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Evelyn Waugh
BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder
(1944)
Печатный источник: Evelyn Waugh, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED: Little, Brown
and Company, Boston, 1945
OCR & spellcheck - Percy, sirpercy@front.ru
To Laura
Author's Note
I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.
E.W.
Prologue
When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I
paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me
through the grey mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we
marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first
leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes
of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and
I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.
Here love had died between me and the army.
Here the tram lines ended, so that men returning fuddled from Glasgow
could doze in their seats until roused by the conductress at their journey's
end. There was some way to go from the tram-stop to the camp gates; a
quarter of a mile in which they could button their blouses and straighten
their caps before passing the guard-room, a quarter of a mile in which
concrete gave place to grass at the road's edge. This was the extreme limit
of the city, a fringe of drift-wood above high-water mark. Here the close,
homogeneous territory of housing estates and cinemas ended and the
hinterland began.
The camp stood where, until quite lately, had been pasture and
ploughland; the farm-house still stood in a fold of the hill and had served
us for battalion offices; ivy still supported part of what had once been the
walls of a fruit garden; half an acre of mutilated old trees behind the
wash-houses survived of an orchard. The place had been marked for
destruction before the army came to it. Had there been another year of
peace, there would have been no farmhouse, no wall, no apple trees. Already
half a mile of concrete road lay between bare clay banks, and on either side
a chequer of open ditches showed where the municipal contractors had
designed a system of drainage. Another year of peace would have made the
place part of the neighbouring suburb. Now the huts where we had wintered
waited their turn for destruction.
Over the way, the subject of much ironical comment, half hidden even in
winter by its embosoming trees, lay the municipal lunatic asylum, whose
cast-iron railings and noble gates put our rough wire to shame. We could
watch the madmen, on clement days, sauntering and skipping among the trim
gravel walks and pleasantly planted lawns; happy collaborationists who had
given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the
undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at
their ease. As we marched past the men used to shout greetings to them
through the railings -- "Keep a bed warm for me, chum. I shan't be long" --
but Hooper, my newest-joined platoon commander, grudged them their life of
privilege: "Hitler would put them in a gas chamber," he said; "I reckon we
can learn a thing or two from him."
Here, when we marched in at midwinter, I brought a company of strong
and hopeful men; word had gone round among them, as we moved from the moors
to this dockland area, that we were at last in transit for the Middle East.
As the days passed and we began clearing the snow and levelling a parade
ground, I saw their disappointment change to resignation. They snuffed the
smell of the fried-fish shops and cocked their ears to familiar, peace-time
sounds of the works' siren and the dance-hall band. On off-days they
slouched now at street corners and sidled away at the approach of an officer
for fear that, by saluting, they would lose face with their new mistresses.
In the company office there was a crop of minor charges and requests for
compassionate leave; while it was still half-light, day began with the whine
of
the malingerer and the glum face and fixed eye of the man with a
grievance.
And I, who by every precept should have put heart into them-- how could
I help them, who could so little help myself? Here the colonel under whom we
had formed was promoted out of our sight and succeeded by a younger and less
lovable man, cross-posted from another regiment. There were few left in the
mess now of the batch of volunteers who trained together at the outbreak of
war; one way and another they were nearly all gone -- some had been
invalided out, some promoted to other battalions, some posted to staff jobs,
some had volunteered for special service, one had got himself killed on the
field firing range, one had been court-martialled -- and their places were
taken by conscripts; the wireless played incessantly in the ante-room
nowadays, and much beer was drunk before dinner; it was not as it had been.
Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and
weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed
proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three
glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed
immediately after the nine o'clock news. I was always awake and fretful an
hour before reveille.
Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of
its death. One day, not long before this last day in camp, as I lay awake
before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness, amid
the deep breathing and muttering of the four other occupants, turning over
in my mind what I had to do that day -- had I put in the names of two
corporals for the weapon-training course? Should I again have the largest
number of men overstaying their leave in the batch due back that day? Could
I trust Hooper to take the candidates class out map-reading? -- as I lay in
that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long
sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the
fourth year
of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or
tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company,
no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or
think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I
knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been
through it together, the army and I, from the first importunate courtship
until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and
duty and custom. I had played every scene in the domestic tragedy, had found
the early tiffs become more frequent, the tears less affecting, the
reconciliations less sweet, till they engendered a mood of aloofness and
cool criticism, and the growing conviction that it was not myself but the
loved one who was at fault. I caught the false notes in her voice and
learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful
stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the
corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept
house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her
slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and
self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She
was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial
stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.
So, on this morning of our move, I was entirely indifferent as to our
destination. I would go on with my job, but I could bring to it nothing more
than acquiescence. Our orders were to entrain at 0915 hours at a near-by
siding, taking in the haversack the unexpired portion of the day's ration;
that was all I needed to know. The company second-in-command had gone on
with a small advance party. Company stores had been packed the .day before.
Hooper had been detailed to inspect the lines. The company was parading at
0730 hours with their kit-bags piled before the huts. There had been many
such moves since the wildly exhilarating morning in 1940 when we had
erroneously believed ourselves destined for the defence of Calais. Three or
four times a year since then we had changed our location; this time our new
commanding officer was making an unusual display of "security" and had even
put us to the trouble of removing all distinguishing badges from our
uniforms and transport. It was "valuable training in active service
conditions," he said, "If I find any of these female camp followers waiting
for us the other end, I'll know there's been a leakage."
The smoke from the cook-houses drifted away in the mist and the camp
lay revealed as a planless maze of short-cuts, superimposed on the
unfinished housing-scheme, as though disinterred at a much later date by a
party of archaeologists.
The Pollock diggings provide a valuable link between the citizen-slave
communities of the twentieth century and the tribal anarchy, which succeeded
them. Here you see a people of advanced culture, capable of an elaborate
draining system, and the construction of permanent highways, overrun by a
race of the lowest type. The measure of the newcomers may be taken by the
facts that their women were devoid of all personal adornment and that the
dead were removed to burying places a great distance from the settlement --
a sure sign of primitive taboo. ...
Thus, I thought, the pundits of the future might write; and, turning
away, I greeted the company sergeant-major: "Has Mr. Hooper been round?"
"Haven't seen him at all this morning, sir." We went to the dismantled
company office, where I found a window newly broken since the
barrack-damages book was completed. "Wind-in-the-night, sir," said the
sergeant-major. (All breakages were thus attributable, or to
"Sappers'-demonstration, sir.")
Hooper appeared; he was a sallow youth with hair combed back, without
parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent; he had been in the
company two months.
The troops did not like Hooper because he knew too little about his
work and would sometimes address them individually as "George" at
stand-easics, but I had a feeling which almost amounted to affection for
him, largely by reason of an incident on his first evening in mess.
The new colonel had been with us less than a week at the time and we
had not yet taken his measure. He had been standing rounds of gin in the
ante-room and was slightly boisterous when he first took notice of Hooper.
"That young officer is one of yours, isn't he, Ryder?" he said to me.
"His hair wants cutting."
"It does, sir," I said. It did. "I'll see that it's done."
The colonel drank more gin and began to stare at Hooper, saying
audibly, "My God, the officers they send us now!"
Hooper seemed to obsess the colonel that evening. After dinner he
suddenly said very loudly: "In my late regiment if a young officer turned up
like that, the other subalterns would bloody well have cut his hair for
him."
No one showed any enthusiasm for this sport, and our lack of response
seemed to inflame the colonel. "You," he said, turning to a decent boy in A
Company, "go and get a pair of scissors and cut that young officer's hair
for him."
"Is that an order, sir?"
"It's your commanding officer's wish and that's the best kind of order
I know."
"Very good, sir."
And so, in an atmosphere of chilly embarrassment, Hooper sat in a chair
while a few snips were made at the back of his head. At the beginning of the
operation I left the ante-room, and later apologized to Hooper for his
reception. "It's not the sort of thing that usually happens in this
regiment," I said.
"Oh, no hard feelings," said Hooper. "I can take a bit of sport."
Hooper had no illusions about the army--or rather no special illusions
distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the
universe. He had come to it reluctantly, under compulsion, after he had made
every feeble effort in his power to obtain deferment. He accepted it, he
said, "like the measles." Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child
ridden with Rupert's horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at
the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry -- that stoic, red-skin
interlude which our schools introduce between the fast flowing tears of the
child and the man -- Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry's speech on
St. Crispin's Day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they
taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail
about humane legislation and recent industrial change. Gallipoli, Balaclava,
Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales, and Marathon -- these, and the
Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose
trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me
irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength
of boyhood, sounded in vain to Hooper.
He seldom complained. Though himself a man to whom one could not
confidently entrust the simplest duty, he had an overmastering regard for
efficiency and, drawing on his modest commercial experience, he would
sometimes say of the ways of the army in pay and supply and the use of
man-hours: "They couldn't get away with that in business."
He slept sound while I lay awake fretting.
In the weeks that we were together Hooper became a symbol to me of
Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming
what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would
test these general statements by substituting "Hooper" and seeing if they
still seemed as plausible. Thus in the dark hour before reveille I sometimes
pondered: "Hooper Rallies," "Hooper Hostels," "International Hooper
Co-operation" and "the Religion of Hooper." He was the acid test of all
these alloys.
So far as he had changed at all, he was less soldierly now thaa when he
arrived from his OCTU. This morning, laden with full equipment, he looked
scarcely human. He came to attention with a kind of shuffling dance-step and
spread a wool-gloved palm across his forehead.
"I want to speak to Mr. Hooper, sergeant-major . . . well, where the
devil have you been? I told you to inspect the lines."
" 'M I late ? Sorry. Had a rush getting my gear together."
"That's what you have a servant for."
"Well I suppose it is, strictly speaking. But you know how it is. He
had his own stuff to do. If you get on the wrong side of these fellows they
take it out of you other ways."
"Well, go and inspect the lines now."
"Rightyoh."
"And for Christ's sake don't say 'rightyoh.'"
"Sorry. I do try to remember. It just slips out."
When Hooper left the sergeant-major returned.
"C.O. just coming up the path, sir," he said.
I went out to meet him.
There were beads of moisture on the hog-bristles of his little red
moustache.
"Well, everything squared up here?"
"Yes, I think so, sir."
"Think so? You ought to know."
His eyes fell on the broken window. "Has that been entered in the
barrack-damages?"
"Not yet, sir."
"Not yet? I wonder when it would have been if I hadn't seen it."
He was not at ease with me, and much of his bluster rose from timidity,
but I thought none the better of it for that.
He led me behind the huts to a wire fence which divided my area from
the carrier-platoon's, skipped briskly over and made for an overgrown ditch
and bank which had once been a field boundary on the farm. Here he began
grubbing with his walking-stick like a truffling pig and presently gave a
cry of triumph. He had disclosed one of those deposits of rubbish which are
dear to the private soldier's sense of order: the head of a broom, the lid
of a stove, a bucket rusted through, a sock, a loaf of bread, lay under the
dock and nettle among cigarette packets and empty tins.
"Look at that," said the commanding officer. "Fine impression that
gives to the regiment taking over from us."
"That's bad," I said.
"It's a disgrace. See everything there is burned before you leave
camp."
"Very good, sir. Sergeant-major, send over to the carrier-platoon and
tell Captain Brown that the C.O. wants this ditch cleared up."
I wondered whether the colonel would take this rebuff; so did he. He
stood a moment irresolutely prodding the muck in the ditch, then he turned
on his heel and strode away.
"You shouldn't do it, sir," said the sergeant-major, who had been my
guide and prop since I joined the company. "You shouldn't really."
"That wasn't our rubbish."
"Maybe not, sir, but you know how it is. If you get on the wrong side
of senior officers they take it out of you other ways."
As we marched past the madhouse two or three elderly inmates gibbered
and mouthed politely behind the railings.
"Cheeroh, chum, we'll be seeing you"; "We shan't be long now"; "Keep
smiling till we meet again," the men called to them.
I was marching with Hooper at the head of the leading platoon.
"I say, any idea where we're off to?"
"None."
"D'you think it's the real thing?"
"No."
"Just a flap?"
"Yes."
"Everyone's been saying we're for it. I don't know what to think
really. Seems so silly somehow, all this drill and training if we never go
into action."
"I shouldn't worry. There'll be plenty for everyone in time."
"Oh, I don't want much you know. Just enough to say I've been in it."
A train of antiquated coaches were waiting for us at the siding; an
R.T.O, was in charge; a fatigue party was loading the last of the kit-bags
from the trucks to the luggage vans. In half an hour we were ready to start
and in an hour we started.
My three platoon commanders and myself had a carriage to ourselves.
They ate sandwiches and chocolate, smoked and slept. None of them had a
book. For the first three or four hours they noted the names of the towns
and leaned out of the windows when, as often happened, we stopped between
stations. Later they lost interest. At midday and again at dark some tepid
cocoa was ladled from a container into our mugs. The train moved slowly
South through flat, drab main-line scenery.
The chief incident in the day was the C.O.'s "Order Group." We
assembled in his carriage, at the summons of an orderly, and found him and
the adjutant wearing their steel helmets and equipment. The first thing he
said was: "This is an Order Group. I expect you to attend properly dressed.
The fact that we happen to be in a train is immaterial." I thought he was
going to send us back but, after glaring at us, he said: "Sit down. . . ."
"The camp was left in a disgraceful condition. Wherever I went I found
evidence that officers are not doing their duty. The state in which a camp
is left is the best possible test of the efficiency of regimental officers.
It is on such matters that the reputation of a battalion and its commander
rests. And"--Did he in fact say this or am I finding words for the
resentment in his voice and eye? I think he left it unsaid--"I do not intend
to have my professional reputation compromised by the slackness of a few
temporary officers."
We sat with our note-books and pencils waiting to take down the details
of our next jobs. A more sensitive mian would have seen that he had failed
to be impressive; perhaps he saw, for he added in a petulant schoolmasterish
way: "All I ask is loyal co-operation."
Then he referred to his notes and read: --
"Orders.
"Information. The battalion is now in transit between location A and
location B. This is a major L of C and is liable to bombing and gas attack
from the enemy.
"Intention. I intend to arrive at location B.
"Method. Train will arrive at destination at approximately 2315 hours .
. ." and so on.
The sting came at the end under the heading, "Administration." C
Company, less one platoon, was to unload the train on arrival at the siding
where three three-tonners would be available for moving all stores to a
battalion dump in the new camp; work to continue until completed; the
remaining platoon was to find a guard on the dump and perimeter sentries for
the camp area.
"Any questions?"
"Can we have an issue of cocoa for the working party?"
"No. Any more questions?"
When I told the sergeant-major of these orders he said: "Poor old C
Company struck unlucky again"; and I knew this to be a reproach for rny
having antagonized the commanding officer.
I told the platoon commanders.
"I say," said Hooper, "it makes it awfully awkward with the chaps.
They'll be fairly browned-off. He always seems to pick on us for the dirty
work."
"You'll do guard."
"Okcydoke. But I say, how am I to find the perimeter in the dark?"
Shortly after blackout we were disturbed by an orderly making his way
lugubriously down the length of the train with a rattle. One of the more
sophisticated sergeants called out "Deuxieme service."
"We are being sprayed with liquid mustard-gas," I said. "See that the
windows are shut." I then wrote a neat little situation-report to say that
there were no casualties and nothing had been contaminated; that men had
been detained to decontaminate the outside of the coach before detraining.
This seemed to satisfy the commanding officer, for we heard no more from
him. After dark we all slept.
At last, very late, we came to our siding. It was part of our training
in security and active service conditions that we should eschew stations and
platforms. The drop from the running board to the cinder track made for
disorder and breakages in the darkness:
"Fall in on the road below the embankment. C Company seem to be taking
their time as usual, Captain Ryder."
"Yes sir. We're having a little difficulty with the bleach."
"Bleach?"
"For decontaminating the outside of the coaches, sir."
"Oh, very conscientious, I'm sure. Skip it and get a move on."
By now my half-awake and sulky men were clattering into shape on the
road. Soon Hooper's platoon had marched off into the darkness; I found the
lorries, organized lines of men to pass the stores from hand to hand down
the steep bank, and, presently, as they found themselves doing something
with an apparent purpose in it, they got more cheerful. I handled stores ;
with them for the first half-hour; then broke off to meet the company
second-in-command who came down with the first returning truck.
"It's not a bad camp," he reported; "big private house with two or
three lakes! Looks as if we might get some duck if we're lucky. Village with
one pub and a post office. No town within miles. I've managed to get a hut
between the two of us."
By four in the morning the work was done. I drove in the last lorry,
through tortuous lanes where the overhanging boughs whipped the wind screen;
somewhere we left the lane and turned into a drive; somewhere we reached an
open space where two drives converged and a ring of storm lanterns marked
the heap of stores. Here we unloaded the truck and, at long last, followed
the guides to our quarters, under a starless sky, with a fine drizzle of
rain beginning now to fall.
I slept until my servant called me, rose wearily, dressed and shaved in
silence. It was not till I reached the door that I asked the
second-in-command, "What's this place called?"
He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched
off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly,
fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense
silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense
regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and
long-forgotten sounds -- for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to
me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the
phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.
Outside the hut I stood awed and bemused between two realities and two
dreams. The rain had ceased but the clouds hung low and heavy overhead. It
was a still morning and the smoke from the cookhouse rose straight to the
leaden sky. A cart-track, once metalled, then overgrown, now rutted and
churned to mud, followed the contour of the hillside and dipped out of sight
below a knoll, and on either side of it lay the haphazard litter of
corrugated iron, from which rose the rattle and chatter and whistling and
catcalls, all the zoo-noises of the battalion beginning a new day. Beyond
and about us, more familiar still, lay an exquisite man-made landscape. It
was a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced in a single, winding valley.
Our camp lay along one gentle slope; opposite us the ground led, still
unravished, to the neighbourly horizon, and between us flowed a stream -- it
was named the Bride and rose not two miles away at a farm called
Bridesprings, where we used sometimes to walk to tea; it became a
considerable river lower down before it joined the Avon -- which had been
dammed here to form three lakes, one no more than a wet slate among the
reeds, but the others more spacious, reflecting the clouds and the mighty
beeches at their margin. The woods were all of oak and beech, the oak grey
and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds; they
made a simple, carefully designed pattern with the green glades and the wide
green spaces -- Did the fallow deer graze here still? -- and, lest the eye
wander aimlessly, a Doric temple stood by the water's edge, and an ivy-grown
arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs. All this had been planned
and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might
be seen in its maturity. From where I stood the house was hidden by a green
spur, but I knew well how and where it lay, couched among the lime trees
like a hind in the bracken. Which was the mirage, which the palpable earth?
Hooper came sidling up and greeted me with his much imitated but
inimitable salute. His face was grey from his night's vigil and he had not
yet shaved.
"B Company relieved us. I've sent the chaps off to get cleaned up."
"Good."
"The house is up there, round the corner."
"Yes," I said.
"Brigade Headquarters are coming there next week. Great barrack of a
place. I've just had a snoop round. Very ornate, I'd call it. And a queer
thing, there's a sort of R.C. church attached. I looked in and there was a
kind of service going on -- just a padre and one old man. I felt very
awkward. More in your line than mine." Perhaps I seemed not to hear; in a
final effort to excite my interest he said: "There's a frightful great
fountain, too, in front of the steps, all rocks and sort of carved animals.
You never saw such a thing."
"Yes, Hooper, I did. I've been here before."
The words seemed to ring back to me enriched from the vaults of my
dungeon.
"Oh well, you know all about it. I'll go and get cleaned up."
I had been there before; I knew all about it.
BOOK I
ET IN ARCADIA EGO
Chapter One
"I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with
Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the
ditches were white with fool's-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy
with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as
our climate ar-fords once, or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird
and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory qf God; and
though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first
visit that my heart returned on this, my latest. That day, too, I had come
not knowing my destination. It was Eights Week. Oxford -- submerged now and
obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come
flooding in --Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her
spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman's
day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her
summer days -- such as that day when the chestnut was in flower and the
bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft
vapours of a thousand years of learning. It was this cloistral hush which
gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the
intervening clamour. Here, discordantly, in Eights Week, came a rabble of
womankind, some hundreds strong, twittering and fluttering over the cobbles
and up the steps, sight-seeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup,
eating cucumber sandwiches; pushed in punts about the river, herded in
droves to the college barges; greeted in the Isis and in the Union by a
sudden display of peculiar, facetious, wholly distressing
Gilbert-and-Sullivan badinage, and by peculiar choral effects in the college
chapels. Echoes of the intruders penetrated every corner, and in my own
college was no echo, but an original fount of the grossest disturbance. We
were giving a ball. The front quad, where I lived, was floored and tented;
palms and azaleas were banked round the porter's lodge; worst of all, the
don who lived above me, a mouse of a man connected with the Natural
Sciences, had lent his rooms for a Ladies' Cloakroom, and a printed notice
proclaiming this outrage hung not six inches from my oak.
No one felt more strongly about it than my scout.
"Gentlemen who haven't got ladies are asked as far as possible to take
their meals out in the next few days," he announced despondently. "Will you
be lunching in?"
"No, Lunt."
"So as to give the servants a chance, they say. What a chance! I've got
to buy a pin-cushion for the Ladies' Cloakroom. What do they want with
dancing? I don't see the reason in it. There never was dancing before in
Eights Week. Commcm. now is another matter being in the vacation, but not in
Eights Week as if teas and the river wasn't enough. If you ask me, sir, it's
all on account of the war. It couldn't have happened but for that." For this
was 1923 and for Lunt, as for thousands of others, things could never be the
same as they had been in 1914. "Now wine in the evening," he continued, as
was his habit, half in and half out of the door, "or one or two gentlemen to
luncheon, there's reason in. But not dancing. It all came in with the men
back from the war. They were too old and they didn't know and they wouldn't
learn. That's the truth. And there's sorne even goes dancing with the town
at the Masonic --but the proctors will get them, you see. . . . Well, here's
Lord Sebastian. I mustn't stand here talking when there's pin-cushions to
get."
Sebastian entered -- dove-grey flannel, white crepe-de-chine, a Charvet
tie, my tie as it happened, a pattern of postage stamps-- "Charles, what in
the world's happening at your college? Is there a circus? I've seen
everything except elephants. I must say the whole of Oxford has become most
peculiar suddenly. Last night it was pullulating with women. You're to come
away at once, out of danger. I've got a motor-car and a basket of
strawberries and a bottle of Chateau Peyraguey -- which isn't a wine you've
ever tasted, so don't pretend. It's heaven with strawberries."
"Where are we going?"
"To see a friend."
"Who?"
"Name of Hawkins. Bring some money in case we see anything we want to
buy. The motor-car is the property of a man called Hardcastle. Return the
bits to him if I kill myself; I'm not very good at driving."
Beyond the gate, beyond the winter garden that was once the lodge,
stood an open, two-seater Morris-Cowley. Sebastian's Teddy-bear sat at the
wheel. We put him between us --"Take care he's ndt sick" -- and drove off.
The bells of St. Mary's were chiming nine; we escaped collision with a
clergyman, black-straw-hatted, white-bearded, pedalling quietly down the
wrong side of the High Street, crossed Carfax, passed the station, and were
soon in open country on the Botley Road; open country was easily reached in
those days.
"Isn't it early?" said Sebastian. "The women are still doing whatever
women do to themselves before they come downstairs. Sloth has undone them.
We're away. God bless Hardcastle."
"Whoever he may be."
"He thought he wa,s coming with us. Sloth undid him too. Well, I did
tell him ten. He's a very gloomy man in my college. He leads a double life.
At least I assume he does. He couldn't go on being Hardcastle, day and
night, always, could he? Or he'd die of it. He says he knows my father,
which is impossible."
"Why?"
"No one knows Papa. He's a social leper. Hadn't you heard?"
"It's a pity neither of us can sing," I said.
At Swindon we turned off the main road and, as the mounted high, we
were among dry-stone walls and ashlar ho It was about eleven when Sebastian,
without warning, turned the! car into a cart track and stopped. It was hot
enough now toj make us seek the shade. On a sheep-cropped knoll under a I
clump of elms we ate the strawberries and drank the wine -- as Sebastian
promised, they were delicious together -- and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes
and lay on our backs, Sebastian's eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his
profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the
blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged
with the sweet! summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden
wine seemed to lift us a finger's breadth above the turf and hold us
suspended.
"Just the place to bury a crock of gold," said Sebastian. "I should
like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and
then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up
and remember."
This was my third term since matriculation, but I date my Oxford life
from my first meeting with Sebastian, which had happened, by chance, in the
middle of the term before. We were in different colleges and came from
different schools; I might well have spent my three or four years in the
University and never have met him, but for the chance of his getting drunk
one evening in my college and of my having ground-floor rooms in the front
quadrangle.
I had been warned against the dangers of these rooms by my cousin
Jasper, who alone, when I first came up, thought me a suitable subject for
detailed guidance. My father offered me none. Then, as always, he eschewed
serious conversation with me. It was not until I was within a fortnight of
going up that he mentioned the subject at all; then he said, shyly and
rather slyly: "I've been talking about you. I met your future Warden at the
Athenaeum. I wanted to talk about Etruscan notions of immortality; he wanted
to talk about extension lectures for the working-class; so we compromised
and talked about you. I asked him what your allowance should be. He said,
'Three hundred a year; on no account give him more; that's all most men
have.' I thought that a deplorable answer. / had more than most men when /
was up, and my recollection is that nowhere else in the world and at no
other time, do a few hundred pounds, one way or the other, make so much
difference to one's importance and popularity. I toyed with the idea of
giving you six hundred," said my father, snuffling a little, as he did when
he was amused, "but I reflected that, should the Warden come to hear of it,
it might sound deliberately impolite. So I shall give you five hundred and
fifty."
I thanked him.
"Yes, it's indulgent of me, but it all comes out of capital, you know.
... I suppose this is the time I should give you advice. I never had any
myself except once from your cousin Alfred. Do you know in the summer before
I was going up, your cousin Alfred rode over to Boughton especially to give
me a piece of advice? And do you know what that advice was? 'Ned,' he said,
'there's one thing I must beg of you. Always wear a tall hat on Sundays
during term. It is by that, more than anything, that a man is judged.' And
do you know," continued my father, snuffling deeply, "I always did? Some men
did, some didn't. I never saw any difference between them or heard it
commented on, but I always wore mine. It only shows what effect judicious
advice can have, properly delivered at the right moment. I wish I had some
for you, but I haven't."
My cousin Jasper made good the loss; he was the son of my father's
elder brother, to whom he referred more than once, only half facetiously, as
"the Head of the Family"; he was in his fourth year and, the term before,
had come within appreciable distance of getting his rowing blue; he was
secretary of the Canning and president of the J.C.R. -- a considerable
person in college. He called on me formally during my first week and stayed
to tea; he ate a very heavy meal of honey-buns, anchovy toast-and Puller's
walnut cake, then he lit his pipe and, lying back in the basket-chair, laid
down the rules of conduct which I should follow; he covered most subjects;
even to-day I could repeat much of what he said, word for word. "... You're
reading History? A perfectly respectable school. The very worst is English
Literature and the next worst is Modern Greats. You want either a first or a
fourth. There is no value in anything between. Time spent on a good second
is time thrown away. You should go to the best lectures -- Arkwright on
Demosthenes for instance -- irrespective of whether they are in your school
or not.....Clothes. Dress as you do in a country house. Never wear a tweed
coat and flannel trousers -- always a suit. And go to a London tailor; you
get better cut and longer credit. . . . Clubs. Join the Carlton now and the
Grid at the beginning of your second year. If you want to run for the Union
-- and it's not a bad thing to do -- make your reputation outside first, at
the Canning or the Chatham, and begin by speaking on the paper. . . . Keep
clear of Boar's Hill . . ." The sky over the opposing gables glowed and then
darkened; I put more coal on the fire and turned on the light, revealing in
their respectability his London-made plus fours and his Leander tie. . . .
"Don't treat dons like schoolmasters; treat them as you would the vicar at
home. . . . You'll find you spend half your second year shaking off the
undesirable friends you made in your first. . . . Beware of the
Anglo-Catholics -- they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents. In fact,
steer clear of all the religious groups; they do nothing but harm. . . ."
Finally, just as he was going, he said, "One last point. Change your
rooms." They were large, with deeply recessed windows and painted,
eighteenth-century panelling; I was lucky as a freshman to get them. "I've
seen many a man ruined through having ground-floor rooms in the front quad,"
said my cousin with deep gravity. "People start dropping in. They leave
their gowns here and come and collect them before hall; you start giving
them sherry. Before you know where you are, you've opened a free bar for all
the undesirables of the college."
I do not know that I ever, consciously, followed any o this advice. I
certainly never changed my rooms; there were gillyflowers growing below the
windows which on summer evenings filled them with fragrance.
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false
precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's
stature on the edge of the door. I should like to think -- indeed I
sometimes do think -- that I decorated those rooms with Morris stuffs and
Arundel prints and that my shelves were filled with seventeenth-century
folios and French novels of the second empire in Russia-leather and
watered-silk. But this was not the truth. On my first afternoon I proudly
hung a reproduction of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" over the fire and set up a
screen, painted by Roger Fry with a Provencal landscape, which I had bought
inexpensively when the Omega workshops were sold up. I displayed also a
poster by McKnight Kauffer and Rhyme Sheets from the Poetry Bookshop, and,
most painful to recall, a porcelain figure of Polly Peachum which stood
between black tapers on the chimney-piece. My books were meagre and
commonplace -- Roger Fry's Vision and Design; the Medici Press edition of A
Shropshire Lad; Eminent Victorians; some volumes of Georgian Poetry;
Sinister Street; and South Wind -- and my earliest friends fitted well into
this background; they were Collins, a Wykehamist, an embryo don, a man of
solid reading and childlike humour, and a small circle of college
intellectuals, who maintained a middle course of culture between the
flamboyant "aesthetes" and the proletarian scholars who scrambled fiercely
for facts in the lodging houses of the Iffley -Road and Wellington Square.
It was by this circle that I found myself adopted during my first term; they
provided the kind of company I had enjoyed in the sixth form at school, for
which the sixth form had prepared me; but even in the earliest days, when
the whole business of living at Oxford, with rooms of my own and my own
cheque book, was a source of excitement, I felt at heart that this was not
all that Oxford had to offer.
At Sebastian's approach these grey figures seemed quietly to fade into
the landscape and vanish, like highland sheep in the misty heather. Collins
had exposed the fallacy of modern aesthetics to me: "... The whole argument'
from Significant Form stands or falls by volume. If you allow Cezanne to
represent a third dimension on his two-dimensional canvas, then you must
allow Landseer his gleam of loyalty in the spaniel's eye"-- but it was not
until Sebastian, idly turning the page of Clive Bell's Art, read: " 'Does
anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he
feels for a cathedral or a picture?' Yes. I do," that my eyes were opened.
I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable
for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by
reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of
behaviour which seemed to know no bounds. My first sight of him was as we
passed in the door of Germer's, and, on that occasion, I was struck less by
his looks than by the fact that he was carrying a large Teddy-bear.
"That," said the barber, as I took his chair, "was Lord Sebastian
Flyte. A most amusing young gentleman."
"Apparently," I said coldly.
"The Marquis of Marchmain's second boy. His brother, the Earl of
Brideshead, went down last term. Now he was very different, a very quiet
gentleman, quite like an old man. What do you suppose Lord Sebastian wanted?
A hair brush for his Teddy-bear; it had to have very stiff bristles, not,
Lord Sebastian said, to brush him with, but to threaten him with a spanking
when he was sulky. He bought a very nice one with an ivory back and he's
having 'Aloysius' engraved on it -- that's the bear's name." The man, who,
in his time, had had ample chance to tire of undergraduate fantasy, was
plainly captivated by him. I, however, remained censorious and subsequent
glimpses of Sebastian, driving in a hansom cab and dining at the George in
false whiskers, did not soften me, although Collins, who was reading Freud,
had a number of technical terms to cover everything.
Nor, when at last we met, were the circumstances propitious. It was
shortly before midnight in early March; I had been entertaining the college
intellectuals to mulled ,claret; the fire was roaring, the air of my room
heavy with smoke and spice, and my mind weary with metaphysics. I threw open
my windows and from the quad outside came the not uncommon sounds of
bibulous laughter and unsteady steps. A voice said: "Hold up"; another,
"Come on"; another, "Plenty of time . . . House . . . till Tom stops
ringing"; and another, clearer than the rest, "D'you know I feel most
unaccountably unwell. I must leave you a minute," and there appeared at my
window the face I knew to be Sebastian's -- but not as I had formerly seen
it, alive and alight with gaiety; he looked at me for a moment with unseeing
eyes and then, leaning forward well into the room, he was sick.
It was not unusual for dinner parties to end in that way; there was in
fact a recognized tariff on such occasions for the comfort of the scout; we
were all learning, by trial and error, to carry our wine. There was also a
kind of insane and endearing orderliness about Sebastian's choice, in his
extremity, of an open window. But, when all is said, it remained an
unpropitious meeting.
His friends bore him to the gate and, in a few minutes, his host, an
amiable Etonian of my year, returned to apologize. He, too, was tipsy and
his explanations were repetitive and, towards the end, tearful. "The wines
were too various," he said; "it was neither the quality nor the quantity
that was at fault. It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of
the matter. To understand all is to forgive all."
"Yes," I said, but it was with a sense of grievance that I faced Lunt's
reproaches next morning.
"A couple of jugs of mulled claret between the five of you," Lunt said,
"and this had to happen. Couldn't even get to the window. Those that can't
keep it down are better without it."
"It wasn't one of my party. It was someone from out of college."
"Well, it's just as nasty clearing it up, whoever it was."
"There's five shillings on the sideboard."
"So I saw and thank you, but I'd rather not have the money and not have
the mess, any morning."
I took my gown and left him to his task. I still frequented the lecture
room in those days, and it was after eleven when I returned to college. I
found my room full of flowers; what looked like, and, in fact, was, the
entire day's stock of a market-stall stood in every conceivable vessel in
every part of the room. Lunt was secreting the last of them in brown paper
preparatory to taking them home.
"Lunt, what is all this?"
"The gentleman from last night, sir, he left a note for you."
The note was written in conte crayon on a whole sheet of my choice
Whatman H.P. drawing paper: I am very contrite. Aloysius won't speak to me
until he sees I am forgiven, so please come to luncheon to-day. Sebastian
Flyte. It was typical of him, I reflected, to assume I knew where he lived;
but then, I did know. '
"A most amusing gentleman, I'm sure it's quite a pleasure to clean up
after him. I take it you're lunching out, sir. I told Mr. Collins and Mr.
Partridge so--they wanted to have their commons in here with you."
"Yes, Lunt, lunching out."
That luncheon party -- for party it proved to be -- was the beginning
of a new epoch in my life, but its details are dimmed for me and confused by
so many others, almost identical with it, that succeeded one another that
term and the next, like romping cupids in a Renaissance frieze.
I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a
tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which in the tones of Collins told
me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days,
and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that
here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I
knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden,
which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey
city.
Sebastian lived at Christ Church, high in Meadow Buildings. He was
alone when I came, peeling a plover's egg taken from the large nest of moss
in the centre of the table.
"I've just counted them," he said. "There were five each and two over,
so I'm having the two. I'm unaccountably hungry to-day. I put myself
unreservedly in the hands of Dolbear and Goodall, and feel so drugged that
I've begun to believe that the whole of yesterday evening was a dream.
Please don't wake me up."
He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme
youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.
His room was filled with a strange jumble of objects -- a harmonium in
a gothic case, an elephant's-foot waste-paper basket, a dome of wax fruit,
two disproportionately large Sevres vases, framed drawings by Daumier --
made all the more incongruous by the austere college furniture and the large
luncheon table. His chimney-piece was covered with cards of invitation from
London hostesses.
"That beast Hobson has put Aloysius in the bedder," be said. "Perhaps
it's as well as there wouldn't have been any plovers' eggs for him. D'you
know, Hobson hates Aloysius? I wish I had a scout like yours. He was sweet
to me this morning where some people might have been quite strict."
The party assembled. There were three Etonian freshmen, mild, elegant,
detached young men who had all been to a dance in London the night before,
and spoke of it as though it had been the funeral of a near but unloved
kinsman. Each as he came into the room made first for the plovers' eggs,
then noticed Sebastian and then myself with a polite lack of curiosity which
seemed to say: "We should not dream of being so offensive as to suggest that
you never met us before."
"The first this year," they said. "Where do you get them?"
"Mummy sends them from Brideshead. They always lay early for her."
When the eggs were gone and we were eating the lobster Newburg, the
last guest arrived.
"My dear," he said, "I couldn't get away before. I was lunching with my
p-p-preposterous tutor. He thought it very odd my leaving when I did. I told
him I had to change for F-f-footer."
From the moment he arrived the newcomer took charge, talking in a
luxurious, self-taught stammer; teasing; caricaturing the guests at his
previous luncheon; telling lubricious anecdotes of Paris and Berlin; and
doing more than entertain -- transfiguring the party, shedding a vivid,
false light of eccentricity upon everyone so that the three prosaic Etonians
seemed suddenly to become creatures of his fantasy.
This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the "aesthete" par
excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville, a young
man who seemed to me, then, fresh from the sombre company of the College
Essay Society, ageless as a lizard, as foreign as a Martian. He had been
pointed out to me often in the streets, as he moved with his own peculiar
stateliness, as though he had not fully accustomed himself to coat and
trousers and was more at his ease in heavy, embroidered robes; I had heard
his voice in the George challenging the conventions; and now meeting him,
under the spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously, like
the fine piece of cookery he was.
After luncheon he stood on the balcony with a megaphone which had
appeared surprisingly among the bric-a-brac of Sebastian's room, and in
languishing, sobbing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the
sweatcred and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.
" 'I, Tiresias, have fpresuffered all,'" he sobbed to them from the
Venetian arches --
"Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead. . . ."
And then, stepping lightly into the room, "How I have surprised them!
All bJDoatmen are Grace Darlings to me."
We sat on sipping Cointreau while the mildest and most detached of the
Etonians sang "Home they brought Her warrior dead" to his own accompaniment
on the harmonium.
It was four o'clock before we broke up.
Anthony Blanche was the first to go. He took formal and complimentary
leave of each of us in turn. To Sebastian he said: "My dear, I should like
to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion," and to me: "I
think it's perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do
you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chiwy you out like an old
st-t-toat."
The others left soon after him. I rose to go with them, but Sebastian
said: "Have some more Cointreau," so I stayed and later he said, "I must'go
to the Botanical Gardens."
"Why?"
"To see the ivy."
- It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as
we walked under the walls of Merton.
"I've never been to the Botanical Gardens," I said.
"Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There's a beautiful arch
there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don't know
where I should be without the Botanical Gardens."
When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had
left them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me
before. What was wrong? Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be
real. Was it the screen? I turned it face to the wall. That was better.
It was the end of the screen. Lunt never liked it, and after a few days
he took it away, to an obscure refuge he had under the stairs, full of mops
and buckets.
That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it
came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade
of the high elms, watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the
branches.
Presently we drove on and in another hour were hungry. We stopped at an
inn, which was half farm also, and ate eggs and bacon, pickled walnuts and
cheese, and drank our beer in a sunless parlour where an old clock ticked in
the shadows and a cat slept by the empty grate.
We drove on and in the early afternoon came to our destination:
wrought-iron gates and twin, classical lodges on a village green, an avenue,
more gates, open parkland, a turn in the drive; and suddenly a new and
secret landscape opened before us. We ' were at the head of a valley and
below us, half a mile distant, prone in the sunlight, grey and gold amid a
screen of boskage, shone the dome and columns of an old house.
"Well?" said Sebastian, stopping the car. Beyond the dome lay receding
steps of water and round it, guarding and hiding it, stood the soft hills.
"Well?"
"What a place to live in!" I said.
"You must see the garden front and the fountain." He leaned forward and
put the car into gear. "It's where my family live." And even then, rapt in
the vision, I felt, momentarily, like a wind stirring the tapestry, an
ominous chill at the words he used -- not "That is my home," but "It's where
my family live."
"Don't worry," he continued, "they're all away. You won't have to meet
them."
"But I should like to."
"Well, you can't. They're in London, dancing."
We drove round the front into a side court -- "Everything's shut up.
We'd better go in this way"--and entered through the fortress-like,
stone-flagged, stone-vaulted passages of the servants' quarters -- "I want
you to meet Nanny Hawkins. That's what we've come for" -- and climbed
uncarpeted, scrubbed elm stairs, followed more passages of wide boards
covered in the centre by a thin strip of drugget, through passages covered
by linoleum, passing the wells of many minor staircases and many rows of
crimson and gold fire buckets, up a final staircase, gated at the head,
where at last we reached the nurseries, high in the dome in the centre of
the main block.
Sebastian's Nanny was seated at the open window; the fountain lay
before her, the lakes, the temple, and, far away on the last spur, a
glittering obelisk; her hands lay open in her lap and, loosely between them,
a rosary; she was fast asleep. Long hours of work in her youth, authority in
middle life, repose and security in her age, had set their stamp on her
lined and serene face.
"Well," she said, waking; "this is a surprise."
Sebastian kissed her.
"Who's this?" she said, looking at me. "I don't think I know him."
Sebastian introduced us.
"You've come just the right time. Julia's here for the day. She was up
with me nearly all the morning telling me about London. Such a time they're
all having. It's dull without them. Just Mrs. Chandler and two of the girls
and old Bert. And then they're all going on holidays and the boiler's being
done out in August and you going, to see his Lordship in Italy, and the rest
on visits, it'll be^ October before we're settled down again. Still, I
suppose Julia must have her enjoyment the same as other young ladies, though
what they always want to go to London for in the best of the summer and the
gardens all out, I never have understood. Father Phipps was here on Thursday
and I said exactly the same to him," she added as though she had thus
acquired sacerdotal authority for her opinion.
"D'you say Julia's here?"
"Yes, dear, you must have just missed her. It's the Conservative Women.
Her Ladyship was to have done them, but she's poorly. Julia won't be long;
she's leaving immediately after her speech, before the tea."
"I'm afraid we may miss her again."
"Don't do that, dear, it'll be such a surprise to her seeing you,
though she ought to wait for the tea, I told her, it's what the Conservative
Women come for. Now what's the news? Are you studying hard at your books?"
"Not very, I'm afraid, Nanny."
"Ah, cricketing all day long I expect, like your brother. He found time
to study, too, though. He's not been here since Christmas, but he'll be here
for the Agricultural I expect. Did you see this piece about Julia in the
paper ? She brought it down for me. Not that it's nearly good enough of her,
but what it says is very nice. 'The lovely daughter whom Lady Marchmain is
bringing out this season . . . witty as well as ornamental . . . the most
popular debutante,' well that's no more than the truth, though it was a
shame to cut her hair; such a lovely head of hair she had just like her
Ladyship's. I said to Father Phipps it's not natural He said, 'Nuns do it,'
and I said, 'Well, surely, Father, you aren't going to make a nun out of
Lady Julia? The very idea!'"
Sebastian and the old wbman talked on. It was a charming room, oddly
shaped to conform with the curve of the dome. The walls were papered in a
pattern of ribbon and roses. There was a rocking horse in the corner and an
oleograph of the Sacred Heart over the mantelpiece; the empty grate was
hidden by a bunch of pampas grass and bulrushes; laid out on the top of the
chest of drawers and carefully dusted were the collection of small presents
which had been brought home to her at various times by her children, carved
shell and lava, stamped leather, painted wood, china, bog oak, damascened
silver, blue-John, alabaster, coral, the souvenirs of many holidays.
Presently Nanny said: "Ring the bell, dear, and we'll have some tea. I
usually go down to Mrs. Chandler, but we'll have it up here to-day. My usual
girl has gone to London with the others. The new one is just up from the
village. She didn't know anything at first, but she's coming along nicely.
Ring the bell."
But Sebastian said we had to go.
"And Miss Julia? She will be upset when she hears. It would have been
such a surprise for her."
"Poor Nanny," said Sebastian when we left the nursery. "She does have
such a dull life. I've a good mind to bring her to Oxford to live with me,
only she'd always be trying to send me to church. We must go quickly before
my sister gets back."
"Which are you ashamed of, her or me?"
"I'm ashamed of myself," said Sebastian gravely. "I'm not going to have
you get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming. All my life
they've been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with
their charm, they'd make you their friend, not mine, and I won't let them."
"All right," I said. "I'm perfectly content. But am I not going to be
allowed to see any more of the house?"
"It's all shut up. We came to see Nanny. On Queen Alexandra's Day it's
all open for a shilling. Well, come and look if you want to. ..."
He led me through a baize door into a dark corridor; I could dimly see
a gilt cornice and vaulted plaster above; then, opening a heavy,
smooth-swinging, mahogany door, he led me into a darkened hall. Light
streamed through the cracks in the shutters. Sebastian unbarred one, and
folded it back; the mellow afternoon sun flooded in, over the bare floor,
the vast, twin fireplaces o sculptured marble, the coved ceiling frescoed
with classic deities and heroes, the gilt mirrors and scagliola pilasters,
the islands of sheeted furniture. It was a glimpse only, such as might be
had from the top of an omnibus into a lighted ballroom; then Sebastian
quickly shut out the sun.
"You see," he said; "it's like this."
His mood had changed since we had drunk our wine under the elm trees,
since we had turned the corner of the drive and he had said: "Well?"
"You see, there's nothing to see. A few pretty things I'd like to show
you one day -- not now. But there's the chapel. You must see that. It's a
monument of art nouveau."
The last architect to work it Brideshead had sought to unify its growth
with a-colonnade and flanking pavilions. One of these was the chapel. We
entered it by the public porch (another door led direct to the house);
Sebastian dipped his fingers in the water stoup, crossed himself and
genuflected; I copied him. "Why do you do that?" he asked crossly.
"Just good manners."
"Well, you needn't on my account. You wanted to do sightseeing; how
about this?"
The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and
redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the
nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses,
flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in
armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours.
There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar
property of seeming to have been moulded in plasticine. The sanctuary lamp
and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a
pockmarked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with
white and gold daisies.
"Golly," I said.
"It was Papa's wedding present to Mamma. Now, if you've seen enough,
we'll go."
On the drive we passed a closed Rolls-Royce driven by a chauffeur; in
the back was a vague, girlish figure who looked round at us through the
window.
"Julia," said Sebastian. "We only just got away in time." We stopped to
speak to a man with a bicycle -- "That was old Bat," said Sebastian -- and
then were away, past the wrought-iron gates, past the lodges and out on the
road heading back to Oxford.
"I'm sorry," said Sebastian after a time. "I'm afraid I wasn't very
nice this afternoon. Brideshead often has that effect on me. But I had to
take you to see Nanny."
Why? I wondered; but said nothing (Sebastian's life was governed by a
code of such imperatives. "I must have pillar-box red pyjamas," "I have to
stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows," "I've absolutely got
to drink champagne to-night!") except, "It had quite the reverse effect on
me."
After a long pause he said petulantly, "I don't keep asking you
questions about your family."
"Neither do I about yours."
"But you look inquisitive."
"Well, you're so mysterious about" them."
"I hoped I was mysterious about everything."
"Perhaps I am rather curious about people's families--you sec, it's not
a thing I know about. There is only my father and myself. An aunt kept an
eye on me for a time but my father drove her abroad. My mother was killed in
the war."
"Oh . . . how very unusual."
"She went to Serbia with the Red Cross. My father has been rather odd
in the head ever since. He just lives alone in London with no friends, and
footles about collecting things."
Sebastian said, "You don't know what you've been saved. There are lots
of us. Look them up in Debrett."
His mood was lightening now. The further we drove from Brideshead the
more he seemed to cast off his uneasiness -- the almost furtive restlessness
and irritability that had possessed him. The sun was behind us as we drove,
so that we seemed to be in pursuit of our own shadows.
"It's half-past five. We'll get to Godstow in time for dinner, drink at
the Trout, leave Hardcastle's motor car and walk back by the river. Wouldn't
that be best?"
That is the full account of my first brief visit to Brideshead; could I
have known then that so small a thing, in other days, would be remembered
with tears by a middle-aged captain of infantry?
Chapter Two
towards the end of that summer term I received the last visit and Grand
Remonstrance of my cousin Jasper. I was just free of the schools, having
taken the last paper of History Previous on the afternoon before; Jasper's
subfusc suit and white tie proclaimed him still in the thick of it; he'had,
too, the exhausted but resentful air of one who fears he has failed to do
himself full justice on the subject of Pindar's Orphism. Duty alone had
brought him to my rooms that afternoon, at great inconvenience to himself
and, as it happened, to me, who, when he caught me in the door, was on my
way to make final arrangements about a dinner I was giving that evening. It
was one of several parties designed to comfort Hardcastle -- one of the
tasks that had lately fallen to Sebastian and me since, by leaving his car
out, we had got him into grave trouble with the proctors.
Jasper would not sit down; this was to be no cosy chat; he stood with
his back to the fireplace and, in his own phrase, talked to me "like an
uncle."
". . . I've tried to get in touch with you several times in the last
week or two. In fact, I have the impression you are avoiding me. If that is
so, Charles, I can't say I'm surprised.
"You may think it none of my business, but I feel a sense of
responsibility. You know as well as I do that since your -- well, since the
war, your father has not been really in touch with things -- lives in his
own world. I don't want to sit back and see you making mistakes which a word
in season might save you from.
"I expected you to make mistakes your first year. We all do. I got in
with some thoroughly objectionable O.S.C.U. men who ran a mission to
hop-pickers during the long vac. But you, my dear Charles, whether you
realize it or not, have gone straight, hook, line and sinker, into the very
worst set in the University. You may think that, living in digs, I don't
know what goes on in college; but I hear things. In fact, I hear all too
much. I find that I've become a figure of mockery on your account at the
Dining Club. There's that chap Sebastian Flyte you seem inseparable from. He
may be all right, I don't know. His brother Brideshead was a very sound
fellow. But this friend of yours looks odd to me, and he gets himself talked
about. Of course, they're an odd family. The Marchmains have lived apart
since the war, you know. An extraordinary thing; everyone thought they were
a devoted couple. Then he went off to France with his Yeomanry and just
never came back. It was as if he'd been killed. She's a Roman Catholic, so
she can't get a divorce -- or won't, I expect. You can do anything at Rome
with money, and they're enormously rich. Flyte may be all right, but Anthony
Blanche--now there's a man there's absolutely no excuse for."
"I don't particularly like him myself," I said.
"Well, he's always hanging round here, and the stiffer element in
college don't like it. They won't stand for him at the House. He was in
Mercury again last night. None of these people you go about with pull any
weight in their own colleges, and that's the real test. They think because
they've got a lot of money to throw about, they can do anything.
"And that's another thing. I don't know what allowance my uncle makes
you, but I don't mind betting you're spending double. All this" he said,
including in a wide sweep of his hand the evidences of profligacy about him.
It was true; my room had cast its austere winter garments, and, by not very
slow stages, assumed a richer wardrobe. "Is that paid for?" (The box of a
hundred cabinet Partagas on the sideboard.) "Or those?" (A dozen frivolous,
new books on the table.) "Or those?" (A Lalique decanter and glasses.) "Or
that peculiarly noisome object?" (A human skull lately purchased from the
School of Medicine, which, resting in a bowl of roses, formed, at the
moment, the chief decoration of my table. It bore the motto Et in Arcadia
ego inscribed on its forehead.)
"Yes," I said, glad to be clear of one charge. "I had to pay cash for
the skull."
"You can't be doing any work. Not that that matters, particularly if
you're making something of your career elsewhere -- but are you? Have you
spoken at the Union or at any of the clubs? Are you connected with any of
the magazines? Are you even making a position in the O.U.D.S.? And your
clothes!" continued my cousin. "When you came up I remember advising you to
dress as you would in a country house. Your present get-up seems an unhappy
compromise between the correct wear for a theatrical party at Maidenhead and
a glee-singing competition in a garden suburb.
"And drink -- no one minds a man getting tight once or twice a term. In
fact, he ought to, on certain occasions. But I hear you're constantly seen
drunk in the middle of the afternoon."
He paused, his duty discharged. Already the perplexities of the
examination school were beginning to re-assert themselves in his mind.
"I'm sorry, Jasper," I said. "I know it must be embarrassing for you,
but I happen to like this bad set. I like getting drunk at luncheon, and
though I haven't yet spent quite double my allowance, I undoubtedly shall
before the end of term. I usually have a glass of champagne about this time.
Will you join me?"
So my cousin Jasper despaired and, I learned later,' wrote to his
father on the subject of my excesses who, in his turn, wrote to my father,
who took no action or particular thought in the matter, partly because he
had disliked my uncle for nearly sixty years and partly because, as Jasper
had said, he lived in his own world now, since my mother's death.
Thus, in broad outline, Jasper sketched the more prominent features of
my first year; some detail may be added on the same scale.
I had committed myself earlier to spend the Easter vacation with
Collins and, though I would have broken my word without compunction, and
left my former friend friendless, had Sebastian made a sign, no sign was
made; accordingly Collins and I spent several economical and instructive
weeks together in Ravenna. A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those
mighty tombs. In a hotel bedroom, designed for a warmer season, I wrote long
letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post office for his answers.
There were two, each from a different address, neither giving any plain news
of himself, for he wrote in a style of remote fantasy (. .-. Mummy and two
attendant poets have three bad colds in the head, so I have come here. It is
the feast of S. Nichodemus of Thyatira, who was martyred by having goatskin
nailed to his pate, and is accordingly the patron of bald heads. Tell
Collins, who I am sure will be bald before us. There are too many people
here, but one, praise heaven! has an ear-trumpet, and that keeps me in good
humour. And now I must try to catch a fish. It is too far to send it to you
so I will keep the backbone . . .) which left me fretful. Collins made notes
for a little thesis pointing out the inferiority of the original mosaics to
their photographs. Here was planted the seed of what became his life's
harvest. When, many years later, there appeared the first massive volume of
his still unfinished work on Byzantine Art, I was touched to find, among two
pages of polite, preliminary acknowledgments of debt, my own name:.... To
Charles Ryder, with the aid of whose all-seeing eyes I first saw the
Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and San Vitale . . .
I sometimes wonder whether, had it not been for Sebastian, I might have
trodden the same path as Collins round the cultural water-wheel. My father
in his youth sat for All Souls and, in a year of hot competition, failed;
other successes and honours came his way later, but that early failure
impressed itself on him, and through him on me, so that I came up with an
ill-considered sense that there lay the proper and natural goal of the life
of reason. I, too, should doubtless have failed, but, having failed, I might
perhaps have slipped into a less august academic life elsewhere. It is
conceivable, but not, I believe, likely, for the hot spring of anarchy rose
from deep furnaces where was no solid earth, and burst into the sunlight --
a rainbow in its cooling vapours -- with a power the rocks could not
repress.
In the event, that Easter vacation formed a short stretch of level road
in the precipitous descent of which Jasper warned me. Descent or ascent? It
seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired.
I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and
overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence,
the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad
and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed
as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy
childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and
its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of
nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.
At the end of the term I took my first schools; it was necessary to pass, if
I was to remain at Oxford, and pass I did, after a week in which I forbade
Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late hour, with iced black coffee and
charcoal biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected texts. I remember no
syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient, lore which I acquired
that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour.
"I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon"; that was
enough then. Is more needed now?
Looking back, now, after twenty years, there is little I would have
left undone or done otherwise. I could match my cousin Jasper's game-cock
maturity with a sturdier fowl. I could tell him that all the wickedness of
that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro,
heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the
whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the
wine, renders it undrinkable, so that it must lie in the dark, year in, year
out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table.
I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is
the root of all wisdom. But I felt no need for these sophistries as I sat
before my cousin, saw him, freed from his , inconclusive struggle with
Pindar, in his dark grey suit, his white tie, his scholar's gown; heard his
grave tones and, all the time, savoured the gillyflowers in full bloom under
my windows. I had my secret and sure defence, like a talisman worn in the
bosom, felt for in the moment of danger, found and firmly grasped. So I told
him what was not in fact the truth, that I usually had a glass of champagne
about that time, and asked him to join me.
On the day after Jasper's Grand Remonstrance I received another, in
different terms and from an unexpected source.
All the term I had been seeing rather more of Anthony Blanche than my
liking for him warranted. I lived now among his friends, but our frequent
meetings were more of his choosing than mine, for I held him in considerable
awe.
In years he was barely my senior, but he seemed then to be burdened
with the experience of the Wandering Jew. He was indeed a nomad of no
nationality.
An attempt had been made in his childhood to make an Englishman of him;
he was two years at Eton; then in the middle of the war he had defied the
submarines, rejoined his mother in the Argentine, and a clever and audacious
schoolboy was added to the valet, the maid, the two chauffeurs,'the Pekinese
and the second husband. Criss-cross about the world he travelled with them,
waxing in wickedness like a Hogarthian page-boy. When peace came they
returned to Europe to hotels and furnished villas, spas, casinos and bathing
beaches. At the age of fifteen, for a wager, he was disguised as a girl and
taken to play at the big table in the Jockey Club at Buenos Aires; he dined
with Proust and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diag-hilev;
Firbank sent him his novels with fervent inscriptions; he had aroused three
irreconcilable feuds in Capri; he had practised black art in Cefalu; he had
been cured of drug-taking in California and of an OEdipus complex in Vienna.
At times we all seemed children beside him -- at most times, but not
always, for there was a bluster and zest in Anthony which the rest of us had
shed somewhere in our more leisured adolescence, on the playing field or in
the school-room; his vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than
in the wish to shock, and in the midst of his polished exhibitions I was
often reminded of an urchin I had once seen in Naples, capering derisively,
with obscene, unambiguous gestures, before a party of English tourists; as
he told the tale of his evening at the gaming table one could see in the
roll of his eye just how he had glanced, covertly, over the dwindling pile
of chips at his stepfather's party; while we had been rolling one another in
the mud at football and gorging ourselves with crumpets, Anthony had helped
oil fading beauties on sub-tropical sands and had sipped his aperitif in
smart little bars, so that the savage we had tamed was still rampant in him.
He was competitive in the bet-you-can't-do-this style of the private school;
you had only to mention the name of your bootmaker for him to recommend an
Armenian at Biarritz who catered especially for fetishists, or to name a
house where you had stayed, for him to describe a palace he frequented in
Madrid. He was cruel, too, in the wanton, insect-maiming manner of the very
young and 'fearless, like a little boy, charging, head down, small fists
whirling, at the school prefects.
He asked me to dinner, and I was a little disconcerted to find that we
were to dine alone. "We are going to Thame," he said. "There is a delightful
hotel there, which luckily doesn't appeal to the Bullingdon. We will drink
Rhine wine and imagine ourselves . . . where? Not on a j-j-jaunt with
J-J-Jorrocks, anyway. But first we will have our aperitif."
At the George bar he ordered "Four Alexander cocktails, please," ranged
them before him with a loud "Yum-yum" which drew every eye, outraged, upon
him. "I expect you would prefer sherry, but, my dear Charles, you are not
going to have sherry. Isn't this a delicious concoction? You don't like it?
Then I will drink it for you. One, two, three, four, down the red lane they
go. How the students stare!" And he led me out to the waiting motor car.
"I hope we shall find no undergraduates there. I am a little out of
sympathy with them for the moment. You heard about their treatment of me on
Thursday? It was too naughty. Luckily I was wearing my oldest pyjamas and it
was an evening of oppressive heat, or I might have been seriously cross."
Anthony had a habit of putting his face near one when he spoke; the sweet
and creamy cocktail had tainted his breath. I leaned away from him in the
corner of the hired car.
"Picture me, my dear, alone and studious. I had just bought a rather
forbidding book called Antic Hay, which I knew I must read before going to
Garsington on Sunday, because everyone was bound to talk about it, and it's
so banal saying you have not read the book of the moment, if you haven't.
The solution I suppose is not to go to Garsington, but that didn't occur to
me until this moment. So, my dear, I had an omelet and a peach and a bottle
of Vichy water and put on my pyjamas and settled down to read. I must say my
thoughts wandered, but I kept turning the pages and watching the light fade,
which in Peckwater, my dear, is quite an experience -- as darkness falls the
stone seems positively to decay under one's eyes. I was reminded of some of
those leprous fa?ades in the vieux port at Marseille, until suddenly I was
disturbed by such a bawling and caterwauling as you never heard, and there,
down in the little piazza, I saw a mob of about twenty terrible young men,
and do you know what they were chanting 'We want Blanche. We want Blanche!'
in a kind of litany. Such a public declaration! Well, I saw it was all up
with Mr. Huxley for the evening, and I must say I had reached a point of
tedium when any interruption was welcome. I was stirred by the bellows, but,
do you know, the louder they shouted the shyer they seemed ? They kept
saying 'Where's Boy ?' 'He's Boy Mulcaster's friend,' 'Boy must bring him
down.' Now you may or may not know 'Boy' Mulcaster. Seen at a distance -- at
some considerable distance -- you might think him rather personable: a
lanky, old-fashioned young man, you might think; but look at him closer and
his face all falls to pieces in an idiot gape. People are rather free with
the word 'degenerate.' They have even used it of me. If you want to know
what a real degenerate is, look at Boy Mulcaster. He came to Le Touquet at
Easter and, in some extraordinary way, I seemed to have asked him to stay.
Well, my mother is used to me, but my poor stepfather found Mulcaster very
hard to understand. You see my stepfather is a d-d-dago and therefore has a
very high opinion of the English aristocracy. He couldn't quite fit
Mulcaster into his idea of a lord, and really I couldn't explain him; he
lost some infinitesimal sum at cards, and as a result expected me to pay for
all his treats -- well, Mulcaster was in this party; I could see his
ungainly form shuffling about below and hear him saying: 'It's no good. He's
out. Let's go back and have a drink?' So then I put my head out of the
window and called to him: 'Good evening, Mulcaster, old sponge and toady,
are you lurking among the hobbledehoys? Have you come to repay me the three
hundred francs I lent you for the poor drab you picked up in the Casino ? It
was a niggardly sum for her trouble, and what a trouble, Mulcaster. Come up
and pay me, poor hooligan!'
"That, my dear, seemed to put a little life into them, and up the
stairs they came, clattering. About six of them came into my room, the rest
stood mouthing outside. My dear, they looked too extraordinary. They had
been having one of their ridiculous club dinners, and they were all wearing
coloured tail-coats -- a sort of livery. 'My dears,' I said to them, 'you
look like a lot of most disorderly footmen.' Then one of them, rather a
juicy little piece, accused me of unnatural vices. 'My dear,' I said, 'I may
be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone' Then they
began to blaspheme in a very shocking manner, and suddenly I, too, began to
be annoyed. Really, I thought, when I think of all the hullabaloo there was
when I was seventeen, and the Due de Vincennes (old Armand, of course, not
Philippe) challenged me to a duel for an affair of the heart, and very much
more than the heart, I assure you, with the duchess (Stefanie, of course,
not old Poppy) -- now, to submit to impertinence from these pimply, tipsy
virgins . . . Well, I gave up the light, bantering tone and let myself be
just a little offensive.
"Then they began saying, 'Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury.' Now as
you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I
did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, 'Dear
sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know
that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you
meaty boys. It w.ould be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. I So if any
of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other
hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified
libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.'
"Do you know, they all looked a little foolish at that? I walked down
with them and no one came within a yard of me. Then I got into the fountain
and, you know, it was really most refreshing, so I sported there a little
and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home,
and I heard Boy Mul-caster saying, 'Anyway, we did put him in Mercury.' You
know, Charles, that is just what they'll be saying in thirty years' time.
When they're all married to scraggy little women like hens and have
cretinous, porcine sons like themselves, getting drunk at the same club
dinner in the same coloured coats, they'll still say, when my name is
mentioned, 'We put1 him in Mercury one night,' and their
barn-yard daughters will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in
his day, and what a pity he's grown so dull. Oh, la fatigue du Nord!"
It was not, I knew, the first time Anthony had been ducked, but the
incident seemed much on his mind, for he reverted to it again at dinner.
"Now you can't imagine an unpleasantness like that happening to
Sebastian, can you?"
"No," I said; I could not.
"No, Sebastian has charm." He held up his glass of hock to the
candle-light and repeated, "Such charm. Do you know, I went round to call on
Sebastian next day? I thought the tale of my evening's adventures might
amuse him. And what do you think I found -- besides, of course, his amusing
toy bear? Mulcaster and two of his cronies of the night before. They looked
very foolish and Sebastian, as composed as Mrs. P-p-ponsonby-de-Tomkyns in
P-p-punch, said, 'You know Lord Mulcaster, of course,' and the oafs said,
'Oh, we just came to see how Aloysius was,' for they find the toy bear just
as amusing as we do -- or, shall I hint, just a teeny bit more? So off they
went. And I said, 'S-s-sebastian, do you realize that those s-sycophantic
s-slugs insulted me last night, and but for the warmth of the weather might
have given me a s-s-severe cold?' and he said, 'Poor things. I expect they
were drunk.' He has a kind word for everyone you see; he has such charm.
"I can see he has completely captivated you, my dear Charles. Well, I'm
not surprised. Of course, you haven't known him as long as I have. I was at
school with him. You wouldn't believe it, but in those days people used to
say he was a little bitch; just a few unkind boys who knew him well.
Everyone in pop liked him, of course, and all the masters. I expect it was
really that they were jealous of him. He never seemed to get into trouble.
The rest of us were constantly being beaten in the most savage way, on the
most frivolous pretexts, but never Sebastian. He was the only boy in my
house who was never beaten at all. I can see him now, at the age of fifteen.
He never had spots you know; all the other boys were spotty. Boy Mulcaster
was positively scrofulous. But not Sebastian. Or did he have one, rather a
stubborn one at the back of his neck ? I think, now, that he did. Narcissus,
with one pustule. He and I were both Catholics, so we used to go to mass
together. He used to spend such a'time in the confessional, I used to wonder
what he had to say, because he never did anything wrong; never quite; at
least, he never got punished. Perhaps he was just being charming through the
grille. I left under what is called a 'cloud,' you know--I can't think why
it is called that; it seemed to me a glare of unwelcome light; the process
involved a series of harrowing interviews with my tutor. It was
disconcerting to find how observant that mild old man proved to be. The
things he knew about me, which I thought no one -- except possibly Sebastian
-- knew. It was a lesson never to trust mild old men -- or charming
schoolboys; which?
"Shall we have another bottle of this wine, or of something different?
Something different, some bloody, old Burgundy, eh? You see, Charles, I
understand all your tastes. You must come to France with me and drink the
wine. We will go at the vintage. I will take you to stay at the Vincennes'.
It is all made up with them now, and he has the finest wine in France; he
and the Prince de Portallon--I will take you there, too. I think they would
amuse you, and of course they would love you. I want to introduce you to a
lot of my friends. I have told Cocteau about you. He is all agog. You see,
my dear Charles, you are that very rare thing, An Artist. Oh yes, you must
not look bashful. Behind that cold, English, phlegmatic exterior you are An
Artist. I have seen those little drawings you keep hidden away in your room.
They are exquisite. And you, dear Charles, if you will understand me, are
not exquisite; but not at all. Artists are not exquisite. I am; Sebastian,
in a kind of way, is exquisite; but the Artist is an eternal type, solid,
purposeful, observant -- and, beneath it all, p-p-passionate, eh, Charles ?
"But who recognizes you? The other day I was speaking to Sebastian
about you, and I said, 'But you know Charles is an artist. He draws like a
young Ingres,' and do you know what Sebastian said? 'Yes, Aloysius draws
very prettily, too, but of course he's rather more modern.' So charming; so
amusing.
"Of course those that have charm don't really need brains. Stefanie de
Vincennes intoxicated me four years ago; but I was besotted with her,
crawling with love like lice. My dear, I even used the same coloured varnish
for my toe-nails. I used her words and lit my cigarette in the same way and
spoke with her tone on the telephone so that the duke used to carry on long
and intimate conversations with me, thinking that I was her. It was largely
that which put his mind on pistol and sabres in such an old-fashioned
manner. My stepfather thought it an excellent education for me. He thought
it would make me grow out of what he calls my 'English habits.' Poor man, he
is very South American. Well, I have kept my 'English habits,' but I think I
lost something else. At seventeen I might have been anything; an artist
even; it is not impossible; it is in the blood. At twenty-one I am what you
see me. To have squandered everything, so young, on a woman who, except that
I was more presentable, would as soon have had her chiropodist for her
lover. ... I never heard anyone speak an ill word of Stefanie, except the
duke; everyone loved her, whatever she did."
Anthony had lost his stammer in the deep waters of his old romance. It
came floating back to him, momentarily, with the coffee and liqueurs. "Real
G-g-green Chartreuse, made before the expulsion of the monks. There are five
distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue. It is like swallowing a
sp-spectrum. Do you wish Sebastian was with us? Of course you do. Do I? I
wonder. How our thoughts do run on that little bundle of charm to be sure. I
think you must be mesmerizing me, Charles. I bring you here, at very
considerable expense, my dear, simply to talk about myself, and I find I
talk of no one except Sebastian. It's odd because there's really no mystery
about him except how he came to be born of such a very sinister family.
"I forget if you know his family. Now there, my dear, is1 a
subject for the poet -- for the poet of the future who must be also a
psychoanalyst -- and perhaps a diabolist, too. I don't suppose he'll ever
let you meet them. He's far too clever. They're all charming, of course, and
quite, quite gruesome. Do you ever feel is something a teeny bit gruesome
about Sebastian? No? Perhaps I imagine it; it's simply that he loofo so like
the rest of them, sometimes.
"There's Brideshead who's something archaic, out of a cave that's been
sealed for centuries. He has the face as though an Aztec sculptor had
attempted a portrait of Sebastian; he's a learned bigot, a ceremonious
barbarian, a snowbound lama. . . . Well, anything you like. But not Julia,
oh, not Lady Julia. She is one thing only, Renaissance tragedy. You know
what she looks like. Who could help it? Her photograph appears as regularly
in the illustrated papers as the advertisements for Beecham's Pills. A face
of flawless Florentine Quattrocento beauty; almost anyone else with those
looks would have been tempted to become artistic; not Lady Julia; she's as
smart as -- well, as smart as Stefanie. Nothing greenery-yallery about her.
So gay, so correct, so unaffected. Dogs and children love her, other girls
love her -- my dear, she's a fiend -- a passionless, acquisitive,
intriguing, ruthless filler. I wonder if she's incestuous. I doubt it; all
she wants is power. There ought to be an Inquisition especially set up to
burn her. There's another sister, too, I believe, in the schoolroom. Nothing
is known of her yet except that her governess went mad and drowned herself
not long ago. I'm sure she's abominable. So you see there was really very
little left for poor Sebastian to do except be sweet and charming.
"It's when one gets to the parents that a bottomless pit opens. My
dear, such a pair. How does Lady Marchmain manage it? It is one of the
questions of the age. You have seen her? Very, very beautiful; no artifice,
her hair just turning grey in elegant silvery streaks, no rouge, very pale,
huge-eyed -- it is extraordinary how large those eyes look and how the lids
are veined blue where anyone else would have touched them with a fingertip
of paint; pearls and a few great starlike jewels, heirlooms, in ancient
settings, a voice as quiet as a prayer, and as powerful. And Lord Marchmain,
well, a little fleshy perhaps, but very handsome, a magnified, a voluptuary,
Byronic, bored, infectiously slothful, not at all the sort of man you would
expect to see easily put down. And that Reinhardt nun, my dear, has
destroyed him --but utterly. He daren't show his great purple face anywhere.
He is the last, historic, authentic case of someone being hounded out of
society. Brideshead won't see him, the girls mayn't, Sebastian does, of
course, because he's so charming. No one else goes near him. Why, last
September Lady March-main was in Venice staying at the Palazzo Fogliere. To
tell you the truth she was just a teeny bit ridiculous in Venice. She never,
went near the Lido, of course, but she was always drifting about the canals
in a gondola with Sir Adrian Person -- such attitudes, my dear, like Madame
Recamier; once I passed them and I caught the eye of the Fogliere gondolier,
whom, of course, I knew, and, my dear, he gave me such a wink. She came to
all the parties in a sort of cocoon of gossamer, my dear, as though she were
part of some Celtic play or a heroine from Maeterlinck; and she would go to
church. Well, as you know, Venice is the one town in Italy where no one ever
has gone to church. Anyway, she was rather a figure of fun that year, and
then who should turn up, in the Maltons' yacht, but poor Lord Marchmain.
He'd taken a little palace there, but was he allowed in? Lord Malton put him
and his valet into a dinghy, my dear, and transhipped him there and then
into the steamer for Trieste. He hadn't even his mistress with him. It was
her yearly holiday. No one ever knew how they heard Lady Marchmain was
there. And, do you know, for a week Lord Malton slunk about as if he was in
disgrace? And he was in disgrace. The Principessa Fogliere gave a ball and
Lord Malton was not asked nor anyone from his yacht -- even the de Panoses.
How does Lady Marchmain do it? She has convinced the world that Lord
Marchmain is a monster. And what is the truth ? They were married for
fifteen years or so and then Lord Marchmain went to the war; he never came
back but formed a connection with a highly talented dancer. There are a
thousand such cases. She refuses to divorce him because she is so pious.
Well, there have been cases of that before. Usually, it arouses sympathy for
the adulterer; not for Lord Marchmain though. You would think that the old
reprobate had tortured her, stolen her patrimony, flung her out of doors,
roasted, stuffed and eaten his children, and gone frolicking about wreathed
in all the flowers of Sodom and Gomorrah; instead of what? Begetting four
splendid children by her, handing over to her Brideshead and Marchmain House
in St. James's and all the money she can possibly want to spend, while he
sits with a snowy shirt-front at Larue's with a personable, middle-aged lady
of the theatre, in the most conventional Edwardian style. And she meanwhile
keeps a small gang of enslaved and emaciated prisoners for her exclusive
enjoyment. She sucks their blood. You can see the tooth-marks all over
Adrian Porson's shoulders when he is bathing. And he, my dear, was the
greatest, the only, poet of our time. He's bled dry; there's nothing left of
him. There are five or six others of all ages and sexes, like wraiths
following her round. They never escape once she's had her teeth into them.
It is witchcraft. There's no other explanation.
"So you see we mustn't blame Sebastian if at times he seems a little
insipid -- but then you don't blame him, do you, Charles? With that very
murky background, what could he do ex