Страница:
ringing"; and another, clearer than the rest, "D'you know I feel most
unaccountably unwell. I must leave you a minute," and there appeared at my
window the face I knew to be Sebastian's -- but not as I had formerly seen
it, alive and alight with gaiety; he looked at me for a moment with unseeing
eyes and then, leaning forward well into the room, he was sick.
It was not unusual for dinner parties to end in that way; there was in
fact a recognized tariff on such occasions for the comfort of the scout; we
were all learning, by trial and error, to carry our wine. There was also a
kind of insane and endearing orderliness about Sebastian's choice, in his
extremity, of an open window. But, when all is said, it remained an
unpropitious meeting.
His friends bore him to the gate and, in a few minutes, his host, an
amiable Etonian of my year, returned to apologize. He, too, was tipsy and
his explanations were repetitive and, towards the end, tearful. "The wines
were too various," he said; "it was neither the quality nor the quantity
that was at fault. It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of
the matter. To understand all is to forgive all."
"Yes," I said, but it was with a sense of grievance that I faced Lunt's
reproaches next morning.
"A couple of jugs of mulled claret between the five of you," Lunt said,
"and this had to happen. Couldn't even get to the window. Those that can't
keep it down are better without it."
"It wasn't one of my party. It was someone from out of college."
"Well, it's just as nasty clearing it up, whoever it was."
"There's five shillings on the sideboard."
"So I saw and thank you, but I'd rather not have the money and not have
the mess, any morning."
I took my gown and left him to his task. I still frequented the lecture
room in those days, and it was after eleven when I returned to college. I
found my room full of flowers; what looked like, and, in fact, was, the
entire day's stock of a market-stall stood in every conceivable vessel in
every part of the room. Lunt was secreting the last of them in brown paper
preparatory to taking them home.
"Lunt, what is all this?"
"The gentleman from last night, sir, he left a note for you."
The note was written in conte crayon on a whole sheet of my choice
Whatman H.P. drawing paper: I am very contrite. Aloysius won't speak to me
until he sees I am forgiven, so please come to luncheon to-day. Sebastian
Flyte. It was typical of him, I reflected, to assume I knew where he lived;
but then, I did know. '
"A most amusing gentleman, I'm sure it's quite a pleasure to clean up
after him. I take it you're lunching out, sir. I told Mr. Collins and Mr.
Partridge so--they wanted to have their commons in here with you."
"Yes, Lunt, lunching out."
That luncheon party -- for party it proved to be -- was the beginning
of a new epoch in my life, but its details are dimmed for me and confused by
so many others, almost identical with it, that succeeded one another that
term and the next, like romping cupids in a Renaissance frieze.
I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a
tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which in the tones of Collins told
me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days,
and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that
here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I
knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden,
which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey
city.
Sebastian lived at Christ Church, high in Meadow Buildings. He was
alone when I came, peeling a plover's egg taken from the large nest of moss
in the centre of the table.
"I've just counted them," he said. "There were five each and two over,
so I'm having the two. I'm unaccountably hungry to-day. I put myself
unreservedly in the hands of Dolbear and Goodall, and feel so drugged that
I've begun to believe that the whole of yesterday evening was a dream.
Please don't wake me up."
He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme
youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.
His room was filled with a strange jumble of objects -- a harmonium in
a gothic case, an elephant's-foot waste-paper basket, a dome of wax fruit,
two disproportionately large Sevres vases, framed drawings by Daumier --
made all the more incongruous by the austere college furniture and the large
luncheon table. His chimney-piece was covered with cards of invitation from
London hostesses.
"That beast Hobson has put Aloysius in the bedder," be said. "Perhaps
it's as well as there wouldn't have been any plovers' eggs for him. D'you
know, Hobson hates Aloysius? I wish I had a scout like yours. He was sweet
to me this morning where some people might have been quite strict."
The party assembled. There were three Etonian freshmen, mild, elegant,
detached young men who had all been to a dance in London the night before,
and spoke of it as though it had been the funeral of a near but unloved
kinsman. Each as he came into the room made first for the plovers' eggs,
then noticed Sebastian and then myself with a polite lack of curiosity which
seemed to say: "We should not dream of being so offensive as to suggest that
you never met us before."
"The first this year," they said. "Where do you get them?"
"Mummy sends them from Brideshead. They always lay early for her."
When the eggs were gone and we were eating the lobster Newburg, the
last guest arrived.
"My dear," he said, "I couldn't get away before. I was lunching with my
p-p-preposterous tutor. He thought it very odd my leaving when I did. I told
him I had to change for F-f-footer."
From the moment he arrived the newcomer took charge, talking in a
luxurious, self-taught stammer; teasing; caricaturing the guests at his
previous luncheon; telling lubricious anecdotes of Paris and Berlin; and
doing more than entertain -- transfiguring the party, shedding a vivid,
false light of eccentricity upon everyone so that the three prosaic Etonians
seemed suddenly to become creatures of his fantasy.
This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the "aesthete" par
excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville, a young
man who seemed to me, then, fresh from the sombre company of the College
Essay Society, ageless as a lizard, as foreign as a Martian. He had been
pointed out to me often in the streets, as he moved with his own peculiar
stateliness, as though he had not fully accustomed himself to coat and
trousers and was more at his ease in heavy, embroidered robes; I had heard
his voice in the George challenging the conventions; and now meeting him,
under the spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously, like
the fine piece of cookery he was.
After luncheon he stood on the balcony with a megaphone which had
appeared surprisingly among the bric-a-brac of Sebastian's room, and in
languishing, sobbing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the
sweatcred and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.
" 'I, Tiresias, have fpresuffered all,'" he sobbed to them from the
Venetian arches --
"Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead. . . ."
And then, stepping lightly into the room, "How I have surprised them!
All bJDoatmen are Grace Darlings to me."
We sat on sipping Cointreau while the mildest and most detached of the
Etonians sang "Home they brought Her warrior dead" to his own accompaniment
on the harmonium.
It was four o'clock before we broke up.
Anthony Blanche was the first to go. He took formal and complimentary
leave of each of us in turn. To Sebastian he said: "My dear, I should like
to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion," and to me: "I
think it's perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do
you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chiwy you out like an old
st-t-toat."
The others left soon after him. I rose to go with them, but Sebastian
said: "Have some more Cointreau," so I stayed and later he said, "I must'go
to the Botanical Gardens."
"Why?"
"To see the ivy."
- It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as
we walked under the walls of Merton.
"I've never been to the Botanical Gardens," I said.
"Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There's a beautiful arch
there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don't know
where I should be without the Botanical Gardens."
When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had
left them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me
before. What was wrong? Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be
real. Was it the screen? I turned it face to the wall. That was better.
It was the end of the screen. Lunt never liked it, and after a few days
he took it away, to an obscure refuge he had under the stairs, full of mops
and buckets.
That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it
came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade
of the high elms, watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the
branches.
Presently we drove on and in another hour were hungry. We stopped at an
inn, which was half farm also, and ate eggs and bacon, pickled walnuts and
cheese, and drank our beer in a sunless parlour where an old clock ticked in
the shadows and a cat slept by the empty grate.
We drove on and in the early afternoon came to our destination:
wrought-iron gates and twin, classical lodges on a village green, an avenue,
more gates, open parkland, a turn in the drive; and suddenly a new and
secret landscape opened before us. We ' were at the head of a valley and
below us, half a mile distant, prone in the sunlight, grey and gold amid a
screen of boskage, shone the dome and columns of an old house.
"Well?" said Sebastian, stopping the car. Beyond the dome lay receding
steps of water and round it, guarding and hiding it, stood the soft hills.
"Well?"
"What a place to live in!" I said.
"You must see the garden front and the fountain." He leaned forward and
put the car into gear. "It's where my family live." And even then, rapt in
the vision, I felt, momentarily, like a wind stirring the tapestry, an
ominous chill at the words he used -- not "That is my home," but "It's where
my family live."
"Don't worry," he continued, "they're all away. You won't have to meet
them."
"But I should like to."
"Well, you can't. They're in London, dancing."
We drove round the front into a side court -- "Everything's shut up.
We'd better go in this way"--and entered through the fortress-like,
stone-flagged, stone-vaulted passages of the servants' quarters -- "I want
you to meet Nanny Hawkins. That's what we've come for" -- and climbed
uncarpeted, scrubbed elm stairs, followed more passages of wide boards
covered in the centre by a thin strip of drugget, through passages covered
by linoleum, passing the wells of many minor staircases and many rows of
crimson and gold fire buckets, up a final staircase, gated at the head,
where at last we reached the nurseries, high in the dome in the centre of
the main block.
Sebastian's Nanny was seated at the open window; the fountain lay
before her, the lakes, the temple, and, far away on the last spur, a
glittering obelisk; her hands lay open in her lap and, loosely between them,
a rosary; she was fast asleep. Long hours of work in her youth, authority in
middle life, repose and security in her age, had set their stamp on her
lined and serene face.
"Well," she said, waking; "this is a surprise."
Sebastian kissed her.
"Who's this?" she said, looking at me. "I don't think I know him."
Sebastian introduced us.
"You've come just the right time. Julia's here for the day. She was up
with me nearly all the morning telling me about London. Such a time they're
all having. It's dull without them. Just Mrs. Chandler and two of the girls
and old Bert. And then they're all going on holidays and the boiler's being
done out in August and you going, to see his Lordship in Italy, and the rest
on visits, it'll be^ October before we're settled down again. Still, I
suppose Julia must have her enjoyment the same as other young ladies, though
what they always want to go to London for in the best of the summer and the
gardens all out, I never have understood. Father Phipps was here on Thursday
and I said exactly the same to him," she added as though she had thus
acquired sacerdotal authority for her opinion.
"D'you say Julia's here?"
"Yes, dear, you must have just missed her. It's the Conservative Women.
Her Ladyship was to have done them, but she's poorly. Julia won't be long;
she's leaving immediately after her speech, before the tea."
"I'm afraid we may miss her again."
"Don't do that, dear, it'll be such a surprise to her seeing you,
though she ought to wait for the tea, I told her, it's what the Conservative
Women come for. Now what's the news? Are you studying hard at your books?"
"Not very, I'm afraid, Nanny."
"Ah, cricketing all day long I expect, like your brother. He found time
to study, too, though. He's not been here since Christmas, but he'll be here
for the Agricultural I expect. Did you see this piece about Julia in the
paper ? She brought it down for me. Not that it's nearly good enough of her,
but what it says is very nice. 'The lovely daughter whom Lady Marchmain is
bringing out this season . . . witty as well as ornamental . . . the most
popular debutante,' well that's no more than the truth, though it was a
shame to cut her hair; such a lovely head of hair she had just like her
Ladyship's. I said to Father Phipps it's not natural He said, 'Nuns do it,'
and I said, 'Well, surely, Father, you aren't going to make a nun out of
Lady Julia? The very idea!'"
Sebastian and the old wbman talked on. It was a charming room, oddly
shaped to conform with the curve of the dome. The walls were papered in a
pattern of ribbon and roses. There was a rocking horse in the corner and an
oleograph of the Sacred Heart over the mantelpiece; the empty grate was
hidden by a bunch of pampas grass and bulrushes; laid out on the top of the
chest of drawers and carefully dusted were the collection of small presents
which had been brought home to her at various times by her children, carved
shell and lava, stamped leather, painted wood, china, bog oak, damascened
silver, blue-John, alabaster, coral, the souvenirs of many holidays.
Presently Nanny said: "Ring the bell, dear, and we'll have some tea. I
usually go down to Mrs. Chandler, but we'll have it up here to-day. My usual
girl has gone to London with the others. The new one is just up from the
village. She didn't know anything at first, but she's coming along nicely.
Ring the bell."
But Sebastian said we had to go.
"And Miss Julia? She will be upset when she hears. It would have been
such a surprise for her."
"Poor Nanny," said Sebastian when we left the nursery. "She does have
such a dull life. I've a good mind to bring her to Oxford to live with me,
only she'd always be trying to send me to church. We must go quickly before
my sister gets back."
"Which are you ashamed of, her or me?"
"I'm ashamed of myself," said Sebastian gravely. "I'm not going to have
you get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming. All my life
they've been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with
their charm, they'd make you their friend, not mine, and I won't let them."
"All right," I said. "I'm perfectly content. But am I not going to be
allowed to see any more of the house?"
"It's all shut up. We came to see Nanny. On Queen Alexandra's Day it's
all open for a shilling. Well, come and look if you want to. ..."
He led me through a baize door into a dark corridor; I could dimly see
a gilt cornice and vaulted plaster above; then, opening a heavy,
smooth-swinging, mahogany door, he led me into a darkened hall. Light
streamed through the cracks in the shutters. Sebastian unbarred one, and
folded it back; the mellow afternoon sun flooded in, over the bare floor,
the vast, twin fireplaces olasters,
the islands of sheeted furniture. It was a glimpse only, such as might be
had from the top of an omnibus into a lighted ballroom; then Sebastian
quickly shut out the sun.
"You see," he said; "it's like this."
His mood had changed since we had drunk our wine under the elm trees,
since we had turned the corner of the drive and he had said: "Well?"
"You see, there's nothing to see. A few pretty things I'd like to show
you one day -- not now. But there's the chapel. You must see that. It's a
monument of art nouveau."
The last architect to work it Brideshead had sought to unify its growth
with a-colonnade and flanking pavilions. One of these was the chapel. We
entered it by the public porch (another door led direct to the house);
Sebastian dipped his fingers in the water stoup, crossed himself and
genuflected; I copied him. "Why do you do that?" he asked crossly.
"Just good manners."
"Well, you needn't on my account. You wanted to do sightseeing; how
about this?"
The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and
redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the
nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses,
flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in
armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours.
There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar
property of seeming to have been moulded in plasticine. The sanctuary lamp
and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a
pockmarked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with
white and gold daisies.
"Golly," I said.
"It was Papa's wedding present to Mamma. Now, if you've seen enough,
we'll go."
On the drive we passed a closed Rolls-Royce driven by a chauffeur; in
the back was a vague, girlish figure who looked round at us through the
window.
"Julia," said Sebastian. "We only just got away in time." We stopped to
speak to a man with a bicycle -- "That was old Bat," said Sebastian -- and
then were away, past the wrought-iron gates, past the lodges and out on the
road heading back to Oxford.
"I'm sorry," said Sebastian after a time. "I'm afraid I wasn't very
nice this afternoon. Brideshead often has that effect on me. But I had to
take you to see Nanny."
Why? I wondered; but said nothing (Sebastian's life was governed by a
code of such imperatives. "I must have pillar-box red pyjamas," "I have to
stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows," "I've absolutely got
to drink champagne to-night!") except, "It had quite the reverse effect on
me."
After a long pause he said petulantly, "I don't keep asking you
questions about your family."
"Neither do I about yours."
"But you look inquisitive."
"Well, you're so mysterious about" them."
"I hoped I was mysterious about everything."
"Perhaps I am rather curious about people's families--you sec, it's not
a thing I know about. There is only my father and myself. An aunt kept an
eye on me for a time but my father drove her abroad. My mother was killed in
the war."
"Oh . . . how very unusual."
"She went to Serbia with the Red Cross. My father has been rather odd
in the head ever since. He just lives alone in London with no friends, and
footles about collecting things."
Sebastian said, "You don't know what you've been saved. There are lots
of us. Look them up in Debrett."
His mood was lightening now. The further we drove from Brideshead the
more he seemed to cast off his uneasiness -- the almost furtive restlessness
and irritability that had possessed him. The sun was behind us as we drove,
so that we seemed to be in pursuit of our own shadows.
"It's half-past five. We'll get to Godstow in time for dinner, drink at
the Trout, leave Hardcastle's motor car and walk back by the river. Wouldn't
that be best?"
That is the full account of my first brief visit to Brideshead; could I
have known then that so small a thing, in other days, would be remembered
with tears by a middle-aged captain of infantry?
Chapter Two
towards the end of that summer term I received the last visit and Grand
Remonstrance of my cousin Jasper. I was just free of the schools, having
taken the last paper of History Previous on the afternoon before; Jasper's
subfusc suit and white tie proclaimed him still in the thick of it; he'had,
too, the exhausted but resentful air of one who fears he has failed to do
himself full justice on the subject of Pindar's Orphism. Duty alone had
brought him to my rooms that afternoon, at great inconvenience to himself
and, as it happened, to me, who, when he caught me in the door, was on my
way to make final arrangements about a dinner I was giving that evening. It
was one of several parties designed to comfort Hardcastle -- one of the
tasks that had lately fallen to Sebastian and me since, by leaving his car
out, we had got him into grave trouble with the proctors.
Jasper would not sit down; this was to be no cosy chat; he stood with
his back to the fireplace and, in his own phrase, talked to me "like an
uncle."
". . . I've tried to get in touch with you several times in the last
week or two. In fact, I have the impression you are avoiding me. If that is
so, Charles, I can't say I'm surprised.
"You may think it none of my business, but I feel a sense of
responsibility. You know as well as I do that since your -- well, since the
war, your father has not been really in touch with things -- lives in his
own world. I don't want to sit back and see you making mistakes which a word
in season might save you from.
"I expected you to make mistakes your first year. We all do. I got in
with some thoroughly objectionable O.S.C.U. men who ran a mission to
hop-pickers during the long vac. But you, my dear Charles, whether you
realize it or not, have gone straight, hook, line and sinker, into the very
worst set in the University. You may think that, living in digs, I don't
know what goes on in college; but I hear things. In fact, I hear all too
much. I find that I've become a figure of mockery on your account at the
Dining Club. There's that chap Sebastian Flyte you seem inseparable from. He
may be all right, I don't know. His brother Brideshead was a very sound
fellow. But this friend of yours looks odd to me, and he gets himself talked
about. Of course, they're an odd family. The Marchmains have lived apart
since the war, you know. An extraordinary thing; everyone thought they were
a devoted couple. Then he went off to France with his Yeomanry and just
never came back. It was as if he'd been killed. She's a Roman Catholic, so
she can't get a divorce -- or won't, I expect. You can do anything at Rome
with money, and they're enormously rich. Flyte may be all right, but Anthony
Blanche--now there's a man there's absolutely no excuse for."
"I don't particularly like him myself," I said.
"Well, he's always hanging round here, and the stiffer element in
college don't like it. They won't stand for him at the House. He was in
Mercury again last night. None of these people you go about with pull any
weight in their own colleges, and that's the real test. They think because
they've got a lot of money to throw about, they can do anything.
"And that's another thing. I don't know what allowance my uncle makes
you, but I don't mind betting you're spending double. All this" he said,
including in a wide sweep of his hand the evidences of profligacy about him.
It was true; my room had cast its austere winter garments, and, by not very
slow stages, assumed a richer wardrobe. "Is that paid for?" (The box of a
hundred cabinet Partagas on the sideboard.) "Or those?" (A dozen frivolous,
new books on the table.) "Or those?" (A Lalique decanter and glasses.) "Or
that peculiarly noisome object?" (A human skull lately purchased from the
School of Medicine, which, resting in a bowl of roses, formed, at the
moment, the chief decoration of my table. It bore the motto Et in Arcadia
ego inscribed on its forehead.)
"Yes," I said, glad to be clear of one charge. "I had to pay cash for
the skull."
"You can't be doing any work. Not that that matters, particularly if
you're making something of your career elsewhere -- but are you? Have you
spoken at the Union or at any of the clubs? Are you connected with any of
the magazines? Are you even making a position in the O.U.D.S.? And your
clothes!" continued my cousin. "When you came up I remember advising you to
dress as you would in a country house. Your present get-up seems an unhappy
compromise between the correct wear for a theatrical party at Maidenhead and
a glee-singing competition in a garden suburb.
"And drink -- no one minds a man getting tight once or twice a term. In
fact, he ought to, on certain occasions. But I hear you're constantly seen
drunk in the middle of the afternoon."
He paused, his duty discharged. Already the perplexities of the
examination school were beginning to re-assert themselves in his mind.
"I'm sorry, Jasper," I said. "I know it must be embarrassing for you,
but I happen to like this bad set. I like getting drunk at luncheon, and
though I haven't yet spent quite double my allowance, I undoubtedly shall
before the end of term. I usually have a glass of champagne about this time.
Will you join me?"
So my cousin Jasper despaired and, I learned later,' wrote to his
father on the subject of my excesses who, in his turn, wrote to my father,
who took no action or particular thought in the matter, partly because he
had disliked my uncle for nearly sixty years and partly because, as Jasper
had said, he lived in his own world now, since my mother's death.
Thus, in broad outline, Jasper sketched the more prominent features of
my first year; some detail may be added on the same scale.
I had committed myself earlier to spend the Easter vacation with
Collins and, though I would have broken my word without compunction, and
left my former friend friendless, had Sebastian made a sign, no sign was
made; accordingly Collins and I spent several economical and instructive
weeks together in Ravenna. A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those
mighty tombs. In a hotel bedroom, designed for a warmer season, I wrote long
letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post office for his answers.
There were two, each from a different address, neither giving any plain news
of himself, for he wrote in a style of remote fantasy (. .-. Mummy and two
attendant poets have three bad colds in the head, so I have come here. It is
the feast of S. Nichodemus of Thyatira, who was martyred by having goatskin
nailed to his pate, and is accordingly the patron of bald heads. Tell
Collins, who I am sure will be bald before us. There are too many people
here, but one, praise heaven! has an ear-trumpet, and that keeps me in good
humour. And now I must try to catch a fish. It is too far to send it to you
so I will keep the backbone . . .) which left me fretful. Collins made notes
for a little thesis pointing out the inferiority of the original mosaics to
their photographs. Here was planted the seed of what became his life's
harvest. When, many years later, there appeared the first massive volume of
his still unfinished work on Byzantine Art, I was touched to find, among two
pages of polite, preliminary acknowledgments of debt, my own name:.... To
Charles Ryder, with the aid of whose all-seeing eyes I first saw the
Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and San Vitale . . .
I sometimes wonder whether, had it not been for Sebastian, I might have
trodden the same path as Collins round the cultural water-wheel. My father
in his youth sat for All Souls and, in a year of hot competition, failed;
other successes and honours came his way later, but that early failure
impressed itself on him, and through him on me, so that I came up with an
ill-considered sense that there lay the proper and natural goal of the life
of reason. I, too, should doubtless have failed, but, having failed, I might
perhaps have slipped into a less august academic life elsewhere. It is
conceivable, but not, I believe, likely, for the hot spring of anarchy rose
from deep furnaces where was no solid earth, and burst into the sunlight --
a rainbow in its cooling vapours -- with a power the rocks could not
repress.
In the event, that Easter vacation formed a short stretch of level road
in the precipitous descent of which Jasper warned me. Descent or ascent? It
seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired.
I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and
overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence,
the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad
and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed
as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy
childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and
its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of
nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.
At the end of the term I took my first schools; it was necessary to pass, if
I was to remain at Oxford, and pass I did, after a week in which I forbade
Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late hour, with iced black coffee and
charcoal biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected texts. I remember no
syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient, lore which I acquired
that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour.
"I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon"; that was
enough then. Is more needed now?
Looking back, now, after twenty years, there is little I would have
left undone or done otherwise. I could match my cousin Jasper's game-cock
maturity with a sturdier fowl. I could tell him that all the wickedness of
that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro,
heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the
whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the
wine, renders it undrinkable, so that it must lie in the dark, year in, year
out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table.
I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is
the root of all wisdom. But I felt no need for these sophistries as I sat
before my cousin, saw him, freed from his , inconclusive struggle with
Pindar, in his dark grey suit, his white tie, his scholar's gown; heard his
grave tones and, all the time, savoured the gillyflowers in full bloom under
my windows. I had my secret and sure defence, like a talisman worn in the
bosom, felt for in the moment of danger, found and firmly grasped. So I told
him what was not in fact the truth, that I usually had a glass of champagne
about that time, and asked him to join me.
On the day after Jasper's Grand Remonstrance I received another, in
different terms and from an unexpected source.
All the term I had been seeing rather more of Anthony Blanche than my
liking for him warranted. I lived now among his friends, but our frequent
meetings were more of his choosing than mine, for I held him in considerable
awe.
In years he was barely my senior, but he seemed then to be burdened
with the experience of the Wandering Jew. He was indeed a nomad of no
nationality.
An attempt had been made in his childhood to make an Englishman of him;
he was two years at Eton; then in the middle of the war he had defied the
submarines, rejoined his mother in the Argentine, and a clever and audacious
schoolboy was added to the valet, the maid, the two chauffeurs,'the Pekinese
and the second husband. Criss-cross about the world he travelled with them,
waxing in wickedness like a Hogarthian page-boy. When peace came they
returned to Europe to hotels and furnished villas, spas, casinos and bathing
beaches. At the age of fifteen, for a wager, he was disguised as a girl and
taken to play at the big table in the Jockey Club at Buenos Aires; he dined
with Proust and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diag-hilev;
Firbank sent him his novels with fervent inscriptions; he had aroused three
irreconcilable feuds in Capri; he had practised black art in Cefalu; he had
been cured of drug-taking in California and of an OEdipus complex in Vienna.
At times we all seemed children beside him -- at most times, but not
always, for there was a bluster and zest in Anthony which the rest of us had
shed somewhere in our more leisured adolescence, on the playing field or in
the school-room; his vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than
in the wish to shock, and in the midst of his polished exhibitions I was
often reminded of an urchin I had once seen in Naples, capering derisively,
with obscene, unambiguous gestures, before a party of English tourists; as
he told the tale of his evening at the gaming table one could see in the
roll of his eye just how he had glanced, covertly, over the dwindling pile
of chips at his stepfather's party; while we had been rolling one another in
the mud at football and gorging ourselves with crumpets, Anthony had helped
oil fading beauties on sub-tropical sands and had sipped his aperitif in
smart little bars, so that the savage we had tamed was still rampant in him.
He was competitive in the bet-you-can't-do-this style of the private school;
you had only to mention the name of your bootmaker for him to recommend an
Armenian at Biarritz who catered especially for fetishists, or to name a
house where you had stayed, for him to describe a palace he frequented in
Madrid. He was cruel, too, in the wanton, insect-maiming manner of the very
young and 'fearless, like a little boy, charging, head down, small fists
whirling, at the school prefects.
He asked me to dinner, and I was a little disconcerted to find that we
were to dine alone. "We are going to Thame," he said. "There is a delightful
hotel there, which luckily doesn't appeal to the Bullingdon. We will drink
Rhine wine and imagine ourselves . . . where? Not on a j-j-jaunt with
J-J-Jorrocks, anyway. But first we will have our aperitif."
At the George bar he ordered "Four Alexander cocktails, please," ranged
them before him with a loud "Yum-yum" which drew every eye, outraged, upon
him. "I expect you would prefer sherry, but, my dear Charles, you are not
going to have sherry. Isn't this a delicious concoction? You don't like it?
Then I will drink it for you. One, two, three, four, down the red lane they
go. How the students stare!" And he led me out to the waiting motor car.
"I hope we shall find no undergraduates there. I am a little out of
sympathy with them for the moment. You heard about their treatment of me on
Thursday? It was too naughty. Luckily I was wearing my oldest pyjamas and it
was an evening of oppressive heat, or I might have been seriously cross."
Anthony had a habit of putting his face near one when he spoke; the sweet
and creamy cocktail had tainted his breath. I leaned away from him in the
corner of the hired car.
"Picture me, my dear, alone and studious. I had just bought a rather
forbidding book called Antic Hay, which I knew I must read before going to
Garsington on Sunday, because everyone was bound to talk about it, and it's
so banal saying you have not read the book of the moment, if you haven't.
The solution I suppose is not to go to Garsington, but that didn't occur to
me until this moment. So, my dear, I had an omelet and a peach and a bottle
of Vichy water and put on my pyjamas and settled down to read. I must say my
thoughts wandered, but I kept turning the pages and watching the light fade,
which in Peckwater, my dear, is quite an experience -- as darkness falls the
stone seems positively to decay under one's eyes. I was reminded of some of
those leprous fa?ades in the vieux port at Marseille, until suddenly I was
disturbed by such a bawling and caterwauling as you never heard, and there,
down in the little piazza, I saw a mob of about twenty terrible young men,
and do you know what they were chanting 'We want Blanche. We want Blanche!'
in a kind of litany. Such a public declaration! Well, I saw it was all up
with Mr. Huxley for the evening, and I must say I had reached a point of
tedium when any interruption was welcome. I was stirred by the bellows, but,
do you know, the louder they shouted the shyer they seemed ? They kept
saying 'Where's Boy ?' 'He's Boy Mulcaster's friend,' 'Boy must bring him
down.' Now you may or may not know 'Boy' Mulcaster. Seen at a distance -- at
some considerable distance -- you might think him rather personable: a
lanky, old-fashioned young man, you might think; but look at him closer and
his face all falls to pieces in an idiot gape. People are rather free with
the word 'degenerate.' They have even used it of me. If you want to know
what a real degenerate is, look at Boy Mulcaster. He came to Le Touquet at
Easter and, in some extraordinary way, I seemed to have asked him to stay.
Well, my mother is used to me, but my poor stepfather found Mulcaster very
hard to understand. You see my stepfather is a d-d-dago and therefore has a
very high opinion of the English aristocracy. He couldn't quite fit
Mulcaster into his idea of a lord, and really I couldn't explain him; he
lost some infinitesimal sum at cards, and as a result expected me to pay for
all his treats -- well, Mulcaster was in this party; I could see his
ungainly form shuffling about below and hear him saying: 'It's no good. He's
out. Let's go back and have a drink?' So then I put my head out of the
window and called to him: 'Good evening, Mulcaster, old sponge and toady,
are you lurking among the hobbledehoys? Have you come to repay me the three
hundred francs I lent you for the poor drab you picked up in the Casino ? It
was a niggardly sum for her trouble, and what a trouble, Mulcaster. Come up
and pay me, poor hooligan!'
"That, my dear, seemed to put a little life into them, and up the
stairs they came, clattering. About six of them came into my room, the rest
stood mouthing outside. My dear, they looked too extraordinary. They had
been having one of their ridiculous club dinners, and they were all wearing
coloured tail-coats -- a sort of livery. 'My dears,' I said to them, 'you
look like a lot of most disorderly footmen.' Then one of them, rather a
juicy little piece, accused me of unnatural vices. 'My dear,' I said, 'I may
be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone' Then they
began to blaspheme in a very shocking manner, and suddenly I, too, began to
be annoyed. Really, I thought, when I think of all the hullabaloo there was
when I was seventeen, and the Due de Vincennes (old Armand, of course, not
Philippe) challenged me to a duel for an affair of the heart, and very much
more than the heart, I assure you, with the duchess (Stefanie, of course,
not old Poppy) -- now, to submit to impertinence from these pimply, tipsy
virgins . . . Well, I gave up the light, bantering tone and let myself be
just a little offensive.
"Then they began saying, 'Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury.' Now as
you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I
did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, 'Dear
sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know
that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you
meaty boys. It w.ould be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. I So if any
of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other
hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified
libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.'
"Do you know, they all looked a little foolish at that? I walked down
with them and no one came within a yard of me. Then I got into the fountain
and, you know, it was really most refreshing, so I sported there a little
and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home,
and I heard Boy Mul-caster saying, 'Anyway, we did put him in Mercury.' You
know, Charles, that is just what they'll be saying in thirty years' time.
When they're all married to scraggy little women like hens and have
cretinous, porcine sons like themselves, getting drunk at the same club
dinner in the same coloured coats, they'll still say, when my name is
mentioned, 'We put1 him in Mercury one night,' and their
barn-yard daughters will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in
his day, and what a pity he's grown so dull. Oh, la fatigue du Nord!"
It was not, I knew, the first time Anthony had been ducked, but the
incident seemed much on his mind, for he reverted to it again at dinner.
"Now you can't imagine an unpleasantness like that happening to
Sebastian, can you?"
"No," I said; I could not.
"No, Sebastian has charm." He held up his glass of hock to the
candle-light and repeated, "Such charm. Do you know, I went round to call on
Sebastian next day? I thought the tale of my evening's adventures might
amuse him. And what do you think I found -- besides, of course, his amusing
toy bear? Mulcaster and two of his cronies of the night before. They looked
very foolish and Sebastian, as composed as Mrs. P-p-ponsonby-de-Tomkyns in
P-p-punch, said, 'You know Lord Mulcaster, of course,' and the oafs said,
'Oh, we just came to see how Aloysius was,' for they find the toy bear just
as amusing as we do -- or, shall I hint, just a teeny bit more? So off they
went. And I said, 'S-s-sebastian, do you realize that those s-sycophantic
s-slugs insulted me last night, and but for the warmth of the weather might
have given me a s-s-severe cold?' and he said, 'Poor things. I expect they
were drunk.' He has a kind word for everyone you see; he has such charm.
"I can see he has completely captivated you, my dear Charles. Well, I'm
not surprised. Of course, you haven't known him as long as I have. I was at
school with him. You wouldn't believe it, but in those days people used to
say he was a little bitch; just a few unkind boys who knew him well.
Everyone in pop liked him, of course, and all the masters. I expect it was
really that they were jealous of him. He never seemed to get into trouble.
The rest of us were constantly being beaten in the most savage way, on the
most frivolous pretexts, but never Sebastian. He was the only boy in my
house who was never beaten at all. I can see him now, at the age of fifteen.
He never had spots you know; all the other boys were spotty. Boy Mulcaster
was positively scrofulous. But not Sebastian. Or did he have one, rather a
stubborn one at the back of his neck ? I think, now, that he did. Narcissus,
with one pustule. He and I were both Catholics, so we used to go to mass
together. He used to spend such a'time in the confessional, I used to wonder
what he had to say, because he never did anything wrong; never quite; at
least, he never got punished. Perhaps he was just being charming through the
grille. I left under what is called a 'cloud,' you know--I can't think why
it is called that; it seemed to me a glare of unwelcome light; the process
involved a series of harrowing interviews with my tutor. It was
disconcerting to find how observant that mild old man proved to be. The
unaccountably unwell. I must leave you a minute," and there appeared at my
window the face I knew to be Sebastian's -- but not as I had formerly seen
it, alive and alight with gaiety; he looked at me for a moment with unseeing
eyes and then, leaning forward well into the room, he was sick.
It was not unusual for dinner parties to end in that way; there was in
fact a recognized tariff on such occasions for the comfort of the scout; we
were all learning, by trial and error, to carry our wine. There was also a
kind of insane and endearing orderliness about Sebastian's choice, in his
extremity, of an open window. But, when all is said, it remained an
unpropitious meeting.
His friends bore him to the gate and, in a few minutes, his host, an
amiable Etonian of my year, returned to apologize. He, too, was tipsy and
his explanations were repetitive and, towards the end, tearful. "The wines
were too various," he said; "it was neither the quality nor the quantity
that was at fault. It was the mixture. Grasp that and you have the root of
the matter. To understand all is to forgive all."
"Yes," I said, but it was with a sense of grievance that I faced Lunt's
reproaches next morning.
"A couple of jugs of mulled claret between the five of you," Lunt said,
"and this had to happen. Couldn't even get to the window. Those that can't
keep it down are better without it."
"It wasn't one of my party. It was someone from out of college."
"Well, it's just as nasty clearing it up, whoever it was."
"There's five shillings on the sideboard."
"So I saw and thank you, but I'd rather not have the money and not have
the mess, any morning."
I took my gown and left him to his task. I still frequented the lecture
room in those days, and it was after eleven when I returned to college. I
found my room full of flowers; what looked like, and, in fact, was, the
entire day's stock of a market-stall stood in every conceivable vessel in
every part of the room. Lunt was secreting the last of them in brown paper
preparatory to taking them home.
"Lunt, what is all this?"
"The gentleman from last night, sir, he left a note for you."
The note was written in conte crayon on a whole sheet of my choice
Whatman H.P. drawing paper: I am very contrite. Aloysius won't speak to me
until he sees I am forgiven, so please come to luncheon to-day. Sebastian
Flyte. It was typical of him, I reflected, to assume I knew where he lived;
but then, I did know. '
"A most amusing gentleman, I'm sure it's quite a pleasure to clean up
after him. I take it you're lunching out, sir. I told Mr. Collins and Mr.
Partridge so--they wanted to have their commons in here with you."
"Yes, Lunt, lunching out."
That luncheon party -- for party it proved to be -- was the beginning
of a new epoch in my life, but its details are dimmed for me and confused by
so many others, almost identical with it, that succeeded one another that
term and the next, like romping cupids in a Renaissance frieze.
I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a
tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which in the tones of Collins told
me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days,
and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that
here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I
knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden,
which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey
city.
Sebastian lived at Christ Church, high in Meadow Buildings. He was
alone when I came, peeling a plover's egg taken from the large nest of moss
in the centre of the table.
"I've just counted them," he said. "There were five each and two over,
so I'm having the two. I'm unaccountably hungry to-day. I put myself
unreservedly in the hands of Dolbear and Goodall, and feel so drugged that
I've begun to believe that the whole of yesterday evening was a dream.
Please don't wake me up."
He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme
youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.
His room was filled with a strange jumble of objects -- a harmonium in
a gothic case, an elephant's-foot waste-paper basket, a dome of wax fruit,
two disproportionately large Sevres vases, framed drawings by Daumier --
made all the more incongruous by the austere college furniture and the large
luncheon table. His chimney-piece was covered with cards of invitation from
London hostesses.
"That beast Hobson has put Aloysius in the bedder," be said. "Perhaps
it's as well as there wouldn't have been any plovers' eggs for him. D'you
know, Hobson hates Aloysius? I wish I had a scout like yours. He was sweet
to me this morning where some people might have been quite strict."
The party assembled. There were three Etonian freshmen, mild, elegant,
detached young men who had all been to a dance in London the night before,
and spoke of it as though it had been the funeral of a near but unloved
kinsman. Each as he came into the room made first for the plovers' eggs,
then noticed Sebastian and then myself with a polite lack of curiosity which
seemed to say: "We should not dream of being so offensive as to suggest that
you never met us before."
"The first this year," they said. "Where do you get them?"
"Mummy sends them from Brideshead. They always lay early for her."
When the eggs were gone and we were eating the lobster Newburg, the
last guest arrived.
"My dear," he said, "I couldn't get away before. I was lunching with my
p-p-preposterous tutor. He thought it very odd my leaving when I did. I told
him I had to change for F-f-footer."
From the moment he arrived the newcomer took charge, talking in a
luxurious, self-taught stammer; teasing; caricaturing the guests at his
previous luncheon; telling lubricious anecdotes of Paris and Berlin; and
doing more than entertain -- transfiguring the party, shedding a vivid,
false light of eccentricity upon everyone so that the three prosaic Etonians
seemed suddenly to become creatures of his fantasy.
This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the "aesthete" par
excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville, a young
man who seemed to me, then, fresh from the sombre company of the College
Essay Society, ageless as a lizard, as foreign as a Martian. He had been
pointed out to me often in the streets, as he moved with his own peculiar
stateliness, as though he had not fully accustomed himself to coat and
trousers and was more at his ease in heavy, embroidered robes; I had heard
his voice in the George challenging the conventions; and now meeting him,
under the spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously, like
the fine piece of cookery he was.
After luncheon he stood on the balcony with a megaphone which had
appeared surprisingly among the bric-a-brac of Sebastian's room, and in
languishing, sobbing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the
sweatcred and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.
" 'I, Tiresias, have fpresuffered all,'" he sobbed to them from the
Venetian arches --
"Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead. . . ."
And then, stepping lightly into the room, "How I have surprised them!
All bJDoatmen are Grace Darlings to me."
We sat on sipping Cointreau while the mildest and most detached of the
Etonians sang "Home they brought Her warrior dead" to his own accompaniment
on the harmonium.
It was four o'clock before we broke up.
Anthony Blanche was the first to go. He took formal and complimentary
leave of each of us in turn. To Sebastian he said: "My dear, I should like
to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion," and to me: "I
think it's perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do
you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chiwy you out like an old
st-t-toat."
The others left soon after him. I rose to go with them, but Sebastian
said: "Have some more Cointreau," so I stayed and later he said, "I must'go
to the Botanical Gardens."
"Why?"
"To see the ivy."
- It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as
we walked under the walls of Merton.
"I've never been to the Botanical Gardens," I said.
"Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There's a beautiful arch
there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don't know
where I should be without the Botanical Gardens."
When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had
left them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me
before. What was wrong? Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be
real. Was it the screen? I turned it face to the wall. That was better.
It was the end of the screen. Lunt never liked it, and after a few days
he took it away, to an obscure refuge he had under the stairs, full of mops
and buckets.
That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it
came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade
of the high elms, watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the
branches.
Presently we drove on and in another hour were hungry. We stopped at an
inn, which was half farm also, and ate eggs and bacon, pickled walnuts and
cheese, and drank our beer in a sunless parlour where an old clock ticked in
the shadows and a cat slept by the empty grate.
We drove on and in the early afternoon came to our destination:
wrought-iron gates and twin, classical lodges on a village green, an avenue,
more gates, open parkland, a turn in the drive; and suddenly a new and
secret landscape opened before us. We ' were at the head of a valley and
below us, half a mile distant, prone in the sunlight, grey and gold amid a
screen of boskage, shone the dome and columns of an old house.
"Well?" said Sebastian, stopping the car. Beyond the dome lay receding
steps of water and round it, guarding and hiding it, stood the soft hills.
"Well?"
"What a place to live in!" I said.
"You must see the garden front and the fountain." He leaned forward and
put the car into gear. "It's where my family live." And even then, rapt in
the vision, I felt, momentarily, like a wind stirring the tapestry, an
ominous chill at the words he used -- not "That is my home," but "It's where
my family live."
"Don't worry," he continued, "they're all away. You won't have to meet
them."
"But I should like to."
"Well, you can't. They're in London, dancing."
We drove round the front into a side court -- "Everything's shut up.
We'd better go in this way"--and entered through the fortress-like,
stone-flagged, stone-vaulted passages of the servants' quarters -- "I want
you to meet Nanny Hawkins. That's what we've come for" -- and climbed
uncarpeted, scrubbed elm stairs, followed more passages of wide boards
covered in the centre by a thin strip of drugget, through passages covered
by linoleum, passing the wells of many minor staircases and many rows of
crimson and gold fire buckets, up a final staircase, gated at the head,
where at last we reached the nurseries, high in the dome in the centre of
the main block.
Sebastian's Nanny was seated at the open window; the fountain lay
before her, the lakes, the temple, and, far away on the last spur, a
glittering obelisk; her hands lay open in her lap and, loosely between them,
a rosary; she was fast asleep. Long hours of work in her youth, authority in
middle life, repose and security in her age, had set their stamp on her
lined and serene face.
"Well," she said, waking; "this is a surprise."
Sebastian kissed her.
"Who's this?" she said, looking at me. "I don't think I know him."
Sebastian introduced us.
"You've come just the right time. Julia's here for the day. She was up
with me nearly all the morning telling me about London. Such a time they're
all having. It's dull without them. Just Mrs. Chandler and two of the girls
and old Bert. And then they're all going on holidays and the boiler's being
done out in August and you going, to see his Lordship in Italy, and the rest
on visits, it'll be^ October before we're settled down again. Still, I
suppose Julia must have her enjoyment the same as other young ladies, though
what they always want to go to London for in the best of the summer and the
gardens all out, I never have understood. Father Phipps was here on Thursday
and I said exactly the same to him," she added as though she had thus
acquired sacerdotal authority for her opinion.
"D'you say Julia's here?"
"Yes, dear, you must have just missed her. It's the Conservative Women.
Her Ladyship was to have done them, but she's poorly. Julia won't be long;
she's leaving immediately after her speech, before the tea."
"I'm afraid we may miss her again."
"Don't do that, dear, it'll be such a surprise to her seeing you,
though she ought to wait for the tea, I told her, it's what the Conservative
Women come for. Now what's the news? Are you studying hard at your books?"
"Not very, I'm afraid, Nanny."
"Ah, cricketing all day long I expect, like your brother. He found time
to study, too, though. He's not been here since Christmas, but he'll be here
for the Agricultural I expect. Did you see this piece about Julia in the
paper ? She brought it down for me. Not that it's nearly good enough of her,
but what it says is very nice. 'The lovely daughter whom Lady Marchmain is
bringing out this season . . . witty as well as ornamental . . . the most
popular debutante,' well that's no more than the truth, though it was a
shame to cut her hair; such a lovely head of hair she had just like her
Ladyship's. I said to Father Phipps it's not natural He said, 'Nuns do it,'
and I said, 'Well, surely, Father, you aren't going to make a nun out of
Lady Julia? The very idea!'"
Sebastian and the old wbman talked on. It was a charming room, oddly
shaped to conform with the curve of the dome. The walls were papered in a
pattern of ribbon and roses. There was a rocking horse in the corner and an
oleograph of the Sacred Heart over the mantelpiece; the empty grate was
hidden by a bunch of pampas grass and bulrushes; laid out on the top of the
chest of drawers and carefully dusted were the collection of small presents
which had been brought home to her at various times by her children, carved
shell and lava, stamped leather, painted wood, china, bog oak, damascened
silver, blue-John, alabaster, coral, the souvenirs of many holidays.
Presently Nanny said: "Ring the bell, dear, and we'll have some tea. I
usually go down to Mrs. Chandler, but we'll have it up here to-day. My usual
girl has gone to London with the others. The new one is just up from the
village. She didn't know anything at first, but she's coming along nicely.
Ring the bell."
But Sebastian said we had to go.
"And Miss Julia? She will be upset when she hears. It would have been
such a surprise for her."
"Poor Nanny," said Sebastian when we left the nursery. "She does have
such a dull life. I've a good mind to bring her to Oxford to live with me,
only she'd always be trying to send me to church. We must go quickly before
my sister gets back."
"Which are you ashamed of, her or me?"
"I'm ashamed of myself," said Sebastian gravely. "I'm not going to have
you get mixed up with my family. They're so madly charming. All my life
they've been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with
their charm, they'd make you their friend, not mine, and I won't let them."
"All right," I said. "I'm perfectly content. But am I not going to be
allowed to see any more of the house?"
"It's all shut up. We came to see Nanny. On Queen Alexandra's Day it's
all open for a shilling. Well, come and look if you want to. ..."
He led me through a baize door into a dark corridor; I could dimly see
a gilt cornice and vaulted plaster above; then, opening a heavy,
smooth-swinging, mahogany door, he led me into a darkened hall. Light
streamed through the cracks in the shutters. Sebastian unbarred one, and
folded it back; the mellow afternoon sun flooded in, over the bare floor,
the vast, twin fireplaces olasters,
the islands of sheeted furniture. It was a glimpse only, such as might be
had from the top of an omnibus into a lighted ballroom; then Sebastian
quickly shut out the sun.
"You see," he said; "it's like this."
His mood had changed since we had drunk our wine under the elm trees,
since we had turned the corner of the drive and he had said: "Well?"
"You see, there's nothing to see. A few pretty things I'd like to show
you one day -- not now. But there's the chapel. You must see that. It's a
monument of art nouveau."
The last architect to work it Brideshead had sought to unify its growth
with a-colonnade and flanking pavilions. One of these was the chapel. We
entered it by the public porch (another door led direct to the house);
Sebastian dipped his fingers in the water stoup, crossed himself and
genuflected; I copied him. "Why do you do that?" he asked crossly.
"Just good manners."
"Well, you needn't on my account. You wanted to do sightseeing; how
about this?"
The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and
redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the
nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses,
flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in
armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours.
There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar
property of seeming to have been moulded in plasticine. The sanctuary lamp
and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a
pockmarked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with
white and gold daisies.
"Golly," I said.
"It was Papa's wedding present to Mamma. Now, if you've seen enough,
we'll go."
On the drive we passed a closed Rolls-Royce driven by a chauffeur; in
the back was a vague, girlish figure who looked round at us through the
window.
"Julia," said Sebastian. "We only just got away in time." We stopped to
speak to a man with a bicycle -- "That was old Bat," said Sebastian -- and
then were away, past the wrought-iron gates, past the lodges and out on the
road heading back to Oxford.
"I'm sorry," said Sebastian after a time. "I'm afraid I wasn't very
nice this afternoon. Brideshead often has that effect on me. But I had to
take you to see Nanny."
Why? I wondered; but said nothing (Sebastian's life was governed by a
code of such imperatives. "I must have pillar-box red pyjamas," "I have to
stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows," "I've absolutely got
to drink champagne to-night!") except, "It had quite the reverse effect on
me."
After a long pause he said petulantly, "I don't keep asking you
questions about your family."
"Neither do I about yours."
"But you look inquisitive."
"Well, you're so mysterious about" them."
"I hoped I was mysterious about everything."
"Perhaps I am rather curious about people's families--you sec, it's not
a thing I know about. There is only my father and myself. An aunt kept an
eye on me for a time but my father drove her abroad. My mother was killed in
the war."
"Oh . . . how very unusual."
"She went to Serbia with the Red Cross. My father has been rather odd
in the head ever since. He just lives alone in London with no friends, and
footles about collecting things."
Sebastian said, "You don't know what you've been saved. There are lots
of us. Look them up in Debrett."
His mood was lightening now. The further we drove from Brideshead the
more he seemed to cast off his uneasiness -- the almost furtive restlessness
and irritability that had possessed him. The sun was behind us as we drove,
so that we seemed to be in pursuit of our own shadows.
"It's half-past five. We'll get to Godstow in time for dinner, drink at
the Trout, leave Hardcastle's motor car and walk back by the river. Wouldn't
that be best?"
That is the full account of my first brief visit to Brideshead; could I
have known then that so small a thing, in other days, would be remembered
with tears by a middle-aged captain of infantry?
Chapter Two
towards the end of that summer term I received the last visit and Grand
Remonstrance of my cousin Jasper. I was just free of the schools, having
taken the last paper of History Previous on the afternoon before; Jasper's
subfusc suit and white tie proclaimed him still in the thick of it; he'had,
too, the exhausted but resentful air of one who fears he has failed to do
himself full justice on the subject of Pindar's Orphism. Duty alone had
brought him to my rooms that afternoon, at great inconvenience to himself
and, as it happened, to me, who, when he caught me in the door, was on my
way to make final arrangements about a dinner I was giving that evening. It
was one of several parties designed to comfort Hardcastle -- one of the
tasks that had lately fallen to Sebastian and me since, by leaving his car
out, we had got him into grave trouble with the proctors.
Jasper would not sit down; this was to be no cosy chat; he stood with
his back to the fireplace and, in his own phrase, talked to me "like an
uncle."
". . . I've tried to get in touch with you several times in the last
week or two. In fact, I have the impression you are avoiding me. If that is
so, Charles, I can't say I'm surprised.
"You may think it none of my business, but I feel a sense of
responsibility. You know as well as I do that since your -- well, since the
war, your father has not been really in touch with things -- lives in his
own world. I don't want to sit back and see you making mistakes which a word
in season might save you from.
"I expected you to make mistakes your first year. We all do. I got in
with some thoroughly objectionable O.S.C.U. men who ran a mission to
hop-pickers during the long vac. But you, my dear Charles, whether you
realize it or not, have gone straight, hook, line and sinker, into the very
worst set in the University. You may think that, living in digs, I don't
know what goes on in college; but I hear things. In fact, I hear all too
much. I find that I've become a figure of mockery on your account at the
Dining Club. There's that chap Sebastian Flyte you seem inseparable from. He
may be all right, I don't know. His brother Brideshead was a very sound
fellow. But this friend of yours looks odd to me, and he gets himself talked
about. Of course, they're an odd family. The Marchmains have lived apart
since the war, you know. An extraordinary thing; everyone thought they were
a devoted couple. Then he went off to France with his Yeomanry and just
never came back. It was as if he'd been killed. She's a Roman Catholic, so
she can't get a divorce -- or won't, I expect. You can do anything at Rome
with money, and they're enormously rich. Flyte may be all right, but Anthony
Blanche--now there's a man there's absolutely no excuse for."
"I don't particularly like him myself," I said.
"Well, he's always hanging round here, and the stiffer element in
college don't like it. They won't stand for him at the House. He was in
Mercury again last night. None of these people you go about with pull any
weight in their own colleges, and that's the real test. They think because
they've got a lot of money to throw about, they can do anything.
"And that's another thing. I don't know what allowance my uncle makes
you, but I don't mind betting you're spending double. All this" he said,
including in a wide sweep of his hand the evidences of profligacy about him.
It was true; my room had cast its austere winter garments, and, by not very
slow stages, assumed a richer wardrobe. "Is that paid for?" (The box of a
hundred cabinet Partagas on the sideboard.) "Or those?" (A dozen frivolous,
new books on the table.) "Or those?" (A Lalique decanter and glasses.) "Or
that peculiarly noisome object?" (A human skull lately purchased from the
School of Medicine, which, resting in a bowl of roses, formed, at the
moment, the chief decoration of my table. It bore the motto Et in Arcadia
ego inscribed on its forehead.)
"Yes," I said, glad to be clear of one charge. "I had to pay cash for
the skull."
"You can't be doing any work. Not that that matters, particularly if
you're making something of your career elsewhere -- but are you? Have you
spoken at the Union or at any of the clubs? Are you connected with any of
the magazines? Are you even making a position in the O.U.D.S.? And your
clothes!" continued my cousin. "When you came up I remember advising you to
dress as you would in a country house. Your present get-up seems an unhappy
compromise between the correct wear for a theatrical party at Maidenhead and
a glee-singing competition in a garden suburb.
"And drink -- no one minds a man getting tight once or twice a term. In
fact, he ought to, on certain occasions. But I hear you're constantly seen
drunk in the middle of the afternoon."
He paused, his duty discharged. Already the perplexities of the
examination school were beginning to re-assert themselves in his mind.
"I'm sorry, Jasper," I said. "I know it must be embarrassing for you,
but I happen to like this bad set. I like getting drunk at luncheon, and
though I haven't yet spent quite double my allowance, I undoubtedly shall
before the end of term. I usually have a glass of champagne about this time.
Will you join me?"
So my cousin Jasper despaired and, I learned later,' wrote to his
father on the subject of my excesses who, in his turn, wrote to my father,
who took no action or particular thought in the matter, partly because he
had disliked my uncle for nearly sixty years and partly because, as Jasper
had said, he lived in his own world now, since my mother's death.
Thus, in broad outline, Jasper sketched the more prominent features of
my first year; some detail may be added on the same scale.
I had committed myself earlier to spend the Easter vacation with
Collins and, though I would have broken my word without compunction, and
left my former friend friendless, had Sebastian made a sign, no sign was
made; accordingly Collins and I spent several economical and instructive
weeks together in Ravenna. A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those
mighty tombs. In a hotel bedroom, designed for a warmer season, I wrote long
letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post office for his answers.
There were two, each from a different address, neither giving any plain news
of himself, for he wrote in a style of remote fantasy (. .-. Mummy and two
attendant poets have three bad colds in the head, so I have come here. It is
the feast of S. Nichodemus of Thyatira, who was martyred by having goatskin
nailed to his pate, and is accordingly the patron of bald heads. Tell
Collins, who I am sure will be bald before us. There are too many people
here, but one, praise heaven! has an ear-trumpet, and that keeps me in good
humour. And now I must try to catch a fish. It is too far to send it to you
so I will keep the backbone . . .) which left me fretful. Collins made notes
for a little thesis pointing out the inferiority of the original mosaics to
their photographs. Here was planted the seed of what became his life's
harvest. When, many years later, there appeared the first massive volume of
his still unfinished work on Byzantine Art, I was touched to find, among two
pages of polite, preliminary acknowledgments of debt, my own name:.... To
Charles Ryder, with the aid of whose all-seeing eyes I first saw the
Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and San Vitale . . .
I sometimes wonder whether, had it not been for Sebastian, I might have
trodden the same path as Collins round the cultural water-wheel. My father
in his youth sat for All Souls and, in a year of hot competition, failed;
other successes and honours came his way later, but that early failure
impressed itself on him, and through him on me, so that I came up with an
ill-considered sense that there lay the proper and natural goal of the life
of reason. I, too, should doubtless have failed, but, having failed, I might
perhaps have slipped into a less august academic life elsewhere. It is
conceivable, but not, I believe, likely, for the hot spring of anarchy rose
from deep furnaces where was no solid earth, and burst into the sunlight --
a rainbow in its cooling vapours -- with a power the rocks could not
repress.
In the event, that Easter vacation formed a short stretch of level road
in the precipitous descent of which Jasper warned me. Descent or ascent? It
seems to me that I grew younger daily with each adult habit that I acquired.
I had lived a lonely childhood and a boyhood straitened by war and
overshadowed by bereavement; to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence,
the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad
and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed
as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy
childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and
its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of
nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.
At the end of the term I took my first schools; it was necessary to pass, if
I was to remain at Oxford, and pass I did, after a week in which I forbade
Sebastian my rooms and sat up to a late hour, with iced black coffee and
charcoal biscuits, cramming myself with the neglected texts. I remember no
syllable of them now, but the other, more ancient, lore which I acquired
that term will be with me in one shape or another to my last hour.
"I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon"; that was
enough then. Is more needed now?
Looking back, now, after twenty years, there is little I would have
left undone or done otherwise. I could match my cousin Jasper's game-cock
maturity with a sturdier fowl. I could tell him that all the wickedness of
that time was like the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro,
heady stuff full of dark ingredients; it at once enriched and retarded the
whole process of adolescence as the spirit checks the fermentation of the
wine, renders it undrinkable, so that it must lie in the dark, year in, year
out, until it is brought up at last fit for the table.
I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is
the root of all wisdom. But I felt no need for these sophistries as I sat
before my cousin, saw him, freed from his , inconclusive struggle with
Pindar, in his dark grey suit, his white tie, his scholar's gown; heard his
grave tones and, all the time, savoured the gillyflowers in full bloom under
my windows. I had my secret and sure defence, like a talisman worn in the
bosom, felt for in the moment of danger, found and firmly grasped. So I told
him what was not in fact the truth, that I usually had a glass of champagne
about that time, and asked him to join me.
On the day after Jasper's Grand Remonstrance I received another, in
different terms and from an unexpected source.
All the term I had been seeing rather more of Anthony Blanche than my
liking for him warranted. I lived now among his friends, but our frequent
meetings were more of his choosing than mine, for I held him in considerable
awe.
In years he was barely my senior, but he seemed then to be burdened
with the experience of the Wandering Jew. He was indeed a nomad of no
nationality.
An attempt had been made in his childhood to make an Englishman of him;
he was two years at Eton; then in the middle of the war he had defied the
submarines, rejoined his mother in the Argentine, and a clever and audacious
schoolboy was added to the valet, the maid, the two chauffeurs,'the Pekinese
and the second husband. Criss-cross about the world he travelled with them,
waxing in wickedness like a Hogarthian page-boy. When peace came they
returned to Europe to hotels and furnished villas, spas, casinos and bathing
beaches. At the age of fifteen, for a wager, he was disguised as a girl and
taken to play at the big table in the Jockey Club at Buenos Aires; he dined
with Proust and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diag-hilev;
Firbank sent him his novels with fervent inscriptions; he had aroused three
irreconcilable feuds in Capri; he had practised black art in Cefalu; he had
been cured of drug-taking in California and of an OEdipus complex in Vienna.
At times we all seemed children beside him -- at most times, but not
always, for there was a bluster and zest in Anthony which the rest of us had
shed somewhere in our more leisured adolescence, on the playing field or in
the school-room; his vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than
in the wish to shock, and in the midst of his polished exhibitions I was
often reminded of an urchin I had once seen in Naples, capering derisively,
with obscene, unambiguous gestures, before a party of English tourists; as
he told the tale of his evening at the gaming table one could see in the
roll of his eye just how he had glanced, covertly, over the dwindling pile
of chips at his stepfather's party; while we had been rolling one another in
the mud at football and gorging ourselves with crumpets, Anthony had helped
oil fading beauties on sub-tropical sands and had sipped his aperitif in
smart little bars, so that the savage we had tamed was still rampant in him.
He was competitive in the bet-you-can't-do-this style of the private school;
you had only to mention the name of your bootmaker for him to recommend an
Armenian at Biarritz who catered especially for fetishists, or to name a
house where you had stayed, for him to describe a palace he frequented in
Madrid. He was cruel, too, in the wanton, insect-maiming manner of the very
young and 'fearless, like a little boy, charging, head down, small fists
whirling, at the school prefects.
He asked me to dinner, and I was a little disconcerted to find that we
were to dine alone. "We are going to Thame," he said. "There is a delightful
hotel there, which luckily doesn't appeal to the Bullingdon. We will drink
Rhine wine and imagine ourselves . . . where? Not on a j-j-jaunt with
J-J-Jorrocks, anyway. But first we will have our aperitif."
At the George bar he ordered "Four Alexander cocktails, please," ranged
them before him with a loud "Yum-yum" which drew every eye, outraged, upon
him. "I expect you would prefer sherry, but, my dear Charles, you are not
going to have sherry. Isn't this a delicious concoction? You don't like it?
Then I will drink it for you. One, two, three, four, down the red lane they
go. How the students stare!" And he led me out to the waiting motor car.
"I hope we shall find no undergraduates there. I am a little out of
sympathy with them for the moment. You heard about their treatment of me on
Thursday? It was too naughty. Luckily I was wearing my oldest pyjamas and it
was an evening of oppressive heat, or I might have been seriously cross."
Anthony had a habit of putting his face near one when he spoke; the sweet
and creamy cocktail had tainted his breath. I leaned away from him in the
corner of the hired car.
"Picture me, my dear, alone and studious. I had just bought a rather
forbidding book called Antic Hay, which I knew I must read before going to
Garsington on Sunday, because everyone was bound to talk about it, and it's
so banal saying you have not read the book of the moment, if you haven't.
The solution I suppose is not to go to Garsington, but that didn't occur to
me until this moment. So, my dear, I had an omelet and a peach and a bottle
of Vichy water and put on my pyjamas and settled down to read. I must say my
thoughts wandered, but I kept turning the pages and watching the light fade,
which in Peckwater, my dear, is quite an experience -- as darkness falls the
stone seems positively to decay under one's eyes. I was reminded of some of
those leprous fa?ades in the vieux port at Marseille, until suddenly I was
disturbed by such a bawling and caterwauling as you never heard, and there,
down in the little piazza, I saw a mob of about twenty terrible young men,
and do you know what they were chanting 'We want Blanche. We want Blanche!'
in a kind of litany. Such a public declaration! Well, I saw it was all up
with Mr. Huxley for the evening, and I must say I had reached a point of
tedium when any interruption was welcome. I was stirred by the bellows, but,
do you know, the louder they shouted the shyer they seemed ? They kept
saying 'Where's Boy ?' 'He's Boy Mulcaster's friend,' 'Boy must bring him
down.' Now you may or may not know 'Boy' Mulcaster. Seen at a distance -- at
some considerable distance -- you might think him rather personable: a
lanky, old-fashioned young man, you might think; but look at him closer and
his face all falls to pieces in an idiot gape. People are rather free with
the word 'degenerate.' They have even used it of me. If you want to know
what a real degenerate is, look at Boy Mulcaster. He came to Le Touquet at
Easter and, in some extraordinary way, I seemed to have asked him to stay.
Well, my mother is used to me, but my poor stepfather found Mulcaster very
hard to understand. You see my stepfather is a d-d-dago and therefore has a
very high opinion of the English aristocracy. He couldn't quite fit
Mulcaster into his idea of a lord, and really I couldn't explain him; he
lost some infinitesimal sum at cards, and as a result expected me to pay for
all his treats -- well, Mulcaster was in this party; I could see his
ungainly form shuffling about below and hear him saying: 'It's no good. He's
out. Let's go back and have a drink?' So then I put my head out of the
window and called to him: 'Good evening, Mulcaster, old sponge and toady,
are you lurking among the hobbledehoys? Have you come to repay me the three
hundred francs I lent you for the poor drab you picked up in the Casino ? It
was a niggardly sum for her trouble, and what a trouble, Mulcaster. Come up
and pay me, poor hooligan!'
"That, my dear, seemed to put a little life into them, and up the
stairs they came, clattering. About six of them came into my room, the rest
stood mouthing outside. My dear, they looked too extraordinary. They had
been having one of their ridiculous club dinners, and they were all wearing
coloured tail-coats -- a sort of livery. 'My dears,' I said to them, 'you
look like a lot of most disorderly footmen.' Then one of them, rather a
juicy little piece, accused me of unnatural vices. 'My dear,' I said, 'I may
be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone' Then they
began to blaspheme in a very shocking manner, and suddenly I, too, began to
be annoyed. Really, I thought, when I think of all the hullabaloo there was
when I was seventeen, and the Due de Vincennes (old Armand, of course, not
Philippe) challenged me to a duel for an affair of the heart, and very much
more than the heart, I assure you, with the duchess (Stefanie, of course,
not old Poppy) -- now, to submit to impertinence from these pimply, tipsy
virgins . . . Well, I gave up the light, bantering tone and let myself be
just a little offensive.
"Then they began saying, 'Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury.' Now as
you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I
did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, 'Dear
sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know
that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you
meaty boys. It w.ould be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. I So if any
of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other
hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified
libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.'
"Do you know, they all looked a little foolish at that? I walked down
with them and no one came within a yard of me. Then I got into the fountain
and, you know, it was really most refreshing, so I sported there a little
and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home,
and I heard Boy Mul-caster saying, 'Anyway, we did put him in Mercury.' You
know, Charles, that is just what they'll be saying in thirty years' time.
When they're all married to scraggy little women like hens and have
cretinous, porcine sons like themselves, getting drunk at the same club
dinner in the same coloured coats, they'll still say, when my name is
mentioned, 'We put1 him in Mercury one night,' and their
barn-yard daughters will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in
his day, and what a pity he's grown so dull. Oh, la fatigue du Nord!"
It was not, I knew, the first time Anthony had been ducked, but the
incident seemed much on his mind, for he reverted to it again at dinner.
"Now you can't imagine an unpleasantness like that happening to
Sebastian, can you?"
"No," I said; I could not.
"No, Sebastian has charm." He held up his glass of hock to the
candle-light and repeated, "Such charm. Do you know, I went round to call on
Sebastian next day? I thought the tale of my evening's adventures might
amuse him. And what do you think I found -- besides, of course, his amusing
toy bear? Mulcaster and two of his cronies of the night before. They looked
very foolish and Sebastian, as composed as Mrs. P-p-ponsonby-de-Tomkyns in
P-p-punch, said, 'You know Lord Mulcaster, of course,' and the oafs said,
'Oh, we just came to see how Aloysius was,' for they find the toy bear just
as amusing as we do -- or, shall I hint, just a teeny bit more? So off they
went. And I said, 'S-s-sebastian, do you realize that those s-sycophantic
s-slugs insulted me last night, and but for the warmth of the weather might
have given me a s-s-severe cold?' and he said, 'Poor things. I expect they
were drunk.' He has a kind word for everyone you see; he has such charm.
"I can see he has completely captivated you, my dear Charles. Well, I'm
not surprised. Of course, you haven't known him as long as I have. I was at
school with him. You wouldn't believe it, but in those days people used to
say he was a little bitch; just a few unkind boys who knew him well.
Everyone in pop liked him, of course, and all the masters. I expect it was
really that they were jealous of him. He never seemed to get into trouble.
The rest of us were constantly being beaten in the most savage way, on the
most frivolous pretexts, but never Sebastian. He was the only boy in my
house who was never beaten at all. I can see him now, at the age of fifteen.
He never had spots you know; all the other boys were spotty. Boy Mulcaster
was positively scrofulous. But not Sebastian. Or did he have one, rather a
stubborn one at the back of his neck ? I think, now, that he did. Narcissus,
with one pustule. He and I were both Catholics, so we used to go to mass
together. He used to spend such a'time in the confessional, I used to wonder
what he had to say, because he never did anything wrong; never quite; at
least, he never got punished. Perhaps he was just being charming through the
grille. I left under what is called a 'cloud,' you know--I can't think why
it is called that; it seemed to me a glare of unwelcome light; the process
involved a series of harrowing interviews with my tutor. It was
disconcerting to find how observant that mild old man proved to be. The