br />As we went up to bed that night Sebastian said: "He's rather a poppet,<br />isn't he?"<br /><br /><br />Lord Marchmain's mistress arrived next day. I was nineteen years old<br />and completely ignorant of women. I could not with any certainty recognize a<br />prostitute in the streets. I was therefore not indifferent to the fact of<br />living under the roof of an adulterous couple, but I was old enough to hide<br />my interest. Lord March-main's mistress, therefore, found me with a<br />multitude of conflicting expectations about her, all of which were, for the<br />moment, disappointed by her appearance. She was not a voluptuous<br />Toulouse-Lautrec odalisque; she was not a "little bit of fluff'; she was a<br />middle-aged, well-preserved, well-dressed, well-mannered woman such as I had<br />seen in countless public places and occasionally met. Nor did she seem<br />marked by any social stigma. On the day of her arrival we lunched at the<br />Lido, where she was greeted at almost every table.<br /><br />"Vittoria Corombona has asked us all to her ball on Saturday."<br /><br />"It is very kind of her. You know I do not dance," said Lord Marchmain.<br /><br />"But for the boys? It is a thing to be seen -- the Corombona palace lit<br />up for the ball. One does not know how many such balls there will be in the<br />future."<br /><br />"The boys can do as they like. We must refuse."<br /><br />"And I have asked Mrs. Hacking Brunner to luncheon. She has a charming<br />daughter. Sebastian and his friend will like her."<br /><br />"Sebastian and his friend are more interested in art than heiresses."<br /><br />"But that is what I have always wished," said Cara, changing her point<br />of attack adroitly. "I have been here more times than I can count and Alex<br />has not once let me inside San Marco even. We will become tourists, yes?"<br /><br />We became tourists; Cara enlisted as guide a midget Venetian nobleman<br />to whom all doors were open, and with him at her side and a guide-book in<br />her hand, she came with us, flagging sometimes but never giving up, a neat,<br />prosaic figure amid the immense splendours of the place.<br />The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly -- perhaps too<br />sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. On some days life, kept pace<br />with the gondola, as we nosqd through the side-canals and die boatman<br />uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days, with the<br />speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam; it left a<br />confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors;<br />of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light<br />on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might<br />have known, and another Byronic night fishing for scampi in the shallows of<br />Chioggia, the phosphorescent wake of the little ship, the lantern swinging<br />in the prow and the net coming up full of weed and sand and floundering<br />fishes; of melon and prosciutto on the balcony in the cool of the morning;<br />of hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at the English<br />bar.<br /><br />I remember Sebastian looking up at the Colleoni statue and saying,<br />"It's rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly<br />get involved in a war."<br /><br />I remember most particularly one conversation towards the end of my<br />visit.<br /><br />Sebastian had gone to play tennis with his father and Cara at last<br />admitted to fatigue. 'We sat in the late afternoon at the windows<br />overlooking the Grand Canal, she on the sofa with a piece of needlework, I<br />in an armchair, idle. It was the first time we had been alone together.<br /><br />"I think you are very fond of Sebastian," she said.<br /><br />"Why, certainly."<br /><br />"I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans.<br />They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too<br />long."<br /><br />She was so composed and matter-of-fact that I could not take I her<br />amiss, but I failed to find an answer. She seemed not to ' expect one but<br />continued stitching, pausing sometimes to match the silk from a work bag at<br />her side.<br /><br />"It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its<br />meaning. In England it comes when you are almost men; I think I like that.<br />It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl. Alex<br />you see had it for a girl, for his wife. Do you think he loves me?"<br /><br />"Really, Cara, you ask the most embarrassing questions. How should I<br />know? I assume ..."<br /><br />"He does not. But not the littlest piece. Then why does he stay with<br />me? I will tell you; because I protect him from Lady I Marchmain. He hates<br />her; but you can have no conception how he hates her. You would think him so<br />calm and English -- the milord, rather blase, all passion dead, wishing to<br />be comfortable and not to be worried, following the sun, with me to look<br />after that one thing that no man can do for himself. My friend, he is<br />•' a volcano of hate. He cannot breathe the same air as she. He will<br />not set foot in England because it is her home; he can scarcely be happy<br />with Sebastian because he is her son. But Sebastian hates her too."<br /><br />"I'm sure you're wrong there."<br /><br />"He may not admit it to you. He may not admit it to himself; they are<br />full of hate -- hate of themselves. Alex and his family. . . . Why do you<br />think he will never go into Society?" "I always thought people had turned<br />against him." "My dear boy, you are very young. People turn against a<br />handsome, clever, wealthy man like Alex? Never in your life. It is he who<br />has driven them away. Even now they come back again and again to be snubbed<br />and laughed at. And all for Lady Marchmain. He will not touch a hand which<br />may have touched hers. When we have guests I see him thinking, 'Have they<br />perhaps just come from Brideshead? Are they on their way to Marchmain House?<br />Will they speak of me to my wife? Are they a link between me and her whom I<br />hate?' But, seriously, with my heart, that is how he thinks. He is mad. And<br />how has she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except be loved by<br />someone who was not grown-up. I have never met Lady March-main; I have seen<br />her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other women<br />he has loved. I know Lady March-main very well. She is a good and simple<br />woman whp has been loved in the wrong way.<br /><br />"When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves<br />they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood -- innocence,<br />God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. He loved me for a time,<br />quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a<br />woman; she has not all these ways of loving.<br /><br />"Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence.<br />We are comfortable.<br />"Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very<br />unhappy. His Teddy-bear, his Nanny . . . and he is nineteen years old. . .<br />."<br /><br />She stirred on her sofa, shifting her weight so that she could look<br />down at the passing boats, and said in fond, mocking tones:<br /><br />"How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love," and then added<br />with a sudden swoop to earth, "Sebastian drinks too much."<br /><br />"I suppose we both do."<br /><br />"With you it does not matter. I have watched you together. With<br />Sebastian it is different. He will be a drunkard if someone does not come to<br />stop him. I have known so many. Alex was nearly a drunkard when he met me;<br />it is in the blood. I see it in the way Sebastian drinks. It is not your<br />way."<br /><br />We arrived in London on the day before term began. On the way from<br />Charing Cross I dropped Sebastian in the forecourt of his mother's house.<br />"Here is 'Marchers,'" he said with a sigh<br />which meant the end of a holiday. "I won't ask you in, the place is<br />probably full of my family. We'll meet at Oxford." I drove on to Hyde Park<br />Gardens.<br /><br />My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret. "Here to-day,"<br />he said; "gone to-morrow. I seem to see very little of you. Perhaps it is<br />dull for you here. How could it be otherwise? You have enjoyed yourself?"<br /><br />"Very much. I went to Venice."<br /><br />"Yes. Yes. I suppose so. The weather was fine?"<br /><br />When he went to bed after an evening of silent study, he paused to ask:<br />"The friend you were so much concerned about, did he die?" "No." "I am very<br />thankful. You should have written to tell me. I worried about him so much."Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-74487422339542433362008-08-06T12:50:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:14:04.028+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book I. Et in Arcadia Ego. Chapter ThreeChapter Three<br /><br />I returned home for the Long Vacation without plans and without money.<br />To cover end-of-term expenses I had sold my Omega screen to Collins for ten<br />pounds, of which I now kept four; my last cheque overdrew my account by a<br />few shillings, and I had been told that, without my father's authority, I<br />must draw no more. My next allowance was not due until October. I was thus<br />faced with a bleak prospect and, turning the matter over in my mind, I felt<br />something not far off remorse for the prodigality of the preceding weeks.<br /><br />I had started the term with my battels paid and over a hundred pounds<br />in hand. All that had gone, and not a penny paid out where I could get<br />credit. There had been no reason for it, no great pleasure unattainable<br />else; it had gone in ducks and drakes. Sebastian often chid me with<br />extravagance, but I resented his censure for a large part of my money went<br />on and with him. His own finances were perpetually, vaguely distressed.<br />"It's all done by lawyers," he said helplessly, "and I suppose they embezzle<br />a lot. Anyway, I never seem to get much. Of course, Mummy would give me<br />anything I asked for."<br /><br />"Then why don't you ask her for a proper allowance?"<br /><br />"Oh, Mummy likes everything to be a present. She's so sweet," he said,<br />adding one more line to the picture I was forming of her.<br /><br />Now Sebastian had disappeared into that other life of his where I was<br />not asked to follow, and I was left, instead, forlorn and regretful.<br /><br />How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our<br />youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation,<br />Dresden figures of pastoral gaiety! Our wisdom, we prefer to think, is all<br />of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of it, the<br />last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time. There is no candour in a<br />story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for<br />nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours<br />which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable<br />regularity.<br /><br />Thus I spent the first afternoon at home, wandering from room to room,<br />looking from the plate-glass windows in turn on the garden and the street,<br />in a mood of vehement self-reproach.<br />My father, I knew, was in the house, but his library was inviolable,<br />and it was not until just before dinner that he appeared to greet me. He was<br />then in his late fifties, but it was his idiosyncrasy to seem much older<br />than his years; to see him one might have put him at seventy, to hear him<br />speak at nearly eighty. He came to me now, with the shuffling mandarin-tread<br />which he affected, and a shy smile of welcome. When he dined at home -- and<br />he seldom dined elsewhere•-- he wore a f rogged velvet smoking suit of<br />the kind which had been fashionable many years before and was to be so<br />again, but, at that time, was a deliberate archaism.<br /><br />"My dear boy, they never told me you were here. Did you have a very<br />exhausting journey? They gave you tea? You are well? I have just made a<br />somewhat audacious purchase from Sonerschein's -- a terra-cotta bull of the<br />fifth century. I was examining it and forgot your arrival. Was the carriage<br />very full? You had a corner seat?" (He travelled so rarely himself that to<br />hear of others doing so always excited his solicitude.) "Hayter brought you<br />the evening paper ? There is no news, of course -- such a lot of nonsense."<br /><br />Dinner was announced. My father from long habit took a book with him to<br />the table and then, remembering my presence, furtively dropped it under his<br />chair. "What do you like to drink? Hayter, what'have we for Mr. Charles to<br />drink?"<br /><br />"There's some whiskey."<br /><br />"There's whiskey. Perhaps you like something else? What else have we?"<br /><br />"There isn't anything else in the house, sir."<br /><br />"There's nothing else. You must tell Hayter what you would like and he<br />will get it in. I never keep any wine now. I am forbidden it and no one<br />comes to see me. But while you are here, you must have what you like. You<br />are here for long?"<br /><br />"I'm not quite sure, Father."<br /><br />"It's a very long vacation," he said wistfully. "In my day we used to<br />go on what were called 'reading parties,' always in mountainous areas. Why?<br />Why," he repeated petulantly, "should alpine scenery be thought conducive to<br />study?"<br /><br />"I thought of putting in some time at an art school -- in the life<br />class."<br /><br />"My dear boy, you'll find them all shut. The students go to Barbison or<br />such places and paint in the open air. There was an institution in my day<br />called a 'sketching club' -- mixed sexes" (snuffle), "bicycles" (snuffle),<br />"pepper-and-salt knickerbockers, holland umbrellas and, it was popularly<br />thought, free love." (Snuffle) "Such a lot of nonsense. I expect they still<br />go on. You might try that."<br /><br />"One of the problems of the vacation is money, Father." "Oh, I<br />shouldn't worry about a thing like that at your age." "You see, I've run<br />rather short." "Yes?" said my father without any sound of interest. "In fact<br />I don't quite know how I'm going to get through the next two months."<br /><br />"Well, I'm the worst person to come to for advice. I've never been<br />'short,' as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard<br />up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke?" (Snuffle) "On the<br />rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at<br />that. Your grandfather once said to me, 'Live within your means, 'but if you<br />do get into difficulties, come to me. Don't go to the Jews.' Such a lot of<br />nonsense. You try. Go to those gentlemen in Jermyn Street who offer advances<br />on note of hand only. My dear boy, they won't give you a sovereign."<br /><br />"Then what do you suggest my doing?"<br /><br />"Your cousin Melchior was imprudent with his investments and got into a<br />very queer street. He went to Australia."<br /><br />I had not seen my father so gleeful since he found two pages of<br />second-century papyrus between the leaves of a Lombardic breviary.<br /><br />"Hayter, I've dropped my book."<br /><br />It was recovered for him from under his feet and propped against the<br />epergne. For the rest of dinner he was silent save for an occasional snuffle<br />of merriment which could not, I thought, be provoked by the work he read.<br /><br />Presently we left the table and sat in the garden-room; and there,<br />plainly, he put me out of his mind; his thoughts, I knew, were far away, in<br />those distant ages where he moved at ease, where time passed in centuries<br />and all the figures were defaced and the names of his companions were<br />corrupt readings of words , of quite other meaning. He sat in an attitude<br />which to anyone else would have been one of extreme discomfort, askew in his<br />upright armchair, with his book held high and obliquely to the light. Now<br />and then he took a gold pencil case from his watch-chain and made an entry<br />in the margin. The windows were open to the summer night; the ticking of the<br />clocks, the distant murmur of traffic on the Bayswater Road, and my father's<br />regular turning of the pages were the only sounds. I had thought it<br />impolitic to smoke a cigar while pleading poverty; now in desperation I went<br />to my room and fetched one. My father did not look up. I pierced it, lit it,<br />and with renewed confidence said, "Father, you surely don't want rne to<br />spend the whole vacation here with you?"<br /><br />"Eh?"<br /><br />"Won't you find it rather a bore having me at home for so long?"<br /><br />"I trust I should not betray such an emotion even if I felt it," said<br />my father mildly and turned back to his book.<br /><br />The evening passed. Eventually all over the room clocks of diverse<br />pattern musically chimed eleven. My father closed his book and removed his<br />spectacles. "You are very welcome, my dear boy," he said. "Stay as long as<br />you find it convenient." At the door he paused and turned back. "Your cousin<br />Melchior worked his passage to Australia before the mast" (Snuffle) "What, I<br />wonder, is 'before the mast'?"<br /><br /><br />During the sultry week that followed my relations with my father<br />deteriorated sharply. I saw little of 'him during the day; he spent hours on<br />end in the library; now and then he emerged and I would hear him calling<br />over the banisters: "Hayter. Call me a cab." Then he would be away,<br />sometimes for half an hour or less, sometimes for a whole day; his errands<br />were never explained. Often I saw trays going up to him at odd hours, laden<br />with meagre nursery snacks -- rusks, glasses of milk, bananas and so forth.<br />If we met in a passage or on the stairs he would look at me vacantly and say<br />"Ah-ha" or "Very warm," or "Splendid, splendid," but in the evening, when he<br />came to the garden-room in his velvet smoking suit, he always greeted me<br />formally.<br /><br />The dinner table was our battlefield.<br /><br />On the second evening I took my book with me to the dining-room. His<br />mild and wandering eye fastened on it with sudden attention, and as we<br />passed through the hall he surreptitiously left his own on a side table.<br />When we sat down he said plaintively: "I do think, Charles, you might talk<br />to me. I've had a very exhausting day. I was looking forward to a little<br />conversation."<br /><br />"Of course, Father. What shall we talk about?"<br /><br />"Cheer me up. Take me out of myself"; (petulantly) "tell me all about<br />the new plays."<br /><br />"But I haven't been to any."<br /><br />"You should, you know, you really should. It's not natural in a young<br />man to spend all his evenings at home."<br /><br />"Well, Father, as I told you, I haven't much money to spare for<br />theatre-going."<br /><br />"My dear boy, you must not let money become your master in this way.<br />Why, at your age, your cousin Melchior was part owner of a musical piece. It<br />was one of his few happy ventures. You should go to the play as part of your<br />education. If you read the lives of eminent men you will find that quite<br />half of them made their first acquaintance with drama from the gallery. I am<br />told there is no pleasure like it. It is there that you find the real<br />critics and devotees. It is called 'sitting with the gods.'<br /><br />The expense is nugatory, and even while you wait for admission in the<br />street you are diverted by 'buskers.' We will sit with the gods together one<br />night. How do you find Mrs. Abel's cooking?"<br /><br />"Rather insipid."<br /><br />"It was inspired by my sister Philippa. She gave Mrs. Abel ten menus,<br />and they have never been varied. When I am alone I do not notice what I eat,<br />but now that you are here, we must have a change. What would you like? What<br />is in season? Are you fond of lobsters? Hayter, tell Mrs. Abel to give us<br />lobsters to-morrow night."<br /><br />Dinner that evening consisted of a white, tasteless soup, over-fried<br />fillets of sole with a pink sauce, lamb cutlets propped against a cone of<br />mashed potato, stewed pears in jelly standing on a kind of sponge cake.<br /><br />"It is purely out of respect for your Aunt Philippa that I dine at this<br />length. She laid it down that a three-course dinner was middle-class. 'If<br />you once let the servants get their way,' she said, 'you will find yourself<br />dining nightly off a single chop.' There is nothing I should like more. In<br />fact, that is exactly what I do when I go to my club on Mrs. Abel's evening<br />out. But your aunt ordained that at home I must have soup and three courses;<br />some nights it is fish, meat and savoury, on others it is meat, sweet,<br />savoury -- there are a number of possible permutations.<br /><br />"It is remarkable how some people are able to put their opinions in<br />lapidary form; your aunt had that gift.<br /><br />"It is odd to think that she and I once dined together nightly -- just<br />as you and I do, my boy. Now she made unremitting efforts to take me out of<br />myself. She used to tell me about her reading. It was in her mind to make a<br />home with me, you know. She thought I should get into funny ways if I was<br />left on my own. Perhaps I have got into funny ways. Have I? But it didn't<br />do. I got her out in the end."<br /><br />There was an unmistakable note of menace in his voice as he said this.<br /><br />It was largely by reason of my Aunt Philippa that I now found myself so<br />much a stranger in my father's house. After my mother's death she came to<br />live with my father and me, no doubt, as he said, with the idea of making<br />her home with us. I knew nothing, then, of the nightly agonies at the dinner<br />table. My aunt made herself my companion, and I accepted her without<br />question. That was for a year. The first change was that she re-opened her<br />house in Surrey which she had meant to sell, and lived there during my<br />school terms, coming to London only for a few days' shopping and<br />entertainment. In the summer we went to lodgings together at the sea-side.<br />Then in my last year at school she left England. "/ got her out in the end"<br />he said with derision and triumph of that kindly lady, and he knew that I<br />heard in the words a challenge to myself.<br /><br />As we left the dining-room my father said, "Hayter, have you said<br />anything yet to Mrs. Abel about the lobsters I ordered for to-morrow?"<br /><br />"No, sir."<br /><br />"Do not do so."<br /><br />"Very good, sir."<br /><br />And when we reached our chairs in the garden-room he said: "I wonder<br />whedier Hayter had any intention of mentioning lobsters. I rather think not.<br />Do you know, I believe he thought I was joking?"<br /><br /><br />Next day, by chance, a weapon came to hand. I met an old acquaintance<br />of school days, a x contemporary of mine named Jorkins. I never had much<br />liking for Jorkins. Once, in my Aunt Philippa's day, he had come to tea, and<br />she had condemned him as being probably charming at heart, but unattractive<br />at first sight. Now I greeted him with enthusiasm and asked him to dinner.<br />He came and showed little alteration. My father must have been warned by<br />Hayter that there was a guest, for instead of his velvet suit he wore a tail<br />coat; this, with a black waistcoat, very high collar, and very narrow white<br />tie, was his evening dress; he wore it with an air of melancholy as though<br />it were court mourning, which he had assumed in early youth and, finding the<br />style sympathetic, had retained. He never possessed a dinner jacket.<br /><br />"Good evening, good evening. So nice of you to come all this way."<br /><br />"Oh, it wasn't far," said Jorkins, who lived in Sussex Square.<br /><br />"Science annihilates distance," said my father disconcertingly. "You<br />are over here on business?"<br /><br />"Well, I'm in business, if that's what you mean."<br /><br />"I had a cousin who was in business--you wouldn't know him; it was<br />before your time. I was telling Charles about him only the other night. He<br />has been much in my mind. He came," my father paused to give full weight to<br />the bizarre word -- "a cropper."<br /><br />Jorkins giggled nervously. My father fixed him with a look of reproach.<br /><br />"You find his misfortune the subject of mirth? Or perhaps the word I<br />used was unfamiliar; you no doubt would say that he 'folded up.'"<br /><br />My father was master of the situation. He had made a little fantasy for<br />himself, tha Jorkins should be an American, and throughout the evening he<br />played a delicate, one-sided parlour-game with him, explaining any<br />peculiarly English terms that occurred in the conversation, translating<br />pounds into dollars, and courteously deferring to him with such phrases as<br />"Of course, by your standards . . ."; "All this must seem very parochial to<br />Mr. Jorkins"; "In the vast spaces to which you are accustomed . . ." so that<br />my guest was left with the vague sense that there was a misconception<br />somewhere as to his identity, which he never got the chance of explaining.<br />Again and again during dinner he sought my father's eye, thinking to read<br />there the simple statement that this form of address was an elaborate joke,<br />but met instead a look of such mild benignity that he was left baffled.<br /><br />Once I thought my father had gone too far, when he said: "I am afraid<br />that, living in London, you must sadly miss your national game."<br /><br />"My national game?" asked Jorkins, slow in the uptake, but scenting<br />that here, at last, was the opportunity for clearing the matter up.<br /><br />My father glanced from him to me and his expression changed from<br />kindness to malice; then back to kindness again as he turned once more to<br />Jorkins. It was the look of a gambler who lays down fours against a full<br />house. "Your national game," he said gently, "cricket" and he snuffled<br />uncontrollably, shaking all over and wiping his eyes with his napkin.<br />"Surely, working in the City, you find your time on the cricket-field<br />greatly curtailed?"<br /><br />At the door of the dining-room he left us. "Good night, Mr. Jorkins,"<br />he said. "I hope you will pay us another visit when you next 'cross the<br />herring pond.'"<br /><br />"I say, what did your governor mean by that? He seemed almost to think<br />I was American."<br /><br />"He's rather odd at times."<br /><br />"I mean all that about advising me to visit Westminster Abbey. It<br />seemed rum."<br /><br />"Yes. I can't quite explain."<br /><br />"I almost thought he was pulling my leg," said Jorkins in puzzled<br />tones.<br /><br /><br />My father's counter-attack was delivered a few days later.<br /><br />He sought me out and said, "Mr. Jorkins is still here?"<br /><br />"No, Father, of course not. He only came to dinner."<br /><br />"Oh, I hoped he was staying with us. Such a versatile young man. But<br />you will be dining in?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"I am giving a little dinner party to diversify the'rather monotonous<br />series of your evenings at home. You think Mrs. Abel is up to it? No. But<br />our guests are not exacting. Sir Cuthbert and Lady Orme-Herrick are what<br />might be called the nucleus. I hope for a little music afterwards. I have<br />included in the invitations some young people for you."<br /><br />My presentiments of my father's plan were surpassed by the actuality.<br />As the guests assembled in the room which my father, without<br />self-consciousness, called "the Gallery," it was plain to me that they had<br />been carefully chosen for my discomfort. The "young people" were Miss Gloria<br />Orme-Herrick, a student of the cello; her fiance, a bald young man from the<br />British Museum; and a monoglot Munich publisher. I saw my father snuffling<br />at me from behind a case of ceramics as he stood with them. That evening he<br />wore, like a chivalric badge of battle, a small red rose in his button-hole.<br /><br />Dinner was long and chosen, like the guests, in a spirit of careful<br />mockery. It was not of Aunt Philippa's choosing, but had been reconstructed<br />from a much earlier period, long before he was of an age to dine downstairs.<br />The dishes were ornamental in appearance and regularly alternated in colour<br />between red and white. They and the wine were equally tasteless. After<br />dinner my father led the German publisher to the piano and then, while he<br />played, left the dining-room to show Sir Cuthbert Orme-Herrick the Etruscan<br />bull in the gallery.<br /><br />It was a gruesome evening, and I was astonished to find, when at last<br />the party broke up, that it was only a few minutes after eleven. My father<br />helped himself to a glass of barley-water and said: "What very dull friends<br />I have! You know, without the spur of your presence I should never have<br />roused myself to invite them. I have been very negligent about entertaining<br />lately. Now that you are paying me such a long visit, I will have many such<br />evenings. You liked Miss Gloria Orme-Herrick?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"No? Was it her little moustache you objected to or her very large<br />feet? Do you think she enjoyed herself?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"That was my impression also. I doubt if any of our guests will count<br />this as one of their happiest evenings. That young foreigner played<br />atrociously, I thought. Where can I have met him? And Miss.Constantia<br />Smethwick -- where can I have met her? But the obligations of hospitality<br />must be observed. As long as you are here, you shall not be dull."<br /><br />Strife was internecine during the next fortnight, but I suffered the<br />more, for my father had greater reserves to draw on and a wider territory<br />for manoeuvre, while I was pinned to my bridgehead between the uplands and<br />the sea. He never declared his war aims, and I do not to this day know<br />whether they were purely punitive -- whether he had really at the back of<br />his mind some geopolitical idea of getting me out of the country, as Aunt<br />Philippa had been driven to Bordighera and my cousin Melchior to Darwin, or<br />whether, as seems most likely, he fought for the sheer love of a battle, in<br />which indeed he shone.<br /><br />I received one letter from Sebastian, a conspicuous object which was<br />brought to me in my father's presence one day when he was lunching at home;<br />I saw him look curiously at it and bore it away to read in solitude. It was<br />written on, and enveloped in, heavy late-Victorian mourning paper,<br />black-coroneted and black-bordered. I read it eagerly: --<br /><br />brideshead castle<br />wiltshire<br /><br />Dearest Charles,-<br /><br />I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to<br />you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The<br />doctors despaired of it from the start.<br /><br />Soon I am off to Venice to stay with my papa in his palace of sin. I<br />wish you were coming. I wish you were here.<br /><br />I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and<br />collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe.<br /><br />I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to<br />meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.<br /><br />Love or what you will.<br />S.<br /><br /><br />I knew his letters of old; I had had them at Ravenna; I should not have<br />been disappointed; but that day as I tore the stiff sheet across and let it<br />fall into the basket, and gazed resentfully across the grimy gardens and<br />irregular backs of Bayswater, at the jumble of soil pipes and fire-escapes<br />and protuberant little conservatories, I saw, in my mind's eye, the pale<br />face of Anthony Blanche, peering through the straggling leaves as it had<br />peered through the candle flames at Thame, and heard, above the murmur of<br />traffic, his clear tones . . . "You mustn't blame Sebastian if at times he<br />seems a little insipid. . . . When I hear him talk I am reminded of that in<br />some ways nauseating picture of 'Bubbles.' . . . Boredom . . . like a cancer<br />in the breast. . . ."<br /><br />For days after that I thought I hated Sebastian; then one Sunday<br />afternoon a telegram came from him, which dispelled that shadow, adding a<br />new and darker one of its own.<br /><br />My father was out and returned to find me in a condition of feverish<br />anxiety. He stood in the hall with his Panama hat still on his head and<br />beamed at me.<br /><br />"You'll never guess how I have spent the day; I have been to the Zoo.<br />It was most agreeable; the animals seem to enjoy the sunshine so much."<br /><br />"Father, I've got to leave at once."<br /><br />"Yes?"<br /><br />"A great friend of mine -- he's had a terrible accident. I must go to<br />him at once. Hayter's packing for me, now. There's a train in half an hour."<br /><br />I showed him the telegram, which read simply: GRAVELY INJURED. COME AT<br />ONCE. SEBASTIAN.<br /><br />"Well," said my father. "I'm sorry you are upset. Reading this message<br />I should not say that the accident was as serious as you seem to think --<br />otherwise it would hardly be signed by the victim himself. Still, of course,<br />he may well be fully conscious but blind or paralysed with a broken back.<br />Why exactly is your presence so necessary? You have no medical knowledge.<br />You are not in holy orders. Do you hope for a legacy?"<br /><br />"I told you, he is a great friend."<br /><br />"Well, Orme-Herrick is a great friend of mine, but I should not go<br />tearing off to his deathbed on a warm Sunday afternoon. I should doubt<br />whether Lady Orme-Herrick would welcome me. However, I see you have no such<br />doubts. I shall miss you, my dear boy, but do not hurry back on my account."<br /><br />Paddington Station on that August Sunday evening, with the sun<br />streaming through the obscure panes of its roof, the bookstalls shut, and<br />the few passengers strolling unhurried beside their porters, would have<br />soothed a mind less agitated than mine. The train was nearly empty. I had my<br />suitcase put in the corner of a third-class carriage and took a seat in the<br />dining-car. "First dinner after Reading, sir; about seven o'clock. Can I get<br />you anything now?" I ordered gin and vermouth; it was brought to me as we<br />pulled out of the station. The knives and forks set up their regular jingle;<br />the bright landscape rolled past the windows. But I had no mind for these<br />smooth things; instead, fear worked like yeast in my thoughts, and the<br />fermentation brought to the surface, in great gobs of scum, the images of<br />disaster: a loaded gun held carelessly at a stile, a horse rearing and<br />rolling over, a shaded pool with a submerged stake, an elm bough falling<br />suddenly on a still morning, a car at a blind corner; all the catalogue of<br />threats to civilized life rose and haunted me; I even pictured a homicidal<br />maniac mouthing in the shadows swinging a length of lead pipe. The<br />cornfields and heavy woodland sped past, deep in the golden evening, and the<br />throb of the wheels repeated monotonously in my ears, "You've come too late.<br />You've come too late. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead."<br /><br />I dined and changed trains to the local line, and in twilight came to<br />Melstead Carbury, which was my destination. "Brideshead, sir? Yes, Lady<br />Julia's in the yard." I recognized her at once; I could not have failed to.<br />She was sitting at the wheel of an open car.<br /><br />"You're Mr. Ryder? Jump in." Her voice was Sebastian's and his her<br />w&y of speaking. "How is he?"<br /><br />"Sebastian? Oh, he's fine. Have you had dinner? Well, I expect it was<br />beastly. There's some more at home. Sebastian and I are alone, so we thought<br />we'd wait for you." "What's happened to him?"<br />"Didn't he say? I expect he thought you wouldn't come if you knew. He's<br />cracked a bone in his ankle so small that it hasn't a name. But they X-rayed<br />it yesterday and told him to keep it up for'a month. It's a great bore to<br />him, putting out all his plans; he's been making the most enormous fuss. . .<br />. Everyone else has gone. He tried" to make me stay back with him. Well, I<br />expect you know how maddeningly pathetic he can be. I almost gave in, and<br />then I said: 'Surely there must be someone you can get hold of,' and he said<br />everybody was away or busy and, anyway, no one else would do. But at last he<br />agreed to try you, and I promised I'd stay if you failed him, so you can<br />imagine how popular you are with me. I must say it's noble of you to come<br />all this way at a moment's notice." But as she said it I heard, or thought I<br />heard, a tiny note of contempt in her voice that I should be so readily<br />available.<br /><br />"How did he do it?"<br /><br />"Believe it or not, playing croquet. He lost his temper and tripped<br />over a hoop. Not a very honourable scar."<br /><br />She so much resembled Sebastian that, sitting beside her in the<br />gathering dusk, I was confused by the double illusion of familiarity and<br />strangeness. Thus, looking through strong lenses one may watch a man<br />approaching from afar, study every detail of his face and clothes, believe<br />one has only to put out a hand to touch him, marvel that he does not hear<br />one, and look up as one moves, and then seeing him with the naked eye<br />suddenly remember that one is to him a distant speck, doubtfully human. I<br />knew her and she did not know me. Her dark hair .was scarcely longer than<br />Sebastian's, and it blew back from her forehead as his did; her eyes on the<br />darkling road were his, but larger, her painted mouth was less friendly to<br />the world. She wore a bangle of charms on her wrist and in her ears little<br />gold rings. Her light coat revealed an inch or two of flowered silk; skirts<br />were short in those days, and her legs, stretched forward to the controls of<br />the car, were spindly, as was also the fashion. Because her sex was the<br />palpable difference between the familiar and the strange, it seemed to fill<br />the space between us, so that I felt her to be especially female as I had<br />felt of no woman before.<br /><br />"I'm terrified of driving at this time of the eve'ning," she said.<br />"There doesn't seem anyone left at home who can drive a car. Sebastian and I<br />are practically camping out here. I hope you haven't come expecting a<br />pompous party." She leaned forward to the locker for a box of cigarettes.<br /><br />"No thanks."<br /><br />"Light one for me, will you?"<br /><br />It was the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and<br />as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin<br />bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.<br /><br />"Thanks. You've been here before. Nanny reported it. We both thought it<br />very odd of you not to stay to tea with me."<br /><br />"That was Sebastian."<br /><br />"You seem to let him boss you about a good deal. You shouldn't. It's<br />very bad for him."<br />We had turned the corner of the drive now; the colour had died in the<br />woods and sky and the house seemed painted in grisaille, save for the<br />central golden square at the open, doors. A man was waiting to take my<br />luggage.<br /><br />"Here we are."<br /><br />She led me up the steps and into the hall, flung her coat on a marble<br />table, and stooped to fondle a dog which came to greet her. "I wouldn't put<br />it past Sebastian to have started dinner."<br /><br />At that moment he appeared between the pillars at the further end,<br />propelling himself in a wheel-chair. He was in pyjamas and dressing-gown<br />with one foot heavily bandaged.<br /><br />"Well, darling, I've collected your chum," she said, again with a<br />barely perceptible note of contempt.<br /><br />"I thought you were dying," I said, conscious then, as I had been ever<br />since I arrived, of the predominating emotion of vexation, rather than of<br />relief, that I had been bilked of my expectations of a grand tragedy.<br /><br />"I thought I was, too. The pain was excruciating. Julia, do you think<br />if you asked him, Wilcox would give us champagne to-night?"<br /><br />"I hate champagne and Mr. Ryder has had dinner."<br /><br />"Mister Ryder? Mister Ryder? Charles drinks champagne at all hours. Do<br />you know, seeing this great swaddled foot of mine, I can't get it out of my<br />mind that I have gout, and that gives me a craving for champagne?"<br /><br />We dined in a room they called "the Painted Parlour." It was a spacious<br />octagon, later in design than the rest of the house; its walls were adorned<br />with wreathed medallions, and across its dome prim Pompeian figures stood in<br />pastoral groups. They and the satin-wood and ormolu furniture, the carpet,<br />the hanging bronze candelabrum, the mirrors and sconces, were all a single<br />composition, the design of one illustrious hand. "We usually eat here when<br />we're alone," said Sebastian, "it's so cosy."<br /><br />While they dined I ate a peach and told them of the war with my father.<br /><br />"He sounds a perfect poppet," said Julia. "And now I'm going to leave<br />you boys."<br /><br />"Where are you off to?"<br /><br />"The nursery. I promised Nanny a last game of halma." She kissed the<br />top of Sebastian's head. I opened the door for her. "Good night, Mr. Ryder,<br />and good-bye. I don't suppose we'll meet to-morrow. I'm leaving early. I<br />can't tell you how grateful I am to you for relieving me at the sick-bed."<br /><br />"My sister's very pompous to-night," said Sebastian, when she was gone.<br /><br />"I don't think she cares for me," I said.<br /><br />"I don't think she cares for anyone much. I love her. She's so like<br />me."<br /><br />"Do you? Is she?"<br /><br />"In looks I mean and the way she talks. I wouldn't love anyone with a<br />character like mine."<br />When we had drunk our port I walked beside Sebastian's chair through<br />the pillared hall to the library, where we sat that night and nearly every<br />night of the ensuing month. It lay on the side of the house that overlooked<br />the lakes; the windows were open to the stars and the scented air, to the<br />indigo and silver, moonlit landscape of the valley and the sound of water<br />falling in the fountain.<br /><br />"We'll have a heavenly time alone," said Sebastian, and when next<br />morning, while I was shaving, I saw from my bathroom window Julia, with<br />luggage at her back, drive from the forecourt and disappear at the hill's<br />crest, without a backward glance, I felt a sense of liberation and peace<br />such as I was to know years-later when, after a night of unrest, the sirens<br />sounded the All Clear.Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-55696306215706692882008-08-06T12:30:00.001+02:002008-08-06T14:13:34.162+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book I. Et in Arcadia Ego. Chapter TwoChapter Two<br /><br />towards the end of that summer term I received the last visit and Grand<br />Remonstrance of my cousin Jasper. I was just free of the schools, having<br />taken the last paper of History Previous on the afternoon before; Jasper's<br />subfusc suit and white tie proclaimed him still in the thick of it; he'had,<br />too, the exhausted but resentful air of one who fears he has failed to do<br />himself full justice on the subject of Pindar's Orphism. Duty alone had<br />brought him to my rooms that afternoon, at great inconvenience to himself<br />and, as it happened, to me, who, when he caught me in the door, was on my<br />way to make final arrangements about a dinner I was giving that evening. It<br />was one of several parties designed to comfort Hardcastle -- one of the<br />tasks that had lately fallen to Sebastian and me since, by leaving his car<br />out, we had got him into grave trouble with the proctors.<br /><br />Jasper would not sit down; this was to be no cosy chat; he stood with<br />his back to the fireplace and, in his own phrase, talked to me "like an<br />uncle."<br /><br />". . . I've tried to get in touch with you several times in the last<br />week or two. In fact, I have the impression you are avoiding me. If that is<br />so, Charles, I can't say I'm surprised.<br /><br />"You may think it none of my business, but I feel a sense of<br />responsibility. You know as well as I do that since your -- well, since the<br />war, your father has not been really in touch with things -- lives in his<br />own world. I don't want to sit back and see you making mistakes which a word<br />in season might save you from.<br /><br />"I expected you to make mistakes your first year. We all do. I got in<br />with some thoroughly objectionable O.S.C.U. men who ran a mission to<br />hop-pickers during the long vac. But you, my dear Charles, whether you<br />realize it or not, have gone straight, hook, line and sinker, into the very<br />worst set in the University. You may think that, living in digs, I don't<br />know what goes on in college; but I hear things. In fact, I hear all too<br />much. I find that I've become a figure of mockery on your account at the<br />Dining Club. There's that chap Sebastian Flyte you seem inseparable from. He<br />may be all right, I don't know. His brother Brideshead was a very sound<br />fellow. But this friend of yours looks odd to me, and he gets himself talked<br />about. Of course, they're an odd family. The Marchmains have lived apart<br />since the war, you know. An extraordinary thing; everyone thought they were<br />a devoted couple. Then he went off to France with his Yeomanry and just<br />never came back. It was as if he'd been killed. She's a Roman Catholic, so<br />she can't get a divorce -- or won't, I expect. You can do anything at Rome<br />with money, and they're enormously rich. Flyte may be all right, but Anthony<br />Blanche--now there's a man there's absolutely no excuse for."<br /><br />"I don't particularly like him myself," I said.<br /><br />"Well, he's always hanging round here, and the stiffer element in<br />college don't like it. They won't stand for him at the House. He was in<br />Mercury again last night. None of these people you go about with pull any<br />weight in their own colleges, and that's the real test. They think because<br />they've got a lot of money to throw about, they can do anything.<br /><br />"And that's another thing. I don't know what allowance my uncle makes<br />you, but I don't mind betting you're spending double. All this" he said,<br />including in a wide sweep of his hand the evidences of profligacy about him.<br />It was true; my room had cast its austere winter garments, and, by not very<br />slow stages, assumed a richer wardrobe. "Is that paid for?" (The box of a<br />hundred cabinet Partagas on the sideboard.) "Or those?" (A dozen frivolous,<br />new books on the table.) "Or those?" (A Lalique decanter and glasses.) "Or<br />that peculiarly noisome object?" (A human skull lately purchased from the<br />School of Medicine, which, resting in a bowl of roses, formed, at the<br />moment, the chief decoration of my table. It bore the motto Et in Arcadia<br />ego inscribed on its forehead.)<br /><br />"Yes," I said, glad to be clear of one charge. "I had to pay cash for<br />the skull."<br /><br />"You can't be doing any work. Not that that matters, particularly if<br />you're making something of your career elsewhere -- but are you? Have you<br />spoken at the Union or at any of the clubs? Are you connected with any of<br />the magazines? Are you even making a position in the O.U.D.S.? And your<br />clothes!" continued my cousin. "When you came up I remember advising you to<br />dress as you would in a country house. Your present get-up seems an unhappy<br />compromise between the correct wear for a theatrical party at Maidenhead and<br />a glee-singing competition in a garden suburb.<br /><br />"And drink -- no one minds a man getting tight once or twice a term. In<br />fact, he ought to, on certain occasions. But I hear you're constantly seen<br />drunk in the middle of the afternoon."<br />He paused, his duty discharged. Already the perplexities of the<br />examination school were beginning to re-assert themselves in his mind.<br /><br />"I'm sorry, Jasper," I said. "I know it must be embarrassing for you,<br />but I happen to like this bad set. I like getting drunk at luncheon, and<br />though I haven't yet spent quite double my allowance, I undoubtedly shall<br />before the end of term. I usually have a glass of champagne about this time.<br />Will you join me?"<br /><br />So my cousin Jasper despaired and, I learned later,' wrote to his<br />father on the subject of my excesses who, in his turn, wrote to my father,<br />who took no action or particular thought in the matter, partly because he<br />had disliked my uncle for nearly sixty years and partly because, as Jasper<br />had said, he lived in his own world now, since my mother's death.<br /><br />Thus, in broad outline, Jasper sketched the more prominent features of<br />my first year; some detail may be added on the same scale.<br /><br />I had committed myself earlier to spend the Easter vacation with<br />Collins and, though I would have broken my word without compunction, and<br />left my former friend friendless, had Sebastian made a sign, no sign was<br />made; accordingly Collins and I spent several economical and instructive<br />weeks together in Ravenna. A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those<br />mighty tombs. In a hotel bedroom, designed for a warmer season, I wrote long<br />letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post office for his answers.<br />There were two, each from a different address, neither giving any plain news<br />of himself, for he wrote in a style of remote fantasy (. .-. Mummy and two<br />attendant poets have three bad colds in the head, so I have come here. It is<br />the feast of S. Nichodemus of Thyatira, who was martyred by having goatskin<br />nailed to his pate, and is accordingly the patron of bald heads. Tell<br />Collins, who I am sure will be bald before us. There are too many people<br />here, but one, praise heaven! has an ear-trumpet, and that keeps me in good<br />humour. And now I must try to catch a fish. It is too far to send it to you<br />so I will keep the backbone . . .) which left me fretful. Collins made notes<br />for a little thesis pointing out the inferiority of the original mosaics to<br />their photographs. Here was planted the seed of what became his life's<br />harvest. When, many years later, there appeared the first massive volume of<br />his still unfinished work on Byzantine Art, I was touched to find, among two<br />pages of polite, preliminary acknowledgments of debt, my own name:.... To<br />Charles Ryder, with the aid of whose all-seeing eyes I first saw the<br />Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and San Vitale . . .<br /><br />I sometimes wonder whether, had it not been for Sebastian, I might have<br />trodden the same path as Collins round the cultural water-wheel. My father<br />in his youth sat for All Souls and, in a year of hot competition, failed;<br />other successes and honours came his way later, but that early failure<br />impressed itself on him, and through him on me, so that I came up with an<br />ill-considered sense that there lay the proper and natural goal of the life<br />of reason. I, too, should doubtless have failed, but, having failed, I might<br />perhaps have slipped into a less august academic life elsewhere. It is<br />conceivable, but not, I believe, likely, for the hot spring of anarchy rose<br />from deep furnaces where was no solid earth, and burst into the sunlight --<br />a rainbow in its cooling vapours -- with a power the rocks could not<br />repress.<br /><br />In the event, that Easter vacation formed a short stretch of level road<br />in the precipitous descent of which Jasper warned me. Descent or ascent? It<br />seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired.<br />I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and<br />overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence,<br />the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad<br />and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed<br />as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy<br />childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and<br />its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of<br />nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.<br />At the end of the term I took my first schools; it was necessary to pass, if<br />I was to remain at Oxford, and pass I did, after a week in which I forbade<br />Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late hour, with iced black coffee and<br />charcoal biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected texts. I remember no<br />syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient, lore which I acquired<br />that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour.<br /><br />"I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon"; that was<br />enough then. Is more needed now?<br /><br />Looking back, now, after twenty years, there is little I would have<br />left undone or done otherwise. I could match my cousin Jasper's game-cock<br />maturity with a sturdier fowl. I could tell him that all the wickedness of<br />that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro,<br />heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the<br />whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the<br />wine, renders it undrinkable, so that it must lie in the dark, year in, year<br />out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table.<br />I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is<br />the root of all wisdom. But I felt no need for these sophistries as I sat<br />before my cousin, saw him, freed from his , inconclusive struggle with<br />Pindar, in his dark grey suit, his white tie, his scholar's gown; heard his<br />grave tones and, all the time, savoured the gillyflowers in full bloom under<br />my windows. I had my secret and sure defence, like a talisman worn in the<br />bosom, felt for in the moment of danger, found and firmly grasped. So I told<br />him what was not in fact the truth, that I usually had a glass of champagne<br />about that time, and asked him to join me.<br /><br /><br />On the day after Jasper's Grand Remonstrance I received another, in<br />different terms and from an unexpected source.<br /><br />All the term I had been seeing rather more of Anthony Blanche than my<br />liking for him warranted. I lived now among his friends, but our frequent<br />meetings were more of his choosing than mine, for I held him in considerable<br />awe.<br /><br />In years he was barely my senior, but he seemed then to be burdened<br />with the experience of the Wandering Jew. He was indeed a nomad of no<br />nationality.<br /><br />An attempt had been made in his childhood to make an Englishman of him;<br />he was two years at Eton; then in the middle of the war he had defied the<br />submarines, rejoined his mother in the Argentine, and a clever and audacious<br />schoolboy was added to the valet, the maid, the two chauffeurs,'the Pekinese<br />and the second husband. Criss-cross about the world he travelled with them,<br />waxing in wickedness like a Hogarthian page-boy. When peace came they<br />returned to Europe to hotels and furnished villas, spas, casinos and bathing<br />beaches. At the age of fifteen, for a wager, he was disguised as a girl and<br />taken to play at the big table in the Jockey Club at Buenos Aires; he dined<br />with Proust and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diag-hilev;<br />Firbank sent him his novels with fervent inscriptions; he had aroused three<br />irreconcilable feuds in Capri; he had practised black art in Cefalu; he had<br />been cured of drug-taking in California and of an OEdipus complex in Vienna.<br /><br />At times we all seemed children beside him -- at most times, but not<br />always, for there was a bluster and zest in Anthony which the rest of us had<br />shed somewhere in our more leisured adolescence, on the playing field or in<br />the school-room; his vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than<br />in the wish to shock, and in the midst of his polished exhibitions I was<br />often reminded of an urchin I had once seen in Naples, capering derisively,<br />with obscene, unambiguous gestures, before a party of English tourists; as<br />he told the tale of his evening at the gaming table one could see in the<br />roll of his eye just how he had glanced, covertly, over the dwindling pile<br />of chips at his stepfather's party; while we had been rolling one another in<br />the mud at football and gorging ourselves with crumpets, Anthony had helped<br />oil fading beauties on sub-tropical sands and had sipped his aperitif in<br />smart little bars, so that the savage we had tamed was still rampant in him.<br />He was competitive in the bet-you-can't-do-this style of the private school;<br />you had only to mention the name of your bootmaker for him to recommend an<br />Armenian at Biarritz who catered especially for fetishists, or to name a<br />house where you had stayed, for him to describe a palace he frequented in<br />Madrid. He was cruel, too, in the wanton, insect-maiming manner of the very<br />young and 'fearless, like a little boy, charging, head down, small fists<br />whirling, at the school prefects.<br /><br />He asked me to dinner, and I was a little disconcerted to find that we<br />were to dine alone. "We are going to Thame," he said. "There is a delightful<br />hotel there, which luckily doesn't appeal to the Bullingdon. We will drink<br />Rhine wine and imagine ourselves . . . where? Not on a j-j-jaunt with<br />J-J-Jorrocks, anyway. But first we will have our aperitif."<br /><br />At the George bar he ordered "Four Alexander cocktails, please," ranged<br />them before him with a loud "Yum-yum" which drew every eye, outraged, upon<br />him. "I expect you would prefer sherry, but, my dear Charles, you are not<br />going to have sherry. Isn't this a delicious concoction? You don't like it?<br />Then I will drink it for you. One, two, three, four, down the red lane they<br />go. How the students stare!" And he led me out to the waiting motor car.<br /><br />"I hope we shall find no undergraduates there. I am a little out of<br />sympathy with them for the moment. You heard about their treatment of me on<br />Thursday? It was too naughty. Luckily I was wearing my oldest pyjamas and it<br />was an evening of oppressive heat, or I might have been seriously cross."<br />Anthony had a habit of putting his face near one when he spoke; the sweet<br />and creamy cocktail had tainted his breath. I leaned away from him in the<br />corner of the hired car.<br />"Picture me, my dear, alone and studious. I had just bought a rather<br />forbidding book called Antic Hay, which I knew I must read before going to<br />Garsington on Sunday, because everyone was bound to talk about it, and it's<br />so banal saying you have not read the book of the moment, if you haven't.<br />The solution I suppose is not to go to Garsington, but that didn't occur to<br />me until this moment. So, my dear, I had an omelet and a peach and a bottle<br />of Vichy water and put on my pyjamas and settled down to read. I must say my<br />thoughts wandered, but I kept turning the pages and watching the light fade,<br />which in Peckwater, my dear, is quite an experience -- as darkness falls the<br />stone seems positively to decay under one's eyes. I was reminded of some of<br />those leprous fa?ades in the vieux port at Marseille, until suddenly I was<br />disturbed by such a bawling and caterwauling as you never heard, and there,<br />down in the little piazza, I saw a mob of about twenty terrible young men,<br />and do you know what they were chanting 'We want Blanche. We want Blanche!'<br />in a kind of litany. Such a public declaration! Well, I saw it was all up<br />with Mr. Huxley for the evening, and I must say I had reached a point of<br />tedium when any interruption was welcome. I was stirred by the bellows, but,<br />do you know, the louder they shouted the shyer they seemed ? They kept<br />saying 'Where's Boy ?' 'He's Boy Mulcaster's friend,' 'Boy must bring him<br />down.' Now you may or may not know 'Boy' Mulcaster. Seen at a distance -- at<br />some considerable distance -- you might think him rather personable: a<br />lanky, old-fashioned young man, you might think; but look at him closer and<br />his face all falls to pieces in an idiot gape. People are rather free with<br />the word 'degenerate.' They have even used it of me. If you want to know<br />what a real degenerate is, look at Boy Mulcaster. He came to Le Touquet at<br />Easter and, in some extraordinary way, I seemed to have asked him to stay.<br />Well, my mother is used to me, but my poor stepfather found Mulcaster very<br />hard to understand. You see my stepfather is a d-d-dago and therefore has a<br />very high opinion of the English aristocracy. He couldn't quite fit<br />Mulcaster into his idea of a lord, and really I couldn't explain him; he<br />lost some infinitesimal sum at cards, and as a result expected me to pay for<br />all his treats -- well, Mulcaster was in this party; I could see his<br />ungainly form shuffling about below and hear him saying: 'It's no good. He's<br />out. Let's go back and have a drink?' So then I put my head out of the<br />window and called to him: 'Good evening, Mulcaster, old sponge and toady,<br />are you lurking among the hobbledehoys? Have you come to repay me the three<br />hundred francs I lent you for the poor drab you picked up in the Casino ? It<br />was a niggardly sum for her trouble, and what a trouble, Mulcaster. Come up<br />and pay me, poor hooligan!'<br /><br />"That, my dear, seemed to put a little life into them, and up the<br />stairs they came, clattering. About six of them came into my room, the rest<br />stood mouthing outside. My dear, they looked too extraordinary. They had<br />been having one of their ridiculous club dinners, and they were all wearing<br />coloured tail-coats -- a sort of livery. 'My dears,' I said to them, 'you<br />look like a lot of most disorderly footmen.' Then one of them, rather a<br />juicy little piece, accused me of unnatural vices. 'My dear,' I said, 'I may<br />be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone' Then they<br />began to blaspheme in a very shocking manner, and suddenly I, too, began to<br />be annoyed. Really, I thought, when I think of all the hullabaloo there was<br />when I was seventeen, and the Due de Vincennes (old Armand, of course, not<br />Philippe) challenged me to a duel for an affair of the heart, and very much<br />more than the heart, I assure you, with the duchess (Stefanie, of course,<br />not old Poppy) -- now, to submit to impertinence from these pimply, tipsy<br />virgins . . . Well, I gave up the light, bantering tone and let myself be<br />just a little offensive.<br /><br />"Then they began saying, 'Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury.' Now as<br />you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I<br />did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, 'Dear<br />sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know<br />that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you<br />meaty boys. It w.ould be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. I So if any<br />of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other<br />hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified<br />libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.'<br /><br />"Do you know, they all looked a little foolish at that? I walked down<br />with them and no one came within a yard of me. Then I got into the fountain<br />and, you know, it was really most refreshing, so I sported there a little<br />and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home,<br />and I heard Boy Mul-caster saying, 'Anyway, we did put him in Mercury.' You<br />know, Charles, that is just what they'll be saying in thirty years' time.<br />When they're all married to scraggy little women like hens and have<br />cretinous, porcine sons like themselves, getting drunk at the same club<br />dinner in the same coloured coats, they'll still say, when my name is<br />mentioned, 'We put1 him in Mercury one night,' and their<br />barn-yard daughters will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in<br />his day, and what a pity he's grown so dull. Oh, la fatigue du Nord!"<br /><br />It was not, I knew, the first time Anthony had been ducked, but the<br />incident seemed much on his mind, for he reverted to it again at dinner.<br /><br />"Now you can't imagine an unpleasantness like that happening to<br />Sebastian, can you?"<br /><br />"No," I said; I could not.<br /><br />"No, Sebastian has charm." He held up his glass of hock to the<br />candle-light and repeated, "Such charm. Do you know, I went round to call on<br />Sebastian next day? I thought the tale of my evening's adventures might<br />amuse him. And what do you think I found -- besides, of course, his amusing<br />toy bear? Mulcaster and two of his cronies of the night before. They looked<br />very foolish and Sebastian, as composed as Mrs. P-p-ponsonby-de-Tomkyns in<br />P-p-punch, said, 'You know Lord Mulcaster, of course,' and the oafs said,<br />'Oh, we just came to see how Aloysius was,' for they find the toy bear just<br />as amusing as we do -- or, shall I hint, just a teeny bit more? So off they<br />went. And I said, 'S-s-sebastian, do you realize that those s-sycophantic<br />s-slugs insulted me last night, and but for the warmth of the weather might<br />have given me a s-s-severe cold?' and he said, 'Poor things. I expect they<br />were drunk.' He has a kind word for everyone you see; he has such charm.<br /><br />"I can see he has completely captivated you, my dear Charles. Well, I'm<br />not surprised. Of course, you haven't known him as long as I have. I was at<br />school with him. You wouldn't believe it, but in those days people used to<br />say he was a little bitch; just a few unkind boys who knew him well.<br />Everyone in pop liked him, of course, and all the masters. I expect it was<br />really that they were jealous of him. He never seemed to get into trouble.<br />The rest of us were constantly being beaten in the most savage way, on the<br />most frivolous pretexts, but never Sebastian. He was the only boy in my<br />house who was never beaten at all. I can see him now, at the age of fifteen.<br />He never had spots you know; all the other boys were spotty. Boy Mulcaster<br />was positively scrofulous. But not Sebastian. Or did he have one, rather a<br />stubborn one at the back of his neck ? I think, now, that he did. Narcissus,<br />with one pustule. He and I were both Catholics, so we used to go to mass<br />together. He used to spend such a'time in the confessional, I used to wonder<br />what he had to say, because he never did anything wrong; never quite; at<br />least, he never got punished. Perhaps he was just being charming through the<br />grille. I left under what is called a 'cloud,' you know--I can't think why<br />it is called that; it seemed to me a glare of unwelcome light; the process<br />involved aseries ofharrowing interviews with my tutor. Itwas<br />disconcerting to find how observant that mild old man proved to be. The<br />things he knew about me, which I thought no one -- except possibly Sebastian<br />-- knew. It was a lesson never to trust mild old men -- or charming<br />schoolboys; which?<br /><br />"Shall we have another bottle of this wine, or of something different?<br />Something different, some bloody, old Burgundy, eh? You see, Charles, I<br />understand all your tastes. You must come to France with me and drink the<br />wine. We will go at the vintage. I will take you to stay at the Vincennes'.<br />It is all made up with them now, and he has the finest wine in France; he<br />and the Prince de Portallon--I will take you there, too. I think they would<br />amuse you, and of course they would love you. I want to introduce you to a<br />lot of my friends. I have told Cocteau about you. He is all agog. You see,<br />my dear Charles, you are that very rare thing, An Artist. Oh yes, you must<br />not look bashful. Behind that cold, English, phlegmatic exterior you are An<br />Artist. I have seen those little drawings you keep hidden away in your room.<br />They are exquisite. And you, dear Charles, if you will understand me, are<br />not exquisite; but not at all. Artists are not exquisite. I am; Sebastian,<br />in a kind of way, is exquisite; but the Artist is an eternal type, solid,<br />purposeful, observant -- and, beneath it all, p-p-passionate, eh, Charles ?<br /><br />"But who recognizes you? The other day I was speaking to Sebastian<br />about you, and I said, 'But you know Charles is an artist. He draws like a<br />young Ingres,' and do you know what Sebastian said? 'Yes, Aloysius draws<br />very prettily, too, but of course he's rather more modern.' So charming; so<br />amusing.<br /><br />"Of course those that have charm don't really need brains. Stefanie de<br />Vincennes intoxicated me four years ago; but I was besotted with her,<br />crawling with love like lice. My dear, I even used the same coloured varnish<br />for my toe-nails. I used her words and lit my cigarette in the same way and<br />spoke with her tone on the telephone so that the duke used to carry on long<br />and intimate conversations with me, thinking that I was her. It was largely<br />that which put his mind on pistol and sabres in such an old-fashioned<br />manner. My stepfather thought it an excellent education for me. He thought<br />it would make me grow out of what he calls my 'English habits.' Poor man, he<br />is very South American. Well, I have kept my 'English habits,' but I think I<br />lost something else. At seventeen I might have been anything; an artist<br />even; it is not impossible; it is in the blood. At twenty-one I am what you<br />see me. To have squandered everything, so young, on a woman who, except that<br />I was more presentable, would as soon have had her chiropodist for her<br />lover. ... I never heard anyone speak an ill word of Stefanie, except the<br />duke; everyone loved her, whatever she did."<br /><br />Anthony had lost his stammer in the deep waters of his old romance. It<br />came floating back to him, momentarily, with the coffee and liqueurs. "Real<br />G-g-green Chartreuse, made before the expulsion of the monks. There are five<br />distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue. It is like swallowing a<br />sp-spectrum. Do you wish Sebastian was with us? Of course you do. Do I? I<br />wonder. How our thoughts do run on that little bundle of charm to be sure. I<br />think you must be mesmerizing me, Charles. I bring you here, at very<br />considerable expense, my dear, simply to talk about myself, and I find I<br />talk of no one except Sebastian. It's odd because there's really no mystery<br />about him except how he came to be born of such a very sinister family.<br /><br />"I forget if you know his family. Now there, my dear, is1 a<br />subject for the poet -- for the poet of the future who must be also a<br />psychoanalyst -- and perhaps a diabolist, too. I don't suppose he'll ever<br />let you meet them. He's far too clever. They're all charming, of course, and<br />quite, quite gruesome. Do you ever feel is something a teeny bit gruesome<br />about Sebastian? No? Perhaps I imagine it; it's simply that he loofo so like<br />the rest of them, sometimes.<br /><br />"There's Brideshead who's something archaic, out of a cave that's been<br />sealed for centuries. He has the face as though an Aztec sculptor had<br />attempted a portrait of Sebastian; he's a learned bigot, a ceremonious<br />barbarian, a snowbound lama. . . . Well, anything you like. But not Julia,<br />oh, not Lady Julia. She is one thing only, Renaissance tragedy. You know<br />what she looks like. Who could help it? Her photograph appears as regularly<br />in the illustrated papers as the advertisements for Beecham's Pills. A face<br />of flawless Florentine Quattrocento beauty; almost anyone else with those<br />looks would have been tempted to become artistic; not Lady Julia; she's as<br />smart as -- well, as smart as Stefanie. Nothing greenery-yallery about her.<br />So gay, so correct, so unaffected. Dogs and children love her, other girls<br />love her -- my dear, she's a fiend -- a passionless, acquisitive,<br />intriguing, ruthless filler. I wonder if she's incestuous. I doubt it; all<br />she wants is power. There ought to be an Inquisition especially set up to<br />burn her. There's another sister, too, I believe, in the schoolroom. Nothing<br />is known of her yet except that her governess went mad and drowned herself<br />not long ago. I'm sure she's abominable. So you see there was really very<br />little left for poor Sebastian to do except be sweet and charming.<br /><br />"It's when one gets to the parents that a bottomless pit opens. My<br />dear, such a pair. How does Lady Marchmain manage it? It is one of the<br />questions of the age. You have seen her? Very, very beautiful; no artifice,<br />her hair just turning grey in elegant silvery streaks, no rouge, very pale,<br />huge-eyed -- it is extraordinary how large those eyes look and how the lids<br />are veined blue where anyone else would have touched them with a fingertip<br />of paint; pearls and a few great starlike jewels, heirlooms, in ancient<br />settings, a voice as quiet as a prayer, and as powerful. And Lord Marchmain,<br />well, a little fleshy perhaps, but very handsome, a magnified, a voluptuary,<br />Byronic, bored, infectiously slothful, not at all the sort of man you would<br />expect to see easily put down. And that Reinhardt nun, my dear, has<br />destroyed him --but utterly. He daren't show his great purple face anywhere.<br />He is the last, historic, authentic case of someone being hounded out of<br />society. Brideshead won't see him, the girls mayn't, Sebastian does, of<br />course, because he's so charming. No one else goes near him. Why, last<br />September Lady March-main was in Venice staying at the Palazzo Fogliere. To<br />tell you the truth she was just a teeny bit ridiculous in Venice. She never,<br />went near the Lido, of course, but she was always drifting about the canals<br />in a gondola with Sir Adrian Person -- such attitudes, my dear, like Madame<br />Recamier; once I passed them and I caught the eye of the Fogliere gondolier,<br />whom, of course, I knew, and, my dear, he gave me such a wink. She came to<br />all the parties in a sort of cocoon of gossamer, my dear, as though she were<br />part of some Celtic play or a heroine from Maeterlinck; and she would go to<br />church. Well, as you know, Venice is the one town in Italy where no one ever<br />has gone to church. Anyway, she was rather a figure of fun that year, and<br />then who should turn up, in the Maltons' yacht, but poor Lord Marchmain.<br />He'd taken a little palace there, but was he allowed in? Lord Malton put him<br />and his valet into a dinghy, my dear, and transhipped him there and then<br />into the steamer for Trieste. He hadn't even his mistress with him. It was<br />her yearly holiday. No one ever knew how they heard Lady Marchmain was<br />there. And, do you know, for a week Lord Malton slunk about as if he was in<br />disgrace? And he was in disgrace. The Principessa Fogliere gave a ball and<br />Lord Malton was not asked nor anyone from his yacht -- even the de Panoses.<br />How does Lady Marchmain do it? She has convinced the world that Lord<br />Marchmain is a monster. And what is the truth ? They were married for<br />fifteen years or so and then Lord Marchmain went to the war; he never came<br />back but formed a connection with a highly talented dancer. There are a<br />thousand such cases. She refuses to divorce him because she is so pious.<br />Well, there have been cases of that before. Usually, it arouses sympathy for<br />the adulterer; not for Lord Marchmain though. You would think that the old<br />reprobate had tortured her, stolen her patrimony, flung her out of doors,<br />roasted, stuffed and eaten his children, and gone frolicking about wreathed<br />in all the flowers of Sodom and Gomorrah; instead of what? Begetting four<br />splendid children by her, handing over to her Brideshead and Marchmain House<br />in St. James's and all the money she can possibly want to spend, while he<br />sits with a snowy shirt-front at Larue's with a personable, middle-aged lady<br />of the theatre, in the most conventional Edwardian style. And she meanwhile<br />keeps a small gang of enslaved and emaciated prisoners for her exclusive<br />enjoyment. She sucks their blood. You can see the tooth-marks all over<br />Adrian Porson's shoulders when he is bathing. And he, my dear, was the<br />greatest, the only, poet of our time. He's bled dry; there's nothing left of<br />him. There are five or six others of all ages and sexes, like wraiths<br />following her round. They never escape once she's had her teeth into them.<br />It is witchcraft. There's no other explanation.<br /><br />"So you see we mustn't blame Sebastian if at times he seems a little<br />insipid -- but then you don't blame him, do you, Charles? With that very<br />murky background, what could he do except set up as being simple and<br />charming, particularly as he isn't very well endowed in the Top Storey. We<br />couldn't claim that for him, could we, much as we love him?<br /><br />"Tell me candidly, have you ever heard Sebastian say anything you have<br />remembered for five minutes? You know, when I hear him talk, I am reminded<br />of that in some ways nauseating picture of 'Bubbles.' Conversation, as I<br />know it, is like juggling; up go the balls and the balloons and the plates,<br />up and over, in and out, spinning and leaping, good solid objects that<br />glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when<br />dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsuds drifting off<br />the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second<br />and then--"phut!--vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.<br /><br />"Stefanie was like that: never dull; at least never really dull; at<br />least not for the first year; and then, my dear, when she had become a<br />habit, Boredom grew like a cancer in the breast, more and more; the<br />anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words,<br />the death sentence, of sheer triteness! I felt the oxygen being pumped out<br />of the atmosphere all round me; I felt myself expiring in a vacuum while all<br />the while I could see through the bell-glass the loved executioner. And she<br />went on with the murder in a gentle, leisurely way, quite, quite unconscious<br />that she was doing any harm. It is not an experience I would recommend for<br />An Artist at the tenderest stage of his growth, to be strangled with charm."<br /><br />And then Anthony spoke of the proper experiences of an artist, of the<br />appreciation and criticism and stimulus he should expect from his friends,<br />of the hazards he should take in the pursuit of emotion, of one thing and<br />another while I fell drowsy and let my mind wander a little. So we drove<br />home, but his words, as we swung over Magdalen Bridge, recalled the central<br />theme of our dinner. "Well, my dear, I've no doubt that first thing<br />to-morrow you'll trot round to Sebastian and tell him everything I've said<br />about him. And I will tell you two things: one, that it will not make the<br />slightest difference to Sebastian's feeling for me and, secondly, my dear --<br />and I beg you to remember this though I have plainly bored you into a<br />condition of coma -- that he will immediately start talking about that<br />amusing bear of his. Good night. Sleep innocently."<br /><br /><br />But I slept ill. Within an hour of tumbling drowsily to bed I was awake<br />again, thirsty, restless, hot and cold by turns and unnaturally excited. I<br />had drunk a lot, but neither the mixture of wines, nor the Chartreuse, nor<br />the Mavrodaphne Trifle, nor even the fact that I had sat immobile and almost<br />silent throughout the evening instead of clearing the fumes, as We normally<br />did, in J some light frenzy of drunken nonsense, explains the distress of<br />that hag-ridden night. No dream distorted the images of the evening into<br />horrific shapes. It seemed I heard St. Mary's strike each quarter till dawn.<br />The figures of nightmare were already racing through my brain as throughout<br />the wakeful hours I repeated to myself Anthony's words, catching his accent,<br />soundlessly, and the stress and cadence of his speech, while under the<br />closed lips I saw his pale, candle-lit face as it had fronted me across the<br />dinner table. Once during the hours of darkness I brought to light the<br />drawings in my sitting-room and sat at the open window, turning them over.<br />Everything was black and dead-still in the quadrangle; only at the<br />quarter-hours the bells awoke and sang over the gables. I drank soda water<br />and smoked and fretted, until light began to break and the rustle of a<br />rising breeze turned me back to my bed.<br /><br /><br />When I awoke Lunt was at the open door. "I let you lie," he said, "I<br />didn't think you'd be going to the Corporate Communion."<br /><br />"You were quite right."<br /><br />"Most of the freshmen went and quite a few second- and third-year men.<br />It's all on account of the new chaplain. There was never Corporate Communion<br />before -- just Holy Communion for those that wanted it and chapel and<br />evening chapel."<br /><br />It was the last Sunday of term; the last of the year. As I went to my<br />bath the quad filled with gowned and surpliced undergraduates drifting from<br />chapel to hall. As I came back they were standing in groups, smoking; Jasper<br />had cycled in from his digs to be among them.<br /><br />I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast, as I often did on Sundays,<br />at a teashop opposite Balliol. The air was full of bells from the<br />surrounding spires and the sun, casting long shadows across the open spaces,<br />dispelled the fears of night. The teashop was hushed as a library; a few<br />solitary men from Balliol and Trinity, in bedroom slippers, looked up as I<br />entered, then turned back to their Sunday newspapers. I ate my scrambled<br />eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless<br />night. I lit a cigarette and sat on, while one by one the Balliol and<br />Trinity men paid their bills and shuffled away, slipslop, across the street<br />to their colleges. It was nearly eleven when I left, and during my walk I<br />heard the change-ringing cease and, all over the town, give place to the<br />single chime, which warned the city that service was about to start.<br /><br />None but church-goers seemed abroad that morning; undergraduates and<br />graduates and wives and tradespeople, walking with that unmistakable English<br />church-going pace which eschewed equally both haste and idle sauntering;<br />holding, bound in black lamb-skin and white celluloid, the liturgies of half<br />a dozen conflicting sects; on their way to St. Barnabas, St. Columba, St.<br />Aloysius, St. Mary's, Pusey House, Blackfriars and heaven knows where<br />besides; to restored Norman and revived Gothic, to travesties of Venice and<br />Athens; all in the summer sunshine going to the temples of their race. Four<br />proud infidels alone proclaimed their dissent; four Indians from the gates<br />of Balliol, in freshly laundered white flannels and neatly pressed blazers,<br />with snow-white turbans on their heads, and in their plump, brown hands<br />bright cushions, a picnic basket and the Unpleasant Plays of Bernard Shaw,<br />making for the river.<br /><br />In the Cornmarket a party of tourists stood on the steps of the<br />Clarendon Hotel discussing a road map with their chauffeur, while opposite,<br />through the venerable arch of the Golden Cross, I greeted a group of<br />undergraduates from my college who had breakfasted there and now lingered<br />with their pipes in the creeper-hung courtyard. A troop of Boy Scouts,<br />church-bound too, bright with coloured ribbons and badges, loped past in<br />unmilitary array, and at Carfax I met the Mayor and corporation, in scarlet<br />gowns and gold chains, preceded by wand bearers and followed by no curious<br />glances, in procession to the preaching at the City Church. In St. Aldates I<br />passed a crocodile of choir-boys, in starched collars and peculiar caps, on<br />their way to Tom Gate and the Cathedral. So through a world of piety I made<br />my way to Sebastian.<br /><br />He was out. I read the letters, none of them very revealing, that<br />littered his writing table, and scrutinized the invitation cards on his<br />chimney-piece -- there were no new additions. Then I read Lady into Fox<br />until he returned.<br /><br />"I've been to mass at the Old Palace," he said. "I haven't been all<br />this term, and Monsignor Bell asked me to dinner twice last week, and I know<br />what that means. Mummy's been writing to him. So I sat bang in front where<br />he couldn't help seeing me and absolutely shouted the Hail Marys at the end;<br />so that's over. How was dinner with Antoine? What did you talk about?"<br /><br />"Well, he did most of the talking. Tell me, did you know him at Eton?"<br /><br />"He was sacked my first half. I remember seeing him about. He always<br />has been a noticeable figure."<br /><br />"Did he go to church with you?"<br /><br />"I don't think so, why?"<br /><br />"Has he met any of your family?"<br /><br />"Charles, how very peculiar you're being to-day. No. I don't suppose<br />so."<br /><br />"Not your mother at Venice?"<br /><br />"I believe she did say something about it. I forget what. I think she<br />was staying with some Italian cousins of ours, the Foglieres, and Anthony<br />turned up with his family at the hotel, and there was some party the<br />Foglieres gave that they weren't | asked to. I know Mummy said something<br />about it when I told her he was a friend of mine. I can't think why he<br />should want to go to a party at the Foglieres' -- the princess is so proud<br />of her English blood that she talks of nothing else. Anyway, no one objected<br />to Antoine -- much, I gather. It was his mother they thought difficult."<br /><br />"And who is the Duchess de Vincennes?"<br /><br />"Poppy?"<br /><br />"Stefanie."<br /><br />"You must ask Antoine that. He claims to have had an affair with her."<br /><br />"Did he?"<br /><br />"There was something --I forget what. I think he was stuck in a lift<br />with her once at Miami and the old duke made a scene."<br /><br />"Not a grand passion?"<br /><br />"Good God, no! Why all this interest?"<br /><br />"I just wanted to find out how much truth there was in what Anthony<br />said last night."<br /><br />"I shouldn't think-a word. That's his great charm."<br /><br />"You may think it charming. I think it's devilish. Do you know he spent<br />the whole of yesterday evening trying to turn me against you, and almost<br />succeeded?"<br /><br />"Did he? How silly. Aloysius wouldn't approve of that at all, would<br />you, you pompous old bear?"Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-35178858598960066022008-08-06T12:13:00.000+02:002008-08-06T14:13:20.665+02:00Brideshead Revisited: Book I. Et in Arcadia Ego. Chapter OneBOOK I<br /><br />ET IN ARCADIA EGO<br /><br />Chapter One<br /><br />"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before;first with<br />Sebastian morethan twenty years ago on a cloudlessday in June,when the<br />ditches werewhitewith fool's-parsley and meadowsweet andtheair heavy<br />with allthe scents of summer; it was a dayof peculiar splendour, such as<br />our climate ar-fordsonce, or twice a year, when leaf andflowerand bird<br />andsun-litstone and shadowseem all toproclaimthe glory qf God; and<br />though Ihad been there sooften, in so manymoods, it was tothat first<br />visit that my heart returned on this,my latest. That day, too,I had come<br />not knowing my destination. It was Eights Week. Oxford -- submerged nowand<br />obliterated,irrecoverableas Lyonnesse, so quickly havethewaters come<br />flooding in--Oxford, in thosedays, wasstill a city of aquatint. In her<br />spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's<br />day;her autumnalmists, her greyspringtime, andthe rare gloryof her<br />summer days -- such asthat daywhen the chestnutwasin flowerand the<br />bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled thesoft<br />vapours of athousand years of learning. It wasthiscloistral hush which<br />gave our laughter its resonance,and carriedit still, joyously,over the<br />intervening clamour.Here,discordantly, in Eights Week, came a rabbleof<br />womankind, some hundreds strong, twittering and fluttering over thecobbles<br />and upthe steps, sight-seeingandpleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup,<br />eatingcucumbersandwiches; pushedin puntsabout theriver,herded in<br />droves to the collegebarges;greetedin the Isis andin the Unionby a<br />suddendisplayofpeculiar,facetious,whollydistressing<br />Gilbert-and-Sullivan badinage, and by peculiar choral effects in the college<br />chapels. Echoesoftheintruders penetrated every corner,andin my own<br />college was no echo, butan originalfount of the grossest disturbance. We<br />were giving a ball. Thefront quad, where I lived, was floored andtented;<br />palmsand azaleaswere banked round the porter's lodge; worst of all,the<br />don wholivedaboveme,a mouseofa manconnected withtheNatural<br />Sciences, had lent hisrooms for a Ladies' Cloakroom, and a printednotice<br />proclaiming this outrage hung not six inches from my oak.<br /><br />No one felt more strongly about it than my scout.<br /><br />"Gentlemen who haven't got ladies are asked as faras possible to take<br />their meals out in the next few days," heannounced despondently. "Will you<br />be lunching in?"<br /><br />"No, Lunt."<br /><br />"So as to give the servants a chance, they say. What a chance! I've got<br />tobuyapin-cushion for the Ladies' Cloakroom. Whatdotheywant with<br />dancing? I don'tseethe reason in it.There neverwas dancing before in<br />Eights Week. Commcm. now is another matter being in the vacation, but not in<br />Eights Week as if teas and the river wasn't enough. If you ask me, sir, it's<br />all on account of the war. It couldn't have happened but for that." For this<br />was 1923 and for Lunt, as for thousands of others, things could never be the<br />same as they had beenin 1914."Now wine in the evening," he continued, as<br />was his habit, half in and half out of the door, "or one or two gentlemen to<br />luncheon, there's reason in.But not dancing. It all camein with themen<br />back from the war. They were too oldand they didn't know and they wouldn't<br />learn. That's the truth.And there's sorne even goesdancing with the town<br />at the Masonic --but the proctors will get them, you see. . . . Well, here's<br />Lord Sebastian. I mustn't stand heretalking when there'spin-cushionsto<br />get."<br /><br />Sebastian entered -- dove-grey flannel, white crepe-de-chine, a Charvet<br />tie, mytie as it happened, a pattern of postage stamps-- "Charles, what in<br />theworld'shappening atyourcollege?Isthereacircus? I'veseen<br />everything exceptelephants. I must say the whole of Oxford has become most<br />peculiar suddenly.Last night it was pullulating with women. You're to come<br />awayatonce, outofdanger. I'vegotamotor-carandabasketof<br />strawberries and abottle of Chateau Peyraguey -- which isn't a wine you've<br />ever tasted, so don't pretend. It's heaven with strawberries."<br /><br />"Where are we going?"<br /><br />"To see a friend."<br /><br />"Who?"<br /><br />"Name of Hawkins. Bring somemoneyin case we see anything we want to<br />buy.The motor-car is the property of a man called Hardcastle.Returnthe<br />bits to him if I kill myself; I'm not very good at driving."<br /><br />Beyondthe gate, beyondthe wintergarden that wasonce thelodge,<br />stood an open,two-seater Morris-Cowley. Sebastian'sTeddy-bear sat at the<br />wheel. We put him between us --"Take care he's ndt sick"--and drove off.<br />The bells ofSt.Mary'swere chimingnine; we escaped collisionwitha<br />clergyman,black-straw-hatted,white-bearded,pedallingquietly down the<br />wrong side of the High Street, crossedCarfax, passed the station, and were<br />soon in opencountry on the Botley Road; open country was easily reached in<br />those days.<br /><br />"Isn't it early?" said Sebastian. "The women arestill doingwhatever<br />women dotothemselves before they come downstairs. Sloth has undone them.<br />We're away. God bless Hardcastle."<br /><br />"Whoever he may be."<br /><br />"He thought hewa,s comingwithus. Sloth undid him too. Well, I did<br />tell him ten. He's a very gloomy man in my college. Heleads a double life.<br />AtleastI assume he does.He couldn't goon being Hardcastle,dayand<br />night, always, couldhe? Or he'd dieof it.He sayshe knows myfather,<br />which is impossible."<br /><br />"Why?"<br /><br />"No one knows Papa. He's a social leper. Hadn't you heard?"<br /><br />"It's a pity neither of us can sing," I said.<br /><br />AtSwindonwe turned off the main roadand, as themounted high, we<br />were among dry-stone walls and ashlar ho It was about eleven when Sebastian,<br />without warning, turned the! car into a carttrack and stopped. It washot<br />enough now toj make usseekthe shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under aI<br />clumpof elms weate the strawberries and drank the wine --asSebastian<br />promised, they were delicious together -- and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes<br />and lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves above him, mineon his<br />profile,while the blue-grey smoke rose,untroubledbyany wind, tothe<br />blue-green shadowsoffoliage, and thesweet scent of thetobacco merged<br />with the sweet! summerscents around us and thefumes of the sweet, golden<br />wine seemedto liftusafinger's breadthabovetheturf andhold us<br />suspended.<br /><br />"Just theplace to bury acrock of gold," saidSebastian. "Ishould<br />like to bury something precious in everyplace where I'vebeenhappyand<br />then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up<br />and remember."<br /><br />This was my third term since matriculation, butI datemy Oxford life<br />from my first meeting with Sebastian, which hadhappened, by chance, in the<br />middleof theterm before. Wewere in differentcollegesandcame from<br />different schools; Imightwell have spentmy three or fouryears in the<br />University andnever have met him, butfor the chance of his getting drunk<br />oneevening in my college and ofmy having ground-floor rooms in the front<br />quadrangle.<br /><br />Ihadbeen warned against the dangersoftheserooms by mycousin<br />Jasper, who alone, when I first cameup, thoughtme a suitable subject for<br />detailed guidance. My father offered me none. Then,as always,he eschewed<br />serious conversation with me. It was notuntil Iwas within a fortnight of<br />going upthat hementioned thesubject at all;thenhe said, shylyand<br />ratherslyly: "I've been talking about you. I met your future Warden at the<br />Athenaeum. I wanted to talk about Etruscan notions of immortality; he wanted<br />totalkabout extensionlectures for the working-class; so we compromised<br />andtalked about you. I asked him whatyour allowance should be.He said,<br />'Threehundred a year; on no account givehimmore; that'sallmost men<br />have.' I thought that a deplorable answer./ had more than most menwhen /<br />wasup, andmy recollection is that nowhere elsein the world andatno<br />other time, doa few hundred pounds,oneway orthe other, makeso much<br />difference to one'simportanceandpopularity. Itoyed with the ideaof<br />giving you six hundred," said my father, snuffling a little, ashe did when<br />he was amused, "but I reflected that, should theWarden come to hear of it,<br />it might sound deliberately impolite.So I shall give you fivehundred and<br />fifty."<br /><br />I thanked him.<br /><br />"Yes, it's indulgent of me,but it all comes out of capital, you know.<br />... I suppose this is the time I shouldgive you advice.Ineverhad any<br />myself except once from your cousin Alfred. Do you know in the summer before<br />I was going up, your cousin Alfredrode over to Boughton especially to give<br />me a piece of advice? And do youknow what that advice was? 'Ned,' he said,<br />'there'sone thing I mustbeg of you. Alwaysweara tallhat on Sundays<br />duringterm. It is by that,more than anything, that a man is judged.' And<br />do you know," continued my father, snuffling deeply, "I always did? Some men<br />did,some didn't.Ineversaw anydifference between themorheard it<br />commentedon, but I always wore mine. Itonly shows what effectjudicious<br />advice can have, properlydelivered at the right moment. I wish Ihad some<br />for you, but I haven't."<br /><br />My cousinJasper madegood the loss; he was thesonofmy father's<br />elder brother, to whom he referred more than once, only half facetiously, as<br />"the Head of the Family"; hewas in his fourth yearand,the term before,<br />hadcome within appreciable distanceofgettinghis rowing blue; hewas<br />secretary of the Canningandpresident ofthe J.C.R.--aconsiderable<br />person in college. He called onme formally during my first week and stayed<br />to tea;he ate a very heavy meal of honey-buns, anchovy toast-andPuller's<br />walnut cake, then he lit his pipe and,lying back in the basket-chair, laid<br />down the rules of conduct which I should follow;hecovered most subjects;<br />even to-day I could repeatmuch of what he said, word for word. "... You're<br />readingHistory? A perfectly respectableschool. The very worst is English<br />Literature and the next worst is Modern Greats. You want either a first or a<br />fourth. There is no value in anything between.Timespent on a good second<br />is time thrownaway. You shouldgo to the bestlectures--Arkwright on<br />Demosthenes for instance-- irrespective of whether they are in your school<br />or not.....Clothes. Dress as you do in acountry house. Neverwear a tweed<br />coat and flannel trousers -- always a suit.Andgo to a London tailor; you<br />get better cut and longer credit. .. . Clubs. Join the Carlton now and the<br />Grid at the beginning of your secondyear. If you want to run for the Union<br />-- andit's not a bad thing to do -- make your reputation outside first, at<br />the Canning orthe Chatham, and begin by speaking on the paper. . .. Keep<br />clear of Boar's Hill . . ." The sky over the opposing gables glowed and then<br />darkened; I put morecoal on the fire and turned on the light, revealing in<br />their respectability his London-made plus foursandhis Leander tie. . . .<br />"Don'ttreatdons like schoolmasters; treat them as you would the vicar at<br />home. .. . You'll find you spendhalfyour second yearshakingoff the<br />undesirablefriendsyoumadeinyourfirst....Bewareofthe<br />Anglo-Catholics -- they're allsodomites with unpleasantaccents. In fact,<br />steer clear of all the religious groups; they do nothing but harm. . . ."<br /><br />Finally, justas he was going,he said, "Onelast point. Change your<br />rooms."Theywerelarge,withdeeplyrecessedwindowsandpainted,<br />eighteenth-century panelling; I was lucky asa freshman to get them."I've<br />seen many a man ruined through having ground-floor rooms in the front quad,"<br />said my cousinwithdeep gravity. "Peoplestartdropping in. Theyleave<br />theirgowns here andcome andcollect them before hall; youstart giving<br />them sherry. Before you know where you are, you've opened a free bar for all<br />the undesirables of the college."<br /><br />I do not knowthat I ever, consciously, followed any o this advice. I<br />certainlynever changed my rooms; there were gillyflowers growing below the<br />windows which on summer evenings filled them with fragrance.<br /><br />Itiseasy,retrospectively,toendowone's youthwithafalse<br />precocityora false innocence;totamperwiththe dates marking one's<br />statureonthe edge ofthedoor.Ishouldlike to think-- indeedI<br />sometimes do think --thatI decorated those rooms with Morrisstuffs and<br />Arundelprintsand that myshelves were filledwithseventeenth-century<br />foliosandFrenchnovels ofthesecondempireinRussia-leatherand<br />watered-silk.But this was not thetruth. On myfirst afternoon I proudly<br />hung a reproduction of Van Gogh's"Sunflowers"over the fire and set upa<br />screen, painted by Roger Fry with a Provencallandscape, which I had bought<br />inexpensively whenthe Omega workshopsweresoldup.I displayed also a<br />poster by McKnight Kauffer and Rhyme Sheetsfromthe Poetry Bookshop, and,<br />most painful torecall,a porcelain figure of PollyPeachumwhichstood<br />betweenblacktapersonthechimney-piece.Mybooksweremeagre and<br />commonplace -- Roger Fry's Visionand Design; the Medici Press edition of A<br />ShropshireLad;EminentVictorians;somevolumesofGeorgianPoetry;<br />Sinister Street; and South Wind -- and my earliest friends fitted wellinto<br />this background;they were Collins, aWykehamist, anembryo don, a man of<br />solidreadingandchildlikehumour,andasmallcircleofcollege<br />intellectuals,whomaintainedamiddlecourseof culturebetweenthe<br />flamboyant"aesthetes" andthe proletarian scholars who scrambled fiercely<br />for facts inthe lodging houses of the Iffley -Road andWellington Square.<br />It was by this circle that I found myself adopted during my first term; they<br />provided the kind of company I had enjoyed in thesixth form at school, for<br />which thesixth form had prepared me;but even in the earliest days,when<br />the whole businessofliving at Oxford, with roomsofmy own andmy own<br />cheque book, wasa source of excitement, I feltat heart that this was not<br />all that Oxford had to offer.<br /><br />At Sebastian's approach these greyfigures seemed quietly to fade into<br />the landscape and vanish, like highland sheepin the misty heather. Collins<br />had exposed the fallacy of modern aesthetics to me: "... The whole argument'<br />from Significant Formstandsor falls by volume.If you allow Cezanneto<br />represent a third dimensiononhis two-dimensional canvas, thenyoumust<br />allow Landseer his gleam of loyalty in the spaniel's eye"-- but itwasnot<br />until Sebastian, idlyturning the page of Clive Bell'sArt,read: " 'Does<br />anyone feel thesame kind of emotion for a butterflyor aflowerthat he<br />feels for a cathedral or a picture?' Yes. I do," that my eyes were opened.<br /><br />Iknew Sebastianby sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable<br />for, from hisfirst week, hewasthe most conspicuousman of his year by<br />reasonofhisbeauty,whichwas arresting,andhiseccentricities of<br />behaviour which seemed to knownobounds. My firstsight of him was as we<br />passed in the doorof Germer's, and, on that occasion, I was struck less by<br />his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large Teddy-bear.<br /><br />"That," saidthebarber,as I tookhis chair,"was LordSebastian<br />Flyte. A most amusing young gentleman."<br /><br />"Apparently," I said coldly.<br /><br />"TheMarquis ofMarchmain'ssecondboy. Hisbrother, theEarlof<br />Brideshead,wentdown lastterm. Now hewas very different, a very quiet<br />gentleman, quite like an old man. What do you suppose Lord Sebastian wanted?<br />A hair brush for hisTeddy-bear; it had to havevery stiff bristles,not,<br />Lord Sebastian said, to brush him with, but to threaten himwith a spanking<br />whenhe was sulky.He bought avery niceone with an ivory back and he's<br />having 'Aloysius' engraved on it -- that'sthe bear'sname." The man, who,<br />inhis time,had hadample chance to tireof undergraduatefantasy, was<br />plainly captivated byhim.I, however, remainedcensorious and subsequent<br />glimpsesof Sebastian, driving in a hansom cab and dining at the Georgein<br />false whiskers, did not soften me, although Collins, whowas reading Freud,<br />had a number of technical terms to cover everything.<br /><br />Nor, when atlastwe met, were the circumstancespropitious. Itwas<br />shortly before midnight in early March; I had been entertainingthe college<br />intellectuals to mulled,claret;the fire was roaring, the airof my room<br />heavy with smoke and spice, and my mind weary with metaphysics. I threw open<br />mywindowsandfromthequad outside camethenotuncommon sounds of<br />bibulouslaughter andunsteadysteps.A voicesaid: "Hold up"; another,<br />"Come on"; another,"Plentyof time. ..House .. .till Tomstops<br />ringing";andanother,clearerthantherest, "D'youknow I feel most<br />unaccountably unwell. I must leave you a minute,"andthere appeared at my<br />window the faceI knew to beSebastian's -- but not as I had formerly seen<br />it, alive and alight with gaiety; he looked at me for a moment with unseeing<br />eyes and then, leaning forward well into the room, he was sick.<br /><br />It wasnot unusual for dinner parties to end in that way; there was in<br />fact a recognized tariff on such occasions forthe comfort of the scout; we<br />were all learning, bytrial and error, tocarry our wine. There was also a<br />kindof insane andendearing orderlinessabout Sebastian's choice, in his<br />extremity,ofanopenwindow.But,whenallissaid, it remained an<br />unpropitious meeting.<br /><br />His friends bore him to the gate and, ina few minutes,his host,an<br />amiable Etonian of my year, returnedto apologize. He, too, wastipsyand<br />hisexplanations were repetitive and, towards theend, tearful. "The wines<br />weretoo various," he said; "it wasneitherthe qualitynor the quantity<br />thatwas at fault. Itwas the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of<br />the matter. To understand all is to forgive all."<br /><br />"Yes," I said, but it was with a sense of grievance that I faced Lunt's<br />reproaches next morning.<br /><br /><br />"A couple of jugs of mulled claret between the five of you," Lunt said,<br />"andthis had to happen. Couldn't even get to the window.Those that can't<br />keep it down are better without it."<br /><br />"It wasn't one of my party. It was someone from out of college."<br /><br />"Well, it's just as nasty clearing it up, whoever it was."<br /><br />"There's five shillings on the sideboard."<br /><br />"So I saw and thank you, but I'd rather not have the money and not have<br />the mess, any morning."<br /><br />I took my gown and left him to his task. I still frequented the lecture<br />room in those days, andit was after eleven whenI returnedto college. I<br />foundmy room full offlowers; whatlookedlike, and, in fact, was,the<br />entireday'sstock of a market-stall stood inevery conceivable vessel in<br />every part of theroom. Lunt was secreting the lastof them in brown paper<br />preparatory to taking them home.<br /><br />"Lunt, what is all this?"<br /><br />"The gentleman from last night, sir, he left a note for you."<br /><br />The note waswritten in contecrayon ona whole sheetof mychoice<br />Whatman H.P.drawing paper: I am very contrite. Aloysiuswon't speak to me<br />until hesees I am forgiven, so pleasecome to luncheon to-day.Sebastian<br />Flyte. It was typical of him, Ireflected, to assume I knew where he lived;<br />but then, I did know. '<br /><br />"A mostamusing gentleman, I'm sure it's quite a pleasure to cleanup<br />after him. I take it you'relunching out,sir.I told Mr. Collins and Mr.<br />Partridge so--they wanted to have their commons in here with you."<br /><br />"Yes, Lunt, lunching out."<br /><br />That luncheon party --for party itproved to be -- was the beginning<br />of a new epoch in my life, but its details are dimmed for me and confused by<br />somany others,almost identical with it, thatsucceeded one another that<br />term and the next, like romping cupids in a Renaissance frieze.<br /><br />I wentthere uncertainly,forit wasforeign ground and there was a<br />tiny, priggish, warning voicein my ear which inthe tones of Collins told<br />me it was seemly to holdback.But I was in searchof love in those days,<br />andI went fullof curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that<br />here, atlast, I should findthat lowdoor in the wall,which others,I<br />knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden,<br />which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey<br />city.<br /><br />Sebastianlivedat Christ Church,highinMeadow Buildings. He was<br />alonewhen I came, peeling a plover's egg taken from the large nest of moss<br />in the centre of the table.<br /><br />"I've just counted them," he said."There were five each and two over,<br />soI'm having thetwo.I'munaccountablyhungryto-day.Iput myself<br />unreservedlyin the hands of Dolbear and Goodall,and feel so drugged that<br />I'vebegun tobelieve that thewholeofyesterday evening was adream.<br />Please don't wake me up."<br /><br />He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality whichin extreme<br />youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.<br /><br />His room was filled witha strange jumble of objects -- a harmonium in<br />a gothic case, an elephant's-foot waste-paper basket, adomeof wax fruit,<br />two disproportionatelylargeSevres vases,framed drawingsby Daumier --<br />made all the more incongruous by the austere college furniture and the large<br />luncheon table. His chimney-piece wascovered with cards of invitation from<br />London hostesses.<br /><br />"That beast Hobson has put Aloysius inthebedder," be said. "Perhaps<br />it'sas well asthere wouldn't have been any plovers' eggs for him.D'you<br />know, Hobson hates Aloysius? I wishI hada scout like yours. He was sweet<br />to me this morning where some people might have been quite strict."<br /><br />The party assembled. There were threeEtonian freshmen, mild, elegant,<br />detached young men who had all been toadance in London the night before,<br />and spoke of itasthoughit had been the funeralof a nearbut unloved<br />kinsman. Each as he cameinto theroom madefirst for theplovers' eggs,<br />then noticed Sebastian and then myself with a polite lack of curiosity which<br />seemed to say: "We should not dream of being so offensive as to suggest that<br />you never met us before."<br /><br />"The first this year," they said. "Where do you get them?"<br /><br />"Mummy sends them from Brideshead. They always lay early for her."<br /><br />When the eggs weregone and wewere eatingthe lobster Newburg,the<br />last guest arrived.<br /><br />"My dear," he said, "I couldn't get away before. I was lunching with my<br />p-p-preposterous tutor. He thought it very odd my leaving when I did. I told<br />him I had to change for F-f-footer."<br /><br />From the momenthearrived thenewcomertookcharge, talking ina<br />luxurious,self-taught stammer;teasing;caricaturingthe guestsat his<br />previous luncheon; tellinglubricious anecdotes ofParis andBerlin;and<br />doingmorethan entertain -- transfiguringthe party,sheddinga vivid,<br />false light of eccentricity upon everyone so that the three prosaic Etonians<br />seemed suddenly to become creatures of his fantasy.<br /><br />This, I did notneed telling, wasAnthony Blanche, the "aesthete" par<br />excellence, a byword of iniquity fromCherwell Edgeto Somerville, a young<br />man who seemed to me, then,fresh fromthe sombre company oftheCollege<br />Essay Society, ageless asa lizard,asforeign as a Martian. Hehad been<br />pointed out tomeoften in the streets, as he movedwith his own peculiar<br />stateliness,asthoughhe had not fullyaccustomed himself tocoatand<br />trousers and was more at his easein heavy, embroidered robes; I hadheard<br />his voicein the Georgechallenging the conventions; andnow meeting him,<br />underthe spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously, like<br />the fine piece of cookery he was.<br /><br />Afterluncheonhestoodonthe balcony with a megaphonewhich had<br />appeared surprisingly amongthe bric-a-bracofSebastian'sroom, andin<br />languishing, sobbing tonesrecitedpassages fromTheWasteLand tothe<br />sweatcred and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.<br /><br />" 'I, Tiresias,have fpresuffered all,'"hesobbed to them fromthe<br />Venetian arches --<br />"Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,<br />I who have sat by Thebes below the wall<br />And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead. . . ."<br /><br />And then, stepping lightly into the room,"How I have surprisedthem!<br />All bJDoatmen are Grace Darlings to me."<br /><br />We sat on sippingCointreau while the mildest and most detached of the<br />Etonians sang "Home theybrought Her warrior dead" to his own accompaniment<br />on the harmonium.<br /><br />It was four o'clock before we broke up.<br /><br />Anthony Blanche was the first to go.He took formal andcomplimentary<br />leave ofeach ofus in turn. To Sebastian he said: "My dear, I should like<br />tostick you full of barbed arrows likea p-p-pin-cushion," andto me: "I<br />think it's perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do<br />you lurk?I shall come down your burrowandch-chiwy youout like an old<br />st-t-toat."<br />The others leftsoon after him. Irose to go with them, but Sebastian<br />said: "Have some more Cointreau," so I stayed and later he said, "Imust'go<br />to the Botanical Gardens."<br /><br />"Why?"<br /><br />"To see the ivy."<br /><br />- It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as<br />we walked under the walls of Merton.<br /><br />"I've never been to the Botanical Gardens," I said.<br /><br />"Oh,Charles, what a lot you haveto learn! There's abeautiful arch<br />there and more different kindsof ivy thanIknewexisted. I don'tknow<br />where I should be without the Botanical Gardens."<br />Whenatlength I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had<br />leftthem that morning, Idetecteda jejune air thathadnotirkedme<br />before. Whatwaswrong?Nothingexcept the golden daffodils seemed to be<br />real. Was it the screen? I turned it face to the wall. That was better.<br /><br />It was the end of the screen. Lunt never liked it, and after a few days<br />he took it away, to an obscure refuge he had under the stairs, fullof mops<br />and buckets.<br /><br />That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it<br />came about, thatmorning in June, that Iwas lying beside him in the shade<br />ofthe high elms,watchingthe smoke fromhislipsdriftup intothe<br />branches.<br /><br />Presently we drove on and in another hour were hungry. We stopped at an<br />inn, whichwas half farm also, and ateeggs and bacon, pickled walnuts and<br />cheese, and drank our beer in a sunless parlour where an old clock ticked in<br />the shadows and a cat slept by the empty grate.<br /><br />We droveonandintheearly afternooncame toourdestination:<br />wrought-iron gates and twin, classical lodges on a village green, an avenue,<br />moregates, openparkland, aturninthedrive; and suddenly a new and<br />secret landscape opened before us. We 'wereat thehead of avalley and<br />below us, half a mile distant,prone inthe sunlight, grey and gold amid a<br />screen of boskage, shone the dome and columns of an old house.<br /><br />"Well?" said Sebastian, stopping the car. Beyond the domelay receding<br />steps of water and round it, guarding and hiding it, stood the soft hills.<br /><br />"Well?"<br /><br />"What a place to live in!" I said.<br /><br />"You must see the garden front and the fountain." He leaned forward and<br />put the car intogear. "It's where my family live." And even then,rapt in<br />thevision, Ifelt, momentarily,like awind stirringthe tapestry,an<br />ominous chill at the words he used -- not "That is my home," but "It's where<br />my family live."<br /><br />"Don't worry," he continued,"they're all away. You won't have to meet<br />them."<br /><br />"But I should like to."<br /><br />"Well, you can't. They're in London, dancing."<br /><br />We drove round thefront into aside court --"Everything's shut up.<br />We'dbettergointhisway"--andenteredthroughthefortress-like,<br />stone-flagged, stone-vaulted passages of the servants'quarters -- "Iwant<br />youtomeetNanny Hawkins.That's whatwe've comefor" -- andclimbed<br />uncarpeted,scrubbedelm stairs,followedmore passagesofwide boards<br />covered in the centre by a thinstrip ofdrugget, through passages covered<br />by linoleum, passingthewellsof many minor staircasesand many rows of<br />crimson andgoldfirebuckets, up a finalstaircase, gatedat the head,<br />where at last we reached the nurseries, high in the domeinthe centreof<br />the main block.<br /><br />Sebastian'sNannywasseated at theopen window;the fountainlay<br />beforeher,the lakes,the temple,and,faraway on the lastspur,a<br />glittering obelisk; her hands lay open in her lap and, loosely between them,<br />a rosary; she was fast asleep. Long hours of work in her youth, authority in<br />middle life, reposeandsecurity in herage, hadset their stamp onher<br />lined and serene face.<br />"Well," she said, waking; "this is a surprise."<br /><br />Sebastian kissed her.<br /><br />"Who's this?" she said, looking at me. "I don't think I know him."<br /><br />Sebastian introduced us.<br /><br />"You've come justthe right time. Julia's here for the day. She was up<br />with me nearly all the morning telling meabout London. Such a time they're<br />all having. It's dull without them. Just Mrs. Chandler andtwo of the girls<br />and old Bert. And thenthey're all going on holidays and the boiler's being<br />done out in August and you going, to see his Lordship in Italy, and the rest<br />on visits,it'll be^ October beforewe'resettleddownagain. Still,I<br />suppose Julia must have her enjoyment the same as other young ladies, though<br />what theyalways want to go to London for in the best of the summer and the<br />gardens all out, I never have understood. Father Phipps was here on Thursday<br />andIsaidexactly thesame tohim," she added as thoughshe hadthus<br />acquired sacerdotal authority for her opinion.<br /><br />"D'you say Julia's here?"<br /><br />"Yes, dear, you must have just missed her. It's the Conservative Women.<br />Her Ladyship wasto have done them, but she's poorly.Julia won't be long;<br />she's leaving immediately after her speech, before the tea."<br /><br />"I'm afraid we may miss her again."<br /><br />"Don't do that,dear,it'llbe sucha surprise toher seeingyou,<br />though she ought to wait for the tea, I told her, it's what the Conservative<br />Women come for. Now what's the news? Are you studying hard at your books?"<br /><br />"Not very, I'm afraid, Nanny."<br /><br />"Ah, cricketing all day long I expect, like your brother. He found time<br />to study, too, though. He's not been here since Christmas, but he'll be here<br />forthe Agricultural I expect. Didyou see this piece about Juliainthe<br />paper ? She brought it down for me. Not that it's nearly good enough of her,<br />but whatit says is very nice. 'The lovely daughter whom LadyMarchmain is<br />bringing out this season... witty as well as ornamental . . . the most<br />popular debutante,' wellthat'snomore thanthe truth,though it was a<br />shame to cuther hair; such alovelyheadof hair shehad just like her<br />Ladyship's.I said to Father Phipps it's not natural He said, 'Nuns do it,'<br />and I said, 'Well, surely, Father, you aren'tgoing tomakea nunout of<br />Lady Julia? The very idea!'"<br /><br />Sebastianand the old wbman talkedon. It was a charmingroom, oddly<br />shaped to conform withthe curve ofthe dome. The walls werepapered in a<br />pattern of ribbonand roses. There was a rocking horse in the corner and an<br />oleographof the Sacred Heart overthemantelpiece;the emptygrate was<br />hidden by a bunch of pampas grass andbulrushes; laid out on the top of the<br />chest of drawers and carefully dusted were the collection of smallpresents<br />which had been brought home to her at varioustimes by her children, carved<br />shelland lava,stamped leather, paintedwood, china, bog oak, damascened<br />silver, blue-John, alabaster, coral, the souvenirs of many holidays.<br />Presently Nanny said: "Ring the bell, dear, and we'll havesome tea. I<br />usually go down to Mrs. Chandler, but we'll have it up here to-day. My usual<br />girlhas gone to London with the others. The new one isjust upfromthe<br />village. She didn't knowanythingat first, but she's coming along nicely.<br />Ring the bell."<br /><br />But Sebastian said we had to go.<br /><br />"And Miss Julia? She will be upset when she hears.Itwould have been<br />such a surprise for her."<br />"PoorNanny," said Sebastian when we left the nursery."She does have<br />such adull life. I've a good mind to bring her to Oxfordto live with me,<br />only she'd alwaysbe trying to send me to church. We must go quickly before<br />my sister gets back."<br /><br />"Which are you ashamed of, her or me?"<br /><br />"I'm ashamed of myself," said Sebastian gravely. "I'm not going to have<br />you getmixedupwith my family.They're so madly charming.All my life<br />they've been taking things away from me.If they once gothold of you with<br />their charm, they'd make you their friend, not mine, and I won't let them."<br /><br />"All right," I said. "I'm perfectly content. But am I notgoing tobe<br />allowed to see any more of the house?"<br /><br />"It's all shut up. Wecame to see Nanny. On Queen Alexandra's Day it's<br />all open for a shilling. Well, come and look if you want to. ..."<br /><br />He led me through a baize door into a dark corridor; I coulddimly see<br />agiltcorniceandvaultedplasterabove;then,openingaheavy,<br />smooth-swinging,mahoganydoor,he ledmeintoa darkened hall.Light<br />streamed through the cracksinthe shutters. Sebastian unbarredone,and<br />folded it back; the mellowafternoonsunflooded in, over the bare floor,<br />thevast, twin fireplaces o sculptured marble,the coved ceiling frescoed<br />with classicdeities andheroes, the gilt mirrors and scagliola pilasters,<br />the islandsof sheeted furniture.It was a glimpse only,such as might be<br />hadfrom the topof anomnibusinto alighted ballroom; thenSebastian<br />quickly shut out the sun.<br /><br />"You see," he said; "it's like this."<br /><br />Hismood had changed sincewe had drunk our wine under the elm trees,<br />since we had turned the corner of the drive and he had said: "Well?"<br /><br />"You see, there'snothing to see. A few pretty things I'd like to show<br />you one day --not now.But there's the chapel.You must see that. It's a<br />monument of art nouveau."<br /><br />The last architect to work it Brideshead had sought to unify its growth<br />with a-colonnade andflanking pavilions. One of thesewas thechapel.We<br />entereditbythe publicporch (another doorled direct tothe house);<br />Sebastiandippedhis fingersinthewater stoup,crossedhimselfand<br />genuflected; I copied him. "Why do you do that?" he asked crossly.<br /><br />"Just good manners."<br /><br />"Well, youneedn't onmyaccount. You wanted todo sightseeing; how<br />about this?"<br />Thewholeinteriorhadbeengutted,elaboratelyrefurnishedand<br />redecoratedinthearts-and-craftsstyleofthelastdecadeofthe<br />nineteenthcentury.Angelsinprintedcottonsmocks,rambler-roses,<br />flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts inCeltic script, saintsin<br />armour, covered thewalls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours.<br />Therewas a triptych of paleoak,carved so astogive itthe peculiar<br />property of seemingto havebeen moulded in plasticine. The sanctuary lamp<br />and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beatento the patina ofa<br />pockmarkedskin; the altarsteps had a carpet ofgrass-green, strewn with<br />white and gold daisies.<br /><br />"Golly," I said.<br /><br />"It was Papa'sweddingpresent to Mamma. Now,if you've seen enough,<br />we'll go."<br /><br />On thedrivewe passed a closed Rolls-Royce driven by a chauffeur; in<br />the backwas a vague,girlish figure who lookedroundat us throughthe<br />window.<br /><br />"Julia," said Sebastian. "We only just got away in time." We stopped to<br />speak toa man with a bicycle -- "Thatwas old Bat," said Sebastian -- and<br />then were away, past the wrought-iron gates, past the lodges and out onthe<br />road heading back to Oxford.<br /><br />"I'msorry," said Sebastian after atime. "I'm afraid Iwasn'tvery<br />nice thisafternoon.Brideshead often has that effect on me. ButI had to<br />take you to see Nanny."<br /><br />Why? I wondered;but said nothing (Sebastian's life was governedby a<br />code ofsuch imperatives. "I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,""I have to<br />stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows," "I've absolutelygot<br />to drink champagneto-night!") except,"It had quite the reverse effect on<br />me."<br /><br />Afteralongpausehesaidpetulantly, "Idon't keep askingyou<br />questions about your family."<br /><br />"Neither do I about yours."<br /><br />"But you look inquisitive."<br /><br />"Well, you're so mysterious about" them."<br /><br />"I hoped I was mysterious about everything."<br /><br />"Perhaps I am rather curious about people's families--you sec, it's not<br />a thing I know about. Thereis only my father and myself. Anauntkept an<br />eye on me for a time but my father drove her abroad. My mother was killed in<br />the war."<br /><br />"Oh . . . how very unusual."<br /><br />"She went to Serbiawith theRed Cross. My father has been rather odd<br />in the head ever since. Hejust lives alone in London with no friends,and<br />footles about collecting things."<br /><br />Sebastiansaid, "You don't know what you've been saved. There are lots<br />of us. Look them up in Debrett."<br /><br />His mood was lightening now. Thefurtherwe drove from Brideshead the<br />more he seemed to cast off his uneasiness -- the almost furtive restlessness<br />and irritability that had possessed him. The sun was behindus as we drove,<br />so that we seemed to be in pursuit of our own shadows.<br /><br />"It's half-past five. We'll get to Godstow in time for dinner, drink at<br />the Trout, leave Hardcastle's motor car and walk back by the river. Wouldn't<br />that be best?"<br /><br />That is the full account of my first brief visit to Brideshead; could I<br />haveknown then that so small a thing, in otherdays,would be remembered<br />with tears by a middle-aged captain of infantry?Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5343257724660503295.post-79137414824274936802008-08-06T12:05:00.000+02:002008-08-06T15:46:38.403+02:00Brideshead revisited: PrologueEvelyn Waugh<br /><br />BRIDESHEAD REVISITED<br />The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder<br />(1944)<br /><br /><br />To Laura<br /><br />Author's Note<br />I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.<br />E.W.<br /><br /><br />Prologue<br /><br />When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I<br />paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me<br />through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we<br />marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first<br />leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes<br />of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and<br />I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.<br /><br />Here love had died between me and the army.<br /><br />Here the tram lines ended, so that men returning fuddled from Glasgow<br />could doze in their seats until roused by the conductress at their journey's<br />end. There was some way to go from the tram-stop to the camp gates; a<br />quarter of a mile in which they could button their blouses and straighten<br />their caps before passing the guard-room, a quarter of a mile in which<br />concrete gave place to grass at the road's edge. This was the extreme limit<br />of the city, a fringe of drift-wood above high-water mark. Here the close,<br />homogeneous territory of housing estates and cinemas ended and the<br />hinterland began.<br /><br />The camp stood where, until quite lately, had been pasture and<br />ploughland; the farm-house still stood in a fold of the hill and had served<br />us for battalion offices; ivy still supported part of what had once been the<br />walls of a fruit garden; half an acre of mutilated old trees behind the<br />wash-houses survived of an orchard. The place had been marked for<br />destruction before the army came to it. Had there been another year of<br />peace, there would have been no farmhouse, no wall, no apple trees. Already<br />half a mile of concrete road lay between bare clay banks, and on either side<br />a chequer of open ditches showed where the municipal contractors had<br />designed a system of drainage. Another year of peace would have made the<br />place part of the neighbouring suburb. Now the huts where we had wintered<br />waited their turn for destruction.<br /><br />Over the way, the subject of much ironical comment, half hidden even in<br />winter by its embosoming trees, lay the municipal lunatic asylum, whose<br />cast-iron railings and noble gates put our rough wire to shame. We could<br />watch the madmen, on clement days, sauntering and skipping among the trim<br />gravel walks and pleasantly planted lawns; happy collaborationists who had<br />given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the<br />undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at<br />their ease. As we marched past the men used to shout greetings to them<br />through the railings -- "Keep a bed warm for me, chum. I shan't be long" --<br />but Hooper, my newest-joined platoon commander, grudged them their life of<br />privilege: "Hitler would put them in a gas chamber," he said; "I reckon we<br />can learn a thing or two from him."<br /><br />Here, when we marched in at midwinter, I brought a company of strong<br />and hopeful men; word had gone round among them, as we moved from the moors<br />to this dockland area, that we were at last in transit for the Middle East.<br />As the days passed and we began clearing the snow and levelling a parade<br />ground, I saw their disappointment change to resignation. They snuffed the<br />smell of the fried-fish shops and cocked their ears to familiar, peace-time<br />sounds of the works' siren and the dance-hall band. On off-days they<br />slouched now at street corners and sidled away at the approach of an officer<br />for fear that, by saluting, they would lose face with their new mistresses.<br />In the company office there was a crop of minor charges and requests for<br />compassionate leave; while it was still half-light, day began with the whine<br />of<br />the malingerer and the glum face and fixed eye of the man with a<br />grievance.<br /><br />And I, who by every precept should have put heart into them-- how could<br />I help them, who could so little help myself? Here the colonel under whom we<br />had formed was promoted out of our sight and succeeded by a younger and less<br />lovable man, cross-posted from another regiment. There were few left in the<br />mess now of the batch of volunteers who trained together at the outbreak of<br />war; one way and another they were nearly all gone -- some had been<br />invalided out, some promoted to other battalions, some posted to staff jobs,<br />some had volunteered for special service, one had got himself killed on the<br />field firing range, one had been court-martialled -- and their places were<br />taken by conscripts; the wireless played incessantly in the ante-room<br />nowadays, and much beer was drunk before dinner; it was not as it had been.<br /><br />Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and<br />weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed<br />proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three<br />glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed<br />immediately after the nine o'clock news. I was always awake and fretful an<br />hour before reveille.<br /><br />Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of<br />its death. One day, not long before this last day in camp, as I lay awake<br />before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness, amid<br />the deep breathing and muttering of the four other occupants, turning over<br />in my mind what I had to do that day -- had I put in the names of two<br />corporals for the weapon-training course? Should I again have the largest<br />number of men overstaying their leave in the batch due back that day? Could<br />I trust Hooper to take the candidates class out map-reading? -- as I lay in<br />that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long<br />sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the<br />fourth year<br />of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or<br />tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company,<br />no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or<br />think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I<br />knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been<br />through it together, the army and I, from the first importunate courtship<br />until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and<br />duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found<br />the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the<br />reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and<br />cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the<br />loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and<br />learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful<br />stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the<br />corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept<br />house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her<br />slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and<br />self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She<br />was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial<br />stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.<br /><br />So, on this morning of our move, I was entirely indifferent as to our<br />destination. I would go on with my job, but I could bring to it nothing more<br />than acquiescence. Our orders were to entrain at 0915 hours at a near-by<br />siding, taking in the haversack the unexpired portion of the day's ration;<br />that was all I needed to know. The company second-in-command had gone on<br />with a small advance party. Company stores had been packed the .day before.<br />Hooper had been detailed to inspect the lines. The company was parading at<br />0730 hours with their kit-bags piled before the huts. There had been many<br />such moves since the wildly exhilarating morning in 1940 when we had<br />erroneously believed ourselves destined for the defence of Calais. Three or<br />four times a year since then we had changed our location; this time our new<br />commanding officer was making an unusual display of "security" and had even<br />put us to the trouble of removing all distinguishing badges from our<br />uniforms and transport. It was "valuable training in active service<br />conditions," he said, "If I find any of these female camp followers waiting<br />for us the other end, I'll know there's been a leakage."<br /><br />The smoke from the cook-houses drifted away in the mist and the camp<br />lay revealed as a planless maze of short-cuts, superimposed on the<br />unfinished housing-scheme, as though disinterred at a much later date by a<br />party of archaeologists.<br /><br />The Pollock diggings provide a valuable link between the citizen-slave<br />communities of the twentieth century and the tribal anarchy, which succeeded<br />them. Here you see a people of advanced culture, capable of an elaborate<br />draining system, and the construction of permanent highways, overrun by a<br />race of the lowest type. The measure of the newcomers may be taken by the<br />facts that their women were devoid of all personal adornment and that the<br />dead were removed to burying places a great distance from the settlement --<br />a sure sign of primitive taboo. ...<br />Thus, I thought, the pundits of the future might write; and, turning<br />away, I greeted the company sergeant-major: "Has Mr. Hooper been round?"<br />"Haven't seen him at all this morning, sir." We went to the dismantled<br />company office, where I found a window newly broken since the<br />barrack-damages book was completed. "Wind-in-the-night, sir," said the<br />sergeant-major.(All breakages were thusattributable, or to<br />"Sappers'-demonstration, sir.")<br /><br />Hooper appeared; he was a sallow youth with hair combed back, without<br />parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent; he had been in the<br />company two months.<br /><br />The troops did not like Hooper because he knew too little about his<br />work and would sometimes address them individually as "George" at<br />stand-easics, but I had a feeling which almost amounted to affection for<br />him, largely by reason of an incident on his first evening in mess.<br />The new colonel had been with us less than a week at the time and we<br />had not yet taken his measure. He had been standing rounds of gin in the<br />ante-room and was slightly boisterous when he first took notice of Hooper.<br /><br />"That young officer is one of yours, isn't he, Ryder?" he said to me.<br />"His hair wants cutting."<br /><br />"It does, sir," I said. It did. "I'll see that it's done."<br /><br />The colonel drank more gin and began to stare at Hooper, saying<br />audibly, "My God, the officers they send us now!"<br /><br />Hooper seemed to obsess the colonel that evening. After dinner he<br />suddenly said very loudly: "In my late regiment if a young officer turned up<br />like that, the other subalterns would bloody well have cut his hair for<br />him."<br /><br />No one showed any enthusiasm for this sport, and our lack of response<br />seemed to inflame the colonel. "You," he said, turning to a decent boy in A<br />Company, "go and get a pair of scissors and cut that young officer's hair<br />for him."<br /><br />"Is that an order, sir?"<br /><br />"It's your commanding officer's wish and that's the best kind of order<br />I know."<br /><br />"Very good, sir."<br /><br />And so, in an atmosphere of chilly embarrassment, Hooper sat in a chair<br />while a few snips were made at the back of his head. At the beginning of the<br />operation I left the ante-room, and later apologized to Hooper for his<br />reception. "It's not the sort of thing that usually happens in this<br />regiment," I said.<br /><br />"Oh, no hard feelings," said Hooper. "I can take a bit of sport."<br /><br />Hooper had no illusions about the army--or rather no special illusions<br />distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the<br />universe. He had come to it reluctantly, under compulsion, after he had made<br />every feeble effort in his power to obtain deferment. He accepted it, he<br />said, "like the measles." Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child<br />ridden with Rupert's horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at<br />the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry -- that stoic, red-skin<br />interlude which our schools introduce between the fast flowing tears of the<br />child and the man -- Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry's speech on<br />St. Crispin's Day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they<br />taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail<br />about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava,<br />Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon -- these, and the<br />Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose<br />trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me<br />irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength<br />of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.<br /><br />He seldom complained. Though himself a man to whom one could not<br />confidently entrust the simplest duty, he had an overmastering regard for<br />efficiency and, drawing on his modest commercial experience, he would<br />sometimes say of the ways of the army in pay and supply and the use of<br />man-hours: "They couldn't get away with that in business."<br /><br />He slept sound while I lay awake fretting.<br /><br />In the weeks that we were together Hooper became a symbol to me of<br />Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming<br />what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would<br />test these general statements by substituting "Hooper" and seeing if they<br />still seemed as plausible. Thus in the dark hour before reveille I sometimes<br />pondered: "Hooper Rallies," "Hooper Hostels," "International Hooper<br />Co-operation" and "the Religion of Hooper." He was the acid test of all<br />these alloys.<br /><br />So far as he had changed at all, he was less soldierly now thaa when he<br />arrived from his OCTU. This morning, laden with full equipment, he looked<br />scarcely human. He came to attention with a kind of shuffling dance-step and<br />spread a wool-gloved palm across his forehead.<br /><br />"I want to speak to Mr. Hooper, sergeant-major . . . well, where the<br />devil have you been? I told you to inspect the lines."<br /><br />" 'M I late ? Sorry. Had a rush getting my gear together."<br /><br />"That's what you have a servant for."<br /><br />"Well I suppose it is, strictly speaking. But you know how it is. He<br />had his own stuff to do. If you get on the wrong side of these fellows they<br />take it out of you other ways."<br /><br />"Well, go and inspect the lines now."<br /><br />"Rightyoh."<br /><br />"And for Christ's sake don't say 'rightyoh.'"<br /><br />"Sorry. I do try to remember. It just slips out."<br /><br />When Hooper left the sergeant-major returned.<br /><br />"C.O. just coming up the path, sir," he said.<br /><br />I went out to meet him.<br /><br />There were beads of moisture on the hog-bristles of his little red<br />moustache.<br /><br />"Well, everything squared up here?"<br /><br />"Yes, I think so, sir."<br /><br />"Think so? You ought to know."<br /><br />His eyes fell on the broken window. "Has that been entered in the<br />barrack-damages?"<br /><br />"Not yet, sir."<br /><br />"Not yet? I wonder when it would have been if I hadn't seen it."<br /><br />He was not at ease with me, and much of his bluster rose from timidity,<br />but I thought none the better of it for that.<br /><br />He led me behind the huts to a wire fence which divided my area from<br />the carrier-platoon's, skipped briskly over and made for an overgrown ditch<br />and bank which had once been a field boundary on the farm. Here he began<br />grubbing with his walking-stick like a truffling pig and presently gave a<br />cry of triumph. He had disclosed one of those deposits of rubbish which are<br />dear to the private soldier's sense of order: the head of a broom, the lid<br />of a stove, a bucket rusted through, a sock, a loaf of bread, lay under the<br />dock and nettle among cigarette packets and empty tins.<br /><br />"Look at that," said the commanding officer. "Fine impression that<br />gives to the regiment taking over from us."<br /><br />"That's bad," I said.<br /><br />"It's a disgrace. See everything there is burned before you leave<br />camp."<br /><br />"Very good, sir. Sergeant-major, send over to the carrier-platoon and<br />tell Captain Brown that the C.O. wants this ditch cleared up."<br /><br />I wondered whether the colonel would take this rebuff; so did he. He<br />stood a moment irresolutely prodding the muck in the ditch, then he turned<br />on his heel and strode away.<br /><br />"You shouldn't do it, sir," said the sergeant-major, who had been my<br />guide and prop since I joined the company. "You shouldn't really."<br /><br />"That wasn't our rubbish."<br /><br />"Maybe not, sir, but you know how it is. If you get on the wrong side<br />of senior officers they take it out of you other ways."<br /><br />As we marched past the madhouse two or three elderly inmates gibbered<br />and mouthed politely behind the railings.<br /><br />"Cheeroh, chum, we'll be seeing you"; "We shan't be long now"; "Keep<br />smiling till we meet again," the men called to them.<br /><br />I was marching with Hooper at the head of the leading platoon.<br /><br />"I say, any idea where we're off to?"<br /><br />"None."<br /><br />"D'you think it's the real thing?"<br /><br />"No."<br /><br />"Just a flap?"<br /><br />"Yes."<br /><br />"Everyone's been saying we're for it. I don't know what to think<br />really. Seems so silly somehow, all this drill and training if we never go<br />into action."<br /><br />"I shouldn't worry. There'll be plenty for everyone in time."<br /><br />"Oh, I don't want much you know. Just enough to say I've been in it."<br /><br />A train of antiquated coaches were waiting for us at the siding; an<br />R.T.O, was in charge; a fatigue party was loading the last of the kit-bags<br />from the trucks to the luggage vans. In half an hour we were ready to start<br />and in an hour we started.<br /><br />My three platoon commanders and myself had a carriage to ourselves.<br />They ate sandwiches and chocolate, smoked and slept. None of them had a<br />book. For the first three or four hours they noted the names of the towns<br />and leaned out of the windows when, as often happened, we stopped between<br />stations. Later they lost interest. At midday and again at dark some tepid<br />cocoa was ladled from a container into our mugs. The train moved slowly<br />South through flat, drab main-line scenery.<br /><br />The chief incident in the day was the C.O.'s "Order Group." We<br />assembled in his carriage, at the summons of an orderly, and found him and<br />the adjutant wearing their steel helmets and equipment. The first thing he<br />said was: "This is an Order Group. I expect you to attend properly dressed.<br />The fact that we happen to be in a train is immaterial." I thought he was<br />going to send us back but, after glaring at us, he said: "Sit down. . . ."<br /><br />"The camp was left in a disgraceful condition. Wherever I went I found<br />evidence that officers are not doing their duty. The state in which a camp<br />is left is the best possible test of the efficiency of regimental officers.<br />It is on such matters that the reputation of a battalion and its commander<br />rests. And"--Did he in fact say this or am I finding words for the<br />resentment in his voice and eye? I think he left it unsaid--"I do not intend<br />to have my professional reputation compromised by the slackness of a few<br />temporary officers."<br /><br />We sat with our note-books and pencils waiting to take down the details<br />of our next jobs. A more sensitive mian would have seen that he had failed<br />to be impressive; perhaps he saw, for he added in a petulant schoolmasterish<br />way: "All I ask is loyal co-operation."<br /><br />Then he referred to his notes and read: --<br /><br />"Orders.<br />"Information. The battalion is now in transit between location A and<br />location B. This is a major L of C and is liable to bombing and gas attack<br />from the enemy.<br /><br />"Intention. I intend to arrive at location B.<br /><br />"Method. Train will arrive at destination at approximately 2315 hours .<br />. ." and so on.<br /><br />The sting came at the end under the heading, "Administration." C<br />Company, less one platoon, was to unload the train on arrival at the siding<br />where three three-tonners would be available for moving all stores to a<br />battalion dump in the new camp; work to continue until completed; the<br />remaining platoon was to find a guard on the dump and perimeter sentries for<br />the camp area.<br /><br />"Any questions?"<br /><br />"Can we have an issue of cocoa for the working party?"<br /><br />"No. Any more questions?"<br /><br />When I told the sergeant-major of these orders he said: "Poor old C<br />Company struck unlucky again"; and I knew this to be a reproach for rny<br />having antagonized the commanding officer.<br />I told the platoon commanders.<br /><br />"I say," said Hooper, "it makes it awfully awkward with the chaps.<br />They'll be fairly browned-off. He always seems to pick on us for the dirty<br />work."<br /><br />"You'll do guard."<br /><br />"Okcydoke. But I say, how am I to find the perimeter in the dark?"<br /><br />Shortly after blackout we were disturbed by an orderly making his way<br />lugubriously down the length of the train with a rattle. One of the more<br />sophisticated sergeants called out "Deuxieme service."<br /><br />"We are being sprayed with liquid mustard-gas," I said. "See that the<br />windows are shut." I then wrote a neat little situation-report to say that<br />there were no casualties and nothing had been contaminated; that men had<br />been detained to decontaminate the outside of the coach before detraining.<br />This seemed to satisfy the commanding officer, for we heard no more from<br />him. After dark we all slept.<br /><br />At last, very late, we came to our siding. It was part of our training<br />in security and active service conditions that we should eschew stations and<br />platforms. The drop from the running board to the cinder track made for<br />disorder and breakages in the darkness:<br /><br />"Fall in on the road below the embankment. C Company seem to be taking<br />their time as usual, Captain Ryder."<br /><br />"Yes sir. We're having a little difficulty with the bleach."<br /><br />"Bleach?"<br /><br />"For decontaminating the outside of the coaches, sir."<br /><br />"Oh, very conscientious, I'm sure. Skip it and get a move on."<br /><br />By now my half-awake and sulky men were clattering into shape on the<br />road. Soon Hooper's platoon had marched off into the darkness; I found the<br />lorries, organized lines of men to pass the stores from hand to hand down<br />the steep bank, and, presently, as they found themselves doing something<br />with an apparent purpose in it, they got more cheerful. I handled stores ;<br />with them for the first half-hour; then broke off to meet the company<br />second-in-command who came down with the first returning truck.<br /><br />"It's not a bad camp," he reported; "big private house with two or<br />three lakes! Looks as if we might get some duck if we're lucky. Village with<br />one pub and a post office. No town within miles. I've managed to get a hut<br />between the two of us."<br /><br />By four in the morning the work was done. I drove in the last lorry,<br />through tortuous lanes where the overhanging boughs whipped the wind screen;<br />somewhere we left the lane and turned into a drive; somewhere we reached an<br />open space where two drives converged and a ring of storm lanterns marked<br />the heap of stores. Here we unloaded the truck and, at long last, followed<br />the guides to our quarters, under a starless sky, with a fine drizzle of<br />rain beginning now to fall.<br /><br /><br /><br />I slept until my servant called me, rose wearily, dressed and shaved in<br />silence. It was not till I reached the door that I asked the<br />second-in-command, "What's this place called?"<br /><br />He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched<br />off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly,<br />fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense<br />silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense<br />regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and<br />long-forgotten sounds -- for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to<br />me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the<br />phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.<br /><br />Outside the hut I stood awed and bemused between two realities and two<br />dreams. The rain had ceased but the clouds hung low and heavy overhead. It<br />was a still morning and the smoke from the cookhouse rose straight to the<br />leaden sky. A cart-track, once metalled, then overgrown, now rutted and<br />churned to mud, followed the contour of the hillside and dipped out of sight<br />below a knoll, and on either side of it lay the haphazard litter of<br />corrugated iron, from which rose the rattle and chatter and whistling and<br />catcalls, all the zoo-noises of the battalion beginning a new day. Beyond<br />and about us, more familiar still, lay an exquisite man-made landscape. It<br />was a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced in a single, winding valley.<br />Our camp lay along one gentle slope; opposite us the ground led, still<br />unravished, to the neighbourly horizon, and between us flowed a stream -- it<br />was named the Bride and rose not two miles away at a farm called<br />Bridesprings, where we used sometimes to walk to tea; it became a<br />considerable river lower down before it joined the Avon -- which had been<br />dammed here to form three lakes, one no more than a wet slate among the<br />reeds, but the others more spacious, reflecting the clouds and the mighty<br />beeches at their margin. The woods were all of oak and beech, the oak grey<br />and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds; they<br />made a simple, carefully designed pattern with the green glades and the wide<br />green spaces -- Did the fallow deer graze here still? -- and, lest the eye<br />wander aimlessly, a Doric temple stood by the water's edge, and an ivy-grown<br />arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs. All this had been planned<br />and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might<br />be seen in its maturity. From where I stood the house was hidden by a green<br />spur, but I knew well how and where it lay, couched among the lime trees<br />like a hind in the bracken. Which was the mirage, which the palpable earth?<br /><br />Hooper came sidling up and greeted me with his much imitated but<br />inimitable salute. His face was grey from his night's vigil and he had not<br />yet shaved.<br /><br />"B Company relieved us. I've sent the chaps off to get cleaned up."<br /><br />"Good."<br /><br />"The house is up there, round the corner."<br /><br />"Yes," I said.<br /><br />"Brigade Headquarters are coming there next week. Great barrack of a<br />place. I've just had a snoop round. Very ornate, I'd call it. And a queer<br />thing, there's a sort of R.C. church attached. I looked in and there was a<br />kind of service going on -- just a padre and one old man. I felt very<br />awkward. More in your line than mine." Perhaps I seemed not to hear; in a<br />final effort to excite my interest he said: "There's a frightful great<br />fountain, too, in front of the steps, all rocks and sort of carved animals.<br />You never saw such a thing."<br /><br />"Yes, Hooper, I did. I've been here before."<br /><br />The words seemed to ring back to me enriched from the vaults of my<br />dungeon.<br /><br />"Oh well, you know all about it. I'll go and get cleaned up."<br /><br />I had been there before; I knew all about it.Albertohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10566373820787341986noreply@blogger.com0