cept set up as being simple and
charming, particularly as he isn't very well endowed in the Top Storey. We
couldn't claim that for him, could we, much as we love him?
"Tell me candidly, have you ever heard Sebastian say anything you have
remembered for five minutes? You know, when I hear him talk, I am reminded
of that in some ways nauseating picture of 'Bubbles.' Conversation, as I
know it, is like juggling; up go the balls and the balloons and the plates,
up and over, in and out, spinning and leaping, good solid objects that
glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when
dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsuds drifting off
the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second
and then--"phut!--vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.
"Stefanie was like that: never dull; at least never really dull; at
least not for the first year; and then, my dear, when she had become a
habit, Boredom grew like a cancer in the breast, more and more; the
anguished suspense of watching the lips you hunger for, framing the words,
the death sentence, of sheer triteness! I felt the oxygen being pumped out
of the atmosphere all round me; I felt myself expiring in a vacuum while all
the while I could see through the bell-glass the loved executioner. And she
went on with the murder in a gentle, leisurely way, quite, quite unconscious
that she was doing any harm. It is not an experience I would recommend for
An Artist at the tenderest stage of his growth, to be strangled with charm."
And then Anthony spoke of the proper experiences of an artist, of the
appreciation and criticism and stimulus he should expect from his friends,
of the hazards he should take in the pursuit of emotion, of one thing and
another while I fell drowsy and let my mind wander a little. So we drove
home, but his words, as we swung over Magdalen Bridge, recalled the central
theme of our dinner. "Well, my dear, I've no doubt that first thing
to-morrow you'll trot round to Sebastian and tell him everything I've said
about him. And I will tell you two things: one, that it will not make the
slightest difference to Sebastian's feeling for me and, secondly, my dear --
and I beg you to remember this though I have plainly bored you into a
condition of coma -- that he will immediately start talking about that
amusing bear of his. Good night. Sleep innocently."
But I slept ill. Within an hour of tumbling drowsily to bed I was awake
again, thirsty, restless, hot and cold by turns and unnaturally excited. I
had drunk a lot, but neither the mixture of wines, nor the Chartreuse, nor
the Mavrodaphne Trifle, nor even the fact that I had sat immobile and almost
silent throughout the evening instead of clearing the fumes, as We normally
did, in J some light frenzy of drunken nonsense, explains the distress of
that hag-ridden night. No dream distorted the images of the evening into
horrific shapes. It seemed I heard St. Mary's strike each quarter till dawn.
The figures of nightmare were already racing through my brain as throughout
the wakeful hours I repeated to myself Anthony's words, catching his accent,
soundlessly, and the stress and cadence of his speech, while under the
closed lips I saw his pale, candle-lit face as it had fronted me across the
dinner table. Once during the hours of darkness I brought to light the
drawings in my sitting-room and sat at the open window, turning them over.
Everything was black and dead-still in the quadrangle; only at the
quarter-hours the bells awoke and sang over the gables. I drank soda water
and smoked and fretted, until light began to break and the rustle of a
rising breeze turned me back to my bed.
When I awoke Lunt was at the open door. "I let you lie," he said, "I
didn't think you'd be going to the Corporate Communion."
"You were quite right."
"Most of the freshmen went and quite a few second- and third-year men.
It's all on account of the new chaplain. There was never Corporate Communion
before -- just Holy Communion for those that wanted it and chapel and
evening chapel."
It was the last Sunday of term; the last of the year. As I went to my
bath the quad filled with gowned and surpliced undergraduates drifting from
chapel to hall. As I came back they were standing in groups, smoking; Jasper
had cycled in from his digs to be among them.
I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast, as I often did on Sundays,
at a teashop opposite Balliol. The air was full of bells from the
surrounding spires and the sun, casting long shadows across the open spaces,
dispelled the fears of night. The teashop was hushed as a library; a few
solitary men from Balliol and Trinity, in bedroom slippers, looked up as I
entered, then turned back to their Sunday newspapers. I ate my scrambled
eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless
night. I lit a cigarette and sat on, while one by one the Balliol and
Trinity men paid their bills and shuffled away, slipslop, across the street
to their colleges. It was nearly eleven when I left, and during my walk I
heard the change-ringing cease and, all over the town, give place to the
single chime, which warned the city that service was about to start.
None but church-goers seemed abroad that morning; undergraduates and
graduates and wives and tradespeople, walking with that unmistakable English
church-going pace which eschewed equally both haste and idle sauntering;
holding, bound in black lamb-skin and white celluloid, the liturgies of half
a dozen conflicting sects; on their way to St. Barnabas, St. Columba, St.
Aloysius, St. Mary's, Pusey House, Blackfriars and heaven knows where
besides; to restored Norman and revived Gothic, to travesties of Venice and
Athens; all in the summer sunshine going to the temples of their race. Four
proud infidels alone proclaimed their dissent; four Indians from the gates
of Balliol, in freshly laundered white flannels and neatly pressed blazers,
with snow-white turbans on their heads, and in their plump, brown hands
bright cushions, a picnic basket and the Unpleasant Plays of Bernard Shaw,
making for the river.
In the Cornmarket a party of tourists stood on the steps of the
Clarendon Hotel discussing a road map with their chauffeur, while opposite,
through the venerable arch of the Golden Cross, I greeted a group of
undergraduates from my college who had breakfasted there and now lingered
with their pipes in the creeper-hung courtyard. A troop of Boy Scouts,
church-bound too, bright with coloured ribbons and badges, loped past in
unmilitary array, and at Carfax I met the Mayor and corporation, in scarlet
gowns and gold chains, preceded by wand bearers and followed by no curious
glances, in procession to the preaching at the City Church. In St. Aldates I
passed a crocodile of choir-boys, in starched collars and peculiar caps, on
their way to Tom Gate and the Cathedral. So through a world of piety I made
my way to Sebastian.
He was out. I read the letters, none of them very revealing, that
littered his writing table, and scrutinized the invitation cards on his
chimney-piece -- there were no new additions. Then I read Lady into Fox
until he returned.
"I've been to mass at the Old Palace," he said. "I haven't been all
this term, and Monsignor Bell asked me to dinner twice last week, and I know
what that means. Mummy's been writing to him. So I sat bang in front where
he couldn't help seeing me and absolutely shouted the Hail Marys at the end;
so that's over. How was dinner with Antoine? What did you talk about?"
"Well, he did most of the talking. Tell me, did you know him at Eton?"
"He was sacked my first half. I remember seeing him about. He always
has been a noticeable figure."
"Did he go to church with you?"
"I don't think so, why?"
"Has he met any of your family?"
"Charles, how very peculiar you're being to-day. No. I don't suppose
so."
"Not your mother at Venice?"
"I believe she did say something about it. I forget what. I think she
was staying with some Italian cousins of ours, the Foglieres, and Anthony
turned up with his family at the hotel, and there was some party the
Foglieres gave that they weren't | asked to. I know Mummy said something
about it when I told her he was a friend of mine. I can't think why he
should want to go to a party at the Foglieres' -- the princess is so proud
of her English blood that she talks of nothing else. Anyway, no one objected
to Antoine -- much, I gather. It was his mother they thought difficult."
"And who is the Duchess de Vincennes?"
"Poppy?"
"Stefanie."
"You must ask Antoine that. He claims to have had an affair with her."
"Did he?"
"There was something --I forget what. I think he was stuck in a lift
with her once at Miami and the old duke made a scene."
"Not a grand passion?"
"Good God, no! Why all this interest?"
"I just wanted to find out how much truth there was in what Anthony
said last night."
"I shouldn't think-a word. That's his great charm."
"You may think it charming. I think it's devilish. Do you know he spent
the whole of yesterday evening trying to turn me against you, and almost
succeeded?"
"Did he? How silly. Aloysius wouldn't approve of that at all, would
you, you pompous old bear?"
Chapter Three
I returned home for the Long Vacation without plans and without money.
To cover end-of-term expenses I had sold my Omega screen to Collins for ten
pounds, of which I now kept four; my last cheque overdrew my account by a
few shillings, and I had been told that, without my father's authority, I
must draw no more. My next allowance was not due until October. I was thus
faced with a bleak prospect and, turning the matter over in my mind, I felt
something not far off remorse for the prodigality of the preceding weeks.
I had started the term with my battels paid and over a hundred pounds
in hand. All that had gone, and not a penny paid out where I could get
credit. There had been no reason for it, no great pleasure unattainable
else; it had gone in ducks and drakes. Sebastian often chid me with
extravagance, but I resented his censure for a large part of my money went
on and with him. His own finances were perpetually, vaguely distressed.
"It's all done by lawyers," he said helplessly, "and I suppose they embezzle
a lot. Anyway, I never seem to get much. Of course, Mummy would give me
anything I asked for."
"Then why don't you ask her for a proper allowance?"
"Oh, Mummy likes everything to be a present. She's so sweet," he said,
adding one more line to the picture I was forming of her.
Now Sebastian had disappeared into that other life of his where I was
not asked to follow, and I was left, instead, forlorn and regretful.
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our
youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation,
Dresden figures of pastoral gaiety! Our wisdom, we prefer to think, is all
of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of it, the
last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time. There is no candour in a
story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for
nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours
which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable
regularity.
Thus I spent the first afternoon at home, wandering from room to room,
looking from the plate-glass windows in turn on the garden and the street,
in a mood of vehement self-reproach.
My father, I knew, was in the house, but his library was inviolable,
and it was not until just before dinner that he appeared to greet me. He was
then in his late fifties, but it was his idiosyncrasy to seem much older
than his years; to see him one might have put him at seventy, to hear him
speak at nearly eighty. He came to me now, with the shuffling mandarin-tread
which he affected, and a shy smile of welcome. When he dined at home -- and
he seldom dined elsewhere•-- he wore a f rogged velvet smoking suit of
the kind which had been fashionable many years before and was to be so
again, but, at that time, was a deliberate archaism.
"My dear boy, they never told me you were here. Did you have a very
exhausting journey? They gave you tea? You are well? I have just made a
somewhat audacious purchase from Sonerschein's -- a terra-cotta bull of the
fifth century. I was examining it and forgot your arrival. Was the carriage
very full? You had a corner seat?" (He travelled so rarely himself that to
hear of others doing so always excited his solicitude.) "Hayter brought you
the evening paper ? There is no news, of course -- such a lot of nonsense."
Dinner was announced. My father from long habit took a book with him to
the table and then, remembering my presence, furtively dropped it under his
chair. "What do you like to drink? Hayter, what'have we for Mr. Charles to
drink?"
"There's some whiskey."
"There's whiskey. Perhaps you like something else? What else have we?"
"There isn't anything else in the house, sir."
"There's nothing else. You must tell Hayter what you would like and he
will get it in. I never keep any wine now. I am forbidden it and no one
comes to see me. But while you are here, you must have what you like. You
are here for long?"
"I'm not quite sure, Father."
"It's a very long vacation," he said wistfully. "In my day we used to
go on what were called 'reading parties,' always in mountainous areas. Why?
Why," he repeated petulantly, "should alpine scenery be thought conducive to
study?"
"I thought of putting in some time at an art school -- in the life
class."
"My dear boy, you'll find them all shut. The students go to Barbison or
such places and paint in the open air. There was an institution in my day
called a 'sketching club' -- mixed sexes" (snuffle), "bicycles" (snuffle),
"pepper-and-salt knickerbockers, holland umbrellas and, it was popularly
thought, free love." (Snuffle) "Such a lot of nonsense. I expect they still
go on. You might try that."
"One of the problems of the vacation is money, Father." "Oh, I
shouldn't worry about a thing like that at your age." "You see, I've run
rather short." "Yes?" said my father without any sound of interest. "In fact
I don't quite know how I'm going to get through the next two months."
"Well, I'm the worst person to come to for advice. I've never been
'short,' as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard
up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke?" (Snuffle) "On the
rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at
that. Your grandfather once said to me, 'Live within your means, 'but if you
do get into difficulties, come to me. Don't go to the Jews.' Such a lot of
nonsense. You try. Go to those gentlemen in Jermyn Street who offer advances
on note of hand only. My dear boy, they won't give you a sovereign."
"Then what do you suggest my doing?"
"Your cousin Melchior was imprudent with his investments and got into a
very queer street. He went to Australia."
I had not seen my father so gleeful since he found two pages of
second-century papyrus between the leaves of a Lombardic breviary.
"Hayter, I've dropped my book."
It was recovered for him from under his feet and propped against the
epergne. For the rest of dinner he was silent save for an occasional snuffle
of merriment which could not, I thought, be provoked by the work he read.
Presently we left the table and sat in the garden-room; and there,
plainly, he put me out of his mind; his thoughts, I knew, were far away, in
those distant ages where he moved at ease, where time passed in centuries
and all the figures were defaced and the names of his companions were
corrupt readings of words , of quite other meaning. He sat in an attitude
which to anyone else would have been one of extreme discomfort, askew in his
upright armchair, with his book held high and obliquely to the light. Now
and then he took a gold pencil case from his watch-chain and made an entry
in the margin. The windows were open to the summer night; the ticking of the
clocks, the distant murmur of traffic on the Bayswater Road, and my father's
regular turning of the pages were the only sounds. I had thought it
impolitic to smoke a cigar while pleading poverty; now in desperation I went
to my room and fetched one. My father did not look up. I pierced it, lit it,
and with renewed confidence said, "Father, you surely don't want rne to
spend the whole vacation here with you?"
"Eh?"
"Won't you find it rather a bore having me at home for so long?"
"I trust I should not betray such an emotion even if I felt it," said
my father mildly and turned back to his book.
The evening passed. Eventually all over the room clocks of diverse
pattern musically chimed eleven. My father closed his book and removed his
spectacles. "You are very welcome, my dear boy," he said. "Stay as long as
you find it convenient." At the door he paused and turned back. "Your cousin
Melchior worked his passage to Australia before the mast" (Snuffle) "What, I
wonder, is 'before the mast'?"
During the sultry week that followed my relations with my father
deteriorated sharply. I saw little of 'him during the day; he spent hours on
end in the library; now and then he emerged and I would hear him calling
over the banisters: "Hayter. Call me a cab." Then he would be away,
sometimes for half an hour or less, sometimes for a whole day; his errands
were never explained. Often I saw trays going up to him at odd hours, laden
with meagre nursery snacks -- rusks, glasses of milk, bananas and so forth.
If we met in a passage or on the stairs he would look at me vacantly and say
"Ah-ha" or "Very warm," or "Splendid, splendid," but in the evening, when he
came to the garden-room in his velvet smoking suit, he always greeted me
formally.
The dinner table was our battlefield.
On the second evening I took my book with me to the dining-room. His
mild and wandering eye fastened on it with sudden attention, and as we
passed through the hall he surreptitiously left his own on a side table.
When we sat down he said plaintively: "I do think, Charles, you might talk
to me. I've had a very exhausting day. I was looking forward to a little
conversation."
"Of course, Father. What shall we talk about?"
"Cheer me up. Take me out of myself"; (petulantly) "tell me all about
the new plays."
"But I haven't been to any."
"You should, you know, you really should. It's not natural in a young
man to spend all his evenings at home."
"Well, Father, as I told you, I haven't much money to spare for
theatre-going."
"My dear boy, you must not let money become your master in this way.
Why, at your age, your cousin Melchior was part owner of a musical piece. It
was one of his few happy ventures. You should go to the play as part of your
education. If you read the lives of eminent men you will find that quite
half of them made their first acquaintance with drama from the gallery. I am
told there is no pleasure like it. It is there that you find the real
critics and devotees. It is called 'sitting with the gods.'
The expense is nugatory, and even while you wait for admission in the
street you are diverted by 'buskers.' We will sit with the gods together one
night. How do you find Mrs. Abel's cooking?"
"Rather insipid."
"It was inspired by my sister Philippa. She gave Mrs. Abel ten menus,
and they have never been varied. When I am alone I do not notice what I eat,
but now that you are here, we must have a change. What would you like? What
is in season? Are you fond of lobsters? Hayter, tell Mrs. Abel to give us
lobsters to-morrow night."
Dinner that evening consisted of a white, tasteless soup, over-fried
fillets of sole with a pink sauce, lamb cutlets propped against a cone of
mashed potato, stewed pears in jelly standing on a kind of sponge cake.
"It is purely out of respect for your Aunt Philippa that I dine at this
length. She laid it down that a three-course dinner was middle-class. 'If
you once let the servants get their way,' she said, 'you will find yourself
dining nightly off a single chop.' There is nothing I should like more. In
fact, that is exactly what I do when I go to my club on Mrs. Abel's evening
out. But your aunt ordained that at home I must have soup and three courses;
some nights it is fish, meat and savoury, on others it is meat, sweet,
savoury -- there are a number of possible permutations.
"It is remarkable how some people are able to put their opinions in
lapidary form; your aunt had that gift.
"It is odd to think that she and I once dined together nightly -- just
as you and I do, my boy. Now she made unremitting efforts to take me out of
myself. She used to tell me about her reading. It was in her mind to make a
home with me, you know. She thought I should get into funny ways if I was
left on my own. Perhaps I have got into funny ways. Have I? But it didn't
do. I got her out in the end."
There was an unmistakable note of menace in his voice as he said this.
It was largely by reason of my Aunt Philippa that I now found myself so
much a stranger in my father's house. After my mother's death she came to
live with my father and me, no doubt, as he said, with the idea of making
her home with us. I knew nothing, then, of the nightly agonies at the dinner
table. My aunt made herself my companion, and I accepted her without
question. That was for a year. The first change was that she re-opened her
house in Surrey which she had meant to sell, and lived there during my
school terms, coming to London only for a few days' shopping and
entertainment. In the summer we went to lodgings together at the sea-side.
Then in my last year at school she left England. "/ got her out in the end"
he said with derision and triumph of that kindly lady, and he knew that I
heard in the words a challenge to myself.
As we left the dining-room my father said, "Hayter, have you said
anything yet to Mrs. Abel about the lobsters I ordered for to-morrow?"
"No, sir."
"Do not do so."
"Very good, sir."
And when we reached our chairs in the garden-room he said: "I wonder
whedier Hayter had any intention of mentioning lobsters. I rather think not.
Do you know, I believe he thought I was joking?"
Next day, by chance, a weapon came to hand. I met an old acquaintance
of school days, a x contemporary of mine named Jorkins. I never had much
liking for Jorkins. Once, in my Aunt Philippa's day, he had come to tea, and
she had condemned him as being probably charming at heart, but unattractive
at first sight. Now I greeted him with enthusiasm and asked him to dinner.
He came and showed little alteration. My father must have been warned by
Hayter that there was a guest, for instead of his velvet suit he wore a tail
coat; this, with a black waistcoat, very high collar, and very narrow white
tie, was his evening dress; he wore it with an air of melancholy as though
it were court mourning, which he had assumed in early youth and, finding the
style sympathetic, had retained. He never possessed a dinner jacket.
"Good evening, good evening. So nice of you to come all this way."
"Oh, it wasn't far," said Jorkins, who lived in Sussex Square.
"Science annihilates distance," said my father disconcertingly. "You
are over here on business?"
"Well, I'm in business, if that's what you mean."
"I had a cousin who was in business--you wouldn't know him; it was
before your time. I was telling Charles about him only the other night. He
has been much in my mind. He came," my father paused to give full weight to
the bizarre word -- "a cropper."
Jorkins giggled nervously. My father fixed him with a look of reproach.
"You find his misfortune the subject of mirth? Or perhaps the word I
used was unfamiliar; you no doubt would say that he 'folded up.'"
My father was master of the situation. He had made a little fantasy for
himself, tha Jorkins should be an American, and throughout the evening he
played a delicate, one-sided parlour-game with him, explaining any
peculiarly English terms that occurred in the conversation, translating
pounds into dollars, and courteously deferring to him with such phrases as
"Of course, by your standards . . ."; "All this must seem very parochial to
Mr. Jorkins"; "In the vast spaces to which you are accustomed . . ." so that
my guest was left with the vague sense that there was a misconception
somewhere as to his identity, which he never got the chance of explaining.
Again and again during dinner he sought my father's eye, thinking to read
there the simple statement that this form of address was an elaborate joke,
but met instead a look of such mild benignity that he was left baffled.
Once I thought my father had gone too far, when he said: "I am afraid
that, living in London, you must sadly miss your national game."
"My national game?" asked Jorkins, slow in the uptake, but scenting
that here, at last, was the opportunity for clearing the matter up.
My father glanced from him to me and his expression changed from
kindness to malice; then back to kindness again as he turned once more to
Jorkins. It was the look of a gambler who lays down fours against a full
house. "Your national game," he said gently, "cricket" and he snuffled
uncontrollably, shaking all over and wiping his eyes with his napkin.
"Surely, working in the City, you find your time on the cricket-field
greatly curtailed?"
At the door of the dining-room he left us. "Good night, Mr. Jorkins,"
he said. "I hope you will pay us another visit when you next 'cross the
herring pond.'"
"I say, what did your governor mean by that? He seemed almost to think
I was American."
"He's rather odd at times."
"I mean all that about advising me to visit Westminster Abbey. It
seemed rum."
"Yes. I can't quite explain."
"I almost thought he was pulling my leg," said Jorkins in puzzled
tones.
My father's counter-attack was delivered a few days later.
He sought me out and said, "Mr. Jorkins is still here?"
"No, Father, of course not. He only came to dinner."
"Oh, I hoped he was staying with us. Such a versatile young man. But
you will be dining in?"
"Yes."
"I am giving a little dinner party to diversify the'rather monotonous
series of your evenings at home. You think Mrs. Abel is up to it? No. But
our guests are not exacting. Sir Cuthbert and Lady Orme-Herrick are what
might be called the nucleus. I hope for a little music afterwards. I have
included in the invitations some young people for you."
My presentiments of my father's plan were surpassed by the actuality.
As the guests assembled in the room which my father, without
self-consciousness, called "the Gallery," it was plain to me that they had
been carefully chosen for my discomfort. The "young people" were Miss Gloria
Orme-Herrick, a student of the cello; her fiance, a bald young man from the
British Museum; and a monoglot Munich publisher. I saw my father snuffling
at me from behind a case of ceramics as he stood with them. That evening he
wore, like a chivalric badge of battle, a small red rose in his button-hole.
Dinner was long and chosen, like the guests, in a spirit of careful
mockery. It was not of Aunt Philippa's choosing, but had been reconstructed
from a much earlier period, long before he was of an age to dine downstairs.
The dishes were ornamental in appearance and regularly alternated in colour
between red and white. They and the wine were equally tasteless. After
dinner my father led the German publisher to the piano and then, while he
played, left the dining-room to show Sir Cuthbert Orme-Herrick the Etruscan
bull in the gallery.
It was a gruesome evening, and I was astonished to find, when at last
the party broke up, that it was only a few minutes after eleven. My father
helped himself to a glass of barley-water and said: "What very dull friends
I have! You know, without the spur of your presence I should never have
roused myself to invite them. I have been very negligent about entertaining
lately. Now that you are paying me such a long visit, I will have many such
evenings. You liked Miss Gloria Orme-Herrick?"
"No."
"No? Was it her little moustache you objected to or her very large
feet? Do you think she enjoyed herself?"
"No."
"That was my impression also. I doubt if any of our guests will count
this as one of their happiest evenings. That young foreigner played
atrociously, I thought. Where can I have met him? And Miss.Constantia
Smethwick -- where can I have met her? But the obligations of hospitality
must be observed. As long as you are here, you shall not be dull."
Strife was internecine during the next fortnight, but I suffered the
more, for my father had greater reserves to draw on and a wider territory
for manoeuvre, while I was pinned to my bridgehead between the uplands and
the sea. He never declared his war aims, and I do not to this day know
whether they were purely punitive -- whether he had really at the back of
his mind some geopolitical idea of getting me out of the country, as Aunt
Philippa had been driven to Bordighera and my cousin Melchior to Darwin, or
whether, as seems most likely, he fought for the sheer love of a battle, in
which indeed he shone.
I received one letter from Sebastian, a conspicuous object which was
brought to me in my father's presence one day when he was lunching at home;
I saw him look curiously at it and bore it away to read in solitude. It was
written on, and enveloped in, heavy late-Victorian mourning paper,
black-coroneted and black-bordered. I read it eagerly: --
brideshead castle
wiltshire
Dearest Charles,-
I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to
you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The
doctors despaired of it from the start.
Soon I am off to Venice to stay with my papa in his palace of sin. I
wish you were coming. I wish you were here.
I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and
collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe.
I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to
meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.
Love or what you will.
S.
I knew his letters of old; I had had them at Ravenna; I should not have
been disappointed; but that day as I tore the stiff sheet across and let it
fall into the basket, and gazed resentfully across the grimy gardens and
irregular backs of Bayswater, at the jumble of soil pipes and fire-escapes
and protuberant little conservatories, I saw, in my mind's eye, the pale
face of Anthony Blanche, peering through the straggling leaves as it had
peered through the candle flames at Thame, and heard, above the murmur of
traffic, his clear tones . . . "You mustn't blame Sebastian if at times he
seems a little insipid. . . . When I hear him talk I am reminded of that in
some ways nauseating picture of 'Bubbles.' . . . Boredom . . . like a cancer
in the breast. . . ."
For days after that I thought I hated Sebastian; then one Sunday
afternoon a telegram came from him, which dispelled that shadow, adding a
new and darker one of its own.
My father was out and returned to find me in a condition of feverish
anxiety. He stood in the hall with his Panama hat still on his head and
beamed at me.
"You'll never guess how I have spent the day; I have been to the Zoo.
It was most agreeable; the animals seem to enjoy the sunshine so much."
"Father, I've got to leave at once."
"Yes?"
"A great friend of mine -- he's had a terrible accident. I must go to
him at once. Hayter's packing for me, now. There's a train in half an hour."
I showed him the telegram, which read simply: GRAVELY INJURED. COME AT
ONCE. SEBASTIAN.
"Well," said my father. "I'm sorry you are upset. Reading this message
I should not say that the accident was as serious as you seem to think --
otherwise it would hardly be signed by the victim himself. Still, of course,
he may well be fully conscious but blind or paralysed with a broken back.
Why exactly is your presence so necessary? You have no medical knowledge.
You are not in holy orders. Do you hope for a legacy?"
"I told you, he is a great friend."
"Well, Orme-Herrick is a great friend of mine, but I should not go
tearing off to his deathbed on a warm Sunday afternoon. I should doubt
whether Lady Orme-Herrick would welcome me. However, I see you have no such
doubts. I shall miss you, my dear boy, but do not hurry back on my account."
Paddington Station on that August Sunday evening, with the sun
streaming through the obscure panes of its roof, the bookstalls shut, and
the few passengers strolling unhurried beside their porters, would have
soothed a mind less agitated than mine. The train was nearly empty. I had my
suitcase put in the corner of a third-class carriage and took a seat in the
dining-car. "First dinner after Reading, sir; about seven o'clock. Can I get
you anything now?" I ordered gin and vermouth; it was brought to me as we
pulled out of the station. The knives and forks set up their regular jingle;
the bright landscape rolled past the windows. But I had no mind for these
smooth things; instead, fear worked like yeast in my thoughts, and the
fermentation brought to the surface, in great gobs of scum, the images of
disaster: a loaded gun held carelessly at a stile, a horse rearing and
rolling over, a shaded pool with a submerged stake, an elm bough falling
suddenly on a still morning, a car at a blind corner; all the catalogue of
threats to civilized life rose and haunted me; I even pictured a homicidal
maniac mouthing in the shadows swinging a length of lead pipe. The
cornfields and heavy woodland sped past, deep in the golden evening, and the
throb of the wheels repeated monotonously in my ears, "You've come too late.
You've come too late. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead."
I dined and changed trains to the local line, and in twilight came to
Melstead Carbury, which was my destination. "Brideshead, sir? Yes, Lady
Julia's in the yard." I recognized her at once; I could not have failed to.
She was sitting at the wheel of an open car.
"You're Mr. Ryder? Jump in." Her voice was Sebastian's and his her
w&y of speaking. "How is he?"
"Sebastian? Oh, he's fine. Have you had dinner? Well, I expect it was
beastly. There's some more at home. Sebastian and I are alone, so we thought
we'd wait for you." "What's happened to him?"
"Didn't he say? I expect he thought you wouldn't come if you knew. He's
cracked a bone in his ankle so small that it hasn't a name. But they X-rayed
it yesterday and told him to keep it up for'a month. It's a great bore to
him, putting out all his plans; he's been making the most enormous fuss. . .
. Everyone else has gone. He tried" to make me stay back with him. Well, I
expect you know how maddeningly pathetic he can be. I almost gave in, and
then I said: 'Surely there must be someone you can get hold of,' and he said
everybody was away or busy and, anyway, no one else would do. But at last he
agreed to try you, and I promised I'd stay if you failed him, so you can
imagine how popular you are with me. I must say it's noble of you to come
all this way at a moment's notice." But as she said it I heard, or thought I
heard, a tiny note of contempt in her voice that I should be so readily
available.
"How did he do it?"
"Believe it or not, playing croquet. He lost his temper and tripped
over a hoop. Not a very honourable scar."
She so much resembled Sebastian that, sitting beside her in the
gathering dusk, I was confused by the double illusion of familiarity and
strangeness. Thus, looking through strong lenses one may watch a man
approaching from afar, study every detail of his face and clothes, believe
one has only to put out a hand to touch him, marvel that he does not hear
one, and look up as one moves, and then seeing him with the naked eye
suddenly remember that one is to him a distant speck, doubtfully human. I
knew her and she did not know me. Her dark hair .was scarcely longer than
Sebastian's, and it blew back from her forehead as his did; her eyes on the
darkling road were his, but larger, her painted mouth was less friendly to
the world. She wore a bangle of charms on her wrist and in her ears little
gold rings. Her light coat revealed an inch or two of flowered silk; skirts
were short in those days, and her legs, stretched forward to the controls of
the car, were spindly, as was also the fashion. Because her sex was the
palpable difference between the familiar and the strange, it seemed to fill
the space between us, so that I felt her to be especially female as I had
felt of no woman before.
"I'm terrified of driving at this time of the eve'ning," she said.
"There doesn't seem anyone left at home who can drive a car. Sebastian and I
are practically camping out here. I hope you haven't come expecting a
pompous party." She leaned forward to the locker for a box of cigarettes.
"No thanks."
"Light one for me, will you?"
It was the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and
as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin
bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.
"Thanks. You've been here before. Nanny reported it. We both thought it
very odd of you not to stay to tea with me."
"That was Sebastian."
"You seem to let him boss you about a good deal. You shouldn't. It's
very bad for him."
We had turned the corner of the drive now; the colour had died in the
woods and sky and the house seemed painted in grisaille, save for the
central golden square at the open, doors. A man was waiting to take my
luggage.
"Here we are."
She led me up the steps and into the hall, flung her coat on a marble
table, and stooped to fondle a dog which came to greet her. "I wouldn't put
it past Sebastian to have started dinner."
At that moment he appeared between the pillars at the further end,
propelling himself in a wheel-chair. He was in pyjamas and dressing-gown
with one foot heavily bandaged.
"Well, darling, I've collected your chum," she said, again with a
barely perceptible note of contempt.
"I thought you were dying," I said, conscious then, as I had been ever
since I arrived, of the predominating emotion of vexation, rather than of
relief, that I had been bilked of my expectations of a grand tragedy.
"I thought I was, too. The pain was excruciating. Julia, do you think
if you asked him, Wilcox would give us champagne to-night?"
"I hate champagne and Mr. Ryder has had dinner."
"Mister Ryder? Mister Ryder? Charles drinks champagne at all hours. Do
you know, seeing this great swaddled foot of mine, I can't get it out of my
mind that I have gout, and that gives me a craving for champagne?"
We dined in a room they called "the Painted Parlour." It was a spacious
octagon, later in design than the rest of the house; its walls were adorned
with wreathed medallions, and across its dome prim Pompeian figures stood in
pastoral groups. They and the satin-wood and ormolu furniture, the carpet,
the hanging bronze candelabrum, the mirrors and sconces, were all a single
composition, the design of one illustrious hand. "We usually eat here when
we're alone," said Sebastian, "it's so cosy."
While they dined I ate a peach and told them of the war with my father.
"He sounds a perfect poppet," said Julia. "And now I'm going to leave
you boys."
"Where are you off to?"
"The nursery. I promised Nanny a last game of halma." She kissed the
top of Sebastian's head. I opened the door for her. "Good night, Mr. Ryder,
and good-bye. I don't suppose we'll meet to-morrow. I'm leaving early. I
can't tell you how grateful I am to you for relieving me at the sick-bed."
"My sister's very pompous to-night," said Sebastian, when she was gone.
"I don't think she cares for me," I said.
"I don't think she cares for anyone much. I love her. She's so like
me."
"Do you? Is she?"
"In looks I mean and the way she talks. I wouldn't love anyone with a
character like mine."
When we had drunk our port I walked beside Sebastian's chair through
the pillared hall to the library, where we sat that night and nearly every
night of the ensuing month. It lay on the side of the house that overlooked
the lakes; the windows were open to the stars and the scented air, to the
indigo and silver, moonlit landscape of the valley and the sound of water
falling in the fountain.
"We'll have a heavenly time alone," said Sebastian, and when next
morning, while I was shaving, I saw from my bathroom window Julia, with
luggage at her back, drive from the forecourt and disappear at the hill's
crest, without a backward glance, I felt a sense of liberation and peace
such as I was to know years-later when, after a night of unrest, the sirens
sounded the All Clear.
Chapter Four
the languor of Youth -- how unique and quintessential it is! How
quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the
illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth -- all save
this -- come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we
experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left
behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its
concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us
in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged. These things
are a part of life itself; but languor -- the relaxation of yet unwearie^l
sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in
the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse -- that belongs to
Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes
enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps
the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly
experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those
languid days at Brideshead.
"Why is this house called a 'Castle'?"
"It used to be one until they moved it."
"What can you mean?"
"Just that. We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then in
Inigo Jones's time we took a fancy to the valley and pulled the castle down,
carted the stones up here and built a new house. I'm glad they did, aren't
you?"
"If it was mine I'd never live anywhere else."
"But you see, Charles, it isn't mine. Just at the moment it is, but
usually it's full of ravening beasts. If it could only be like this always
-- always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good
temper. . . ."
It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we
wandered alone together through that enchanted j palace; Sebastian in his
wheel-chair spinning down die box-edged walks of the kitchen gardens in
search of alpine strawberries and warm figs, propelling himself through the
succession; of hothouses, from scent to scent and climate to climate, to cut
the muscat grapes and choose orchids for our buttonholes; Sebas- | tian
hobbling, with a pantomime of difficulty, to the old nurseries, sitting
beside me on the thread-bare, flowered carpet with the toy-cupboard empty
about us and Nanny Hawkins stitching com- I placehtly in the corner, saying,
"You're one as bad as the other; a pair of children the two of you. Is that
what they teach you at college?" Sebastian prone on the sunny seat in the
colonnade, 1 as he was now, and I in a hard chair beside him, trying to draw
the fountain.
"Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later."
"Oh, Charles, don't be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was
built, if it's pretty?"
"It's the sort of thing I like to know."
"Oh dear, I thought I'd cured you of all that--the terrible Mr.
Collins."
It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander
from room to room, from the Soanesque library to the Chinese drawing-room,
adazzle with gilt pagodas and nodding mandarins, painted paper and
Chippendale fret-work, from the Pompeian parlour to the great tapestry-hung
hall which stood unchanged, as it had been designed two hundred and fifty
years before; to sit, hour after hour, in the pillared shade looking out on
the terrace.
This terrace was the final consummation of the house's plan; it stood
on massive stone ramparts above the lakes, so that from the hall steps it
seemed to overhang them, as though, standing by the balustrade, one could
have dropped a pebble into the first of them immediately below one's feet.
It was embraced by the two arms of the colonnade; beyond the pavilions
groves of lime led to the wooded hillsides. Part of the terrace was paved,
part planted with flower-beds and arabesques of dwarf box; taller box grew
in a dense hedge, making a wide oval, cut into niches and interspersed with
statuary, and, in the centre, dominating the whole spendid space, rose the
fountain; such a fountain as one might expect to find in a piazza of
Southern Italy, such a fountain as was, indeed, found there a century ago by
one of Sebastian's ancestors; found, purchased, imported and re-erected in
an alien but welcoming climate.
Sebastian set me to draw it. It was an ambitious subject for an amateur
-- an oval basin with an island of formal rocks at its centre; on the rocks
grew, in stone, formal tropical vegetation and wild English fern in its
natural fronds; through them ran a dozen streams that counterfeited springs,
and round them sported fantastic tropical animals, camels and camelopards
and an ebullient lion all vomiting water; on the rocks, to the height of the
pediment, stood an Egyptian obelisk of red sandstone -- but, by some odd
chance, for the thing was far beyond me, I brought it off and by judicious
omissions and some stylish tricks, produced a very passable echo of
Piranesi. "Shall I give it to your mother?" I asked.
"Why ? You don't know her."
"It seems polite. I'm staying in her house."
"Give it to Nanny," said Sebastian.
I did so, and she put it among the collection on the top of her chest
of drawers, remarking that it had quite a look of the thing, which she had
often heard admired but could never see
the beauty of, herself.
I was myself in almost the same position as Nanny Hawkins.
Since the days when, as a school-boy, I used to bicycle round the
neighbouring parishes, rubbing brasses and photographing fonts, I have
nursed a love of architecture, but though in opinion I had made that easy
leap, characteristic of my generation; from the puritanism of Ruskin to the
puritanism of Roger Fry, my sentiments at heart were insular and mediaeval.
This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and
insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed j through
those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour
by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering
echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt
a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that
spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.
One day in a cupboard we found a large japanned-tin box of oil paints
still in workable condition.
"Mummy bought them a year or two ago. Someone told her that you could
only appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it. We laughed at
her a great deal about it. She couldn't draw at all, and however .bright the
colours were in the tubes, by the time Mummy had mixed them up, they came
out a kind of khaki." Various dry, muddy smears on the palette confirmed
this statement. "Cordelia was always made to wash the brushes. In the end we
all protested and made Mummy stop."
The paints gave us the idea of decorating the office; this was a small
room opening on the colonnade; it had once been used for estate business,
but was now derelict, holding only some garden games and a tub of dead
aloes; it had plainly been designed for a softer use; perhaps as a tea-room
or study, for the plaster walls were decorated with delicate rococo panels
and the roof was prettily groined. Here, in one of the smaller oval frames,
I sketched a romantic landscape, and in the days that followed filled it out
in colour, and by luck and the happy mood of the moment, made a success of
it. The brush seemed somehow to do what was wanted of it. It .was a
landscape without figures, a summer scene of white cloud and blue distances,
with an ivy-clad ruin in the foreground, rocks and a waterfall affording a
rugged introduction to the receding parkland behind. I knew little of oil
painting and learned its ways as I worked. When, in a week, it was finished,
Sebastian was eager for me to start on one of the larger panels. I made some
sketches. He called for a f te champ tre with a ribboned swing and a Negro
page and a shepherd playing the pipes, but the thing languished. I knew it
was good chance that had made my landscape, and that this elaborate pastiche
was too much for me.
One day we went down to the cellars with Wilcox and saw the empty bays
which had once held a vast store of wine; one transept only was used now;
there the bins were well stocked, some of them with vintages fifty years
old.
"There's been nothing added since his Lordship went abroad," said
Wilcox. "A lot of the old wine wants drinking up. We ought to have laid down
the eightcens and twenties. I've had several letters about it from the wine
merchants, but her Ladyship says to ask Lord Brideshead, and he says to ask
his Lordship, and his Lordship says to ask the lawyers. That's how we get
low. There's enough here for ten years at the rate it's going, but how shall
we be then?"
Wilcox welcomed our interest; we had bottles brought up from every bin,
and it was during those tranquil evenings with Sebastian that I first made a
serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of that rich harvest which
was to be my stay in many barren years. We would sit, he and I, in the
Painted Parlour with three bottles open on the table and three glasses
before each of us; Sebastian had found a book on wine-tasting, and we
followed its instructions in detail. We warmed the glass slightly at a
candle, filled a third of it, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our
hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with
it and rolled it over the tongue, ringing it on the palate like a coin on a
counter, tilted our heads back and let it trickle down the throat. Then we
talked of it and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another
wine; then back to the first, then on to another, until all three were in
circulation and the order of glasses got confused, and we fell out over
which was which, and we passed the glasses to and fro between us until there
were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled
from the wrong bottle, till we were obliged to start again with three clean
glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and
more exotic.
"... It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle."
"Like a leprechaun."
"Dappled, in a tapestry meadow."
"Like a flute by still water."
"... And this is a wise old wine."
"A prophet in a cave."
"... And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck."
"Like a swan."
"Like the last unicorn."
And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the
starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in
the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks.
"Ought we to be drunk every night?" Sebastian asked one morning.
"Yes, I think so."
"I think so too."
We saw few strangers. There was the agent, a lean and pouchy colonel,
who crossed our path occasionally and once came to tea. Usually we managed
to hide from him. On Sundays a monk was fetched from a neighbouring
monastery to say mass and breakfast with us. He was the first priest I ever
met; I noticed how unlike he was to a parson, but Brideshead was a place of
such enchantment to me that I expected everything and everyone to be unique;
Father Phipps was in fact a bland, bun-faced man with an interest in county
cricket which he obstinately believed us to share.
"You know, Father, Charles and I simply don't tyiow about cricket."
"I wish I'd seen Tennyson make that fifty-eight last Thursday. That
must have been an innings. The account in The Times was excellent. Did you
see him against the South Africans?"
"I've never seen him."
"Neither have I. I haven't seen a first-class match for years -- not
since Father Graves took me when we were passing through Leeds, after we'd
been to the induction of the Abbot at Ample-forth. Father Graves managed to
look up a train which gave us three hours to wait on the afternoon of the
match against Lancashire. That was an afternoon. I remember every ball of
it. Since then I've had to go by the papers. You seldom go to sec'cricket?"
"Never," I said, and he looked at me with the expression I have seen
since in the religious, of innocent wonder that those who expose themselves
to the dangers of the world should avail themselves so little of its varied
solace.
Sebastian always heard his mass, which was ill-attended. Brideshead was
not an old-established centre of Catholicism. Lady Marchmain had introduced
a few Catholic servants, but the majority of them, and all the cottagers,
prayed, if anywhere, among the Flyte tombs in the little grey church at the
gates.
Sebastian's faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I
felt particularly concerned to solve. I had no religion. I was taken to
church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as
though in compensation, from the time I went to my public school I was
excused church in the holidays. The view implicit in my education was that
the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and
that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of
present value, a division in which the main weight went against it; religion
was a hobby which some people professed and others; did not; at the best it
was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of "complexes" and
"inhibitions" -- catchwords I of the decade -- and of the intolerance,
hypocrisy, and sheer j| stupidity attributed to it for centuries. No one had
ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent
philosophic system and intransigeant historical claims; nor, had they done
so, would I have been much interested.
Often, almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance ' word in
his conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, ' but I took it as
a foible, like his Teddy-bear. We never discussed the matter until on the
second Sunday at Brideshead, when Father Phipps had left us and we sat in
the colonnade with the papers, he surprised me by saying: "Oh dear, it's
very difficult being a Catholic."
"Does it make much difference to you?"
"Of course. All the time."
"Well, I can't say I've noticed it. Are you struggling against
temptation? You don't seem much more virtuous than me."
"I'm very, very much wickeder," said Sebastian indignantly.
"Well then?"
"Who was it used to pray, 'Oh God, make me good, but not yet'?"'
"I don't know. You, I should think."
"Why, yes, I do, every day. But it isn't that." He turned back to the
pages of the News of -the World and said, "Another naughty scout-master."
"I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?"
"Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible
to me."
"But, my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all."
"Can't I?"
"I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and
the ass."
"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."
"But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea."
"But I do. That's how I believe."
"And in prayers? You think you can kneel down in front of a statue and
say a few words, not even out loud, just in your mind, and change the
weather; or that some saints are more influential than others, and you must
get hold of the right one to help you on the right problem?"
"Oh yes. Don't you remember last term when I took Aloysius and left him
behind I didn't know where? I prayed like mad to St. Anthony of Padua that
morning, and immediately after lunch there was Mr. Nichols at Canterbury
Gate with Aloysius in his arms, saying I'd left him in his cab."
"Well," I said, "if you can believe all that and you don't want to be
good, where's the difficulty about your religion?"
"If you can't see, you can't."
"Well, where?"
"Oh, don't be a bore, Charles. I want to read about a woman in Hull
who's been using an instrument."
"You started the subject. I was just getting interested."
"I'll never mention it again . . . Thirty-eight other cases were taken
into consideration in sentencing her to six months -- golly!"
But he did mention it again, some ten days later, as we were lying on
the roof of the house, sunbathing and watching through a telescope the
Agricultural Show which was in progress in the park below us. It was a
modest two-day show serving the neighbouring parishes, and surviving more as
a fair and social gathering than as a centre of serious competition. A ring
was marked out in flags, and round it had been pitched half a dozen tents o
varying size; there was a judges' box, and some pens for livestock; the
largest marquee was for refreshments, and there the
farmers congregated in numbers. Preparations had been going on for a
week. "We shall have to hide," said Sebastian as the day approached. "My
brother will be here. He's in his element 4 at the Agricultural
Show." So we lay on the roof under the balustrade.
Brideshead came down by train in the morning and lunched with Colonel
Fender, the agent. I met him for five minutes on his arrival. Anthony
Blanche's description was peculiarly apt; he had the Flyte face, carved by
an Aztec. We could see him now, through the telescope, moving affably among
the tenants, stopping to greet the judges in their box, leaning over a pen
gazing seriously at the cattle.
"Queer fellow, my brother," said Sebastian.
"He looks normal enough."
"Oh, but he's not. If you only knew, he's much the craziest of us, only
it doesn't come out at all. He's all twisted inside. He wanted to be a
priest, you know."
"I didn't."
"I think he still does. He nearly became a Jesuit, straight from
Stonyhurst. It was awful for Mummy. She couldn't exactly try and stop him,
but of course it was the last thing she wanted. Think what people would have
said -- the eldest son; it's not as if it had been me. And poor Papa. The
Church has been enough trouble to him without that happening. There was a
frightful to-do -- monks and monsignori running round the house like mice,
and Brideshead just sitting glum and talking about the will of God. He was
the most upset, you see, when Papa went abroad -- much more than Mummy
really. Finally they persuaded him to go to Oxford and think it over for
three years. Now he's trying to make up his mind. He talks of going into the
Guards and into the House of Commons and of marrying. He doesn't know what
he wants. I wonder if I should have been like that, if I'd gone to
Stonyhurst. I should have gone, only Papa went abroad before I was old
enough, and the first thing he insisted on was my going to Eton."
"Has your father given up religion?"
"Well, he's had to in a way; he only took to it when he married Mummy.
When he went off, he left that behind with the rest of us. You must meet
him. He's a very nice man."
'Sebastian had never spoken seriously of his father before.
I said: "It must have upset you all when your father went away."
"All but Cordelia. She was too young. It upset me at the time. Mummy
tried to explain it to the three eldest of us so that we wouldn't hate Papa.
I was the only one who didn't. I believe she wishes I did. I was always his
favourite. I should be staying with him now, if it wasn't for this foot. I'm
the only one who goes. Why don't you come too? You'd like him."
A man with a megaphone was shouting the results of the last event in
the field below; his voice came faintly to us.
"So you see we're a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia
are both fervent Catholics; he's miserable, she's bird-happy; Julia and I
are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn't; Mummy is popularly
believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated -- and I wouldn't know
which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn't
seem to have much to do with it, and that's all I want. ... I wish I liked
Catholics more."
"They seem just like other people."
"My dear Charles, that's exactly what they're not -- particularly in
this country, where they're so few. It's not just that they're a clique --
as a matter of fact, they're at least four cliques all blackguarding each
other half the time -- but they've got an entirely different outlook on
life; everything they think important is different from other people. They
try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time. It's
quite natural, really, that they should. But you see it's difficult for
semi-heathens like Julia and me."
We were interrupted in this unusually grave conversation by 1 loud,
childish cries from beyond the chimney-stacks, "Sebastian, Sebastian."
"Good heavens!" said Sebastian, reaching for a blanket. "That sounds
like my sister Cordelia. Cover yourself up."
"Where are you?"
There came into view a robust child of ten or eleven; she had the
unmistakable family characteristics, but had them ill-arranged in a frank
and chubby plainness, two thick old-fashioned pigtails hung down her back.
"Go away, Cordelia. We've got no clothes on."
"Why? You're quite decent. I guessed you were here. You didn't know I
was about, did you? I came down with Bridey J and stopped to see Francis
Xavier." To me, "He's my pig. Then we had lunch with Colonel Fender and then
the show. Francis Xavier got a special mention. That beast Randal got first
with a mangy animal. Darling Sebastian, I am pleased to see you again. How's
your poor foot?"
"Say how-d'you-do to Mr. Ryder."
"Oh, sorry. How d'you do?" All the family charm was in her smile.
"They're all getting pretty boozy down there, so I came away. I say, who's
been painting the office? I went in to look for a shooting stick and saw
it."
"Be careful what you say. It's Mr. Ryder."
"But it's lovely. I say, did you really? You are clever. Why don't you
both dress and come down? There's no one about."
"Bridey's sure to bring the judges in."
"But he won't. I heard him making plans not to. He's very sour to-day.
He didn't want me to have dinner with you, but I fixed that. Come on. I'll
be in the nursery when you're fit to be seen."
* * *
We were a sombre little party that evening. Only Cordelia was perfectly
at ease, rejoicing in the food, the lateness of the hour and her brothers'
company. Brideshead was three years older than Sebastian and I, but he
seemed of another generation. He had the physical tricks of his family, and
his smile, when it rarely came, was as lovely as theirs; he spoke, in their
voice, with a gravity and restraint which in my cousin Jasper would have
sounded pompous and false, but in him was plainly un-assumed and
unconscious.
"I am so sorry to miss so much of your visit," he said to me. "You are
being looked after properly? I hope Sebastian is seeing to the wine. Wilcox
is apt to be rather grudging when he is on his own."
"He's treated us very liberally."
"I am delighted to hear it. You are fond of wine?"
"Very."
"I wish I were. It is such a bond with other men. At Magdalen I tried
to get drunk more than once, but I did not enjoy it. Beer and whiskey I find
even less appetising. Events like this afternoon's are a torment to me in
consequence."
"I like wine," said Cordelia.
"My-sister Cordelia's last report said that she was not only the worst
girl in the school, but the worst there had ever been in the memory of the
oldest nun."
"That's because I refused to be an Enfant de Marie. Reverend Mother
said that if I didn't keep my room tidier I couldn't be one, so I said,
Well, I won't be one, and I don't believe Our Blessed Lady cares two hoots
whether I put my gym shoes on the left or the right of my dancing shoes.
Reverend Mother was livid."
"Our Lady cares about obedience."
"Bridey, you mustn't be pious," said Sebastian. "We've got an atheist
with us."
"Agnostic," I said.
"Really? Is there much of that at your college? There was a certain
amount at Magdalen."
"I really don't know. I was one long before I went to Oxford."
"It's everywhere," said Brideshead.
Religion seemed an inevitable topic that day. For some time we talked
about the Agricultural Show. Then Brideshead said, "I saw the Bishop in
London last week. You know, he wants to close our chapel."
"Oh, he couldn't," said Cordelia.
"I don't think Mummy will let him," said Sebastian.
"It's too far away," said Brideshead. "There are a dozen families round
Melstead who can't get here. He wants to open a mass centre there."
"But what about us?" said Sebastian. "Do we have to drive out on winter
mornings?"
"We must have the Blessed Sacrament here," said Cordelia. "I like
popping in at odd times; so does Mummy."
"So do I," said Brideshead, "but there are so few of us. It's not as
though we were old Catholics with everyone on the estate coming to mass.
It'll have to go sooner or later, perhaps after Mummy's time. The point is
whether it wouldn't be better to let it go now. You are an artist, Ryder,
what do you think of it aesthetically?"
"I think it's beautiful" said Cordelia with tears in her eyes.
"Is it Good Art?"
"Well, I don't quite know what you mean," I said warily. "I think it's
a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be
greatly admired."
"But surely it can't be good twenty years ago and good in eighty years,
and not good now?"
"Well, it may be good now. All I mean is that I don't happen to like it
much."
"But is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it
good?"
"Bridey, don't be so Jesuitical," said Sebastian, but I knew that this
disagreement was not a matter of words only, but expressed a deep and
impassable division between us; neither had any understanding of the other,
nor ever could.
"Isn't that just the distinction'you made about wine?" '"No. I like and
think good the end to which wine is sometimes the means -- the promotion of
sympathy between man and man. But in my own case it does not achieve that
end, so I neither like it nor think it good for me."
"Bridey, do stop."
"I'm sorry," he said, "I thought it rather an interesting point."
"Thank God I went to Eton," said Sebastian.
After dinner Brideshead said: "I'm afraid I must take Sebastian away
for half an hour. I shall be busy all day to-morrow, and I'm off immediately
after the show. I've a lot of papers for Father to sign. Sebastian must take
them out and explain them to him. It's time you were in bed, Cordelia."
"Must digest first," she said. "I'm not used to gorging like this at
night. I'll talk to Charles."
"Charles?" said Sebastian. "Charles? Mister Ryder, to you, child."
"Come on, Charles."
When we were alone she said: "Are you really an agnostic?"
"Does your family always talk about religion all the time?"
"Not all the time. It's a subject that just comes up naturally, doesn't
it?"
"Does it ? It never has with me before."
"Then perhaps you are an agnostic. I'll pray for you."
"That's very kind of you."
"I can't spare you a whole rosary you know. Just a decade. I've got
such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about
once a week."
"I'm sure it's more than I deserve."
"Oh, I've got some harder cases than you. Lloyd George and the Kaiser
and Olive Banks."
"Who is she?"
"She was bunked from the convent last term. I don't quite know what
for. Reverend Mother found something she'd been writing. D'you know, if you
weren't an agnostic, I should ask you for five shillings to buy a black
god-daughter?"
"Nothing will surprise me about your religion."
"It's a new thing a missionary priest started last term. You send five
bob to some nuns in Africa and they christen a baby and name her after you.
I've got six black Cordelias already. Isn't it lovely?"
When Brideshead and Sebastian returned, Cordelia was sent to bed.
Brideshead began again on our discussion.
"Of course, you are right really," he said. "You take art as a means
not as an end. That is strict theology, but it's unusual to find an agnostic
believing it."
"Cordelia has promised to pray for me," I said.
"She made a novena for her pig," said Sebastian.
"You know all this is very puzzling to me," I said.
"I think we're causing scandal," said Brideshead.
That night I began to realize how little I really knew of Sebastian,
and to understand why he had always sought to keep me apart from the rest of
his life. He was like a friend made on
board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port.
Brideshead and Cordelia went away; the tents were struck on the show
ground, the flags uprooted; the trampled grass began to regain its colour;
the month that had .started in leisurely fashion came swiftly to its end.
Sebastian walked without a stick now and had forgotten his injury.
"I think you'd better come with me to Venice," he said.
"No money."
"I thought of that. We live on Papa when we get there. The lawyers pay
my fare -- first class and sleeper. We can both travel third for that."
And so we went; first by the long, cheap sea-crossing to Dunkirk,
sitting all night on deck under a clear sky, watching the grey dawn break
over the sand dunes; then to Paris, on wooden seats, where we drove to the
Lotti, had baths and shaved, lunched at Foyot's, which was hot and
half-empty, loitered sleepily among the shops and sat long in a. half-empty
cafe waiting till the time of our train; then in the warm, dusty evening to
the Gare de Lyon, to the slow train South; again the wooden seats, a
carriage full of the poor, visiting their families -- travelling as the poor
do in Northern countries, with a multitude of small bundles and an air of
patient submission to authority -- and sailors returning from leave. We
slept fitfully, jolting and stopping, changed once in the night, slept again
and awoke in an empty carriage, with pine woods passing the windows and the
distant view of mountain peaks. New uniforms at the frontier, coffee and
bread at the station buffet, people round us of Southern grace and gaiety;
on again into the plains, conifers changing to vine and olive, a change of
trains at Milan; garlic sausage, bread and a flash of Orvieto bought from a
trolley (we had spent all our money save for a few francs, in Paris); the
sun mounted high and the country glowed with heat; the carriage filled with
peasants, ebbing and flowing at each station; the smell of garlic was
overwhelming in the hot carriage. At last in the evening we arrived at
Venice.
A sombre figure was there to meet us. "Papa's valet, Plender."
"I met the express," said Plender. "His Lordship thought you must have
looked up the train wrong. This seemed only to come from Milan."
"We travelled third."
Plender tittered politely. "I have the palace gondola here. I shall
follow with the luggage in the vaporetto. His Lordship has gone to the Lido.
He was not sure he would be home before you
-- that was when we expected you on the express. He should be there by
now."
He led us to the waiting boat. The gondoliers wore green and white
livery and silver plaques on their arms; they smiled and bowed.
"Palazzo. Pronto"
"Si, Signor Plender."
And we floated away.
"You've been here before?"
"No."
"I came once before -- from the sea. This is the way to arrive."
"Ecco ci siamo, signori."
The palace was a little less than it sounded, a narrow Palladian
facade, mossy steps, a dark archway of rusticated stone. One boatman leapt
ashore, made fast to the post, rang the bell; the other stood on the prow
keeping the craft in to the steps. The doors opened; a man in rather raffish
summer livery of striped linen led us up the stairs from shadow into light;
the piano nobile was in full sunshine, ablaze with frescoes of the school of
Tintoretto.
"The marchese at Lido coming quick. Your sleeping this way please.
Making wash at once."
Our rooms were on the floor above; reached by a precipitous marble
staircase, they were shuttered against the afternoon sun; the butler threw
them open and we looked on to the Grand Canal; the beds had mosquito nets.
"Mostica not now."
There was a little bulbous press in each room, a misty, gilt-framed
mirror, and no other furniture. The floor was of bare marble slabs.
"Make hot wash," said the butler, leaving us. ' "A bit bleak?" asked
Sebastian.
"Bleak ? Look at that." I led him again to the window and the
incomparable pageant below and about us.
"No, you couldn't call it bleak."
A tremendous explosion next door announced a setback to the hot wash.
We went to investigate and found a bathroom which seemed to have been built
in a chimney. There was no ceiling; instead the walls ran straight through
the floor above • to the open sky. An antiquated geyser was sending out
clouds of steam, a strong smell of gas and a tiny trickle of cold water.
"No good."
"Si, si, subito, signori"
The butler ran to the top of the staircase and began to shout down it;
a female voice, more strident than his, answered. Sebastian and I returned
to the spectacle below our windows. Presently the argument came to an end
and a woman and child appeared, who smiled at us, scowled at the butler, and
put on Sebastian's press a silver basin and ewer of boiling water. The
butler meanwhile unpacked and folded our clothes and, lapsing into Italian,
told us of the unrecognized merits of the geyser, until suddenly cocking his
head sideways he became alert, said "// signor marchese" and darted
downstairs.
"We'd better look respectable before meeting Papa," said Sebastian. "We
needn't dress. I gather he's alone at the moment"
I was full of curiosity to meet Lord Marchmain. When I did so I was
first struck by his normality, which, as I saw more of him, I found to be
studied. It was as though he were conscious of a Byronic aura, which he
considered to be in bad taste and was at pains to suppress. He was standing
on the balcony of the saloon which was the main living-room of the palace,
and, as he turned to greet us, his face was in deep shadow. I was aware only
of a tall and upright figure.
"Darling Papa," said Sebastian, "how young you are looking!"
He kissed Lord Marchmain on the cheek and I, who had not kissed my
father since I left the nursery, stood shyly behind him.
"This is Charles. Don't you think my father very handsome, Charles?"
Lord Marchmain shook my hand.
"Whoever looked up your train," he said -- and his voice also was
Sebastian's -- "made a b tise. There's no such one."
"We came on it."
"You can't have. There was only a slow train from Milan at that time. I
was at the Lido. I have taken to playing tennis there with the professional
in the early evening. It is the only time of day when it is not too hot. I
hope you boys will be fairly comfortable upstairs. This house seems to have
been designed for the comfort of only one person, and I am that one. I have
a room the size of this and a very decent dressing-room. Cara has taken
possession of the odier sizeable room."
I was fascinated to hear him speak of his mistress, so simply and
casually; later I suspected that it was done for effect, for me.
"How is she?"
"Cara? Well, I hope. She will be back with us to-morrow. She is
visiting some American friends at a villa on the Brenta Canal. Where shall
we dine? We might go to the Luna, but it is filling up with English now.
Would you be too dull at home? Cara is sure to want to go out to-morrow, and
the cook here is really quite excellent."
He had moved away from the window and now stood in the full evening
sunlight, with the red damask of the walls behind him. It was a noble face,
a controlled one, just, it seemed, as he planned it to be; slightly weary,
slightly sardonic, slightly voluptuous. He seemed in the prime of life; it
was odd to think that he was only a few years younger than my father.
We dined at a marble table in the windows; everything was either of
marble, or velvet, or dull, gilt gesso, in this house. Lord Marchmain said,
"And how do you plan your time here? Bathing or sight-seeing?" "Some
sight-seeing, anyway," I said.
"Cara will like that -- she, as Sebastian will have told you, is your
hostess here. You can't do both, you know. Once you go to the Lido there is
no escaping -- you play backgammon, you get caught at the bar, you get
stupefied by the sun. Stick to the churches. You've just come from England?"
"Yes, it was lovely there."
"Was it? Was it? It has been my tragedy that I abominate the English
countryside. I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great
responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the
socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling-block to my own party.
Well, my elder son will change all that, I've no doubt, if they leave him
anything to inherit. . . . Why, I wonder, are Italian sweets always thought
to be so good ? There was always an Italian pastry-cook at Brides-head until
my father's day. He had an Austrian, so much better. And now I suppose there
is some British matron with beefy forearms."
After dinner we left the palace by the street door and walked through a
maze of bridges and squares and alleys, to Florian's for coffee, and watched
the grave crowds crossing and re-crossing under the Campanile. "There is
nothing quite like a Venetian crowd," said Lord Marchmain. "The country is
crawling with Communists, but an American woman tried to sit here the other
night with bare shoulders and they drove her away by coming to stare at her,
quite silently; they were like circling gulls coming back and back to her,
until she left. Our countrymen are much less dignified when they attempt to
express moral disapproval."
An English party had just then come from the water-front, made for a
table near us, and then suddenly moved to the other side, where they looked
askance at us and talked with their heads close together. "That is a man and
his wife I used to know when I was in politics. A prominent member o your
church, Sebastian."
As we went up to bed that night Sebastian said: "He's rather a poppet,
isn't he?"
Lord Marchmain's mistress arrived next day. I was nineteen years old
and completely ignorant of women. I could not with any certainty recognize a
prostitute in the streets. I was therefore not indifferent to the fact of
living under the roof of an adulterous couple, but I was old enough to hide
my interest. Lord March-main's mistress, therefore, found me with a
multitude of conflicting expectations about her, all of which were, for the
moment, disappointed by her appearance. She was not a voluptuous
Toulouse-Lautrec odalisque; she was not a "little bit of fluff'; she was a
middle-aged, well-preserved, well-dressed, well-mannered woman such as I had
seen in countless public places and occasionally met. Nor did she seem
marked by any social stigma. On the day of her arrival we lunched at the
Lido, where she was greeted at almost every table.
"Vittoria Corombona has asked us all to her ball on Saturday."
"It is very kind of her. You know I do not dance," said Lord Marchmain.
"But for the boys? It is a thing to be seen -- the Corombona palace lit
up for the ball. One does not know how many such balls there will be in the
future."
"The boys can do as they like. We must refuse."
"And I have asked Mrs. Hacking Brunner to luncheon. She has a charming
daughter. Sebastian and his friend will like her."
"Sebastian and his friend are more interested in art than heiresses."
"But that is what I have always wished," said Cara, changing her point
of attack adroitly. "I have been here more times than I can count and Alex
has not once let me inside San Marco even. We will become tourists, yes?"
We became tourists; Cara enlisted as guide a midget Venetian nobleman
to whom all doors were open, and with him at her side and a guide-book in
her hand, she came with us, flagging sometimes but never giving up, a neat,
prosaic figure amid the immense splendours of the place.
The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly -- perhaps too
sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. On some days life, kept pace
with the gondola, as we nosqd through the side-canals and die boatman
uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days, with the
speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam; it left a
confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors;
of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light
on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might
have known, and another Byronic night fishing for scampi in the shallows of
Chioggia, the phosphorescent wake of the little ship, the lantern swinging
in the prow and the net coming up full of weed and sand and floundering
fishes; of melon and prosciutto on the balcony in the cool of the morning;
of hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at the English
bar.
I remember Sebastian looking up at the Colleoni statue and saying,
"It's rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly
get involved in a war."
I remember most particularly one conversation towards the end of my
visit.
Sebastian had gone to play tennis with his father and Cara at last
admitted to fatigue. 'We sat in the late afternoon at the windows
overlooking the Grand Canal, she on the sofa with a piece of needlework, I
in an armchair, idle. It was the first time we had been alone together.
"I think you are very fond of Sebastian," she said.
"Why, certainly."
"I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans.
They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too
long."
She was so composed and matter-of-fact that I could not take I her
amiss, but I failed to find an answer. She seemed not to ' expect one but
continued stitching, pausing sometimes to match the silk from a work bag at
her side.
"It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its
meaning. In England it comes when you are almost men; I think I like that.
It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl. Alex
you see had it for a girl, for his wife. Do you think he loves me?"
"Really, Cara, you ask the most embarrassing questions. How should I
know? I assume ..."
"He does not. But not the littlest piece. Then why does he stay with
me? I will tell you; because I protect him from Lady I Marchmain. He hates
her; but you can have no conception how he hates her. You would think him so
calm and English -- the milord, rather blase, all passion dead, wishing to
be comfortable and not to be worried, following the sun, with me to look
after that one thing that no man can do for himself. My friend, he is
•' a volcano of hate. He cannot breathe the same air as she. He will
not set foot in England because it is her home; he can scarcely be happy
with Sebastian because he is her son. But Sebastian hates her too."
"I'm sure you're wrong there."
"He may not admit it to you. He may not admit it to himself; they are
full of hate -- hate of themselves. Alex and his family. . . . Why do you
think he will never go into Society?" "I always thought people had turned
against him." "My dear boy, you are very young. People turn against a
handsome, clever, wealthy man like Alex? Never in your life. It is he who
has driven them away. Even now they come back again and again to be snubbed
and laughed at. And all for Lady Marchmain. He will not touch a hand which
may have touched hers. When we have guests I see him thinking, 'Have they
perhaps just come from Brideshead? Are they on their way to Marchmain House?
Will they speak of me to my wife? Are they a link between me and her whom I
hate?' But, seriously, with my heart, that is how he thinks. He is mad. And
how has she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except be loved by
someone who was not grown-up. I have never met Lady March-main; I have seen
her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other women
he has loved. I know Lady March-main very well. She is a good and simple
woman whp has been loved in the wrong way.
"When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves
they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood -- innocence,
God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. He loved me for a time,
quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a
woman; she has not all these ways of loving.
"Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence.
We are comfortable.
"Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very
unhappy. His Teddy-bear, his Nanny . . . and he is nineteen years old. . .
."
She stirred on her sofa, shifting her weight so that she could look
down at the passing boats, and said in fond, mocking tones:
"How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love," and then added
with a sudden swoop to earth, "Sebastian drinks too much."
"I suppose we both do."
"With you it does not matter. I have watched you together. With
Sebastian it is different. He will be a drunkard if someone does not come to
stop him. I have known so many. Alex was nearly a drunkard when he met me;
it is in the blood. I see it in the way Sebastian drinks. It is not your
way."
We arrived in London on the day before term began. On the way from
Charing Cross I dropped Sebastian in the forecourt of his mother's house.
"Here is 'Marchers,'" he said with a sigh
which meant the end of a holiday. "I won't ask you in, the place is
probably full of my family. We'll meet at Oxford." I drove on to Hyde Park
Gardens.
My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret. "Here to-day,"
he said; "gone to-morrow. I seem to see very little of you. Perhaps it is
dull for you here. How could it be otherwise? You have enjoyed yourself?"
"Very much. I went to Venice."
"Yes. Yes. I suppose so. The weather was fine?"
When he went to bed after an evening of silent study, he paused to ask:
"The friend you were so much concerned about, did he die?" "No." "I am very
thankful. You should have written to tell me. I worried about him so much."
Chapter Five
"It is typical of Oxford," I said, "to start the new year in autumn."
Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in
the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist,
drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by
one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights
were diffuse and remote, like those of a foreign village seen from the
slopes outside; new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under
the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year's
memories.
The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of
June had died with the gillyflowers, whose scent at my windows now yielded
to the damp leaves, smouldering in a corner of the quad.
It was the first Sunday evening of term. "I feel precisely one hundred
years old," said Sebastian. He had come up the night before, a day earlier
than I, and this was our first meeting since we parted in the taxi.
"I've had a talking-to from Monsignor Bell this afternoon. That makes
the fourth since I came up -- my tutor, the junior dean, Mr. Samgrass of All
Souls, and now Monsignor Bell." "Who is Mr. Samgrass of All Souls?"
"Just someone of Mummy's. They all say that I made a very bad start
last year, that I have been noticed, and that if I don't mend my ways I
shall get sent down. How does one mend one's ways? I suppose one joins the
League of Nations Union, and reads the Isif every week, and drinks coffee in
the morning at the Cadena caf 4 and smokes a great pipe and plays hockey and
goes out to tea on Boar's Hill and to lectures at Keble, and rides a bicycle
with a little tray full of note-books and drinks cocoa in the evening and
discusses sex seriously. Oh, Charles, what has happened since last term? I
feel so old."
"I feel middle-aged. That is infinitely worse, I believe we have had
all the fun we can expect here." We sat silent in the firelight as darkness
fell. "Anthony Blanche has gone down."
"Why?"
"He wrote to me. Apparently he's taken a flat in Munich--he has formed
an attachment to a policeman there."
"I shall miss him."
"I suppose I shall, too, in a way."
We fell silent again and sat so still in the firelight that a man who
came in to see me stood for a moment in the door and then went away thinking
the room empty.
"This is no way to start a new year," said Sebastian; but this sombre
October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding
weeks. All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more
in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at
length forgotten, j the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the
chest-of-drawers in Sebastian's bedroom.
There was a change in both of us. We had lost the sense of discovery,
which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down.
Unexpectedly, I missed my cousin Jasper, who had got his first in
Greats and was now cumbrously setting about a life of public mischief in
London; I needed him to shock; without that massive presence the college
seemed to lack solidity; it no longer provoked and gave point to outrage as
it had done in the summer. Moreover, I had come back glutted and a little
chastened, with the resolve to go slow. Never again would I expose myself to
my father's humour; his whimsical persecution had convinced me, as no rebuke
could have done, of the folly of living beyond my means. I had had no
talking-to this term; my success in History Previous and a beta minus- in
one of my Collections papers had put me on easy terms with my tutor -- which
I managed to maintain without undue effort.
I kept a tenuous connection with the History School, wrote my two
essays a week and attended an occasional lecture. Besides this I started my
second year by joining the Ruskin School of Art; two or three mornings a
week we met, about a dozen of us--half, at least, the daughters of North
Oxford -- among the casts from the antique at the Ashmolean Museum; twice a
week we drew from the nude in a small room over a teashop; some pains were
taken by the authorities to exclude any hint of lubricity on these evenings,
and the young woman who sat to us was brought from London for the day and
not allowed to reside in the University city; one flank, that nearer the oil
stove, I remember, was always rosy and the other mottled and puckered as
though it had been plucked. There, in the smell of the oil lamp, we sat
astride the donkey stools and evoked a barely visible wraith of Trilby. My
drawings were worthless; in my own rooms I designed elaborate little
pastiches, some of which, preserved by friends of the period, come to light
occasionally to embarrass me.
We were instructed by a man of about my age, who treated us with
defensive hostility; he wore very dark blue shirts, a lemon-yellow tie and
horn-rimmed glasses, and it was largely by reason of this warning that I
modified my own style of dress until it approximated to what my cousin
Jasper would have thought suitable for country-house visiting. Thus soberly
dressed and happily employed I became a fairly respectable member of my
college.
With Sebastian it was different. His year of anarchy had filled a deep,
interior need of his, the escape from reality, and as he found himself
increasingly hemmed in, where he once felt himself free, he became at times
listless and morose, even with me. We kept very much to our own company that
term, each so much bound up in the other that we did not look elsewhere for
friends. My cousin Jasper had told me that it was normal to spend one's
second year shaking off the friends of one's first, and it happened as he
said. Most of my friends were those I had made through Sebastian; together
we shed them and made no others. There was no renunciation. At first we
seemed to see them as often as ever; we went to parties but gave few of our
own. I was not concerned to impress the new freshmen who, like their London
sisters, were here-being launched in society; there were strange faces now
at every party and I, who a few months back had been voracious of new
acquaintances^ now felt surfeited; even our small circle of intimates, so
lively in the summer sunshine, seemed dimmed and muted now in the pervading
fog, the river-borne twilight that softened and obscured all that year for
me. Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had
locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom
he had always been a stranger, needed him now.
The Charity matinee was over, I felt; the impresario had | buttoned his
astrakhan coat and taken his fee and the disconsolate ladies of the company
were without a leader. Without him they forgot their cues and garbled their
lines; they needed him to ring the curtain up at the right moment; they
needed him to direct the limelights; they needed his whisper in the wings,
and his imperious eye on the leader of the band; without him there were no
photographers from the weekly press, no prearranged goodwill and expectation
of pleasure. No stronger bond held them together than common service; now
the gold lace and velvet were packed away and returned to the costumier and
the drab uniform of the day put on in its stead. For a few happy hours of
rehearsal, for a few ecstatic minutes of performance, they had played
splendid parts, their own great ancestors, the famous paintings they were
thought to resemble; now it was over and in the bleak light of day they must
go back to their homes; to the husband who came to London too often, to the
lover who lost at cards, and to the child who grew too fast.
Anthony Blanche's set broke up and became a bare dozen lethargic,
adolescent Englishmen. Sometimes in later life they would say: "Do you
remember that extraordinary fellow we used all to know at Oxford -- Anthony
Blanche? I wonder what became of him." They lumbered back into the herd from
which they had been so capriciously chosen and grew less and less
individually recognizable. The change was not so apparent to them as to us,
and they still congregated on occasions in our rooms; but we gave up seeking
them. Instead we formed the taste for lower company and spent our evenings,
as often as not, in Hogarthian little inns in St. Ebb's and St. Clement's
and the streets between the old market and the canal, where we managed to be
gay and were, I believe, well liked by the company. The Gardener's Arms and
the Nag's Head, the Druid's Head near the theatre, and the Turf in Hell
Passage knew us well; but in the last of these we were liable to meet other
undergraduates-- pub-crawling hearties from BNC--and Sebastian became
possessed by a kind of phobia, like that which sometimes comes over men in
uniform against their own service, so that many an evening was spoilt by
their intrusion, and he would leave his glass half empty and turn sulkily
back to college.
It was thus that Lady Marchmain found us when, early in that Michaelmas
term, she came for a week to Oxford. She found Sebastian subdued, with all
his host of friends reduced to one, myself. She accepted me as Sebastian's
friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck
at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set
against her abundant kindness to me.
Her business in Oxford was with Mr. Samgrass of All Souls, who now
began to play an increasingly large part in our lives. Lady Marchmain was
engaged in making a memorial book for circulation among her friends, about
her brother, Ned, the eldest of three legendary heroes all killed between
Mons and Paschen-daele; he had left a quantity of papers -- poems, letters,
speeches, articles; to edit them even for a restricted circle needed tact
and countless decisions in which the judgment of an adoring sister was
liable to err.